Found Sounds and Such...

I had the chance to just run with a sort of essay on Steely Dan by way of preparing the populace for their show at Tanglewood on Tuesday evening. Had the chance to quote some of my favorite Dan lyrics; I’m curious to hear what anyone may think of this. Just click on “Comments and Reactions” below.

“Fagen’s lyrics are frequently so dry, so cynical, so dense with in-jokes and references that hint at worlds of meaning while remaining curtly mysterious, that even hipsters can find this radio-ready mainstream behemoth to be irresistible.

In detail-rich lines dense with cultural signifiers—Dean and Deluca and Gramercy Park, a car phone in a Chrysler (in 1980), Cuervo Gold and “fine Columbian”—Fagen depicts a world of cocktail lounges and late-night ice cream parlors, romantic conquests that lead to malaise and romantic failures that inspire pride, white men possessing disposable income and a good dose of nihilism.

I’m pleased to have the cover story in this week’s Metroland, about the Berkshire/Pioneer Valley band Bella’s Bartok. (Metroland, for ausländers, is the alt-weekly for Albany and the New York Capital Region.) I knew I’d seen them in various situations—playing in the parking lot, at a Halloween party, in a friend’s living room—but didn’t realize I also saw their first-ever gig, at a Summer Solstice Festival (that’s how we do it out here.)

For the interview, I caught up with them backstage at Pittsfield’s Colonial Theatre (after attending a different show, Larry Chernicoff’s Miniature Orchestra, a few minutes away) and then over at Mission Bar and Tapas, on a night where the person in charge of the CD player got a little 80’s-happy.

I reinforced the term “borschtcore” after coining it in a review of Bella’s Bartok in the Berkshire Eagle in December.

“’The best thing about Bella’s Bartok for me is that we’re all the biggest fucking nerds. None of us are too cool for school, none of us are …’ Torres declares, pausing several seconds to find the right word before landing simply on ‘cool.’ Later, as if seeking to prove the point, Putnam notes that he is wearing his green, ‘going-out’ cardigan. ‘I have a brown one for home,’ he clarifies dryly.”

“‘I wouldn’t say I sat down and said ‘I’m going to write a ’70s pop record. You try a couple different arrangements for a song and sometimes what works is a Wurlitzer—and you start playing it and it starts to sound like ‘Daniel.”  —Sam Beam

I chatted with a man possessing a much-admired beard for this advance feature in Metroland on Iron and Wine, who play MASS MoCA’s big room, the Hunter Center, on Saturday. It sold clear out just about three or four weeks after tickets went on sale, and has only built in interest since—with added value from the presence of The Low Anthem as support act, who themselves sold out the cabaret room at the venue on March 5. (See my review here.)

“Samuel Beam has been at the leading edge of the hipster reconsideration of American folk and Appalachian music that blossomed into a bona fide subgenre—call it beard rock—for nearly a decade.

Unlike the sound of bands who might be considered first or second cousins to Iron and Wine, Beam’s is informed by American roots music but doesn’t set out to be the musical equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.”

Photo by Piper Ferguson

Kid Koala has been up at MASS MoCA developing a project based on his (as yet unpublished) graphic novel Space Cadet and its accompanying soundtrack. I popped up and chatted with him on his second day in town. Here’s the advance feature, published in today’s Berkshire Eagle. (I got DJ Spooky to chime in as well.)

“Kid Koala pulls out a black-covered journal with ‘Space Cadet’ written in white lettering on its front, and flips through pages of a hand-drawn piano score to find a blank space. Sketching out the planned layout for the gallery of drawings and the performance space, he talks about his efforts to create an immersive experience that reinforces the storyline of the book, which he says is essentially about loneliness, family, and human connection.

‘I can’t play guitar and sing very well, I don’t write good poetry, but I can go lock myself in a room and read all these manuals about turntables and master all these crazy 5,000-knob mixing desks,’ he says.

Phish is playing UMASS Amherst’s Mullins Center twice this weekend, and the Berkshire Eagle wanted an advance feature. I wasn’t offered an interview with a band member, so I wrote a bit of an essay on the band and where I seem them today. (I’ll share some more thoughts about the angle I took, and why, later on.) It was published in today’s paper. A review of Saturday night’s show will follow early next week.

“When Phish takes the stage at this relatively small venue on Saturday and again Sunday, it does so not as a subversive cult band on the rise but as a group of elder statesmen whose list of key achievements on its eventual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame display is, for better or worse, already written...

Smaller venues, an autumnal chill in the air, fall tour in the Northeast—in some ways, it can’t help but feel nostalgic. And indeed, while the band released a new album upon its comeback last year and has worked a handful of even newer songs into the live rotation in 2010, the bulk of the shows are taken up by relatively straightforward versions of the old musical warhorses of yesteryear.”