Hey...hey

Computer Perfection (<--film by Dan DeMaggio)


Orange Roughies (<-reunion show on May 5th @ Paychecks)


High Strung (<--album release show for their latest, 5/19)

Happy to be here...

photo: Andrea Zarzycki

Chris says Pink Lightning spoke too soon when they called their 2011 debut EP First Rodeo, implying, with roll of weary eyes, and soft heave of sighs, that this time, with their new full length album, Happy To Be Here, they feel “seasoned,” feel the actual saddle sore. Butterfield admits though, he’s probably “the more obsessive one…” of the quintet, including founders drummer Neal Parks, bassist Everette Rinehart, and accordionist Leo ("Mike") McWilliams 

Cut from quirkier formative influences like karaoke cut-ups and stand-up comedians, the suspender-strapped, shimmying shout-singer is prone to embrace improvisation – but get him in the studio and he has to do epic, nerve-wracking battle with his “constant-revisionist”-side. “I’m very critical and particular about my parts and you’ll hear a lot of dubbing on Here, but that’s ‘cuz I worship Brian Wilson and Harry Nilsson and Michael Jackson. There was a lot of room on the songs, so, then I said, oh, let’s bring in the horns!”

Pink Lightning’s been honing their strange danceable rock brew for two years now: tribal post-punk rhythms with destructo-disco-romps in the garage, like post-bop jazzheads got jibing with some pedal-inclined neo-psychedelic space-rock shredders. And then there’s that zazzy accordion; ardent performers preaching the New Weird of music melding – something akin to a circus, at the very least, affecting a tilt-o-whirl aesthetic with their energy and song structure.

But capturing that energy, all their experimental tempo-shifts, Parks said, means “WORK,” claiming to have lost three lbs. after slamming skins for hours on end in a “sweatlodge” sound-proof room. “Loved every second of it, though. This album means a lot to me.”

artwork by Ryan Standfest

Tom Bahorski (of The Ashleys) joined last autumn, recruited to fill the departure of original guitarist Matt Paw (who you’ll hear on Here). Bahorski recorded the brass section (Thomas Gilchrist-tuba, Stephen Bublitz-trombone) in McWilliams/Parks’ home, an Eastern Market loft doubling as PL’s rehearsal space, only to lose the first demos with an ill-fated file corruption on the computer.

But that worked out. All that re-working, re-recording – Butterfield, Parks and Rinehart all see the light. “(Butterfield) completely rewrote one song and, honestly,” Rinehart says, “it frustrated me at first, but once I heard how it paid off, I knew I would have to just be patient…”

Hard to stay patient when post-punk rhythms sound like they’re in all your bloodstreams. Bahorski’s anticipating Here as a fan, first and foremost, but now, as a member: “It’s just exciting being around exciting people…and handsome lads to boot…We build excitement.”

--Read the MT post "Oddball Energy"

Album Release  4/28/12 @ Old Miami (Detroit)  w/ Mexican Knives, Beekeepers, Robin Parrent

Currents

Local Music news

This just popped up... -a new music video for a single from Phantasmagoria's forthcoming album (Currents)...

Streaming HERE
....-bolstered by the production efforts of a talented squad of students from Detroit's College of Creative Studies

....-Speaking of CCS... The Student Exhibition opens about two weeks from now - featuring 3,500 student works of art - on display at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education in Detroit's New Center, running Saturday, May 12 – Friday, May 25.

....-Speaking, also, of Phantasmagoria - they play Saturday night at the New Dodge in Hamtramck -celebrating the release of a split 7" single - with Coyote Clean Up - with both bands covering hallowed Nirvana tracks, out on FiveThreeDialTone. 

....-Also on that bill is new band The Vatican, -"new," yes, but packed with tried and true players, along with Coyote Clean Up, of course - and, electro-pop duo Revoir (who just released their own split 7" with the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre...streaming below).  

The Noise I wanna hear...

Inevitably I'd be posting this...
Let's see where it goes...

Record Store Day Rap Up

Have you gotten your proper dose of local rap yet today?


If not... slide up for a slice of bread, compliments of eccentric EmCee Doc Illingsworth - (one part of rap-trio Detroit CYDI) who, just a month ago, put out a solo album documenting his faithful leap into the world of being an independent musician. The first thing he learned was that, from now on, he'd have to subside on a staggeringly humble diet... This...bread...is what you can win! And some fuzzed-out Nintendo-tinged synths and punchy, ambling beats...

Part of the New Weird -in Detroit hip-hop, Illingsworth is cut from the crew who rapped about ringtones and binary code. And now he's tackling pancakes...pretzels...and a bit of his take on the history-and-future-of rap. It's something like the opening entries of a charmingly satirical diary at the dawn of new-independence for a musician - come get a view of things from Doc's perspective.






But ALSO- Single Barrel Detroit are back to their local-cutlure-documentarian-ways - this time framing hip-hop quartet Clear Soul Forces down at Hello Records, down at Trumbull and Bagley. This is a trailer for a full SBD show featuring a performance by the group who were also recently pegged by Red Bull Soundstage series as Detroit's next "rising hip-hop" act. For your listening pleasure, or to get an introductory sampling, head to CSF's bandcamp to hear "Detroit Revolution(s)" -from the album that came out at the start of this spring.


CLEAR SOUL FORCES: Record Store Day Trailer from SINGLE . BARREL . DETROIT on Vimeo.


This is part of SBD's partnership with Detroit Ca$h Mob -in attempt to help "direct traffic" -the vinyl enthusiasts out there- to their nearest record shops. For more info, check with SBD.

But, then...also...
 
Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr - the songwriting duo, Daniel Zott and Joshua Epstein, a duo synonymous throughout the city's indie/underground-pop/rock community as being the exemplary "break-out" band of the moment, have been receiving some warm receptions throughout the hipsto-bloggosphere and other various pockets of InternetWorld, but today, to prop their Apr. 21 performance at the Majestic Theatre (w/Phantasmagoria and the Hard Lessons), there's a piece inside the Detroit Free Press documenting the behind the scenes production of their new music video, for It's a Corporate World single, "We Almost Lost Detroit," a sunnier-synth and funk-flared cover of a Gil Scott-Heron song. 

Fans and Friends

The "whooo's" crackle away. Echoed claps fall to the wooden floor. Hearts were poured out and voices were lost and ankles are left sore from zealous stamping; strings broken or wound out of tune and we all feel, or at least hope, that what needed to be told, in song or in shouting-ear-shots-at-bar's-edge, was told...and told effectively.

And the traffic lights steadily shift us all back to abodes and when the morning makes its deceptively swift arrival, it's seemingly quiet.

Sunday morning rain storms' so beautiful. The bodies of the bands are bedded, their amps are off and though their mouths are agape, no sound, no song, no shout, is coming out. Maybe a slight, gargled snore. It feels sacred outside, not just because it's Sunday, but...because it IS Sunday it means that there's no cars bustling around, yet. No one is mowing their rain-drenched lawns. No one wants to walk their domesticated dogs. There is no human noise outside - and yet it's noisy as hell.

The rain is the applause now. The wind is the ambient fuzz from the amps and the birds are picking their own melody. It sounds like a concert out there, a clamor, a buzz of conversation. But the Blue Jays never try singing like the Cardinals...

Proceeds from Detroit-X-Detroit-II a "DETROIT by DETROIT" Scholarship at the Rochester School of Rock!

Hours ago...before last call...we, the characters perpetuating the dramatic/comedic/inspirational coming-of-age mystery of Detroit's Music Scene et al ...were all dressed up as each other and singing each other's songs, embodying and incanting not as ourselves but as fans of other bands, be they Alice Cooper or the White Stripes.

But this marks the chrystllization of a new sensibility, one of rampant camaraderie. Last weekend, at Detroit X Detroit (where a dozen groups performed cover sets of Detroit bands -whether long-gone legends or contemporary cut-ups) we saw something surreal and endearing, weird, yes, but also remarkable - that we know each other, are...into each other's music, each other's live shows, each other as writeirs and singers, to such a level, that we can zero in on each others idiosyncracies, from clothing to nuanced mannerisms. Cardinals and Blue Jays are on their own out there, in nature's concert. Perhaps, in a way, we've blurred together into one unwieldy band as some way of support - surviving not just the waves of the music biz together, not just the waves of a music scene together, but just...hey,...in this Recession-ruined world where Art is bastardized by Google-demons, we're just surviving. Keeping warm together.

Here, in this fleeting era, the New Weird of post-post-post-Millennial music in Detroit, there's no jockeying - and the line between "fan" and "friend" has been obliterated. This was like a 2nd Halloween...

Tom's really going all out, I told Steve, joining his side as we both watched the Ashleys recreate a Pupils set, seeing Tom go as far as mimicing Steve's scant appearance, barefooted, only in bicycle shorts.

Indeed...says Steve. Those are actually my shorts, too!




(<--pic by Lisa Joan)



WATCH: Pupils - performing "Glue Your Eyelids Together" - as ADULT. - video

Deastro - Incinerator

I've been writing about Deastro's music, now and then...for almost five years and each year I've thought I was, at least somewhat, sure of what it was, what it sounded like....

A year ago, I realized, that even as I try to decipher whatever-his-latest-work-was, or is, I'd have to throw out any preconceived notions... The mind alters, indeed...continues to alter. Randy Chabot is responsible for some of the sunniest and enthusing songs I've ever heard, as well as some of the murkiest, twisted-up and turbulent... Album to album, sometimes song to song, or dissonant movements/choruses/broken-bridges within the composition.

Chabot began garnering attention with his 2007 demos, a 21-year-old computer composer poking his head out in the golden age of electro-auteurs such as Caribou, M83, Fields, and still-prominent veterans like Four Tet or more fickle flashes like Cold Cave. In those 5 years, he's regenerated his airy, synth-saturated song-cycles out to widely scattered points of sonic sensibility and musical mood - techno, goth, space-rock...

But, as I started, this shouldn't be about who Randy Chabot was, or even is now - he learned long before Incinerator not to force himself to write the album that someone, anyone, ...you..., or I, might expect him to write.



"Prisoner" opens up with a jittery jogging bass, a funky growling thing over haunting drones and spliced up vocal-bursts. This is just one movement of up-to-four, inside a nearly 10-minute loping marathon. Hand-claps clatter atop the snuffling burst of sequenced beats while our singer raps this anthemic, chant-like chorus drenched to near-indecipherability by silvery coats of reverb. It's like searing through the stratosphere when you pass the four minute mark, the swell of layered elements pares back a bit and the song turns into more of a musing Krautrock churn, our vocalist turns cold, tinny, his humanity fuzzed-out to where he sounds like a Transformer...and then it all cuts away, right at 5:31... seven blissful seconds of just these tribal drum beats...meditative...
we catch our breath...
and a new movement begins, a new voice comes in, a cheerier bass groove starts jumping along under warming piano chimes and a sprite sprinkle of synth hooks...

Song to song...movement to movement...One thing, then something else. 

Perhaps best, then, to go with your gut. Follow the beats - don't be unsettled by those haunted-house-shrieks coming from down the hallway of the opening measures to "Tokyo Parasites..." Because, good god, just get into the whirlpool of those gravelly synths and your head starts spinning at the layered drums, the steady pulsing disco beat spilled over with those deep booming fills slamming onto the floor tom...you're hooked, this is dark shit, yes, but, like all effective specimens of dance music - trance-like.

And just as you're getting cozy into this nostalgic LCD-Soundystem-trip, eye-closing dance-out-freak-out, he swerves you hard to the left for a grating, guttural, drum-n-bass-toying interpretation of noise - "Experiment" - mystifying, erratic and, by comparison, brief barrage of laser beam cascades, chilly clicks, clacks and cathartic tonal wrings, beating along and bouncing to wherever...

The late-arriving drums of the title track welcome you back slowly from cacophony to a steadily waving hymn, the drums awakening under his voice as the synths hum steadily into this metallic hook...but you'll be sluiced down into a whole other song before the 3 minute mark...and, as we know, somewhere else entirely before this 9-minute closer finally burns away...

At just four tracks, Incinerator feels as though you've mined more than 10 different songs per-se... What Incinerator is, what it sounds like...is inherently something less tangible, thronged...untamed. Free to go somewhere else, three minutes from now...

Again...again

Johnny Headband - And Then Again from Johnny Headband on Vimeo.

What I Could Do

Shuffling songs together - Odd Future into Orpheum Bell - now that's a zesty and refreshingly-disorienting blend. "We Got Bitches..." into "Cuckholded Wren..."

I'd advise you to try something similar today.

Clash.

Anyways...
Songs on my mind this week...
The sweet snarl to Mick's voice, "raving on the corner, out of my mind..." those haunting, icicle-drizzles of piano and the way that guitar feels like its being punched, more so than its being strummed...



...what I could do...
 
And then there's this song, which speaks to how scattered my mind can be...so much to do, so little time... Sparkling with that jittery synth-bass and weirdly wrung by words like "...anomolies anonymous connected to the mothership..."

 
"...bonfire on woodbridge, hangin with a bunch of kids....spaced-out..."

The Anonymous just put out a disc on Woodbridge Records, the same label housing The Summer Pledge, who have their own album, Vessels -coming out next month (stay tuned). Bassett,  meanwhile, has some physical copies coming of his recently-digi-released album - and he's working towards some solo shows, -first up: May 8th at the Crofoot.

¿Possible o’ Impossible?

Josh has an earnest urge to get weirder.

This is partly why meeting at the Penguinarium of the Detroit Zoo seemed a sensible place to start an interview.

“Smells like a Chihuahua farm in here…” He shuffles inside, his cowboy boots echoing off the scuffed linoleum.

It’s dim and completely empty and our voices bounce off of the awkwardly arched ceiling above the viewing platform. We lean against the railing and merely glance at the stumpy, tuxedoed birds, stiff, flightless, sad and sealed. 

Josh Malerman’s mind’s going a mile a minute and he has his own way of rambling it out: starting out with his own anxieties stirred from the stigma of dating a stripper, to the inanity of  meeting a dare from two young vixens to blend shots of vodka and tequila into one glass, and then quickly to the potential book deal that the lead singer of Detroit’s rock quartet The High Strung could be scoring any day now (because when he’s not writing songs and singing them, half-zozzled, on stage, he’s writing supernatural suspense novels).

“Our song, ‘The Luck You Got,’ has been getting thousands of downloads a week…” he holds one hand out, acknowledging that this song of their's is now featured as the theme song for Showtime’s Shameless. “So, then," he holds out his other hand, "‘Okay!...now, does that then mean there’s a growing fan base? …Probably…so, at what point do you test that out?"

And then he brings both hands together as he answers his own question, "Well, we have a new album coming out….We'll test that out, out on the road."

The album's called ¿Possible o’ Impossible?, their seventh album and it’s arriving during a bracing time of possible convergence – a new album, a new tour, and, finally, for Malerman, after 13 completed works, a new book deal? Things are looking pretty good.

“I want to go further…”

The High Strung - "On Your Way Up" by DC/Milo

........

“I feel like we are at a crux now,” Malerman says, as we traipse through an empty Zoo. It's the end of January, the middle of the working week. It's a quarter past 4 pm, the chilled airs keep almost every animal hunched into their inclosures, (except for the sneering alpacas). It's after hours by Zoo standards and a few bicycle-coasting uniformed gents give us a "buy something or get out" look.

It's a random weekday swathed in muting fog, we came here on a whim, it seemed like a better alternative to a coffee shop. "There's nobody in the park...it's OURS..." Malerman sings on an o’ Impossible? song titled "Sometimes It's Odd, Sometimes It's Like God."

Our hour-long conversation charts the development of this band, back ten years to a trio of 27-year olds out of their minds with nervous energy and voracious appetites for open roads, all too willing to wail their rock n roll stylings on weeknights in watering holes on aloof Monday nights in the Randomness of the rustbelt, to their eeked-out-livings between New York lofts and Detroit suburbs, to their 3 albums churned out through a whirldwind's worth of a 4-year-long just-about-non-stop tour... and all the way through to their addition, two years ago, of guitarist Stephen Palmer (noted shredder from Detroit band Back In Spades) and, then, finally to their steady crawl into wider national attention (i.e. Shameless).

“I feel like there’s something different now..."

The Aftermath...

The aftermath of listneing to The Aftermath may find the listener in a state of shakey repose that may seem disquieting to anyone happening-upon said-listener... anyone left out, out on the outside, situated on the exterior of the headphones of said-listener who is -listening-to-The Aftermath (by Lizzie Temple Black) will not understand, may not want to...or may not be ready to...understand...





...the entrancing disturbance, the massage of madness, the detachment that the listener feels as dischordant xyolophones and curdling, cawing violins clatter together...is the listener even here, still, now,...at the table, with his headphones on, or does he now feel like he may not yet have even woken up... intense visuals thunder in, stirred by the kaleidoscopic haunt of the poetic spew, and one starts to fully appreciate whimsically thrown words like -avant-garde- one starts to wonder, really, if this is just noise, or if this is something more nuanced... Are all bets off? Does the chaos of these... "songs" actually follow a system that the listener is trying to jitteringly crawl his way into... Wavy-gravy-grooves from a lucid-dream of musical monstrocity...

Yes...look over at me and see me, with my headphones on... I'll look en-gaged...pro-voked...piqued...musing ...bothered and bewitched... I'm listening to the new noise... Zappa, Beefheart, Cale, Sun Ra... the provocative dream of dissonance is alive - LIVE in Berkely, tonight....