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Win Tickets For Black Lips, Groove Armada, Shearwater and The Ruby Suns
Posted 03-11-10 by Jeff Kuprycz, Kara Manning

TAS Interviews: Broken Bells
Posted 03-10-10 by Alisa Ali

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There are so many good bands making their way to New York this month and we've got tickets to give away to shows from Black Lips on 3/23 (Brooklyn Bowl), Groove Armada on 3/24 (Webster Hall), Shearwater on 3/27 (Bowery Ballroom) and The Ruby Suns on 3/26 (Brooklyn Bowl).

Rowdy garage-rock hellions Black Lips released their fifth studio album 200 Million Thousand late last month and the Southern fried quartet will be headed to New York after creating chaos at SXSW. You can catch their bluesy, profane, aggravated set at Brooklyn Bowl on March 23. They might still have a nasty hangover left over from Austin misadventures, so be forewarned. But if you love real, dirty rock and roll, these are your guys.

Enter to win tickets for Black Lips

Groove Armada's latest album Black Light is the duo's first studio album in three years and is a nod to many of their influences, like Roxy Music, New Order and David Bowie. Though the album includes a surprising contribution from Bryan Ferry on the track "Shameless," he won't be performing with Andy Cato and Tom Findlay when they hit Webster Hall on 3/24. But you can expect to hear some classic Groove Armada tracks like the ass-shaking "I See You Baby" and new singles like the infectious, rowdy stomp of "Paper Romance."

Enter to win tickets for Groove Armada

Originally an Okkervil River side project formed by Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg, Shearwater is now entirely Meiburg's baby since he's left Okkervil River and Sheff has left Shearwater. Confused yet? Shearwater now includes Kimberly Burke and Thor Harris as core members and the band recently released The Golden Archipelago. Meiburg, who is fascinated by anthropology, says the new album was deeply influenced by the displaced residents of the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands who were forced to give up their homeland for American nuclear testing. Shearwater will make its way to the far less exotic island of Manhattan when they play Bowery Ballroom on March 27.

Enter to win tickets for Shearwater

Spring is in the air and there are few bands who make music which so elicits the buoyant, convivial sense of easy summertime drift as The Ruby Suns. The band, led by California-spawned New Zealander Ryan McPhun, just released their third album Fight Softly on Sub Pop and the record's warm buzz is a crafty mix of gentle experimentalism and head-over-heels pop smarts. If a band were a cocktail, these guys would be a Mai Tai with an pretty paper umbrella. Better yet, it will officially be spring when The Ruby Suns make their way to Brooklyn Bowl on March 26.

Enter to win tickets for The Ruby Suns

Posted 03-11-10 by Jeff Kuprycz, Kara Manning

Tags Blog

The new album by Broken Bells, better known as James Mercer of the Shins and Brian Burton (Danger Mouse), is out this week. I couldn't be more thrilled about it.

I had a chance to talk with the guys recently and they were both really excited about the work that they've been doing together. Both James and Brian were invigorated by the experience and were really happy to do something different from what they'd been doing in the past.

Of course, I realized that I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about the status of their previous projects. The response, however, was pretty much what you'd expect. James says that the Shins are still going, just on hiatus. And Brian is not ruling out another Gnarls Barkley album, but it's not really top priority for him. He did hint at a new project, but wouldn't give me any details even though I asked very nicely. I guess we'll just have to wait for more news on that.

Since I spoke to James and Brian several weeks ago, before the tragic death of Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous this past Saturday, we only touched briefly on Brian and James' work with Mark on Dark Night of the Soul. After all kinds of legal hassles holding up the release of that album, all seems to have been resolved over the last couple of weeks and Dark Night of the Soul will likely come out by early summer. Sadly, the album's long overdue release now seems especially bittersweet given Mark's passing. You can find out more about the project here.

Around the time I spoke to Brian and James, their debut album had appeared mysteriously on the internet, nearly a month (or more) before its official release:

Alisa Ali: How did [the Broken Bells] album leak early?

Brian Burton: The version that leaked is not what you have though.

Alisa: Tell me the difference?

James Mercer: It's not mastered, there's parts missing on some of the songs and there's a song missing.

Brian: There's a song missing and there's a song we really didn't include that's on the leak somehow. We don't even know how it happened. It was just an earlier version. I mean, it's similar, it's just not what you have in your hands.

Alisa: It's so funny that it leaked and there are reviews of the leak.

James: I know, it's shameless, isn't it?

Brian: We don't know what the reviews are, don't tell us please!

Alisa: Do you generally not read reviews?

Brian: You hear about them and sometimes if they're really good, they get put in front of you and you'll go, okay, that's cool. But on this one, I think, it's kind of irrelevant really. We've both been doing this for a long time and I think we're kind of meant to do what's on there so if somebody likes it, great.

James: I'm proud of it. I love it.

Alisa: You did release one song from the record early, "The High Road." Why did you choose to release that early?

James: We sort of felt that it was a good combination of both of our input, and it kind of made sense, it's catchy.

Brian: Even though there's no other song that sounds exactly like it on the record, it's a good ... the same reason we led off with it on the album. Not a whole lot of thought went into it. It wasn't completely our choice.

James: Brian's very good at arranging that stuff. I think you thought about the order for quite a while.

Brian: Yeah, I just thought it was a good way to start.

Alisa: James, you're singing in falsetto a lot on the record.

Alisa: So Brian, what are you playing on the record?

Brian: I'm playing most of the instruments that have keys on them like organs, pianos and synths. And drums. A little bit of bass. And James did all of the guitars, singing and bass stuff also. We stuck to similar instruments that we felt comfortable with for the most part. We didn't have any preexisting songs to [go into the studio with]. We'd just go in each day with nothing and sit and write a song and start recording it, playing it right then and there and seeing what would happen.

Alisa: Very different from how you normally work? You were doing a nine to five type job?

James: We used Brian's studio and he has a strong work ethic (laughs).

Alisa: Do you get in trouble if you come in late?

James: Well, I can't come in late because he's my ride.

Alisa: You're carpooling?

Brian: Yeah, cause James lives in Portland so every time we worked together he'd just come [over]. I don't have a roommate so he just comes to my house [and is] my roommate for a couple of weeks and we'd drive to and from [the studio] every day. And that's how we got to know each other. We'd met, but we only really became friends from recording this album. So that's how everything came together so by the end of the album, when the lyrics came, we really knew each other pretty well and it all made its way onto the album.

Alisa: James, what is it about Brian - and vice versa - that makes it all work so well?

Brian: It's hard to ... the specifics of it would probably not be that interesting to everybody but from the beginning, the first day we went in, we'd never done anything before but within the first half hour or so we had the whole structure of a song. We just have a lot of respect for one another. And there was no real ego involved at all.

James: You have to trust the other person. I think it was a good decision also, we decided if either of us didn't like something it wouldn't go on the album.

Alisa: I really love the song "Vaporize."

Alisa: Didn't you guys work together, James and Brian, with Sparklehorse? Wasn't that the first time you worked together?

Brian: No, we started this album around May of '08 and we worked on it for almost a year and at one point during that time there were a few songs left on that Sparklehorse album that we were doing and one of them was one I'd wanted James to be on and it just took us a while to finish it. We'd been more than halfway done with the Broken Bells album we just took a break and did that one song. It sounds very different from the Broken Bells album because the music was done by Mark Linkous and myself. But that's not when [James and I] first started to work together.

Alisa: How cool you got to work with David Lynch too.

Brian: Yeah, it was cool. And Mark Linkous as well. And all the people on it. So great.

Alisa: Brian, what about your other projects? Gnarls Barkley?

Brian: Perhaps one day. Just not right now, [Broken Bells] is the active thing that I'm doing and it takes up a bunch of time and it's slowed me down a lot. I don't have plans to produce much any more in the immediate future. Or in general, I don't know. I got a lot more out of the process, writing and playing and being a part of it in this way than I did out of all of the producing stuff I've done.

Alisa: And you have plans to do another record as Broken Bells?

James: Yeah, we've already started working on that. It's fun.

Brian: It's the most enjoyable record I've ever been a part of easily, even though it's sort of sad in certain places it was really an adventure to make.

Alisa: And plans for the tour?

Broken Bells kick off their tour on Wednesday, March 10 right here in New York. More dates will be added, but here's the schedule so far:

Mar 10 -Music Hall of Williamsburg - SOLD OUT Brooklyn, New York

Mar 14 -The Troubadour - SOLD OUT Los Angeles, California

Mar 17 -SXSW Austin, Texas

Posted 03-10-10 by Alisa Ali

Tags Audio, Audio-Video, Audio, Blog

Joanna Newsom and Freelance Whales enter this week's TAS Top 20 album chart while Yeasayer ambles to the number O.N.E. spot.

1. Yeasayer- Odd Blood

2. Spoon- Transference

3. Vampire Weekend- Contra

4. Beach House- Teen Dream

5. Cold Cave- Love Comes Close

6. BlakRoc- BlakRoc

7. Editors- In This Light and on This Evening

8. Midlake- The Courage of Others

9. The Magnetic Fields- Realism

10. Massive Attack- Heligoland

11. Animal Collective- Fall Be Kind

12. Basia Bulat- Heart of My Own

13. Hot Chip- One Life Stand

14. Broken Bells- Broken Bells

15. Charlotte Gainsbourg- IRM

16. Built to Spill- There is No Enemy

17. Shout Out Louds- Work

18. Ted Leo and The Pharmacists- The Brutalist Bricks

19. Joanna Newsom- Have One on Me

20. Freelance Whales- Weathervane

Posted 03-09-10 by Russ Borris

Tags Blog

Who is the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten to say Coldplay and Radiohead are "soulless"? Oh, and there's more from Rotten, real name Johnny Lydon, who told BBC 6Music in December: "Coldplay and Radiohead bug the hell out of me because it's so soulless. It just seems pointless. It's nice, but it's tosh."

"They don't care about you," continued Rotten. "They care about lining their coffers. There's nothing about heart and soul, they don't know about people dying, living, aspiring."

Maybe Thom Yorke or Chris Martin can call out Johnny as "tosh" because Johnny and PiL will be on American television soon for the first time in 18 years.

You think Johnny is jealous? Just being his punk, Sex Pistols self? Or does he have a point? Then again, aside from touring with the reunited Sex Pistols over the last decade, the 54-year-old Rotten, who lives in Los Angeles, did a punk rock advertisement for British butter. He may have needed the butter money for his Just For Men neon orange hair dye, plaid suits, and zippers, zippers, and more zippers.

Johnny and Public Image Limited will be on Jimmy Kimmel Live shortly after midnight on Wednesday, April 7th. Last December John Lydon performed with PiL for the first time in 17 years. The band has set up a tour in North America and for all the dates, head to PiLOfficial.com.

In the meantime if you're a huge PiL fan, Allan Dias, who played bass with PiL, deejays at the Beauty Bar in New York on Tuesday nights.

Posted 03-09-10 by Demos

Tags Blog

The Drums make fun pop music. It's easy to like them because their melodies are infectiously catchy. Apparently, though, the folks from Fader magazine are not fans. I learned this because The Drums have a quote from the magazine on the front page of their website that says: "We kind of hate these guys, to be honest."

But that makes me like them even more. They don't have a vast catalog though. In fact, they only have one EP out called "Summertime!," but their debut album will come out later this spring and the first single from that, "Best Friend," drops on March 28.

As for their summer-influenced EP, it has a very warm beachy vibe to it. Their first single is called "Let's Go Surfing." Ironically, none of the band members - singer Jonathan Pierce, guitarist Jacob Graham, guitarist Adam Kessler and drummer Connor Hanwick - surf. They say it's more about the feeling of surfing rather than the actual sport. And that's fine with me. I enjoy listening to that song and I don't even know how to swim.

The band, who are based in Brooklyn by way of Florida, have strangely broken out in a big way in the UK, landing as one of the top five bands on the BBC's Sound of 2010 and winning the notable Philip Hall Radar Award at the Shockwaves NME Awards in late February, an honor that's gone to British bands like The Big Pink and Glasvegas. They recently were part of the Shockwaves NME tour with British bands The Big Pink, Bombay Bicycle Club and The Maccabees.

The Drums' music sounds like 60s girl groups mixed with what the Cure would sound like if they were more upbeat. The Drums have a really wholesome quality to them; it's carefree, feel-good music. Good to sing along with as you joyously dance. Speaking of which, check out Jonathan pulling some indie jitterbug moves during his performance.

As lighthearted as their Summertime EP might be, in excerpts from my interview below, the guys say that their full-length album might have more of a wintertime pall:

Alisa Ali: When is your album coming out?

Jacob Graham: Well, we don't know exactly, but early spring. It's completely finished, it's just in that stage where there's tweaking and mixing and artwork that has to be done.

Jonathan Pierce: It was completely self-produced. We wrote it, produced it, we're really thrilled with how it turned out. We're in mixing stages right now. Some here [in New York], some in L.A.

Alisa: How do you, Jake and Jon, know each other?

Jacob: We met when we were really young kids, out of summer camp actually. It was some camp in Pennsylvania because [Jon]was from upstate New York and I was from northeast Ohio and it was kind of right in the middle. We mostly tried to run away from everyone else and talk about music because we were the only ones into that sort of thing. Like Kraftwerk and [Isao] Tomita.

Alisa: Were you making Kraftwerk-like music back then?

Jacob: Trying desperately.

Alisa: What were those early songs like?

Jon: We tried to make them like Kraftwerk. I think we failed miserably but we were very interested in early synth [music], like analog synthesizers. [Jacob] was into it and I was into it. When we met we were just kids but I think it was like a one in a billion chance meeting. That was the original bond.

Alisa: But you were in bands before together?

Jacob: Yeah, John and I had a first band together called Goat Explosion. And then Jon and Adam had a band together later, so we've all kind of been in and out of bands. Jon was living in Brooklyn, moved to Florida last fall and we recorded the EP and the first half of our album which is going to come out in the spring. After we had that done, we assumed we needed to come back here to launch the whole thing. There's not really a lot going on in Florida with music. And when we got here we sort of frantically started looking for people to help us and we tricked Adam and Conner into doing it.

Adam Kessler: We practiced maybe an hour before our first show.

Jacob: It was all kind of thrown together.

Connor Hanwick: It was at a small little club, the Cake Shop.

Jacob: We almost cancelled because it was so last minute but we kind of decided, what the heck, no one will be there or pay attention. But there were and they did. It was part of New York City Popfest, so most people were there to see other bands, but we wowed them.

Alisa: You have a knack for making concise, catchy little pop songs.

Jon: I know it's always been our goal. Even in previous bands, when we may have fallen short, what really excites us is a perfectly written pop song. I'm not going to say that we've achieved that yet, but that's what we strive for. We set limits and we go by the rules that were set up in the late 50s and 60s when I think pop music was really invented. Keep it short and potent and vulnerable. And I think people are ready for that sort of thing, that "give it to me" sort of attitude.

[We live] in Williamsburg, [but] we don't really go out that much. It's hard for us to try to relate with some of the other bands and some of the other things that are going on because everything seems so experimental, like four minute introductions and then the song starts. Everything is kind of edgy and hip. We're not interested in being really exciting or strange. We have one rule: it's to just kind of be selfish. Us being selfish is making three minute pop songs and if people want to come along, that's wonderful.

Jacob: I think there's an actual void for this sort of music right now.

Alisa: I would say that the music you made is exciting!

Jacob: Thank you!

Jon: Thank you! It's not what we set out to do.

Alisa: Somebody once described your sound as what Morrissey or Robert Smith would sound like if they were on Prozac.

Jacob: We don't subscribe to drug use.

Jon: Well, the full-length we just finished is a little different. It's a little darker. A little bit more brooding. It's not all handclaps and whistles, but it still sounds like The Drums. I think the whole EP was just like a moment in Florida and we just decided to be really blatant about it, call it Summertime! and let it be what it is. The full-length is a slight departure, a little bit more serious, a little more personal.

The Drums will be playing guest DJ on my show today, Monday, March 8 at 11 am EST. Their favorite songs include everything from Orange Juice to Field Mice to The Raveonettes.

Posted 03-08-10 by Kara Manning

Tags Audio-Video, In-Studio, Blog