The Post-Rockist

The Shins - “Gone for Good”
(from Chutes Too Narrow)

As with all these sorts of things, I saw it coming, but it still came out of nowhere. It was like a basketball to the face; of course you see it coming, but you can’t move out of its path, and you don’t really believe it’s going to hit you until you hear it collide with your skull.

It wasn’t one of those “big” breakups. We’d only been together for a couple of months – enough time to get to know each other, but not enough time to understand the mechanics, which I think makes things worse – when you don’t know why things happen the way they do in a relationship, when you’re not sure what made those formidable bridges of expectation fall to bricks all around you.

Jens Lekman - “A Little Lost”

Appropriately for a post-rockist romance, we met at a Jens Lekman concert, where the starry disco lights, swelling ballads and the sweet Swedish crooner’s honey tones set just the right mood for a swoon. Then we found out that we knew each other already; I’d commissioned him to do an illustration for my magazine months ago, and we had exchanged a lot of pleasantly-mannered and modestly flirtatious emails. If every great love needs a great story to hold it together, this one, I thought, was clearly meant to be. How could an encounter so enchanted not lead to a legendary affair?

(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)

Of Montreal, Wilco, and other musical acts in Milwaukee

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As a six-year-old, picturing myself at a rock concert, I would have imagined a concert hall, with a heavy red curtain and a crystal chandelier. With my six-year-old musical horizons limited to classical works, Motown, and Josie and the Pussycats, the band I imagined would come from that narrow world – they would be theatrical but light-hearted, catchy but musically deft. There would be flashbulbs, flooding lights, and everyone would be charged with the uncontainable, hyperkinetic energy that only six-year-olds can understand. A rock concert would be friendly, colorful – there might even be cartoons; six-year-olds love cartoons – but there would be a sense of danger, a pushing of boundaries, because rock concerts were a thing that little kids didn’t do, and those sorts of things usually involved trouble. And it would be the future – 2007, maybe (a year I would have called “twenty-oh-seven,” because at six years old, the nineteen-nineties would not have given way to the two-thousands), and the world would be streamlined, cordless, colored with glitter and silver.

Imagine me, then, at Milwaukee’s historic Pabst Theatre, an opera hall built by a beer baron in the 19th century. Now mostly a rock venue, the Pabst is plush – all white marble, gold leaf, and Austrian crystal. Imagine the curtain pulled back after two welcome-overstayed opening acts to reveal a costumed band – the keyboard player in ruffles, the bass player draped in a silver lame gown, wearing huge black wings – on tiered platforms that illuminated when the hook of the first chorus kicked in, bathing our astonished faces in bright white light. Three screens behind them looped psychedelic cartoon.

Imagine the awe of the six-year-old self, somehow incorporated into my confident, gratifying-job-holding, well-dressed, alcohol-consuming, sexually-realized adult being, that this was it, the rock concert of the future as seen from 1990, and it was Of Montreal.

A week later I saw Wilco in a smoky, delapidated ballroom in a poor part of the city (a neighborhood that Marquette University is slowly overtaking). The stage lights cut through the fog, the sloppy sound echoed. The band sounds so much rowdier live, so much fuller and so much more southern – like they belong in a barroom, not on reverential indie hit lists.

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There is nowhere to sit in the ballrooom, although there are scalloped balconies where people get close to the railing and dance. Wilco bothered with none of the misanthropic, reluctant-showmen affect that seems to define so many of the musicians I’ve seen live this fall. I think at one point Jeff Tweedy even said, “Keep cheering, because we’re not gonna stop.” He was wearing a cowboy hat, for God’s sake.

I think seeing Wilco was like seeing the rock concert I imagine to have existed in the past – maybe, 1978. Yeah – it was like seeing some cocky, sweaty, straight-shooting rock and roll band in 1978, the way we romanticize rock and roll bands to have been like once.

Tonight I’m seeing The New Pornographers, again at the Pabst. I wonder what sort of imagined times and spaces this show will bring to terra firma.

-Posted by Amy

The Candliers - The Unsettled West
Live at WMSE

I don’t want to get into the politics of Milwaukee’s local music scene, except to say that for a city that brought you both Liberace AND The Violent Femmes – and hosts the world’s largest music festival every summer – we ought to have more of a scene than we do. A punk band here, a cover-y blues rock band there, a few flappity rappers and DJs bearing the great weight of urban revitalization, and you’ve got a lot of city residents feeling a little punchy (“I’m moving to Chicago!”) – or a little sore.

Admittedly, I copped an attitude when I moved here; after all, I’m from Detroit, a savage crater of a city that has nonetheless managed to crank out a significant percentage of the world’s most awesome music. If Detroit can do it, I wanted to shout from the top of Milwaukee’s abandoned breweries, you can too! Stop feeling so sorry for yourself and kick out some jams!

But after a while, that impulse faded. Milwaukee is a tricky city to get to know, and the music that lives here is no exception. A decade of juvenile bullying between club owners and booking agents has pushed a lot of activity under the surface, so while twinkly venues host hot touring acts and indie record shops bring in hot indie rockers, the premium-grade MKE shit is going down in basements, attics, and the back rooms of dark bars.

(Continued)

A Long (belated) Valentine to the Detholz! 

The Detholz! - Mister Electricity
(from Who Are the Detholz!?)

The Detholz! - Behold the Man
(from Cast Out Devils)

Detholz! recordings, Detholz! tour dates, and other assorted Detholz! tidbits available at www.detholz.com. 

The Detholz! have a way of rearranging the realities of the sensory world. At every Detholz! show I have ever been to, there has been a sniff of the weird, or a sense of the infinitely possible. Strangers show up at Detholz! shows and turn out to be long-lost twins. Lovers reunite, and people who do not yet know they are perfect for each other pair off. I have run into ex-boyfriends, ex-peers, ex-coworkers, ex-costars, and ex-floormates at Detholz! shows. And, it seems, I learn another of the endless and eerie commonalities between myself and drummer Andrew Sole, who grew up in metro Detroit, just like me, and went to church a mile away from my house. He babysat for the kid who played Poseidon to my Medusa in a high school play (directed, as an extra note of interest, by the fiancée of one of the editors of this website); his pastor was the father of a former symphony standpartner, who also made a guest apperance as the frontman of an opening band at a show they played in Wheaton, Illinois.

I was an eighteen-year-old with an angry ache nestled in my heart when I saw the Detholz! for the first time. After a crunchy, kitschy set of space rock – songs about following a spurning lover on a train to Mars, a supervillian named Mr. Electricity who is “impossible to touch,” cities overrun by alien armies – the band came back for an encore, wearing bright suits and pale make-up. They set their gear up in silence, played a few tentative chords, and when they all wailed in unison, they spit out cornstarch blood.

They played “Celebrate” and “Hot for Teacher,” rendering every tacky cover with charge. By night’s end I had never been sweatier or more worked up. I had never heard silliness delivered with such urgent earnesty, flushed rock beauty paired so seamlessly with nerdy irony.

My heartbreak was smashed into dust and scattered over the ocean. I was in love.

It was my first year at Beloit College, and during my four years there, the Detholz! became an institution, playing once a semester in the smelly, roady basement of the C-Haus. Their shows were like no other shows. They played to shirtless, screaming crowds for hours, encore after encore, giving us their best songs two or three times. The walls of the bar would sweat brown streaks of beer, tobacco, and grime. Afterward they would come to our parties and dance on our tables. This was rock revivalism at its best, with all of the danger, all of the spirit, all of the flesh.

The Detholz!, of course, have regularly scheduled lives away from this dirty booze pit on the stateline. They live together in Chicago, have other jobs, play music with other bands (notably, Baby Teeth and Bobby Conn), and maybe – no one really likes admitting this, but we’re jealous lovers  – maybe have dedicated fans that aren’t Beloit College students.

Formed in 1996 at Wheaton College – the notoriously fundamentalist alma mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, where dancing was banned until 2003 – the band initially explored their frustrations with stagy irreverence, performing in space suits and smashing television sets with pickaxes. Return engagements at Wheaton resulted in demonstrations, prayer circles, and altercations between fans and detractors.

“We nurtured images of the ‘quintessential Detholz! fan,’” says lead singer Jim Cooper, “who is a socially maladjusted male between the ages of 15 and 30, in a profession related to science or math, probably hopelessly addicted to porn, terrified of women, snorty, constantly apologizing, etcetera.”

In 2002, Detholz! debuted their first full-length, Who are the Detholz!?, a sort of campy musical Metropolis. Though members of the band have expressed reluctance at ever performing or even hearing most of the songs on that album ever again, it is nonetheless meticulously crafted, full of tabernacle harmonies, impeccable electronics, electrifying arches of melody and rhythms so sharp they could snap your neck. This was the album I took home with me after my first life-altering Detholz! experience, and it spent long summers spinning in my car stereo, and lonely winters waiting with me for the thaw of the earth and the blistering homecoming of my heart’s most resilient suitors.

Seasons turned and the band returned, time and time again, to the C-Haus. I kept listening to Who Are the Detholz!?, but it was becoming evident that the album was aging, and that these rock-and-roll missionaries were not themselves getting any younger. Their new songs were full of disco experimentalism, psycho-curious explorations. Jim’s televangelistic monologues were getting darker and closer to the quick. And as the annual Halloween Jukebox of the Dead fete became increasingly elaborate – evolving to include covers of “We Built This City” and the unfortunate Cher-surrection single “Believe” alongside old favorites “Like a Virgin” and “Dancing on the Ceiling” –  their sets of original music became tentative. Requests for “Last Train to Mars” were not always honored, to widespread disappointment. Songs were played that we would never hear again. Whispers persisted that a new album was coming out “soon,” but we could never get a straight answer as to when.

Their shows remained transcendent. We kept taking our shirts off.

But we started to ask ourselves:

What is going on? Were these guys Christians or what? Were there kernels of sincerity in their preacherly tirades? Was a song like “I.M.A. Believer” presented to us only in parody? Wheaton College was no big secret, and of course we would have accepted the Detholz! regardless of agenda or persuasion. Still, it nagged, and it nagged more as the band seemed to be scampering off in ambiguous directions.

And then, like a strike of lightning from the sky, the good people at RightRightRight Films produced and released Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, a feature-length documentary about Christian rock and including extensive interviews with members of Detholz!, addressing at once the question that many of us had formulated on our own over the course of a long courtship with this band, and forging a valley of clarity. This was a band that was Going Through a Transition. They were Figuring It All Out.

(Continued)

Electric Six
Switzerland
[Metropolis Records; 2006]

Rockists hate Electric Six. Rockists think that Electric Six is everything good rock should not be: trashy, jokey, lewd, full of hooks and disco and naked ladies. Pitchfork Media’s review of last spring’s Señor Smoke, the Six’s second full-length album, branded the band “dick-and-fart-joke rock.” It called the album’s best song a “head-up-ass ballad.” It called the album sad, for god’s sake.

Well, Pitchfork, maybe it’s because it’s summertime, at least until next Thursday, and I’ve been driving around in my car listening to Fire and Señor Smoke (and Franz Ferdinand and Cake classics), which get me where I want to go. Maybe it’s because I’m not quite ready to give up my pulp fiction, my mojitos, or my stupid loud music until some goddamn leaves start falling and I have to stay inside listening to Joanna Newsom and the Silver Jews. Or maybe it’s because I’m from Detroit, where we are more concerned with Vengeance than we are with Fashion.

But you know what? I love this band. I love this band recklessly. The Six themselves may find my love for them embarrassing, but I am not ashamed.

Electric Six’s sound filters through several plates of synth, kitsch, and genre before it reaches one’s ears, inviting a questionable array of critical classifications including disco-metal, disco-punk, and garage-disco. If I were to contribute to these baffling gestures I would call the new album, Switzerland, a sort of pastiche of European techno-trash and disco-desert-rock, complete with twang, slide guitar, and cowboy beats. But of course this is unsatisfactory. What do I really want to say about Switzerland? I want to say that my first impulse was to be disappointed. Wasn’t the opening track, “Band in Hell,” just a little on the … slow side? Sure, the Devil and Hitler both show up before the bridge, but could I be correctly hearing a chorus with no slapstick at all? A chorus that goes something like, “I’m sorry that I lost you/ … I’m sorry that I am who I am”?

With the wisdom of several spins of the record behind me, however, I can tell you that “Band in Hell” sets a striking tone of southwestern despair and (dare I say) genuine regret that carries the whole album forward. There are venereal diseases where there were once beautiful girls. Where we once did the Macarena all night long, we are now pulling the plug on the party. One song is titled “I Wish This Song Was Louder.” It’s not, and there’s nothing that the Six can do, besides keep rocking our infernal souls into eternity.

(Continued)

The sun that had for the last two days turned Chicago’s Union Park into something of a schvitz started its fiery descent at a moment so precise it could hardly have been a coincidence – precisely, that is, at the start of Devendra Banhart’s performance. With the day in its tawny final hour and the night not yet settled in, it was easy to imagine Banhart and his band slipping through some careless crevice of the space-time continuum, straight out of 1972, a few molecules still scrambled. It would certainly help to explain the singer’s bizarre banter. He opened the act by explaining that, inspired by a tour stop in Greece, the band would be henceforth known as “Bathhouse of the Winds”: “where the winds go for anonymous sexual encounters.” Then he said something about sperm being wet and life being made out of water. 

It wasn’t that the music was quite so moving. It was just that the musicians, in tight denim flares and gauzy shirts, all lanky and angelic with long locks and beards, looked so handsome in the amber light. It was the bottle of Maker’s Mark that the lead guitar player took swigs from when he wasn’t using its neck to play slide. It was the young man alone who stepped in next to us, muttering, “Sweet! Open spot!” – then, ten minutes later, stomped away after offering his review: “Boring!” It was because it was not just the sun that was going down but the temperature, and we had all survived one of the hottest weekends ever recorded on the planet. And it was because we knew that as much as we liked Devendra Banhart, as much as we would like Yo La Tengo after him and Spoon after them, and as much as we were all about to puke with anticipation for the legendary once-in-a-lifetime Os Mutantes final one-time only reunion tour extravaganza, we also knew that it was all about to be over. And we were all pretty damn tired.

I was so tired, in fact, that I wandered away from the Devendra Banhart show and bought a popsicle and fell asleep while I tried to eat it, the sounds of Yo La Tengo coloring my dreams. I had slept through Aesop Rock that afternoon, too, just as I had the day before during The Walkmen’s show, though I did wake up when I recognized that one song from the Saturn commercial.

“Well, I guess you did get in for free,” a friend said after I’d told him how many bands had provided soundtrack music for my snoozes. That was true and it wasn’t true. I bought my thirty-dollar two-day whammy ticket in April, the day after the Os Mutantes announcement, in a fever of impulse. It was mailed to me a week later. Of course I lost it. But someone I met at an after-hours coffee shop party in Evanston the night before the festival offered me a spare ticket she didn’t plan on selling. I got in on a free pass, but I’d paid my thirty dollars, and I wasn’t looking to waste it.

Besides, it’s not like I was sleeping because I was bored. It wasn’t that I even regretted falling asleep. Pitchfork, the baby brother of runaway child Intonation, was technically a first-annual festival, but it felt like something we had all been attending for years. Friends I knew from college were there, friends from Ann Arbor and friends from Milwaukee. I ran into at least two dozen people I knew, including a quorum of ex-boyfriends.

(Continued)