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.

Superchunk – Majesty Shredding from Merge Records on Vimeo.

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

BlackSwanSongs.com had the extreme honor of attending two Sixteen Deluxe reunion shows, as well as interviewing them for a short feature in the Austin American-Statesman. Easily the best band to emerge from Austin during the 1990s, Sixteen Deluxe had the potential to be a label’s prestige act. Warner Brothers signed them after a small bidding war. But I personally didn’t feel like Warner Brothers properly promoted the release, “Emits Showers of Sparks” during those dark days just prior to mass Internet adoption.

If you enjoy My Bloody Valentine, The Flaming Lips, Swervedriver and other noise pop/space rock bands, please seek out Sixteen Deluxe and their music. Then convince your friends that are music supervisors to use their music in films.

Yes!

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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

“The music business is a scornful, mirthless lover hellbent on breaking most musicians’ hearts,” said a very wise sage. Actually that’s not true, I just made that sentence up, but I think it’s more often true that not.

No talent pop stars with beautiful smiles often rise to the top of the mediocrity heap while some of the greatest recorded works by the most artful musicians never see the light of day. My friends and their former band Dynamite Hack still watch their greatest creative work collect dust as an unreleased album. Likewise, my old band Schatzi’s sophomore album Snow Is for Saving Hearts remains unreleased, tied up in legal limbo. (The film industry has it’s own version of this scenario – something called “development hell,” or turnaround purgatory – when a project or a great script can never get beyond developmental talks and negotiations.)

That jaded experience aside, Jan and Dean’s lost album Carnival of Sound is an interesting piece of music history that is finally seeing some sunlight thanks to Rhino Records’ Handmade division.

If you enjoy California surf music from the 1960s, you’ll enjoy this creative curiosity that Jan Berry spent 3 years recording after his unfortunate car accident on Dead Man’s Curve, ironically the very same stretch of road that his band  immortalized with their hit song of the same name years earlier.

I love the majority of art created during the fertile period between 1967-1969. And Jan and Dean’s lost tracks are no different. Poppy, whimsical and artfully mixed in mono, Carnival of Sound is a deserving legacy to two musician’s that caught a horrible break during the height of their career.

As distribution becomes more and more available to the masses, albums like Carnival of Sound will hopefully find the appreciative niche audiences that they deserve.

Part-time Austinite Alan Palomo is Neon Indian (with a little help from his friends).

Within 10 seconds of hearing their music I discovered that they were one of those bands that would have never gotten exposure even ten years ago, before the days of MySpace and Facebook, back when radio, a killer live show and an A&R guy dictated what records got recorded.

Owl City is one guy…creating music on his computer…in his bedroom. Owl City is just a kid that spent way too much time listening to the Postal Service; Owl City’s music is like vanilla tasting vanilla ice cream. Their tracks have the gloss of a $100,000 studio, yet its just ultimately…a guy making pop music for the masses out of his bedroom.

Granted, musicians have always recorded masterpieces in their bedroom or rehearsal space, but prior to a few years ago those musicians never had a world-wide distribution network which costs pennies on the dollar. They never had blogs and social networks to spread the buzz. In fact, a great mixtape was lucky to make regional impact.

Now that technology has evened the playing field for recording and distributing music, the bedroom Beethoven can now find his/her niche audience. And his/her niche audience can become such passionate proselytizers that their feverish fandom becomes contagious.

During the music businesses’ old business model (selling CDs), the artists never made money on albums unless they were moving several hundred thousand. The companies had the machine rigged that way (See Steve Albini’s treatise, “Why Some of Your Friends Are This Fucked”).

While Owl City’s music these days exudes a hi-fi gloss, Austin’s latest bedroom maestro Neon Indian (a.k.a. Alan Palomo) possesses a novice, lo-fi charm. Earnest in its cheekiness, the Neon Indian listener feels like they could play in the band. It’s accessible while being arty. It’s the perfect mix of low art and high art pastiched into pop art and pop music.

Neon Indian list their location as Brookyln (cq)/Austin on MySpace. The hipsters of the world with too much money are moving back and forth these days (and occasionally to Portland and San Francisco). This artistic collision between Brooklyn and Austin was inevitable sealed with a miss as soon as Brit Daniel remixed Interpol several years back.

Prior to that, many hipster musician discovered Daniel Johnston through Kurt Cobain, although they likely won’t admit it now.

Every now and again a musician bubbles up from the underground scene in Austin and becomes the flavor of the month in taste-maker circles the world over. Ghostland Observatory took Bob Schneider’s formula for success (self released product + killer live show x ass shaking = exponential word of mouth fame) and moved the happening from the frat party to the dance party, complete with smoke and laser lights.

Now Austin has birthed another musician that combines dance music with a dreamy visual special effects show creating pastiche remix pop art with the insider-meets-outlier feel of someone like Andy Warhol or Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Neon Indian tastes like psychedelic candy mixed with late-night discussions about why every moment  in the present is the most important moment in the universe. We live in the moment that will simultaneously decide our broken past and our translucent future. Can you dig it? Let me know what you think about the current Brooklyn-Austin collabo…

Grizzly Bear: “Cheerleader (Neon Indian ‘Sega Genesis P-Orridge’ Remix)”:

Grizzly Bear: “Cheerleader (Neon Indian ‘Studio 6669′ Remix)”:

Friday, November 27, Neon Indian will headline the kickoff show for a new series sponsored by Austin transplants WOXY.com. Click here for tickets.

One of the BlackSwanSongs’s contributors received a byline on http://brooklynvegan.com for an excerpt of the report below combined with the photos above.

Jay Z appeared very comfortable playing the role of the gracious “king of hip-hop.” Memphis Bleek dropped counterpoint rhymes, providing hardscrabble verbal interplay without the silliness of a sideman like Flavor Flav. I was a casual Jay Z fan going into the show (I bought a “Hard Knock Life” mix tape and have downloaded a couple of other records), but by the end of the show I had been become a hardcore Jay Z fan for life.

The show highlights were too numerous to list here, but they included the rock and bass bombast of “99 Problems,” the audience’s deafening call and response during “Jigga What, Jigga Who” and the booming, thuggish, palpitation-inducing low-end produced by his 10-piece band during “Dirt” and “Big Pimpin’.”

And when Jay Z wasn’t showing us Texans how his crew goes hard in Brooklyn, he spoke from the heart during his between song banter. “I know it sounds cliche, but don’t let any haters block your dream,” Hova said earnestly during one of the final breaks. Another one of the show’s more intimate moments came when he brought up vocalist Bridget Kelly for two songs. After her inspired assist on “Empire State of Mind,” Jigga Man smiled his biggest smile of the evening and said, “Damn…she put something extra on it for Texas…she put some extra bar-b-que sauce on it for Texas!”

Before Jay Z’s final curtain call, he took a break to turn on the house lights and point out individuals in all areas of the basketball arena, personalizing the show and reducing the scale as he talk to individuals, calling them out by their attire, homemades signs, dancing skills, etc.

The set list below is word-for-word identical to the setlist at the front of the stage (which I photographed). I’ve left their abbreviations and notes in tact.

SETLIST: RUN THIS TOWN

D.O.A.
Takeover
U Don’t Know
99 Problems
Show Me What You Got
Give It To Me
Diamonds
Jigga
Izzo
Jigga What
P.S.A.
Heart of City (live)
Already Home (last verse Acapella)
Empire State of Mind
A Star Is Born
So Ambitious
Dirt

—–break—–

Thank You
(PLAYBACK SET)
Big Pimpin’
Hardknock Life
Encore
Forever Young

The band definitely qualifies as a supergroup: Yorke in front on vocals, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck/R.E.M. drummer Joey Waronker, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco, and Flea on bass.

Check this video out! And don’t forget to blow it up to full screen. Or better still, cable it to your 1080 p television and check it out super large. The sound is decent and the HD digital video maintains so much quality that the bigger it gets, the more you feel like you are actually at the show…a strange effect of the HD video combined with the location in the room where the videographer is standing.