The Post-Rockist

Wednesday nights aren’t too bad if you can spend them running around town to catch international touring bands who have serendipitously converged upon a single city limit–your city limit–on the same night. Sure, you have two more days of work before the weekend, and that big meeting tomorrow morning, and you know you’re going to drink a bit too much and feel crummy all day long, but you’ve got Thursday to recover, and don’t you need some release after three grueling days of paper pushing and mindless emailing at your job?

And how often do three popular British acts–in this case, Foals, The Teenagers (England via Paris), and Kate Nash–come through Detroit on the same night? The answer lies somewhere between “very seldom” and “never once before.” That’s almost 3,800 miles, although I think it is a lot shorter if you measure by meters. They should’ve carpooled. Sadly, I only made two shows. Sorry Katie. I totally fell for Lily Allen a couple of years ago and, when it comes to bubble-gum pop with hints of ‘tude from a cute British doll, I pretty much become the gooey lovesick mess of my pubescent yore, but yours was the most expensive show and a man’s gotta draw the line somewheres.

The agenda: Catch my Detroit pals Millions of Brazilians opening at Alvin’s, then to the Magic Stick for The Teenagers, then back to Alvin’s for Foals. (Continued)

Charlie Don’t Shake - “The Ballad of Pat Brown”
(from America Is Our Office)

…Aaaaand, we’re back. Did you miss us? Oh, what’s that, you didn’t even realize we were gone? You’ve been too busy downloading the latest Santogold remixes, watching yet more video clips of the same few Robyn tunes, and telling all your friends how you were way into No Age before Pitchfork ruined everything with a debatable ‘Best New Music’ label? That’s cool, man, we’ve been doing, uhm, the same thing, I guess.

Aw, who the hell am I kidding? We’ve been out of touch. Between day jobs, relocations, personal responsibilities, and freelance hand modeling gigs in Thailand, it’s not always easy, or worthwhile, to keep up with the mercurial tastes of the interweb’s tastemakers. Sometimes you just want comfort music – good, all-American rock & roll that you can blast out your open car windows without having to worry whether or not a skuzzy, two-chord guitar riff meets a predetermined hipster quotient. This is where Charlie Don’t Shake enters the picture. (Continued)

This Saturday is Record Store Day all over America! Actual record stores at physical locations all over the country will be holding events and hosting bands playing live music within the physical spaces of these actual record stores. Some of these record stores may be offering sales on their wares, which include plastic discs surrounded by a plastic cases that may or may not include pictures and lyrics on a coated sheet of paper.

Honestly, it’s great that someone has organized a day to celebrate our extant record stores–they really are my favorite places in the world and, as every girlfriend I’ve ever had can tell you, they are also a virtual black hole that sucks time from your very existence and soul, turning day to night and summer to winter.

And there are probably more record stores around than you might think. I went through the Record Store Day list of participating stores to find that there are several record stores within 45-50 miles of where I live that I never even knew existed.

So go out there on Saturday and blow $14 on a CD that you could have burned from a friend or downloaded from a Torrent site. But don’t just buy any CD. Ask the clerk for his or her recommendation. Give the clerk a challenge, such as “Do you have anything that sounds like Fugazi, but with Robyn Hitchcock’s singing style, covering Jeff Buckley songs using a ukulele?” Not sure if that’s a good example. But maybe ask a legitimate question, like “Do you have anything that sounds like the new Why? album?” or “Is there a one-hit wonder from the 60s whose album was actually really underrated that you can suggest?” or “I don’t like country music. Suggest a country album I won’t hate and I’ll buy it.” Go ahead. Try it out, and enjoy record store day before all the stores are gone forever and someone feels the need to organize iTunes store day.

–Posted by Scotter

Nick Lowe - “Music for Money”
(from Jesus of Cool)

Surely I’m not the only one who’s noticed popular “indie” blogs busking advertisements for ringtones and NBC’s Lipstick Jungle. Blogs are big business. Or, they can be. (Not this one, obviously, because we average fewer hits per day than your typical Geocities-hosted Mad About You tribute site that hasn’t been updated since 1995.) Build up a loyal readership, inflate your Technorati ranking, boost your hit count with some “exclusive” digg-able content, and before you know it advertisers are chomping at the bit to pay you fractions of pennies for every pair of eyes that alights on your page (or so the story goes).

And what’s wrong with making a little extra scratch on the side? After the costs of cassettes, CDs, downloads, concerts, and band T-shirts, being a music fan is an expensive hobby, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to get a little financial kickback for a lifetime of devotion. But as Eric Harvey of Marathonpacks pointed out in a recent column for Pitchfork, the line between enthusiastic fan and (un)paid promoter is becoming increasingly blurred. “The focus group becomes indistinguishable from the public sphere,” Harvey writes, “and labors of love are increasingly being repurposed as free labor channeled into promotion and distribution networks under the rubric of artistic patronage.” (Continued)

Maybe I’m just completely oblivious, but I have never noticed security at a Billiken Club show before. So when one of the periwinkle security officers started encroaching suspiciously close to where I was standing, I asked him:

“Hey, what’s with all the security tonight?” (I’m extraordinarily eloquent in person, apparently.)

“Huh? Oh, yeah, we’re here all the time,” he lied.

“Funny, I had never noticed. Are you sure?”

“Well, after that incident at Wash U where the kid got tased…”

“C’mon, that was a different act entirely,” I replied. He was thinking of the Girl Talk show that took place on the other pricey private college in town, where things got out of hand and a student did, in fact, get tased. In the nude. It even made the news. “Look around, these are good people. Nothing to worry about.”

“It’s just a precaution then. In case things get crazy.”

“Well, isn’t that exactly what we’re hoping for?”

And thank god, that’s exactly what we got.

I won’t go into extreme detail, since we’ve already drooled over the righteous insanity of a Dan Deacon concert at Scrummage in the not-so-distant past, and A to Z and Toe Taps have already attempted much more thorough reviews of Saturday’s show. But I will say that if Dan Deacon wasn’t something of a sweatpants and microphone performance artist, he would make for the World’s Greatest Wedding DJ. (Continued)

Bon Iver - “For Emma”
(from For Emma, Forever Ago)

This is the kind of creative awakening all of us romantic, moony creative-types wish for: a retreat to the north, a burst of lightning in a field of deep meditation, a fully realized work of art borne from the soil, fresh and whole, edifying like a baptism.

What happened here? Justin Vernon spent a few months in a cabin in the woods, never intending to make a transformative album, or any album at all. But weeks went by, he took up his guitar and his four-track and looked at the snow and, one can only imagine, this heartache-lovely piece of poetry poured forth intact.

In the real world, Vernon released For Emma, Forever Ago independently under the name Bon Iver (French for “good winter”) last fall; it was scooped up by Jagjaguwar records and re-released this February. In the real world, yes, For Emma has been prattled on about at length. You kids out there in the real world probably know about it already; maybe you’ve listened to it a few times yourself. But as soon as I put this album on, friends, I leave that world – the snarky, self-conscious sphere of who knows what and when and how well, where all that ever happens sincerely is second guessing and spilling coffee.

It’s not just the album’s spare-ness, or how lonely it is, or the fact that you can hear a chair scooting over creaking floorboards and sirens howling miles away or Justin Vernon coughing or dropping things. It’s not just the eerie whistling, the gentle hand-claps or the expansive, echoing harmonies. (Continued)

“Hold on to your seats,” announced the enthusiastic 50-some-year-old sound guy at Detroit’s Corktown Tavern, “’cause High Anxiety is up next!”

The High Strung - “Rimbaud/Rambo”

from Get the Guests

Detroit’s The High Strung has been around for awhile, and around the country quite a few times. Singer/Lyricist/Guitarist Josh Malerman, Bassist Chad Stocker, and Drummer Derek Berk have recorded three albums–including a Post-Rockist favorite of 2007, Get the Guests–traveled thousands of miles, and played hundreds of shows at bars, clubs, and libraries. They’re working on a new album now in Canada with David Newfeld, who has produced the likes of Broken Social Scene and the Los Campesinos. It was a pretty packed crowd for the Corktown Tav and the fans were jumping and singing along with the mix of old songs and new, as The High Strung kept it up tempo for most of the show, keeping all ballads but the excellent “Arrow” off of the setlist (a bit of a shame, since “Watch Me Sustain the Early Days,” “Childhood,” and “The Meddler” are my faves). (Continued)