...And We're Back! ...And Gnarls B. is here too.

Just got back from a week in LA, which was particularly stoopid during Oscar week.

Highlights? Seeing famous people buying junk food at the Ralph's in Malibu, watching the entire cast of Reno 911! do an improv show at the iO Theatre on Hollywood, nearly getting trampled at the Independent Spirit Awards on the beach in Santa Monica when Brangelina showed up, and eating dinner under a photo portrait of Lemmy at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset.

I spent a lot of time with the Zune stuck in my ears out there, and I became addicted to Gnarls Barkley's "Run" while strolling along Ocean Ave. I'm desperate to hear the rest of the album.

Here's the video:

Kate Nash/NME Tour Announced...Webster Hall Tix On Sale Friday

From the NME:

Kate Nash is set to kick off her first full tour of north America in April – and NME is going along for the ride. The singer will hit the road on the NME Awards Tour, which starts in Atlanta on April 15 and will see Nash playing right across the country for the first time following just a handful of US gigs last year. Nash, whose debut album ’Made Of Bricks’ debuted in the Top 40 of Billboard Top 200 Chart after topping the UK charts in 2007, said she is looking forward to the chance to play to a wider US audience. "It's pretty cool to be touring America, I’m really excited, I can’t wait," she told NME.COM. "I'm really looking forward to playing Chicago and the places I've never been because it'll be really fun to explore America a bit more."

Tickets for the NYC Webster Hall show go onsale Friday (link below).

Kate Nash/NME Awards Tour Dates:

Tuesday, April 15 - Atlanta, GA - Variety Playhouse
Wednesday, April 16 - Asheville, NC - The Orange Peel
Thursday, April 17 Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
Friday, April 18 - Baltimore, MD - Recher Theatre
Saturday, April 19 - Philadelphia - Trocadero
Monday, April 21 - Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club
Wednesday, April 23 - New York, NY - Webster Hall tickets
Saturday, April 26 - Indio, CA - Coachella Music & Arts Festival
Monday, April 28 - Toronto, ON - Phoenix Theatre
Wednesday, April 30 - Detroit, MI - St. Andrews Hall
Friday, May 2 - Chicago, IL - The Vic
Saturday, May 3 - Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
Monday, May 5 - Boulder, CO - Fox Theatre
Thursday, May 8 - Vancouver, BC - Richard’s on Richards
Friday, May 9 Seattle, WA - Showbox
Sunday, May 11 - Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom
Tuesday, May 13 - San Francisco - The Fillmore

Kate Nash - "Foundations (Metronomy Remix)" mp3
(courtesy Electrorash)

movie review: Chicago 10...and Free NYC Screening

A couple nights ago I caught a screening of the forthcoming documentary, Chicago 10, which uses archival footage, animation, and music to recreate the trials of the eight anti-war protesters who led the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Incredibly compelling and insightful, the movie pieces together the chain of events and allows the viewer to visualize the protesting, the absurd reaction by Mayor Daley and the Chicago Police, and the circus that the trials eventually became.

I'm not a big fan of animation in movies, as I usually spend the bulk of my time fretting over how things just don't seem to look right, but I bought into the realism of the cartoon versions of each player pretty quickly. The animated courtroom scenes feature voices by folks like Hank Azaria, Liev Schreiber, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, and the recently departed Roy Scheider as crochety Judge Julius Hoffman.

And the use of period and recent-day protest music is fantastic in the movie. Who doesn't get fired up hearing the MC5's "Kick Out The Jams", ever?

As documentaries about American history and activism go, this film is pretty important. As I left the screening room, the movie reminded me how important activism and agitation is, and why our liberties shouldn't ever be taken for granted. I encourage everyone to check this film out.

If you are in NYC, our good friends at Filter invite you to a free screening of the film at The Landmark Sunshine Theatre on E. Houston Street on Wednesday, February 27 @ 7:30PM. To get on the list, send your info to: rsvpnyc@filtermmm.com



Chicago 10 Trailer:



MC5 - "Kick Out The Jams" mp3 buy

February's Bakers Dozen Downloads...The Teenage Prayers, The Wombats, The Explorers Club, The Whigs, and more.

Here's another installment in our monthly quest to get some quality new tunage into your portable music playing device of choice. As always, thanks to the record companies and PR pimps who are hosting these gems for us.

Load 'em up and crank 'em.

The Explorers Club - "Do You Love Me?" mp3

The Teenage Prayers - "I'm In Love Again" mp3

Bad Flirt - "Heart Of Darkness" mp3

Throw Me The Statue - "About to Walk" mp3

The Whigs - "Right Hand On My Heart" mp3

Cassettes Won't Listen - "Paper Float (Styrofoam Remix)" mp3

Oren Lavie - "Her Morning Elegance" mp3

The Brakes - "Into The Ground" mp3

The Wombats - "Kill The Director" mp3

Jon McKiel - "War On You" mp3

A Weather - "Oh My Stars" mp3

Trash Fashion - "Why Can't We Be Friends (Mason Storm 'Two Hottie Remix') mp3

Decomposure - "Hour 5" mp3

Rockin' monkey photo courtesy of worth1000.com

Nicole Atkins, Live In The Dirty Jerz.

In a convergence of two of the best entities in the New Jersey music scene, Nicole Atkins played a great acoustic set at one of the world's best music stores, Vintage Vinyl of Fords last month, and the whole thing was shot with multiple angles and can be streamed courtesy of YeboTV:

I know I've said it before, but you've got to see her and her band, The Sea, live and in-person to really see and feel how powerful a performer she is. Here's her current string of dates:

02/19/08 Cleveland, OH Beachland Tavern

02/20/08 Ann Arbor, MI Blind Pig

02/21/08 Chicago, IL Subterranean

02/22/08 Milwaukee, WI Cactus Club

02/23/08 Madison, WI Café Montmartre

02/25/08 Minneapolis, MN 7th Street Entry

02/29/08 Portland, OR Doug Fir Lounge

03/01/08 Seattle, WA The Triple Door

03/03/08 San Francisco, CA The Independent

03/05/08 San Diego, CA Brick By Brick

03/06/08 West Hollywood, CA The Troubadour

03/09/08 Dallas, TX House Of Blues - Cambridge Room

03/10/08 Houston, TX The Mink

03/12/08 Austin, TX SXSW
03/13/08 Austin, TX SXSW
03/14/08 Austin, TX SXSW
03/15/08 Austin, TX SXSW

03/17/08 Birmingham, AL Bottle Tree

03/18/08 Atlanta, GA EARL

03/20/08 Charlotte, NC Snug Harbor

03/21/08 Charlotte, NC Snug Harbor

03/22/08 Chapel Hill, NC Local 506

03/24/08 Washington DC Rock and Roll Hotel

3/25 Philadelphia, PA The World Cafe Live

6/12-15 Manchester, TN Bonnaroo


Nicole Atkins - "Party's Over" mp3

New Single From Dirty on Purpose

On the eve of their sold-out Valentine's Day show with Band Of Horses, and as part of what feels like an avalanche of great new music from them, Dirty on Purpose cuts loose yet another slice of dreamy-fuzzy goodness with the new (and free!) single "Hard To Tell You". Get it from the RCRDLBL player/download thingie below:

Dawn Landes...show at Bowery & download here.

A couple days ago we posted about the awesome show Thao put on at the Knitting Factory, and as I was writing that piece up, I was reminded about how we happen to be in the middle of a time producing some pretty great female singer-songwriters. Not goofy, "writin' songs for radio" Lillith Fair-ers, but really solid, passionate, and terrific sounding writers & performers.

One such artist is NYC's own Dawn Landes, who also happens to be a multi-instrumentalist and an accomplished recording engineer (she could be the only person to ever work with both Philip Glass & Ryan Adams...). Landes' second full-length, Fireproof, finally gets a proper US release on March 4 through Cooking Vinyl.

From the press release:

The aptly named album was recorded live to 2" tape in a single day in an old fire station in Red Hook, Brooklyn (along with drummer Ray Rizzo, bassist Jonny Flaugher and engineer Adam Lasus.) It's an astonishing mixture of the urban and the rural. Fireproof is like a little kitchen garden planted between high-rise buildings; in it’s own way, a remarkable act of resistance.

"I think albums are always marked by the places where they were conceived or written. New York was bound to color many of the sounds I recorded for Fireproof," explains Dawn. But at the heart of these songs, there's still that girl playing the guitar in a cornfield in the Midwest. The only difference is that the corn has been replaced by high-rise buildings.

I guess you can grow corn in Red Hook, can't you?

Anyway, Landes plays Bowery Ballroom with Jason Isbell, and my wife's pretend boyfriend Will Hoge, on February 21. That's quite a bill full of state-of-the-art singer-songwriter goodness. Tickets here.

Dawn Landes - "Bodyguard" mp3 buy

Ash playing St Patty's Day Show In Brooklyn

Wow, just announced:

ASH

with guests, Levy

Music Hall Of Williamsburg

Monday 3/17
$15 adv / $17 day of 18+
Doors 8pm / Show 9pm

Tickets here.

I'm pretty sure this is Ash's first American show since the scorcher they played at The Annex in Oct '06.

It's definitely the first show here since the release of their excellent Twilight Of The Innocents album. Let's hope this turns into some sort of full blown tour.


Ash - "There's A Star" mp3 buy

WRXP...A New Home For Local Rock On The Radio?

If you are not from around these parts, you might be surprised to learn that even though NYC is the media capitol of the universe, there has not been a single commercial radio station in town playing new and interesting rock music for many years. In fact, if you were asked to identify what city in New York State you were in by listening to its rock stations, you'd probably boldly state, "Buffalo or Rochester".

And yeah, there are some of the best non-commercial music stations in the country here, including the wonderfully all-over-the-place WFMU, the smart and adult WFUV, and the headbanging WSOU...but if you want to hear a rock track that you haven't already heard 200 times by accident in the last year on a commercial station with a great signal, you've been out of luck.

So my ears pricked up (figuratively and literally) last week, when longtime snooze-jazz radio station CD101.9 flipped formats to something their press release described as, "WXRP...a new Adult Rock station in the New York tri-state market which merges New Music, Classic Rock, Alternative & Local Rock into a new adult blend called 'The New York Rock Experience'."

I quickly flipped the new station on to see if the new format was indeed a new "experience", or just another robot-formatted junk merchant.

I was a bit disappointed in how unexciting my immediate impression was, and the fact that the first song I heard was "Rockstar" by Nickelback was a complete kick in the groin. I guess I was hoping for some Vampire Weekend or Earl Greyhound to welcome me to this new NYC-centric sound. I hung in for a bit, and eventually was treated to a track by White Rabbits, and despite the occasional stinker (see Nickelback above), I found that the playlist didn't really hurt my feelings that badly. It's not as blatantly nu-metal-crappy as K-Rock, not as old-fogeyish as Q-104, but something that you could probably play in the car without someone yelling "turn this junk off!".

For the sake of comparison, I kept track of their playlist for the time period of Noon to 1 pm yesterday (Saturday 2/9), and looked up the songs played for the same period on K-Rock and the closest other station with a similar "broad-based" rock format, North Jersey's WDHA. Here's how they stacked-up against each other:

WRXP 2/9/08 Noon-1pm

Paul McCartney & Wings - Live & Let Die
R.E.M. -Supernatural Superserious
Talking Heads -Once In A Lifetime
Incubus -Stellar
Jeff Beck -Freeway Jam
Spoon -The Underdog
Ramones -I Wanna Be Sedated
Coldplay -Yellow
Derek and the Dominoes -Layla
Foo Fighters -The Pretender
Dave Matthews Band -Jimi Thing
Peter Gabriel -Sledgehammer
Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes

K-Rock (WXRK) 2/9/08 Noon-1pm

Linkin Park -Faint
Soundgarden -Fell On Black Days
Beastie Boys -Fight For Your Right
Jimi Hendrix -Fire
Rush -Fly By Night
Ozzy Osbourne -Flying High Again
Led Zeppelin -Fool In The Rain
AC/DC -For Those About To Rock
Metallica -For Whom The Bell Tolls
Jimi Hendrix -Foxy
Tom Petty -Free Fallin
Rush -Free Will
Metallica -Fuel

WDHA 2/9/08 Noon-1pm

Guns N Roses - Mister Brownstone
Nirvana - Heart Shaped Box
Breaking Benjamin - The Diary Of Jane
ZZ Top - Got Me Under Pressure
Sebastian Bach - Back In The Saddle
Pearl Jam - Black
AC/DC - Jail Break
Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil
Kid Rock - Amen
Aerosmith - Dream On
Van Halen - Dreams

As you can see, WDHA is every bit as boring as any Midwestern classic rocker (with the exception being a spin of local rockstar/goofball Sebastian Bach). I'm not afraid to say that I have no idea who Breaking Benjamin are...and Van Halen's "Dreams"? Not only is that some weak Hagar-era stuff, it's the lamest VH hit ever.

And after I copied K-Rock's playlist, I realized all the song titles were in alphabetical order. So I listened in on the station for a minute to confirm my suspicion that they were in fact doing some sort of unoriginal "Giants Of Rock From A to Z" thing. Yikes. That kind of stuff leads to a listener having to hear Rush, Jimi, and Metallica twice in an hour, as you can see in the playlist above. My New Yorker's bloated sense of intellectual superiority over the rest of the country immediately makes me suspect that this kind of crappy programming may fly in Huntsville, or Spartansburg, or Fargo, but we want and deserve something a bit more challenging or diverse here, even if it's from a commerical rock station. And seriously...when was the last time you actually heard K-Rock being played somewhere or by someone? I can't remember any instance since Howard Stern left for Sirius.

As far as RXP's promise of local action, although the above is only an hour's sampling, I did hear Ramones, Talking Heads, and amazingly, Santogold! The jock played Santi's "L.E.S. Artistes", and though it looks out of place in the context of the playlist above nestled in along with Jeff Beck and DMB, it sounded great and fit in much like the way Thin Lizzy, Kylie, and Radiohead all sound great together on BBC One.

Since RXP claims they'll be programmed for the most part by the jocks themselves, I'm guessing they'll be interested in hearing how they're sounding to folks listening in the car on the way to work or on their Zune radios, so here's their studio line: 800-423-1019, incase you've got some constructive criticism or local music tips for them. Lets hope they open their eyes and ears to some of the other excellent rock coming out of this area that doesn't have a home on commercial airwaves.


Earl Greyhound - "S.O.S" mp3
Santogold - "L.E.S. Artistes" mp3

UPDATE: If you click here, you can see RXP's previous 4 hours of playlist. I just heard Tom Cochrane's "Life Is A Highway" and Marcy Playground's "Sex & Candy" in the same half hour. ..yeesh! That's an "experience" I can live without.

The George Foreman iPod Grill...Genius.

This is genius, and speaks to one of my great passions...listening to music while waiting for my grillin' to get done:



That's right, you're not dreaming...it's the George Foreman iPod Grill.

I've never actually seen one of these in real life before, and I'm not quite sure how you keep the grease and stuff off of your valuable electronics...but I think I need one.

And if the concept isn't enough, dig this customer review from the Buy.com page where I found this thing:

"I love George Foreman's products! I own all of the grills, and I use them when I have small get togethers. They are great, indoors and out. I usually only use one at a time, since my friends don't really come to my parties. I don't know what that is about. I used the George Foreman iPod Grill just this past weekend. I was outdoors, listening to some Celine Dion and grilling one hotdog. Celine is great with barbecue foods. I also had a small can of baked beans. Anyway, the speaker was way too loud. My neighbors (I live next to a sorority house) called the cops on me. Again. I don't know what that is about. "

Awesome. And just in time for my birthday in March...hint, hint.

Grafton Primary - "I Can Cook (Miami Horror Remix)" mp3

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

I caught a fantastic set Monday night by Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down at the Knitting Factory.

She's often compared to Cat Power, but I think that's kind of lazy...if she must be compared to someone vocally, you'd have to include Joni Mitchell, Sinead O'Connor, and maybe even a little Edie Brickell. And, boy oh boy, can she play guitar. Did I mention she can beatbox & hum at the same time?

Her band is also really great, and they take her very personal songs from that area of preciousness that make people uncomfortable, and turn them into compelling, hooky, clap-along-able tunes that seem to end way too soon. And Thao was a totally charming front-person that night, telling stories about funny stuff that happens to her band members, and wondering out loud whether she's as good a dresser as Cat Power (who she'd shared an appearance on WNYC with earlier that day):

Thao's new album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, is flat out excellent. buy

Get six songs from Thao's 2006 stop at Daytrotter here.

Watch Thao's sweet "Rock & Roll (Pt 2)"/"Geography" combo live on the San Francisco waterfront: