About two months ago, I had a phone conversation with a good friend of mine. After talking about the usual silly things that people talk about on the phone (like stuff you’re doing with yourself and whatever happened to that recipe you said you would give me?) somehow our mutual disillusionment with music these days came up. While I won’t go into this issue on here, one of the end results was me asking him whether he had been to any good shows lately (which is one of my favorite ways to listen to music these days) he mentioned seeing an act called “Best Friends Forever.” Chuckling initially at how much their name made me think of fifth grade, I hopped on the old myspace and gave this Minneapolis based band a listen.

Write and record 10 songs or 35 minutes worth of music. And this year you even have 29 days instead of 28 to do it in. Oh Leap Year. What would we do without you?

February 1st begins the kick off of the third Portsmouth, NH based Record Production Month (RPM) Challenge. 2008 marks RPM Challenge’s second year on a worldwide scale.

This is your excuse. This is your every reason for locking yourself in your bathroom and recording until you turn to the water pipes for percussional inspiration. This is your excuse to learn how to play the trombone…just because you can. This is the time when you don’t have to feel guilty about calling in sick to work…because you will be sick, you will be very very sick. Only the sickest are the strongest to survive the RPM bug.

Who’s crazy enough to write AND record an entire album in one month? Last year it was 850 bands worldwide. With one and a half days to go there are 1414 participating artists signed up from places like Vermont to Texas from England to Uruguay from Shanghai to Australia from Norway to Turkey from Latvia to South Africa.

Come February 29 we’ll see how many of these bands will overcome the self imposed boundaries musicians so often inflict upon themselves. How many will brave the sleepless nights, the broken instruments, the used up harddrives, the inband bickering, the music filled nightmares. Who will be strong enough to survive?

Will you?

Sign up here:
http://www.rpmchallenge.com/

upstairs catch

“It Must Be You That’s Making Me Feel Like This Wet Dog”

It was many moons ago that I sent Wildebeest a message, asking for the track listing of the handmade, sharpie texted CD that he left at my house, since the only thing inside the case was a panoramic, photocopied picture of a herd of steer with a poem on the back.

He had come to play a show with local luminaries We Are Jeneric at CDFI in Albany, but got lost, and somehow found his way to Valentine’s where there happened to be a Sgt Dunbar show that night. He asked if he could play his homemade chimes in the parking lot between sets. Of course he could, and he could also set them up in front of the stage and play with us, we said, which he did. It was magnificent, and his musical acuity instantly became evident to everyone present. It was one of my favorite sets, and he had a lot to do with it.

That night he slept at our couch, like a lot of the people do that I post about here, and the next morning we drank coffee and ate toast in the sun on the porch. Also magnificent. He appreciated the shower and orange that were offered to him, and left his CD on our table in exhange.

It’s called “All Heavy, All Mighty” and is filled with impressive blues guitar riffs, intricately timed melodies, varied instrumentation, and a continuous but not overwhelming meloncholy. It’s at times similar to alt-country Bright Eyes, other times you hear the likes of Big Bill Broonzy or Leadbelly, and it all ends with a Dylan-esque folk song with an accordion instead of a guitar.

It’s this last song, “I Don’t Believe” that caused me to take so long to post this. I began to write an entry, which turned into a short story, which then turned into a longer than short short story, which I then felt the need to edit over and over since I am in no ways a writer and therefor unconfident in such ventures. If you are interested in reading it however, you can do so here. It goes somewhat chronologically through the song, and listening to the song first might help make more sense of the scattered story. Be easy on me, it’s my first time.

“All Heavy, All Might” is an 8 track disc that you could probably get from him if you asked nicely. He also has others recordings of varying styles, some on tape, that you could also probably get from him. You can do so on his myspace or at shows.

mp3: Wildebeest - I Don’t Believe (That We Have Met)
mp3: Wildebeest - Host and Hostage

Wildebeest Myspace

I read lots of music blogs, I spend way too much time on the internet but despite that the music I listen to most is usually recommended to me by people I know and trust in real life. I got A Poet Named Revolver Meets Gruesome for my friends in Bloomington, IN’s Dust From 1000 Years last time they stopped through Albany on tour. They left me with a stack of cds from bands they had found while on the road and this album came at the top of their list of recommendations.

When I got the CD it was just a burned copy so I didn’t know any of the track names (I still don’t know most of them) or what the record was called or what the art looked like. I listened to it a couple times without thinking about it and found that I had songs stuck in my head but I couldn’t figure where they came from. It took me a couple weeks to stumble upon it again and find that these were the songs that got stuck in my head(ex meadows in particular). The album is one part the microphones, a half part at the drive in a good dose of Simon Joyner. There is an immediacy and desperation in the songs that really take you into another world for a while, for example the fade in opener ExMeadows puts the listener on the run from what seems like the end of the world. Postwar Pop takes a more folk but yet abstract approach to the end of a city.

Unfortunately A Poet Named Revolver has already decided to call it quits. We think its a shame but are glad for the one record they did make, it is awesome, you should listen to it. You can buy it from here.

mp3:Poet Named Revolver - ExMeadows
mp3:Poet Named Revolver - Postwar Pop
Myspace

As usual I was running late to see Yo La Tengo and Broken Social Scene(presents Kevin Drew), but I did get to drive down rt 89 on the way which had a very pretty if somewhat dark view of Cayuga Lake the whole way. I highly recommend it, I bet its even better in the day time.
I’d like to admit before I start really get into this post that I’ve never really listened to either of these bands all that much despite both of them being somewhat iconic in the indie rock world and the fact that this show provided the one chance to see them together on what are otherwise separate tours, seemed like a good opportunity to check them both out.

I missed the beginning of Yo La Tengo’s set and by the end of it I felt like that wasn’t all that I was missing. I really just don’t get whatever it is that they were getting at in there set which ended with about a six minute songs who’s lyrics were mostly “Lets talk about nuclear war, yeah”. Thats not my main gripe though, mostly the set seemed to me just sort of uninspired. In my past experience though bands don’t get signed to Matador Records or last more than twenty years for nothing and I am willing to bet I really am missing something here, so I would ask you dear reader to please help fill me in. If I was going to put one (of the fifteen) Yo La Tengo records on my mp3 player to give my self a chance to see what they are all about which one would it be and why?

Broken Social Scene on the other hand who I also didn’t know too much about before hand was awesome. They put on a rip roaring show all the way through (there were no ballads and no female members, I don’t know if there was any correlation) and got the whole crowd to hug itself, literally. Their new record Spirit If is quite good and I have also since been directed to their classic You Forget it in People which I would also recommend.