Gary Hustwit is best known (to me, anyway) as the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary about Wilco, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and his film about synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, simply called Moog. He also got my attention by managing to make a very interesting film about, of all things, a font. That was Helvetica, and it was the first in Hustwit’s planned trilogy about design. Now he has returned with the second entry in his trilogy, Objectified. The new film will premiere November 24 on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. Check your local listings for time and channel in your area.
Most people don’t think much about design. We touch and use hundreds of items in a day without giving a second thought about who made them, or why they look and feel as they do. Fortunately, there are people who give a lot of thought to design, and those people are the subjects of Hustwit’s film. Through in-depth conversations with people like Paola Antonelli, the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chris Bangle of the BMW Group in Munich, Bill Moggridge co-founder IDEO (who designed what may have been the first laptop computer, which he demonstrates), and Jonathan Ive at Apple, Hustwit gets to the heart of creative design and thinking. (more…)
Jim O’Rourke is either a master provocateur or just plain infuriating; it all depends on how you feel about his career as a whole. If you liked his experimental acoustic music with David Grubbs as Gastr Del Sol, you might not have been thrilled with his table-top noise compositions. If you enjoyed his indie-pop albums like Insignificance and Eureka, you might not have appreciated his tenure with Sonic Youth. If you liked his output overall, his hiatus while being Wilco’s go-to producer might have ticked you off. It’s fair to say that you can never be sure what you’ll get from O’Rourke.
When word came down that he was finally recording another album (even though he has been fairly prolific in his side jobs for the intervening eight years, so he has never actually gone away) the immediate impression among the indie-ites was that it would be song-based. They were right (sort of), because his latest, The Visitor, is in fact one song and only one song, lasting near forty minutes. It is not abstract collage or fringe at all; in fact, it’s quite accessible. It’s also completely instrumental. Give with one hand, take with the other.
The Visitor, aside from being one consistent track, acts as a companion piece to his Bad Timing album, also acoustic-rooted and instrumental yet four tracks in length. The flow of the music is that of O’Rourke’s guitar moving into crystalline passages, then getting punctuation from other instruments, then falling back into the guitar. These shifts provide the sense of songs within the piece, but make no mistake about it — this is a single musical statement. Producer O’Rourke gets the best of musician O’Rourke as, around the 19-minute mark, he plays with the piano parts, cutting them digitally to create a staccato, stuttering effect. Laid underneath is a brief electric guitar run, in and out, almost subliminally. Then at 23 minutes in, things subside back into organ wash, acoustic guitar, and it’s on to the next “feel.” (more…)
“We’ve kinda found that people really dig one record of ours or another, and then kinda want that version of Wheat to be the one that they always get,” said Brendan Harney, one half of the Boston-area indie-pop band, in a recent interview for the website of Express, an offshoot of the Washington Post. “And that seems to leave a trail of disappointment here and there. We are a tough band to follow ’cause of the constant changing, but, you know, ‘Change is / The better part of me.’”
Harney was borrowing a couple lines from “Changes Is,” one of the highlights of Wheat’s latest album, White Ink Black Ink (The Rebel Group): “Change is / The better part of me / Boom, boom / I’m getting out of here.” In that simple sing-along chorus, he and his partner, Scott Levesque, encapsulate all that is good about Wheat: a never-ending exploration of pop melodies backed by a propulsive rhythm that represents the heartbeat of their life-affirming music.
Like Radiohead or Wilco, Wheat switch gears with each album. “It’s not [about] being willfully obscure; it’s more about being very easily bored,” Harney told Express’s Christopher Porter, “and never wanting to even come close to repeating ourselves. We really do love pop, but we really also do love strange and difficult beauty.”
But unlike Radiohead or Wilco, Wheat remain relatively obscure in terms of popularity, having recorded for four different labels over the course of five albums. And that’s a real shame, because their third LP, 2003’s Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second, is the best album of the decade. (That’s another discussion for another day, of course.) Wheat create soaring anthems big enough to fill stadiums. If only enough people were familiar with their work to fill those stadiums …
In the grand history of pop music, there haven’t been all that many voices that blended perfectly. Oh sure, there’s been lots of harmony singing, but what I’m talking about is two voices that just sound like they were born to be together. There were the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers, and the Wilson brothers, but those are kin. In the non-related category, I’d offer Bobby Hatfield and Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, David Crosby and Graham Nash, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney as examples. I’m sure that you can add your own favorites. Since they were not related, they had to find each other, and the stories of how that happened are often the stuff of music history.
Gary Louris and Mark Olson belong in that category. The story of how they met is really nothing that special. Both were kicking around in different bands in Minneapolis, and when the timing was right in 1985, they got together. Along with bassist Marc Perlman and drummer Norm Rogers, they formed one of the most important roots bands in American music. Call it alt-country, Americana, or No Depression, The Jayhawks were pioneers in the movement. Together with Uncle Tupelo, and later Wilco, they forged the path that many, many artists have followed over the years. Named not for the fabled bird as many suspect, but as an homage to the Dylan-backing Hawks, who became the Band, the Jayhawks have been through some changes over the years, both in their music, and in the band’s membership. They’ve never really achieved the sort of success that they’d hoped for, but they have soldiered on.
Originally inspired by the Sweetheart of the Rodeo-era Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and anything else that Gram Parsons had to do with, the Jayhawks added something of their own to the stew, and eventually had a sound that defied categories, and ignored trends. They were originally signed to a local Minneapolis label, the legendary Twin/Tone Records, and in 1988 their early demos were spruced up and released on an album called Blue Earth. The beautiful sound of Louris and Olson’s voices blending together became their trademark, and the songs that the two co-wrote were no small part of the equation. In 1989 the august Village Voice called the Jayhawks “the only country rock band that matters.” (more…)
Wilco has reached that point in their career when it becomes trendy for the hipster brigade to slag each new release as “not as good as (fill in album name here).” That’s a shame, because the Chicago-based band is making some of their best music these days. Led by the irrepressible Jeff Tweedy, and featuring the off-the-charts guitar work of modern master Nels Cline, this Wilco lineup, together for five years now, finds the band at their musical peak.
One thing that a creative artist learns early on is that you’re not going to be able to please everyone all the time. There were those who found the Wilco masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and its successor, A Ghost Is Born, too experimental for their tastes. The band seemed to react to that by releasing the fairly straightforward Sky Blue Sky in 2007. That one was deemed to be too bland, and the nostalgia merchants began to call for a return to the glorious days of Summerteeth. No doubt we’ll see a similar reaction if Radiohead ever returns to the more easily digestible sound of their OK Computer era.
If Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch) doesn’t please the entire fanbase it won’t be surprising, but it will be pretty damned unfair. For what we have here is an album that is a nearly perfect fusion of Wilco’s experimental bent, and Tweedy’s straightforward Americana songwriting style, and, I might add, these are some of Tweedy’s finest songs ever. He’s unafraid to let his influences show, and as a result we get takes on Talking Heads, the Beatles, and the Motown sound. Producer Jim Scott rejoined the band for this effort, and the recording is first rate. All of this adds up to what may be the finest Wilco album since, well…since always. There, I said it. (more…)
Last week I told you about the Hold Steady’s new DVD, A Positive Rage. You may recall that it is strictly a lo-fi affair, and really more of a documentary about the band on tour than a concert film. All of that works very well for the Hold Steady, a bad still pushing their way to the top.
This week, we have pretty much the polar opposite of that experience in the new DVD from Wilco, called Ashes of American Flags. This is a beautifully shot, recorded, and edited film that shows the band on stage in five quintessentially American venues during its 2008 tour. It was released this past Saturday to celebrate Record Store Day. Jeff Tweedy had this to say about the occasion:
“My introduction to a lot of great music and to the ‘music business’ came from hanging around and eventually working at independent record stores in Belleville, IL and St. Louis many years ago. It’s the life I know. Nothing beats browsing in your favorite store, listening to music, finding something new or old that you’ve been searching for, being ignored by the store clerks, all that. And without these stores, there’s no way Wilco would still be around. They’ve been with us from the very beginning, through thick and thin. Even if I wasn’t in a band, I’d still support Record Store Day. It’s a great thing and I’m glad we could do something special with them.”
And that something is very special indeed. Beginning with a show at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, OK, we watch as the band moves across the country, arriving next at Tipitina’s in New Orleans, followed by the Mobile Civic Center in Alabama, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and ending up at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.
Ashes of American Flags was produced and directed in HD by Christoph Green along with Fugazi’s Brendan Canty, who says that the film “was captured completely on the fly with a terrifying lack of planning. ” The resulting 88-minute film brings us 13 songs from the Wilco repertoire, and nicely showcases the band’s brilliant musicianship, and Tweedy’s adept way with a song. (more…)
“Someone sent some big-shot
Agent here to take a look at me
But he left before I even started
Then said that I was talent-free
I’m having that kind of career…
Having a kind of career”
– Syd Straw, “Actress”
A night in the career of Syd Straw begins like a bad joke: A woman and a dog walk into a bar … the bar, in this case, being the Cinema Bar in beautiful downtown Culver City, California. The place only holds about 40 people, so Straw’s arrival with Henry is difficult to ignore. The two take their time getting situated – Straw greeting friends, Henry sniffing the floor – while longtime L.A. scenester Dean Chamberlain (whose regular Sunday-night gig Straw is commandeering) and his band clear the tiny stage for her. Just as she’s finally removing her coat, strapping on her guitar and soliciting the last-minute participation of Chamberlain’s bass player, Henry makes the mistake of poking his nose behind the bar — at which point Sara the bartender goes apoplectic. “You can’t have that fucking dog in here!” she yells.
Straw protests – “What did he ever do?” – but Sara’s word is law, so a friend trundles Henry off to an undisclosed location as Straw and her band pull themselves together. She hoists a cheap boombox onto her shoulder, turns it on, and the band launches into a whimsical tune called “Invisible Current of Love.” She gets through about eight bars before realizing that no sound is coming from the boombox, then starts over – only to have the appliance crap out on her about three minutes into the song. That doesn’t stop Straw; she begins riffing that her recent purchase “wasn’t such a ‘Best Buy’ after all,” while her band shuffles along behind her. Getting ready to repeat her chorus one last time, she beseeches the small crowd, “C’mon, sing it – I dare you!” And when her entreaty fails to elicit a full-fledged singalong, she glares at us and snarls, “Hipsters!“
Straw treats her set list less like a regimen than a rough draft, choosing songs seemingly at random and trusting the band to follow along. Deciding at one point to sing Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World,” long a linchpin of her live repertoire, she enthuses, “Oh! You’re going to love this one! … And if you don’t, please just file out in an orderly fashion.” The line could serve as an apt metaphor for many a pop-music career, including Straw’s – except that her wit is so sharp, the most shambolic of her shows so endearing, that it’s difficult to imagine leaving the room for any reason while she’s onstage. Her annual Valentine’s Day “Heartwreck” concerts have long been a highlight of the winter concert schedule in New York (at least until this year, when she was unable to find a suitable venue). “She really ought to make a live album,” one Internet commenter recently wrote, “but it would be a two-CD set with three songs on it!” (more…)
Jonatha Brooke is one of those artists whose name always sounds familiar – if only because, really, how many people named “Jonatha” do you know? – but whose music you may not be familiar with…though, frankly, you really should be. She’s a talented singer-songwriter who first got her career rolling in the early ’90s as a member of a duo called The Story, with collaborator Jennifer Kimball, but Brooke soon stood on her own two feet and has trotted out album after album … some on major labels, some on indies … to critical acclaim and a decidedly diehard following. Popdose had the opportunity to speak with Brooke, and we took full advantage of it, asking her about as much of her back catalog as time allowed, quizzing her about how she recently came to collaborate with the late Woody Guthrie (and whether she could even concentrate with the awareness of what Billy Bragg and Wilco had already done with the man’s lyrics), and wondering where she stands on the state of the music industry today.
Gary Hustwit is best known (to me, anyway) as the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary about Wilco, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and his film about synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, simply called Moog. He also got my attention by managing to make a very interesting film about, of all things, a font. That was Helvetica, and it was the first in Hustwit’s planned trilogy about design. Now he has returned with the second entry in his trilogy, Objectified. The new film will premiere November 24 on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. Check your local listings for time and channel in your area.
Jim O’Rourke is either a master provocateur or just plain infuriating; it all depends on how you feel about his career as a whole. If you liked his experimental acoustic music with David Grubbs as Gastr Del Sol, you might not have been thrilled with his table-top noise compositions. If you enjoyed his indie-pop albums like 
and 
, you might not have appreciated his tenure with Sonic Youth. If you liked his output overall, his hiatus while being Wilco’s go-to producer might have ticked you off. It’s fair to say that you can never be sure what you’ll get from O’Rourke.
album, also acoustic-rooted and instrumental yet four tracks in length. The flow of the music is that of O’Rourke’s guitar moving into crystalline passages, then getting punctuation from other instruments, then falling back into the guitar. These shifts provide the sense of songs within the piece, but make no mistake about it — this is a single musical statement. Producer O’Rourke gets the best of musician O’Rourke as, around the 19-minute mark, he plays with the piano parts, cutting them digitally to create a staccato, stuttering effect. Laid underneath is a brief electric guitar run, in and out, almost subliminally. Then at 23 minutes in, things subside back into organ wash, acoustic guitar, and it’s on to the next “feel.” 
“We’ve kinda found that people really dig one record of ours or another, and then kinda want that version of Wheat to be the one that they always get,” said Brendan Harney, one half of the Boston-area indie-pop band, in a recent 
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Last week I told you about the Hold Steady’s new DVD, 
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