The Post-Rockist

Have you ever been so blown away by a few notes in a song upon first listen that you remember exactly where you were when you heard them for the first time?

“Skylark.” 1:57. Aretha Franklin, from Sweet Bitter Love.

Driving northbound on Woodward Avenue in Ferndale, MI, on a warm fall day after Sunday brunch.

Give it a listen right here. You may remember where you were when you first heard those notes too. And no cheating by moving ahead–it’s the wait that makes the notes count. Aretha was smart enough, even in this early recording, to know how to be patient enough to deliver the goods toward the end of the song to get the greatest impact.

-Posted by Scotter

I’ve become infatuated with Destroyer and am extremely excited about Dan Bejar and company’s new album, Trouble in Dreams, out on March 18. So I’ve been checking the old internets because I definitely want to make Destroyer my number one Spring concert priority and, lo, I see that the dates are springing up.

Here’s what I’ve found so far the complete schedule:
March 14- The Parish, SXSW Merge Showcase, Austin, TX
April 16 - 400 Bar, Minneapolis, M
April 17 - Logan Square Auditorium, Chicago, Illinois
April 18 - Pike Room, Pontiac, MI
April 19 - Lee’s Palace, Toronto, Ontario
April 20 - Club Lambi, Montreal, Quebec
April 22 - Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
April 23 - Bowery Ballroom, NY, NY
April 24 - North Star Bar, Philadelphia, PA
April 25 - Black Cat, Washington, DC
April 26 - Grey Eagle, Asheville, NC
April 27 - Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, NC
April 28 - The Earl, Atlanta, Georgia
April 29 - The Mercy Lounge, Nashville, TN
April 30 - Blueberry Hill Duck Room, St. Louis, MO
May 1 - Record Bar, Kansas City, MO
May 2 - Waiting Room, Omaha, NE
May 3 - The Walnut Room, Denver, CO
May 13 - Starlight, Edmonton, Alberta
May 14 - #1 Royal Canadian Legion, Calgary, Alberta
May 16 - Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City, UT
May 18 - Rhythm Room, Phoenix, AZ
May 20 - Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA
May 21 - Independent, San Fran, CA
May 23 - AladdinSane Theater, Portland, OR
May 31 - Le Commodore, Vancouver, BC

I’ll be adding to the list as I find more, but here’s the even bigger news: THE POST-ROCKIST JUST BEAT PITCHFORK TO THE PUNCH!

BAM! Oh, god, this feels so f-ing good. WHAM! Yeah. Oh, my joints are shaky. My blood is pumping. It’s 5:48 on January 28, 2008, and The Post-Rockist just kicked Pitchfork’s ass. YES!

–Posted by Scotter, with jouissance.

I got to Scrummage University in Detroit’s Eastern Market District just after 10pm to find a packed performance space full of living, breathing bodies–some sweating, some really sweating–jumping and gyrating to the last few moments of Benny Stoofy’s set, which I was pretty bummed and baffled to miss since shows at Scrummage rarely start this early. But shows at Scrummage rarely reach beyond legal room capacity either. At least not since Dan Deacon’s last show.

This time around, Deacon presented Ultimate Reality, a joyous, hyperactive electronic symphony set to a film by collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche that slices and dices, then splices and splashes with effulgent neon colorings the myriad films of the Governator, Arnie Schwarzenegger.

(Continued)

Cat Power - “Lost Someone”

Cat Power - “Aretha, Sing One for Me”

(from Jukebox)

It’s after hours and you’re in a haze. Your bourbon buzz is starting to fade and exhaustion is creeping in. You’re lost, in a bad part of town, and alone. Every building you see looks abandoned, uninhabited, and eerily hostile. There’s a faraway hum of an organ; it seems to be coming from the old blues joint on 17th Street that was shut down after its liquor license was revoked and never, to your knowledge, reopened. The front door is boarded up, but you notice that the entrance in the back alley is rigged open. You stumble in, the place is empty. But there, on the stage, is a woman singing mournfully and seemingly to no one. There’s one flickering light shining on her, and the band playing along with her is shrouded in darkness.

It’s hard to pin down the exact scenario in which listening to Cat Power’s Jukebox is most appropriate, in part because the album itself sounds so fragile and ephemeral. It’s distant, evasive, noncommittal — almost as if your listening to it is an accidental act, as if these were rough sketches hashed out late one night in a studio and discovered some years later by a surprised archivist. But even as rough sketches, the songs are beautiful for their fluidity and the way they effortlessly flow from dusty old country to Muscle Shoals soul. Even as a covers album, Jukebox has whispers of self-confession and, in a perhaps unintentional way, a vague air of melodrama.

Jukebox opens up with quiet, restrained versions of “New York” and “Ramblin’ (Wo)man,” two songs sure to raise the ire of Sinatra and Hank Williams purists for her unwillingness to stay true to form. While not a particularly gripping opening, they do set the mood for the rest of the album, seductive and resolute, with a tiny glimmer of hope. Chan Marshall’s backing band, the Dirty Delta Blues Band — which includes the Dirty Three’s Jim White on drums and the John Spencer Blues Explosion’s Judah Bauer on guitar — play with a much gentler touch than the Al Green session players who worked on her last album. While The Greatest had a rich Memphis sound throughout, Jukebox covers like Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” give the impression that the band is perpetually on the verge of fade out. But in a way it works, and it only serves to heighten the presence of Marshall’s smoky vocals.

Most remarkable (and probably most contentious) is the remake of “Metal Heart,” one of the best songs off Cat Power’s earlier album Moon Pix. As great as the original was, it still sounded like a product of its time, reasonably befitting an “alternative” tag for the late 1990s. Marshall’s reworking on Jukebox, meanwhile, sounds out of time. Not necessarily that it will “stand the test of time” better than the original, just that it sounds like it’s working on its own tangential time line. The sparse arrangement of the original has been uplifted with crashing cymbals and haunting guitar and piano. It doesn’t sound like anything else being released today, but at the same time it doesn’t feel retro or throwback, and in no way is it futuristic.

And that’s exactly what makes this album so strong. A year after recovering from her breakdown in a Miami hospital, Marshall has reemerged as one of the most distinct and self-assured songwriter, singer, and arranger out there today. It takes a lot of vision and confidence to breathe new life into an old song, and to do it over and over again with such apparent ease is remarkable. On “Lost Someone” she takes James Brown’s soulful, bended knee plea and strips it of its squeals and brass flourishes, and the bare, echo-filled accompaniment serves to highlight her single-minded determination. It’s unexpectedly groovy and mournful at the same time. Clearly her time spent soaking up southern soul has paid off, as evidenced by her take on “Aretha, Sing One For Me,” which was a hit with Memphis songwriter George Jackson in 1972. It’s the high point of the album, and even though it’s recorded to sound like a Stax studio outtake, the band pulls together like old pros and play with plenty of heart. There seem to be very few artists out there, maybe Wilco, who have taken to shunning trends and focusing on good old fashioned songs as much as Cat Power. I almost hope that becomes a trend again.

-Posted by Todd

While many of you come to visit the Post-Rockist regularly for our groundbreaking content and dedicated focus on the customer service experience, there are those of you who visit our fair site because you want to be on the cutting edge. And what’s more cutting edge than the Post-Rockist? I mean, just look at this place. We were using Times New Roman before the font was even “new,” back when it was just Times Roman. We were streaming digital audio back when other music content providers were sending out traveling minstrels to your cubicle to recreate their intepretations of the latest Yeasayer single. We were post-rockist back when you had no idea what “rockist” even meant. This site truly is your portal into the next frontier.

So it should come as no surprise that when the Post-Rockist Senior Market Trend Spotter (abbrevieted P-R Sr. MTS) spotted the burgeoning internet trend of tumbling, that we jumped on that electronic bandwagon with a gusto you have not yet seen in these here interwebs. After all, we concluded after several hours of international teleconferencing and millions spent on new media market research, most “popular” music-based web logs are just content providers regurgitating headlines about new videos, album release dates, tours, incriminating photographs and the like, coupled with a paragraph or two of unnecessary gobbledy-gook. If we just cut out the gobbledy-gook and go straight for the meat, we could provide regular music news and clips to the hordes of post-rockists who most certainly aren’t getting a daily music fix from this site. So, without further hullabaloo, we present to you: the prockist. (Market research indicated that eliminating letters from words is a swell way to build ‘net credibility.)

So the next time your browsing begins to idle, sneak on over to the prockist. We’ll try and make it interesting for you; fill it with things we think are neat. And don’t fret, we’ll still update the tried and true Post-Rockist for those who still like words and complete sentences.

Yours truly,

The Executive Post-Rockist Marketing-Communications Director

And I was just watching Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (see our review here) on the Sundance Channel last night thinking “I wonder if he’s ever going to tour again?”.

Pitchfork reports that Mojo reports that the Leonard Cohen Forum reports that the legendary Canadian singer/songwriter/poet will be touring Canada and the US in May, on the heels of a new studio album.

Two countries, one month, and a 73-year-old legend = a handful of shows, high ticket prices, and lots of driving from second-tier concert cities like my Detroit to New York or Toronto (hell, Cohen may even pass on Chicago if tour dates are scarce).

We’ll have to wait and see, but I predict that you’ll want to get your tickets as soon as they’re available. This will probably be the last tour, since I don’t really know of any octogenarians outside of Pete Seegar who have done much touring.

The Magnetic Fields - “Too Drunk to Dream”

The Magnetic Fields - “The Nun’s Litany”

The Magnetic Fields - “Old Fools”

(from Distortion)

The trouble with releasing an album as monumentally encyclopedic and utterly perfect as 69 Love Songs is that there’s no precedent for following it up. In its own exhaustive way, 69 Love Songs was a complete statement, a fully realized summary of music in the 20th century, and it’s not easy to add to that accomplishment without the new items coming off as mere footnotes. So, for a time, Stephin Merritt deflected.

He indulged in a few new releases with his mid-‘80s pastiche techno pop group the Future Bible Heroes, co-written by Chris Ewen and Claudia Gonson. Together with accordionist Daniel Handler (alias Lemony Snicket), he released The Tragic Treasury, a cartoonish exercise in hyperbolic gloom and lugubrious excess that turned out to be the Gothic Archies’ best work to date. He wrote a few songs for the indie film Pieces of April before Katie Holmes was beamed up onto the Scientology space shuttle to salvation, and then there were the 26 lyrical vignettes from his Chinese opera work on Showtunes that didn’t manage to win over many new fans.

For fans still hungry for more of that all-encompassing buffet of musical styles and voices that Merritt served up on 69 Love Songs, the closest thing they had to whet their appetite was the 6th’s Hyacinths and Thistles (try saying that three times fast), released immediately afterward in 1999 and thereby solidifying Merritt’s reputation as an unstoppable songwriter. But for all its highlights, it still felt uneven. After a while, with all his idiosyncratic side projects building up and his dour irreverence for most pop music, you couldn’t help but wonder if these little excursions were expendable; just inside jokes he was pulling over on us in his sad hound dog way.

(Continued)