Download audio file (dillaphaseoneremix.mp3)
Jay Dee – “Walkinonit” (Phaseone remix)

Last month I strung together a number of compound sentences and besotted adjectives to endtroduce you to St. Louis hip-hop producer and DIY Dilla disciple Phaseone. Well, this week I had a chance to sit down with him for a quick Q&A session for the Riverfront Times to find out a bit more about who he was and what he’s been up to. Turns out he’s up to quite a lot. In addition to finishing a new album and dispatching a full schedule of remixes, both official (Bloc Party, Banjo or Freakout) and unofficial (Animal Collective, Kanye West), he also unveiled a new track over at Gorilla vs. Bear yesterday: a remix of Jay Dee’s “Walkinonit” in commemoration of the third anniversary of Dee’s death.

The interview shows up in print tomorrow, but keep an eye over at Annie Zablogski’s site later this weekend in case any outtakes crop up. Interview outtakes are basically like a DVD gag reel, only minus the laffs.

Our first album is Pleasure Mountain by Detroit’s Champions of Breakfast. The album can be purchased via the band’s MySpace page.

Pleasure Mountain is a rip-roaring mock-epic thru vast tracks of electro-pop and pop-culture nostalgia. It’s a sexed-up celebration as horny as anything by Prince or Beck’s Midnite Vultures period. The band’s raucous live show consists of live vocals with the music played as backtracking. The band, consisting of members Val Hundreds and Moses Jackson, play makeshift instruments made of 2x4s and cardboard, designed to look like guitars or Moog keyboards.

To discuss this album, The Post-Rockist has assembled the following expert panel:

Anthony DeRogatis is an author and distinguished music critic who writes regularly for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Paste, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Time, Sport Illustrated, and Monster Trucks. He is the author and editor of several books on popular music, including Rolling Stone’s Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, The Rolling Stone Album Guide, and Rolling Stone’s 100,000,000,000 Greatest Albums of Rock n’ Roll.

Kwame Kilpatrick is the embattled mayor of Detroit, currently being charged on 8 felony counts, including perjury, misconduct in office, and conspiracy, after the Detroit Free Press obtained a transcript of text messages between Kilpatrick and his former aide which revealed a saucy affair about which the two are accused of lying under oath at a trial that cost the citizens of Detroit millions of dollars.

Link is the hero and main protagonist of the popular Nintendo Adventures of Zelda video game series. He is among the best-known video game heroes of all time, and is name-dropped in the Champions of Breakfast song “WHNTR (Can U Smell the Phantasy?).”

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The Post-Rockist (P-R): Thank you all for joining us in this panel discussion of Champions of Breakfast’s Pleasure Mountain. I’d like to start first with you, Anthony DeRogatis, and ask about this interesting form of music, electro-pop with all of these fantasy, sci-fi, and video game references, and the fact that Champions of Breakfast (CoB, for short) don’t actually play real instruments on stage.

Anthony DeRogatis: Quite simply, Champions of Breakfast are challenging the Romantic (with a capital “R,” mind you) ideal of music. Beethoven would be very aghast, would “roll over in his grave,” as the song goes, to hear CoB. But this is the next movement, the explosion of the cultural and creative modes that music used to stand by. Everything has been so manufactured by the culture industry so as to make most new music disingenuous–manufactured–and legitimate only in its state of manufacturedness. In many ways, Top 40 hits and new country music are far more destructive to Romantic conceptions of music than anything the CoB have done. If anything, CoB self-consciously challenge the themes of pop music–the fake instruments just call out the now infamous lip sync incident with Ashlee Simpson. Truly, Champions of Breakfast are post-modern music, using play, irony, and lunacy and passing it off as a serious art form of music, which indeed it is in our post-modern, post-industrial, post-humanist, post-deconstructionist, post-literary, post-rockist (if I might use the title of your so-called, somewhat mis-leading, and trite blog) world.

P-R: Um, thanks? Well what do you think of the opening track, “Gravedigger”?

Anthony DeRogatis: “Gravedigger” starts with a mist of electric sound and a thumping that simulates a heartbeat. “We can dance all night.” “We can rock all night.” All of the standard shout-outs and dance-party calling cards are there. Zombies, the undead, “everybody up” from the grave. You can almost see the video, a parody, of course, of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” with all of the spirits rising from the ground, a bit disordered at first, then suddenly finding themselves in line for a coordinated dance up and down the graveyard, led by swaying and skipping Moses Jackson and Val Hundreds. “Let’s get down together…and break dance.”

The fascination with fantasy characters, particularly those associated with the undead, can very much be explained through the post-911 and current Iraqi war milieu as a form of escapism from impending or possible death. Mummies and zombies rising from the grave to dance. In a sense, the undead are invisible, will never die, and can party all they want. They don’t have jobs and don’t need them. They just need physical contact with a living being, and in these fantasies there’s a lot of that contact, often sexual, which gets kind of messed up if you think about it, but there it is.

Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t obviously read this into the song?

P-R: Well, um, not quite, but…

Anthony DeRogatis: Ah, well, I guess you’re just a blog, right? You probably didn’t even see the relation between “Power of Glove” and Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love.” God! Such amateurs!

P-R: Yes, well, Link. First, thanks for joining us.

Link: Hey, no problemo, dude.

P-R: As a famous Nintendo hero, what do you think of “Power of Glove”?

Link: I’ll tell you one thing, that god-damned thing did no good for me, so god bless ‘em for findin’ somethin’ better to do with that piece ‘a shit.

P-R: Well, if you feel so strongly about it, I suppose we could move on to another song. What do you think of the fourth track, “Vanilla Always Gets It Raw”?

Anthony DeRogatis: I’ll answer this one. It’s absolutely obvious that the line “I will be your ice cream man” is a nod to Master P’s album Ice Cream Man, as well as the Van Halen and Jonathan Richman songs titled “Ice Cream Man.” Here, the Champions condition their place in pop music as the electro-pop practitioners of Ice Cream Mannery, since Richman’s folky pop, Van Halen’s classic rock, and Master P’s rap have already positioned themselves among this pantheon. Also, it attempts to overturn the idea that bland white males (the vanilla’d ones) are not as great lovers or sexual beings as others. You have to admit that white males have not exactly been stereotyped lately as vivacious lovers in popular culture. I mean, Justin Timberlake is h-o-t-t and all, but his glib self-characterizations and generally wussiness leaves him as our bad best example of Caucasian viral sexuality.

P-R: Mayor Kilpatrick, do you agree with our critic’s interpretation?

Mayor: LOL LOL! No question.

P-R: Link, what do you think?

Link: Shit. Lemme tell you somethin’. Just you try to save the world from evil or from monsters and shit. Get it bro? Fightin’ with broadswords is serious shit, ya know? Especially when you’re just a reg’ler guy from Hyrule. That’s some serious shit! And how the hell does that royal dame keep gettin’ kidnapped anywho? Every coupla years I gotta get off my keister and save that dame and what do I get? The satisfaction of savin’ the world again from evil and that’s it. It gets old after awhile, man.

Mayor: Damn that.

Link: Fuck yeah, Ya know, you’re not so bad, Kwame!

Mayor: LOL!

Unicorn Bible
Download audio file (Unicorn.mp3)

P-R: Um, let’s move on. The song “Unicorn Bible” is a standout, and it was the song that really got me interested in the band. I thought it should be the theme song to a really sexy Renaissance Festival fantasy. I really enjoy the track. What do you think?

Anthony DeRogatis: Well if you know anything about music, it’s pretty obvious where the Champions of Breakfast got this from. Everybody’s wrong when they say it’s based on Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, it’s obviously a reference to the 1969 Tyrannosaurus Rex album (later to be known as T. Rex, for you neophytes) entitled Unicorn. On the back cover of the LP, Marc Bolan and Steve Took are surrounded by literary influences, such as books by Blake and Shakespeare and, of course, The Bible. On that album, there’s a song called “She Was Born to Be My Unicorn,” that includes the following lyrics:

“Giant of Inca hill
Loosed his boar to gorely kill
The dancing one horned waife
In doublet of puffin-bill.

The beast in feast of sound
Kittened lamb on God’s ground
Ridden by the born of horn
Jigged like a muse on life’s lawn.”

So there. Don’t you get it? It’s obvious.

P-R: Link?

Link: I kinda thought that song was about fucking.

P-R: How so?

Link: A night under the dragon’s flame always leads to fucking.

P-R: Alright. Well, let’s move on to the next track, “Bacchanalian Rock.” Link, do you have any thoughts?

Link: Yeah, you know, I can really relate to the line “When we grow tired of battles and defeats” part, except for the defeats part, you know, because I always end up saving Zelda and shit, but, you know, you kinda want to get it on with some elfin’ babe afterward as a kind of reward. Seriously, dude, there’s no better bait for ladies than coming back from some kick-ass battle all horny and shit and ready for a night of gettin’ it on, you know, so I kind of think that song is about me.

P-R: What about “WHNTR (Can U Smell the Phantasy?),” where you get name-dropped by the band? That’s got to be quite an honor.

Link: Look, they call me the “sexy little guy from the Zelda game.” It’s no name drop, you know what I mean? I mean, how about a song called “Link is the fucking Hero of Time.” I mean, come on! I’m not a little guy, as any Hyrulian babe will tell ya. Ha ha ha.

Mayor: LOL!

P-R: So Mayor Kilpatrick, Pleasure Mountain is a dancy, electro-pop circus of sorts. I heard the album for the first time at a perfect moment: in the car, driving to a party. It’s fun. Where did you first hear the album?

Mayor: At Benz Chili Bowl.

P-R: Really? You know, I was at a Champions of Breakfast show at the Garden Bowl in Detroit where they dedicated the song “Nasty Bunz” to you. Did you hear that they had dedicated that song to you.

Mayor: Damn. I just got out of the shower and looked at my two way. Next time, just tell me to sit down, shut up and do your thing! I’m fucked up now!

P-R: Really? Having the song dedicated to you messed you up pretty bad? Those guys actually gave a shout out to our website once. It was pretty cool.

Mayor: I really feel you.

P-R: The bonus track on the album is called “Rosalie is One Hell of a Party,” and contains the lyrics “O Rosalie you’re gonna turn 18 / before you know it girl. / Then we can finally do it legally. / Won’t that be cool?” This song seems a little illicit to me, depending upon the age of the singer/lover that’s delivering these lines. Mayor Kilpatrick, what do you interpret these lyrics as meaning?

Mayor: In this important and somewhat confusing time in your life, please know with all our hearts and soul that I love you. And you will never, never be alone.

P-R: That’s quite a touching, albeit safe interpretation of seemingly sexual lyrics, Mayor.

Mayor: Damn! Thank you!

P-R: Don’t take offense if I say so, Mayor, but I think you’re being a bit coy. The situation seems a bit like an affair between a younger, pre-18 girl and an older man. What is your real interpretation?

Mayor: Everything is cool. Did you get busted? You were kind of wet last night, inside and out. LOL.

P-R: I think you might be right, Mayor.

Mayor: The ‘might’ is on you!

P-R: Mayor Kilpatrick, are you willing to stand by this statement, on the record?

Mayor: Hell no! Don’t start none. Won’t be none…LOL.

When Trolls Roam the Earth
Download audio file (Trolls.mp3)

P-R: Moving on, then. One of my favorite songs on the album is “When Trolls Roam the Earth.”

Anthony DeRogatis: A masterpiece of comic form. Ambivalence is key here. The lyrics turn positive statement into negative statement to the point of stagnation. Monty Python should’ve come up with this. And, of course, it calls to mind the Bush Administrations policies in Iraq, and has a lot to do with the current predicament with China, as well as the work of Jim Henson.

Link: Fuck that. I guarantee you that trolls got no time to write no songs and make no fuckin’ food. Those fuckers got spears and arrows and shit. No good to me.

P-R: But Link, many non-Nintendo gamers who have a very basic knowledge of you sometimes think that you yourself are a troll of some sort. What is your response to these allegations?

Link: FUCK THAT! You tell me who those fuckers are an’ I’ll broadsword their asses!

P-R: Well, I think that CoB put a pretty good spin on the positives that trolls could bring society.

Link: Yeah, I can see that, kinda. But you don’t get no Triforce of Courage or get to be no Hero of Time for nuthin’. You got to grab that bull by the god damn horns, you know? Look, when you get a Master Sword to throw around at those sons a’ bitches, it’s no play time, you know what I mean? They fuckin’ bite, man. Sharks are cool, but when they start biting, you kill those fuckers.

P-R: Well, on that note, I think we’ll wrap things up. I’d like to thank my guests for this first ever Inter-Review and hope we can do this again soon. Any last thoughts about the album?

Anthony DeRogatis: Well what kind of scale are we judging on?

P-R: What?

Anthony DeRogatis: Do you want a one-to-five scale? A-thru-F? How many stars can I give the album?

P-R: Well, I’d rather you just say what you think.

Anthony DeRogatis: Your site sucks. I’m giving it four stars.

P-R: Link?

Link: Well, I think it’s kinda unrealistic, you know? Dragons aren’t that awesome when you gotta fight ‘em, and that whole thing about the god damned trolls! Although they did hit the hammer on the nail on that thing about Mummy’s eatin’ brains and shit. But, you know, good fuckin’ tunes, so yeah.

P-R: Mayor Kilpatrick, what do you think about Pleasure Mountain, and Val Hundreds and Moses Jackson, overall?

Mayor: I enjoy that. I might be there stepdad one day.

P-R: Wow. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Mayor: Love you too. I realize more everyday how much. You look real good, by the way. See you tomorrow.

P-R: What?

Mayor: Hell yeah! Walk in.

P-R: Ok, well thanks for reading, folks.

Mayor: Love you.

Here’s a recent video of Champions of Breakfast at PJ’s Lager House, courtesy of Motor City Blog:

 

Electro Quarterstaff – Neckwrecker
Electro Quarterstaff – Titanium Overlords
(from Gretzky)

When the average music fan thinks of heavy metal, in either its traditional Maiden/Priest theatricality or in one of its numerous violent subgenres, there is usually one constant in its approach: a sense of misplaced seriousness.  This is a practice as old as metal itself, as lines like Judas Priest’s “Grinder / Looking for meat / Grinder / Wants you to eat!” and Slayer’s classic “How long can you last in this frozen water burial?” were delivered without a hint of irony or self-referential humor.  Death metal has a similarly straight-faced delivery much of the time, even with the ridiculous B-movie horror themes or that old standby Satan as inspiration.  Modern instrumental metal bands are serious in a different way, creating heavy but somber music that sounds like the score to a very dramatic scene in a film in which a character contemplates suicide or cries about something.  I saw the band Pelican (the Explosions in the Sky of metal) live a while back, and not only did they stare at their instruments and not move the whole performance, but they specifically requested that only blue and red lighting be used to illuminate such a boring spectacle.

Canadian quartet Electro Quarterstaff creates exciting, vital instrumental metal without falling into the dreaded trap of seriousness.  They are certainly serious about writing riffs, but they refuse to forget that metal should be fun and slightly goofy.  “We act silly on stage,” guitarist Andrew Dickens wrote to me, “because we’re all silly in person.  We have a great time playing these songs and express that through a stage show filled with funny faces, hip-swinging and foot-stomping good times.  We aren’t going to put on a show acting like we hate the world.”  From their song titles (“Something’s Awry in the Hetfield of Dreams”) to the cover art to their debut album (a bizarre pastel-colored painting of a one-antlered creature in the ocean with a boat sailing through the hole in its torso), the band is winking at the metal establishment.  And unlike many other instrumental metal-ish bands, like Red Sparowes or the aforementioned Pelican, Electro Quarterstaff aren’t here to uplift your heart –they play fast and the riffs never stop.  Ever.  “The goal of this band has always been to embrace the power of the Riff, or in the case of our songs, many riffs working together to resolve themselves into some kind of cohesive musical speech that’s both sonically fulfilling and challenging to play,” says guitarist Drew Johnston.  “There’s such an abundance of boring, tepid, predictable catshit out there that passes for ‘music’ that we try to create something that can be heard as majestic sonic weaponry puncturing the shield of mediocrity! or at least making a dent.”

If you like riffs, then Electro Quarterstaff’s debut album Gretzky is for you.  It’s a buffet of tasty licks courtesy of the triple-axe assault of Dickens, Johnston, and Josh Bedry.  Dan Ryckman pounds the drums and somehow keeps up with the hyperactive harmonic shred squad without veering into the tasteless unrelenting blast territory of brutal death metal.  Three guitars and drums –no vocals, no bass.  “I don’t think of our unorthodox lineup as a defining characteristic of the band.  In fact, I hope riff lovers from around the world relate to our sound for the same reason we do, the ‘feels good sounds good’ approach.  I guess the whole triple guitar instrumental band thing might spark some interest for the uninformed, but to ride that as what defines Electro Quarterstaff would be selling us short in my opinion,” says Dickens.  Johnston adds, “I find that instrumental music is like reading a book. The listener is enabled to use their imagination to really focus and zero-in on the interplay between the instruments as opposed to having the pictures painted for them by a vocalist or singer yattering on and on, gurgling ad nauseum; which, in the case of extreme metal, can sometimes trivialize or belittle otherwise brilliant music…It’s literally impossible for us to get away with something that sounds half-hearted or half-baked as there are no vocals to ‘carry it’ or to ‘masquerade’ a presumably mediocre or temperate section.” 

Their music is rooted in metal traditions, but just because you think you don’t like metal doesn’t mean you can’t get down to this.  “We’ve never been too concerned about being considered a part of the metal world.  Our roots are clearly in metal and the high-gain riff-intensive songs are that of metal, but I would hate to limit ourselves solely to one genre!I think we have enough to offer to allow some interest from outside the genre, as well as to alienate some of the narrow-minded metalheads out there.”  The songs are meticulously-planned (Johnston compares the arranging process to “the molecular Tetris match from hell”) modern compositions that the composer decided to orchestrate within the sound of a specific genre.  There’s very little repetition in these songs, and considering only one of the eight songs on Gretzky is under five minutes long and one is nearly eleven, that’s a lot of riffs.  Johnston says, “The instrumental aspect of the band is liberating in that we’re totally unencumbered by conventional structure, so it’s been interesting for us to experiment with idiosyncratic accent placement, mutating syncopation, and mathematical patterns embedded between multiple, overlapping and intersecting riffs.”  Riffs are serious business, but that’s pretty much the band’s only statement.  “We don’t have any message or political ideal we’re trying to get across,” says Dickens.  “We’re just a few guys having a good time playing songs we love and that’s how we’ll always keep it.”

The band completed their first tour in the spring of 2006, which included a stop at the highly-regarded Maryland Deathfest.  “[The tour] was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” says Dickens.  “We had an awesome response, made lots of new friends, introduced Electro Quarterstaff to quite a few new faces, and even came home without having to get a second job to pay the bills.”  Gretzky was released on Willowtip Records last fall, and the band has been back in Winnipeg since the tour, going to school or working a job and playing the occasional show.   They hope to tour again soon, which would once again bring the riffs to the masses, as well as the most outrageous guitar faces you’ll ever see.  “I liken the faces and antics to a profoundly cherished David Lee Roth quote: ‘You gotta make it look like it sounds!’” says Johnston.  ”Since I sing with my guitar instead of my voice, it’s fun for me to kind of mime the riffs using my face and body. As soon as you climb onstage, you immediately become a performer or entertainer whether you want to admit it or not, so why not relish in that for a minute? I have a lot of fun playing this wild music and I think that unbridled enthusiasm comes across to people when we play live and is effective in establishing a rapport between us and the audience, regardless of how sophisticated their musical tastes may or may not be. At any rate, I certainly hope our band can at the very least be a catalyst or buffer in raising ‘riff awareness’ and turning people on to more progressive, challenging music they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to or interested in.”

-Posted by Andrew