We love Death Cab for Cutie at BlackSwanSongs.com. Probably seen them play live about 8-10 times. Following their history for so long is how we’ve noticed their fandom and marketing move from indie rockers, to teens during their The O.C. plot point days, to Adult Contemporary radio format-listening VH1 Storytellers viewers.
And for y’all aging hipsters who will be at home attending to newborns and young children this evening, tune in to VH1 at 10 p.m. central time zone.
And don’t get it twisted. We realize that Death Cab are aging into adults quite gracefully. After all, we can’t all rock-out with the verve of adolescence well into our 60s like The Rolling Stones.
If web 3.0 will be all about curation, you’ll notice BlackSwanSongs.com has been getting its start on web 3.0 with our last several entries.
Creative entries and analytical blog posts have given way to the curation of videos as BlackSwanSongs brings not one, but two bands to life right here in little ol’ Austin, TX: Norushi Minx and Paraguay.
Most of the stuff on PitchforkTV does not sync up with the taste of BlackSwanSongs, but an acoustic performance from Mac MacCaughan and Jim Wilbur of Chapel Hill, N.C.’s venerable indie rock band, Superchunk, is must-see BlackSwanSongs TV.
Curation, curation, curation: in the future when everyone has Google TV, AppleTV (or something similar), you’ll be able to come to the main page of BlackSwanSongs.com and just watch – or listen – to the tunes and videos we’ve assembled especially for people with immaculately cool taste.
One of BlackSwanSongs.com all-time favorite artists, Adam Franklin (Swervedriver, Magnetic Morning) continues his prolific run with a new Adam Franklin and the Bolts of Melody album entitled I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years which will be released June 29, 2010, on Second Motion Records.
You can hear an acoustic version below of a beautiful track from the upcoming album entitled “Yesterday Has Gone Forever.” The melancholy lyrics and atypical pop song structure are just the type of soul-penetrating solipsistic poesy that make rainy days feel that much more lonesome. As Mick Jagger once said to John Lennon, “It’s a blues, John. It’s a blues.”
And if you can’t wait until June 29, 2010 to listen, you can hear a sample of the entire album right now on Amazon.com.
Get ready to pull up the calendar section on your iPhone/smartphone. On September 14, one of BlackSwanSongs’ favorite bands, Superchunk, will release Majesty Shredding on CD, LP and digital download. The band have announced summer festival dates and September east coast dates with west coast dates to be announced soon. Superchunk will also perform on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Monday, September 20, their first television appearance since 1994. (Let’s pray they announce an Austin show!)
The press release on the Merge Records site reveals:
Having cleared the deck of odds and sods with last year’s Leaves in the Gutter EP, Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan set about to write a batch of songs that would capture the spirit of the band’s live shows. From 1997’s Indoor Living through 2001’s Here’s to Shutting Up, Superchunk had written most of their records together, building their songs through collaborative writing and rehearsal. But, in an effort not to overthink their new material (and because drummer Jon Wurster lives a couple hundred miles away from the rest of the band), Superchunk approached Majesty Shredding the same way they approached their early records: McCaughan provided skeletal demos to his bandmates, who in turn fleshed out the songs during a brief period of rehearsal and recording.
This sense of purpose is enhanced by the presence of Scott Solter, an engineer and producer (The Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice, St. Vincent) known for coaxing exceptional performances out of the artists he works with. Majesty Shredding is a powerful document of Superchunk as a band, augmented as needed with well-placed harmonies, keyboards, and guitar overdubs (and some backing vocals courtesy of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle).
Since releasing their first 7-inch in 1989, Superchunk has run the gamut of milestone albums: early punk rock stompers, polished mid-career masterpieces, and lush, adventurous curveballs. Conventional wisdom holds that a band two decades into its career can only rehash or reinvent, but with Majesty Shredding, Superchunk has done something entirely different. Neither a return nor a departure, Majesty Shredding telescopes two decades into 41 indelible, action-packed minutes. It is the sound of youthful exuberance fine-tuned with grown-up confidence. And it may very well be Superchunk’s best record yet.
Superchunk also recently drank the social media Kool-Aid too; check out their twitter.
Track Listing:
1. Digging for Something
2. My Gap Feels Weird
3. Rosemarie
4. Crossed Wires
5. Slow Drip
6. Fractures in Plaster
7. Learned to Surf
8. Winter Games
9. Rope Light
10. Hot Tubes
11. Everything at Once
Superchunk tour dates:
6/19 Denver, CO – Westword Music Festival
6/20 Chicago, IL – Taste of Randolph Street Festival w/The Love Language
7/24 Omaha, NE – MAHA Music Festival
9/17 Washington, DC- 930 Club
9/18 New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom
9/19 Brooklyn, NY- Music Hall of Williamsburg
9/20 New York, NY – Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
9/21 Boston, MA- Royale
9/22 Philadelphia, PA- Trocadero
Re: no worries if you aren’t checking email and/or don’t see this in time…
mailed-by
srs.blackberry.com
Yes!
——Original Message——
From: Black Swan
To: Mac McCaughan
ReplyTo: gmail.com
Subject: no worries if you aren’t checking email and/or don’t see this in time…
Sent: Mar 18, 2010 11:04 AM…but is Superchunk the special guest at 7:00 p.m. for the Merge Showcase tonight?
From an old-school Austin fan (the brotha that comes to all your Austin shows),
Looks like this is the first year in a while that I might not be writing reviews for any publication other than the one you are reading, but my editor at the Austin American-Statesman asked me for some showcase picks and the following showcases are what I delivered to her. I’ve provided links for some of the bands that I think you must hear:
Note: showcases in bold hold the highest probability of my attendance.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
8:00 Strange Boys – Emo’s Jr. 9:00 Here We Go Magic – Club de Ville
10:30 Motorhead – Austin Music Hall
12:00 Nas & Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley 1:00 Sixteen Deluxe – Encore
Thursday, March 18, 2010
8:00 Ozomatli – Auditorium Shores (free show; no wristband or badge required) 9:00 Miles Kurosky – Emo’s Main Room 10:00 Rogue Wave – Emo’s Main Room
11:30 Band of Horses – Stubb’s 12:00 Centro-matic – Emo’s Annex 1:00 Evan Dando – The Ale House
Friday, March 19, 2010
8:55 Band of Horses – Central Presbyterian Church 9:30 Cruiserweight – Buffalo Billiards
10:00 Smokey Robinson – Austin Music Hall
11:00 Girl in a Coma – Buffalo Billiards 12:00 Broken Social Scene – The Parish 1:00 Dengue Fever – Encore Patio
Saturday, March 20, 2010
8:00 She & Him – Auditorium Shores(free show; no wristband or badge required)
9:30 Sarah Jarosz – Austin Music Hall 10:00 Margaret Cho – Esther’s Follies
11:20 Xzibit – Club de Ville 12:30 Big Star – Antone’s 1:00 Adam Franklin & The Bolts of Melody – The Tap Room at Six
Last night I attended one of the best show’s I’ve seen in a long, long time. I have a copy of the Bon Iver record “For Emma, Forever Ago,” and I knew that the show would be good, but I didn’t expect it to be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
There is something about vocalist Justin Vernon’s voice and songs that I identify with wholeheartedly. Knowing his story – how he wrote and recorded the album in isolation, hibernating away in upstate Wisconsin after breaking up with his girlfriend and his previous band – allows the songs to resonate in your soul that much more deeply.
Bon Iver — a.k.a. indie-folk musician Justin Vernon and band — turned in one of the most memorable performances from the entire ACL Festival weekend Sunday evening at a sold-out show at the Paramount Theatre.
The band’s final performance before their tour-ending Wisconsin homecoming show couldn’t have been scripted better. The sold-out audience was hyped, fueled by adrenaline, alcohol (and who knows what else) after three days of music, sun and rain. The Paramount Theatre’s acoustics sounded as if they had been fine-tuned especially for Vernon’s booming falsetto. The show was also the final night of Bon Iver’s tour with opening band Megafaun (a freak-folk group of stunning power featuring members of Vernon’s previous band DeYarmond Edison).
Vernon was very gracious the entire evening, whether he was calling up an old friend to start the show by reciting a poem, or whether repeatedly thanking the audience for taking part in an evening that was seemingly a poignant apex in his life.
“I can’t express enough gratitude for y’all showing up to fill this beautiful theater,” Vernon said.
Bon Iver began the show with the first three songs from debut album “For Emma, Forever Ago” played in sequence, a comforting start for those familiar with what’s turned out to be one of the strongest debuts of the decade. The band’s emphasis on tone and harmony was obvious from the detail in the arrangements of their four-part vocal harmonies to the intricacies of their instrumentation. On “Skinny Love,” bassist Matthew McCaughan and guitarist Michael Noyce both played drums, adding a primal, inescapable beat accompaniment. On other songs McCaughan simultaneously played bass and a kickdrum with his foot while drummer Sean Carey played a small electronic keyboard.
As strong as the songs on “For Emma, Forever Ago” are, the band’s tireless touring for the past two years has developed them into an impassioned unit. Whereas some artists become detached from songs after performing them again and again, Vernon slipped into the songs like an old comfortable vintage sweater, filling them out with his passionate voice. The crooks and crannies of each song were not dusty and dark, but were places where Vernon’s bright voice illuminated, revealing the artistry of his song craft.
Just past the set’s mid-point, Vernon played an unexpected, rousing cover of the Outfield’s “Your Love,” inciting screams and laughter from the audience. Vernon pulled back the rhythm and created a bouncing groove, emphasizing a backbeat pocket that doesn’t exist in the original song.
An ethereal and sublime version of “re: Stacks” followed where Vernon played solo for the first time of the evening. The instrumentation stripped away to just his voice and guitar emphasized the power of the lyric and Vernon’s immense songwriting talent, recalling everything that was inspiring in Nick Drake’s music while being wholly original.
Bon Iver closed the night with a two-song encore. The first was the elegiac “For Emma,” then he brought Megafaun and various friends up on stage to cover Megafaun’s “Worried Mind” (In the video above, you can see a version of the two bands performing “Worried Mind” in San Francisco a few days earlier). The group of musicians huddled along the edge of the proscenium and used only the theater’s acoustics as amplification, Asylum Street Spankers style. After a few verses, they called on the audience to sing-along to the chorus, a cathartic “Come ease your mind, come on ease your worried mind.” The collaboration received a standing ovation (as did the first set and Megafaun’s brilliant opening set), proving that sometimes the most powerful performances at a music festival are not merely the loudest and largest.
Setlist
Flume
Lump Sum
Skinny Love
Brackett, WI
Blood Bank
Beach Baby
Josie
Creature Fear
re: Stacks
The Wolves (Act I and II)
Saturday evening – just two nights ago – I had the pleasure of attending a sold-out Grizzly Bear and Beach House show at Emo’s. I only caught the last Beach House song…and I’m glad because what I saw of their last song did not sound very good.
I like the Beach House mp3s I’ve heard, but whoa, was the bit I heard of their live show shaky.
Now Grizzly Bear on the other hand, were really amazing. I’m not surprised Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood called them his favorite band.
I wrote a review of their show which was published in the Austin American-Statesman here.
Vocalist Aaron Berhens and keyboardist Thomas Turner rock Trophy's.
I just uploaded some shots of Austin, TX electronica rockers Ghostland Observatory rocking Trophy’s Bar back in 2006 (back when they could still play small clubs in Austin. I’ll upload the definitive interview I did with them quite soon. As soon as possible. You can check out the other Ghostland photos in the blackswansongs flickr photostream here.
The interview was conducted over three different sessions. The first with both members after a show. Then the second and third parts were conducted with each member seperately. Behrens and Turner have such unique backgrounds that them at first seem like unlikely partners, but so many things had to align just perfectly that their collaboration feels more like fate during the telling of their story.
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Malkmus (in blue shirt) was making literate indie rock before it was cool
Less than 10 years after the 1990s’ melancholy sunset, critical consensus continues to build that Stephen Malkmus and his old band Pavement were one of the most influential rock bands of that entire decade, forging timeless indie-ethos rock from a crucible overflowing with high art/post modern aesthetics, sardonically poetic lyrics and a new genre pastiche wherein “Exile on Main Street” loose-feeling slack rock combined with the steely song craft of one of Malkmus’ favorite bands, The Fall.
Malkmus and his current band The Jicks are currently touring – at their leisure – behind their 2008 release “Real Emotional Trash,” his fourth – and best – post-Pavement solo album.
When I woke up Malkmus at his Portland home for this interview (first published in a super-abridged version in the Austin American-Statesman), he was initially groggy. After a few yawns, the lyrically hyper-literate, ever-ironic songwriter proved to be uncannily happy to expound on his early influences, whether or not Sesame Street’s Elmo inspired a song on “Real Emotional Trash” and how he considered becoming an Austinite after the release of Pavement’s “Terror Twilight.”
mergerecords.com
