Happy Halloween At Revolver USA!

Sales representative Matt Lammakins in the spirit of Rowlf.
Halloween 2008.

Krallice Virtuosity Captured On Video.

Exclusive live footage of Krallice posted on Guitar World/Metalkult Website...

October 29th, 2008
Live Kult: KRALLICE “Wretched Wisdom” and “Timehusk” [NYC, 2008]
Posted in Live Kult, Videos

On October 8, 2008, MetalKult trekked down to the Knitting Factory to catch the live actions of the mighty Watain. Before the Swedes’ scorched-earth attack began, we were treated to a good crop of opening bands, including NY’s own black metal virtuosos, Krallice.

The brainchild of guitar wizards Mick Barr (Ocrilim, Orthrelm) and Colin Marston (Behold…The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia), Krallice blends blazing guitar histrionics with seasick atmospherics and seriously vicious vocals. The result, as heard on their self-titled debut (released on Profound Lore earlier this year), is truly intoxicating. And as we found out that night, Krallice’s live show is not to be missed. Go HERE to check out Krallice as they play “Wretched Wisdom” and “Timehusk”.

Vetiver Song Premiered On Stereogum Today.

Today was a good day. Stereogum premiered a free download or stream of "Miles Apart" from the new Vetiver EP More Of The Past along with a few words from Mr. Andy Cabic himself.

As a followup to Thing Of The Past, psychedelic San Francisco folk-rock troupe Vetiver, aka Andy Cabic & Co., is releasing a companion covers EP called More Of The Past (11/11, Gnomonsong). In addition to the EP, the band's putting out a two-song 7", which finds More Of's "Hey Doll Baby" backed by the vinyl-only "Miles Apart." Well, vinyl-only until we premiered it in this week's Drop. On top of offering the new track, we asked Cabic about his take on A.R. Kane's original. Original post with song stream.

How did you decide to cover "Miles Apart"? Why didn't it show up on Thing Of The Past or More Of The Past?

I'm a fan of A.R. Kane -- much like all the other artists whose songs we performed on Thing Of The Past -- and this was a song in particular of theirs that I enjoyed a lot and thought would be fun to try our hand at. It didn't make the album because I wanted to keep Thing Of The Past concise, and "Miles Apart" didn't seem to fit alongside the others.

Any significance in its pairing with "Hey Doll Baby" on the 7"?

Not really, no. They are both songs I personally wanted to have available on vinyl.

How do you go about making a cover song your own?
I'm not sure you do anything different than perform it sincerely, with your own sense of style and abilities, right? I'm not setting out to "own" the song. Ownership is determined by the ear of the listener I suppose. All the songs we performed are significant to me, personally, in how they've played a role in my life through their melody, their lyrics, their style, what they suggest. They already are personally significant ... We just recorded them because it was fun to do, to present these songs in a new but not dissimilar way to people who may not have heard them before.

Upcoming live dates:
12/04 Louisville, KY @ Museum Atrium Gallery
12/05 Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theater (w/ Black Crowes)
12/06 Detroit, MI @ The Filmore @ State Theater (w/ Black Crowes)
12/07 Milwaukee, WI @ Eagles Ballroom (w/ Black Crowes)
12/08 Grinnell, IA @ Herrick Chapel @ Grinnell College
12/09 Fargo, ND @ The Venue (w/ Black Crowes)
12/10 Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue (w/ Black Crowes)
12/11 Des Moines, IA @ ValAir Ballroom (w/ Black Crowes)
12/12 Omaha, NE @ Slowdown Jr
12/13 Denver, CO @ Filmore Auditorium (w/ Black Crowes)
12/14 Lawrence, KS @ Jack Pot Saloon
12/15 St Louis, MO @ Off Broadway Night Club
12/17 New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge

Big Beirut News Announced On Pitchfork This Afternoon.

From Pitchfork.....

When Beirut's Zach Condon canceled his European tour earlier this year to collect himself, he didn't just sit around reading On the Road, watching "Oprah", and wolfing down Ben & Jerry's by the tubful. Well okay, who knows really, maybe he did. But he also spent some time cooking up a nifty little double-disc release.

Come February 17 in the U.S. and February 16 in Europe, Condon's own Pompeii Records (with an assist from Ba Da Bing!) will issue a pair of EPs from the Zachster, packaged together but spread out over separate CDs for maximum EP-ability. The first, March of the Zapotec, collects six new tracks partially recorded in Mexico recently by Beirut, while the second, Holland, is credited to Realpeople and features five solo jams from Zach's early home-recording days. UPDATE: Though Realpeople was the name of Condon's early project, these are new recordings.

Astute readers will recognize Realpeople track "My Night With the Prostitute From Marseille" from that Natalie Portman-curated Big Change comp (billed to Beirut), while "Venice" previously turned up on the CD accompanying The Believer's 2007 Music Issue (billed to Zach's given name). Icy Demon Griffin Rodriguez engineered and mastered the March of the Zapotec/Holland two-fer, and the guy's Obey Your Brain imprint will be responsible for putting it out on vinyl.

Check back tomorrow to read Condon's thoughts on the new release and other matters Beirut, and brace yourself for the band's return to the road, planned for next year.

Beirut: March of the Zapotec:
01 El Zocalo
02 La Llorna
03 My Wife
04 The Akara
05 On a Bayonet
06 The Shrew

Realpeople: Holland:
01 My Night With a Prostitute From Marseille
02 My Wife, Lost in the Wild
03 Venice
04 The Concubine
05 No Dice

Vashti Bunyhan NPR's Day To Day Feature 10/24/08.

The condensed history of Vashti Bunyan on NPR's Day To Day.

Vashti Bunyan: 40 Years Later, A Musical Rebirth
By Christian Bordal
Original post with audio interview link.

Day To Day October 24, 2008 - Back in the mid-'60s, Andrew Oldham, manager of The Rolling Stones, saw something promising in a quiet young singer-songwriter named Vashti Bunyan. So he brought her into the studio to record a single called "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind," written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Oldham himself presided over the session.

"Oh, yeah, he was there," Bunyan says. "Mick Jagger was there. Everybody was there. But nobody really spoke to me, and I certainly didn't speak to anybody. I was way too shy."

Bunyan says she's always been shy.

"Though I had a huge ego about my songs," she says. "I thought these were great and everybody should listen to these. But as a person, I had no way of persuading anybody. I was just way too shy and pretty much merged with the wallpaper, I think."

Bunyan's shyness comes through in her soft, tentative singing. She says that, despite years spent trying to overcome it, singing more strongly just doesn't suit her.

She spent three years recording demos and singles with Oldham and others, but in spite of her own great expectations, she made little headway. In 1967, she says, she decided that she'd had enough.

But if Bunyan's arrival on the London music scene had caused little fanfare, the method of her departure three years later did raise some eyebrows — if only those of her parents. Bunyan had been living with her boyfriend in the woods behind his art school, but they were kicked out. So they decided to move to Scotland, via an antiquated form of transport.

As she and her boyfriend made their slow pilgrimage to Scotland by horse and cart — "Horses don't need petrol," she says — Bunyan says she decided she was done with recording, though she continued to write new songs.

But a chance meeting with the well-known folk-music producer Joe Boyd convinced her to go back into the studio once more, if only to document her journey and record her new songs.

The result was Just Another Diamond Day — an album that, much like her earlier efforts, hardly caused a ripple in the pop-music marketplace.

"People dismissed it as nursery rhymes for children and being very insignificant," Bunyan says. "And I just thought, 'Oh, well, I've made another mistake. They must be right. It must be rubbish. I'll never pick up a guitar again. So I didn't."

And she didn't.

"It was like taking a whole part of myself and putting it in a cupboard and putting a padlock on it," she says. "It was painful."

Instead, Bunyan spent the next 30 years raising a family and farm animals in rural Scotland.

Then, a few years ago, while surfing the Web, Bunyan says she was amazed to find that the music she'd given up for good was actually alive and well. In fact, Just Another Diamond Day and other early recordings were becoming cult classics to a new generation of musicians, and in 2004, that album was reissued. In 2005, Bunyan released her first batch of new songs in 35 years on a thoughtful, bittersweet album called Lookaftering.

"When I first got on the Internet and realized that Diamond Day hadn't just disappeared off the face of the earth and that people were still listening to the songs, it made me able to pick up my guitar again and get some kind of meaning back from it for myself," she says.

Bunyan says she's still shy and still bedeviled by issues of self-confidence. But, more than 40 years after she took her first tentative steps down the path toward a musical life, she's now finally leading it. She set up a small home studio, and, with no more children in the house, is hard at work on her next batch of quiet, carefully crafted little folk-pop poems.

"I'm writing about more particular things: more particular emotions and relationships," she says. "I'm just trying to dig a little deeper, maybe? But I've only got five songs so far. So it's kind of hard to tell."

Mojo Hearts Memphis.

SONIC YOUTH etc. : SENSATIONAL FIX.

SONIC YOUTH etc. : SENSATIONAL FIX - MUSEION, BOLZANO/BOZEN, ITALY (UNTIL 04.01.2009)
Exhibition: Most people probably know Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley) as an experimental guitar band, and to a lesser extent as the multidisciplinary cultural protagonists they have been ever since the collective surfaced in 1981. From day one, Sonic Youth has been exploring and mapping unknown cultural territories through their activities as a band and as four individual musicians, visual artists or cultural entrepreneurs, each member with his or her specific ties to and within the international cultural scene. Through collaborations with musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, writers and other equally creative spirits, Sonic Youth expanded their artistic potential, which by now – 27 years later – could be defined as a true Sonic Universe.

Before the Sonic Boom, in 1981, both Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo were trained as artists who upon arrival in New York City in the late 1970s started playing in bands rather than dedicating themselves fully to the production of visual art. This was the case with many of their artist friends as well, like Glenn Branca, Richard Prince or Robert Longo. The artist Dan Graham was a central figure in this constellation of visual artists/musicians, and was known to schlep his barely portable tape recorder to concerts of punk rock and no wave bands to record these performances, which were often held in art galleries and so-called art lofts. Back then, visual art and experimental music seemed to be one and the same energy, and the natural crossover between the two, as was apparent in those days, laid the foundations for the multidisciplinary activities of Sonic Youth. Since the start, the band has been true to their attitude to be unorthodox and to do their own thing, and in their comprehensive output they continued – and still continue – to amalgamate punk rock’s rebellious posture and DIY attitude with experimental music and conceptual art, a production that in its range and complexity up until today remains unrivalled by that of any other band or artists’ collective.

Their album covers, inner sleeves and inlays have been the carriers of a multifaceted output of art by – next to the band members themselves – artists such as James Welling, Richard Kern, Dan Graham, Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley, William S. Burroughs, Savage Pencil, Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, and Jeff Wall, to mention a few. Many of Sonic Youth’s album covers are true collages in which material of a broad range of sources is freely put together, evoking relations between that what hardly had been imagined before to exist side by side in a single glance. This approach is triggered by the band’s curiosity about all sorts of subjects, such as beat poetry, avant-garde art and music, late 1970s punk rock, no wave, early 1980s hardcore, experimental noise, stardom, politics... Thurston Moore once defined these eclectic interests as follows: “There’s a fascination with those things, for sure, but hopefully none of those things are central to what we’re doing. What we’re doing is always inventing itself. I have no terminology for it.”

The exhibition SONIC YOUTH etc. : SENSATIONAL FIX follows a similar collage technique as the band applies for their album covers. Through this multilayered collage we are able to uncover an alternative history of contemporary culture, while the goal of this exhibition is not so much to give a complete overview of the history of the band and their collaborations, but rather to pinpoint several directions taken by the band, while taking into account possible future collaborations, as the essence of Sonic Youth is that they constantly redefine their mission. Sonic Death inevitably followed their early credo Sonic Life, but what remains bouncing back and forth in this cycle is eternal renewal. And that’s Sonic Youth. Upcoming venues of the exhibition:
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, (31 January – 10 May 2009); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, (29 May – 20 September 2009), Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, Navarra/Nafarroa, (October 2009 – January 2010).

Publication: A vastly illustrated, 720 page English publication will be released in November 2008 by LiFE and Museion, in collaboration with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne. Next to a selection of writings by the band members and reprinted articles by other authors, it contains new contributions by among others John Miller, Jutta Koether & Alan Licht, Carlos van Hijfte, Mike Watt, and Roland Groenenboom. Extensive new interviews with each band member, conducted by Paul Sztulman & Christophe Wavelet, highlight the band’s history in the context of the New York art and music scenes of the late 1970s and early 1980s and their many ties with visual artists, poets, musicians, filmmakers... over the last 27 years. The band’s history is documented in images of album covers, band portraits and live photos, among which many unpublished to date. The exhibition is documented through a selection of works and a listing of the full content of the exhibition. The book furthermore contains two 7” vinyl records with unpublished sound contributions by each member individually.

The publication will soon also be available in French, German and Italian. Check www.museion.it, www.lelife.org or www.sonicyouth.com for availability, prices and order details in the next weeks.

Matt Baldwin Shows and In-store Performance.

Oct. 25th In-store at Metamusic Santa Cruz CA. (4:00 PM)
Oct. 25th @ The Crepe Place, Santa Cruz CA.
Nov. 23rd opening for the legendary Rodriguez at the Great American Music Hall SF, CA.

Dead C Secret Earth Review in Orlando Weekly.

The Dead C live at the Great American Music Hall Oct. 16th 2008.

C CHANGE
New Zealand trio strips down
The Dead C: Secret Earth
Label: Ba Da Bing
Format: Album
Media: CD
Genre: Recording
Original review

Upon emerging from semi-hiatus two years ago, New Zealand grub-note merchants the Dead C made two executive decisions ---– one long overdue and the other cynically pragmatic. In 2006, the trio issued a catalog retrospective – the term "greatest hits" is tough to apply to a band with lower name recognition than Wolf Eyes in the States – called Vain, Erudite and Stupid: Selected Works 1987-2005. Last year saw the release of Future Artists, a restrained display of grumbling noise presented in five instrumental movements. It doesn't matter whether guitarist-singer Michael Morley, laptopist Bruce Russell and drummer Robbie Yeats were cashing in on the present noise vogue or merely following their tectonic shifting-tone bliss – Artists was a late-career master stroke.

Their new album, Secret Earth, released this week, marks a return to the trio's early roots. Treble-heavy chordal themes are introduced and slowly, excruciatingly crushed into powder, propelled by tinny drums and cymbals and narrated in labored, unintelligible syntax by Morley. The instrumental glower and gloom is dialed back to almost loungey levels on "Mansions," and it feels like a head-fake on par with the surprise of abrasive noisers Sightings' menace-shorn 2004 release, Arrived in Gold. On "Stations," feedback is almost another instrument, gilding a turgid, rattling churn that seems to last forever; distended vocal lines push back against the clattering, blackened current, seeking a foothold but finding none. Yeats' fancy kit work on "Plains" provides a mooring force for the prevailing maelstrom of shredded riffage that envelops existentialist sentiments like "No one knows who you are/Drift and peel away."

Characteristically, of course, this gray buzz-saw whirlpool sounds like it's being played thousands of miles away and beamed to us by satellite telephone; as vague coherence gives way to a pummeling, eternal flail, all sense of place and time is lost. We'd settle for nothing more, or rather, nothing less. This is the desiccated vein the Dead C mine best, and it's a relief to see them back at it again.

BY RAYMOND CUMMINGS

The Week That Was: Learn To Learn Video On PitckforkTV.

Upcoming UK & European dates:
10/23 Carlise UK Brickyard
10/24 Glasgow UK Captains Rest
10/25 Edinburgh UK Henry’s Cellar Bar
10/26 Birmingham UK Academy Bar
10/27 Sheffield UK The Harley
10/28 Galway IRE Roisin Dubh
10/29 Dublin IRE Crawdaddy
10/30 Cardiff UK Clwb Ifor Bach
10/31 Oxford UK Zodiac
11/01 Sunderland UK
11/05 Manchester UK Academy 3
11/06 London UK ICA
11/19 Toulouse FR Le Ramier w/Stereolab
11/21 Galicia ESP Caixa Galicia w/Stereolab
11/22 Barcelona ESP Razzmatazz w/Stereolab
11/23 Madrid ESP La Riviera w/Stereolab
11/24 Málaga ESP Teatro Cervantes w/Stereolab
11/26 Paris FR La Cigale w/Stereolab
11/27 Nantes FR Olympic w/Stereolab
11/28 Schorndorf DEU Club Manafaktur w/Stereolab
12/18 Brighton UK Concorde 2 w/Stereolab

Tobacco Fucked Up Friends Commercial.

Octopus Project Video Premiere On Pitch TV.

Pitchfork.tv: The Octopus Project: "I Saw the Bright Shinies" [Video Premiere]

Animated ghosts grace ghostly indietronics in the video for the Octopus Project's "I Saw the Bright Shinies". From the Austin band's fine Hello, Avalanche, the track is an "intricate electro-fugue," as Pitchfork contributor Adam Moerder put it, and it has just enough warm keyboards and fuzzy guitars to take the chill out of the eerie moan of what sounds like it might be a Theremin. Divya Srinivasan, who also directed Spoon's "Everything Hits at Once" video, here animates a charming, crayon-grained Halloween treat, in which a boy ghost unites with some friends and the woodland critters and local townsfolk all party on down.

Just in the nick of time for this tour:
10/17 Baton Rouge, LA @ Spanish Moon
10/18 Birmingham, AL @ The Bottle Tree
10/19 Atlanta, GA @ E.A.R.L.
10/20 Knoxville, TN @ The Pilot Light
10/21 Baltimore, MD @ Talking Head
10/22 Washington, DC @ The Black Cat
10/23 Philadelphia, PA @ The M Room
10/25 New York, NY @ Blender Theater (CMJ showcase 11:20 PM)
10/26 Cambridge, MA @ TT the Bears
10/27 Montreal, QC @ Club Lambi
10/28 Toronto, ON @ The Drake Hotel
10/29 Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop
10/30 St. Louis, MO @ The Bluebird