Show Preview: DRIVE BY TRUCKERS, Blitzen Trapper

photo by David McClister

Saturday, March 29

The Pageant

Alt-country darlings Drive-By Truckers are at it again. Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood keep on truckin’ even after the departure of the much revered guitarist and songwriter Jason Isbell, who is now strumming away on his own critically acclaimed solo career. After 10 studio albums, several live albums, and enough high praise from critics and fans to kill a mule, the band releases their 11th studio record this year and will embark on a new cross-country tour. 

Ever since their formation in 1996, the Georgia-based band have been hosted by a litany of record labels, while undergoing enough line-up changes to make you drop your PBR. They’ve finally landed at ATO Records, a great label for all things confederate. 

Through the traditional ups and downs of keeping their sound alive, they’ve written well and toured hard to earn the kind of following they have. The band excels at blue-collar blues and ballads, plaid-shirt roots rock and harmonies that focus on storytelling and target the more traditional southern narratives of loaded guns in dresser drawers, poker games gone awry, and mothers abandoning their sons for the comfort of wayward strangers. 

This sort of Alabama-rebel sound is boozey and brawling, easy to make friends with, but only if you buy it a drink first.  With subtle nods to the greats that came before them, like young Tom Petty or Jay Farrarr, who traditionally do this genre better than most, the Drive-By Truckers stand apart from all of them. Just a band of hard-working guys, rocking and rolling their wheels as far as the whiskey can carry them. 

Blitzen Trapper opens the show and deals a similar southern-hand with a bit more groove and funk, an ace or two up their sleeves. 

by Kevin Korinek

(Almost) Eleven Questions with Phantogram

By Thomas Crone

First, a little bit of inside baseball: there are phone interviews that come off to perfection. Others fall into the “just okay” camp, to one degree of another. A smaller group, well, you’d love to have the experience back. For me, it was simply too tempting to speak to the principal members of Phantogram, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Josh Carter and vocalist/keyboardist Sarah Barthel. But to get the phone chat, I had to grab an interview slot that was a bit too close for comfort to the start time for a class of mine. Taking the interview after all, I arrived at school a few minutes late, pushing the interview even further into pre-class prep time.

My rattled state was almost a for-sure thing during our brief conversation, which Barthel and Carter soldiered through despite my fragile state. In the questions, I bounced around some legit topics, but we never fully discussed the group’s newest album, Voices. Luckily, for Eleven readers, Jack Probst ably tackles that job in the current, March issue of the print edition, calling it “an album full of hooks and hits that will garner more attention for the band this year and for many to come.”

Having really enjoyed the band’s debut, Eyelid Movies, I knew they were sharply attuned to bringing smart, visually appealing, evocative videos to life and that’s where we started the conversation. (In fact, go check out “When I’m Small” and “Mouthful of Diamonds” just as soon as you’ve finished reading this.) We didn’t get to the eleventh question, but got as close as some weird circumstances allowed.

1. How involved are you in the creation and visioning of your videos?

For us every aspect is important and Phantogram is a very visual band. We spend a lot of time collaborating with the director, the producer, to make sure the the concept is followed through upon. We’re very visual artists and when it comes to writing music, the visual are also very important to us.

2. Is the process of video creation a labor for you, or a joy?

It’s more of the idea and concept that we get into before the shoot. That’s what’s important to us. We leave it the hand of the director after that, in order for them to refine the idea.

3. Can you give a sense of your embrace of the EP format?

We’d been busy touring so much that we just didn’t have the time to put out a full-length. I will say in the future that we’ll be putting out EPs constantly. It’s a good way to fans to keep up with us. It’s good for the fans and for us, its keeps everyone interested. In this day-and-age, everything seems so disposable with the internet and downloading, it’s better to put things out more frequently. Digital singles and EPs, something to keep everybody happy.

4. At the risk of ignorance, I haven’t been able to find this info. Will this be your first appearance in St. Louis?

No, we played LouFest a few years ago. And we played The Firebird - is that a club there? - about three years ago. So it’s been awhile.

5. Do you ever get sense of towns’ individuality when your tour?

Yes and no. It depends on the day, of course. We just started touring in a bus. So we can finally see something other than a green room when we show up in a city. We’ve spent a lot of time touring in cars and vans. You go to bed, pack up for the show, get up and drive. Hopefully, you make it in time for load-in, for soundcheck. You try to eat, sleep and play. That’s the thing of touring with busses. You can see cities, you can see a little bit of the nightlife. Before now, we haven’t had a lot of chance to hang out in St. Louis, but we hope to.

6. What cities have adopted you over time?

As far as playing different cities, a lot of smaller markets are fun to play. Fans there are less-jaded and super-excited to see some live music. Bands don’t come around as frequently as in New York or Chicago. Most of the smaller markets are fun. There’s a real feeling of energy.

7. How often do you play festival dates? You have a lot to play this year?

Yeah, for sure. Sasquatch has been announced, another one in Atlanta, too. There’ll be a couple more.

8. What’s the feeling of playing those dates, form a performer’s perspective?

Just playing in front of a large audience is always fun. There’s a really cool vibe playing festivals, since people are so excited about being there. It’s more like a big party, in a way. It’s great to hang out with other bands and see them backstage, catch up with lots of people that we’re friends with.

9. Immediately following this interview, I’m teaching a class, with a large number of audio students, most of whom see themselves working in the music industry in a couple of years. What advice should I pass along to them?

Yeah, I would say that if you want to do it, do it all the way. Don’t half-ass it. In our case, music was our only option, it’s what we really believe in and what we wanted to do. If you really want to do it, don’t let anything stop you.

Phantogram play The Pageant on Tuesday, April 8.

Album Review: Lambchop Nixon (reissue)

Merge Records

This year, Merge Records is celebrating their 25th anniversary with a 45 subscription series, a 25k race, and a reissue of a classic Merge album every month. Considering Merge’s back catalog, that’s a pretty fantastic way to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with some of the best music of the last 20 years. 

Kicking off the reissue series is Lambchop’s Nixon, originally released in 2000 and a diamond in the rough that has never been pressed to wax. It’s not the most obvious choice; Lambchop has never been one of the label’s more popular bands. They have a solid fan base overseas, and are highly lauded, legendary even, at indie record stores in their Nashville hometown and around the country. But Merge’s method has always been to release great records, whether they sell millions or hundreds, and they’ve stood by the perpetually underrated Lambchop since the beginning.

Nixon is the band’s fifth album, and a great entry point into the band’s catalog. Never a band with strict membership policies, by this point in their career Lambchop was rolling 14 members deep, filling in songs with lush strings, horns, slide guitar, banjo, and whatever else they could catch hold of. As the band kept ballooning, the original alt-country sound they started from began to absorb whole new genres and influences. It could have been a mess, but it’s not: Nixon’s arrangement feels classic and complete, while still being all over the place.

Lead singer/guitarist Kurt Wagner’s voice is generally low and calm, like he’s sitting next to you singing a lullaby, complementing the mellow arrangements on tracks like opener “The Old Gold Shoe” and “Nashville Parent.” Verse after verse of smart lyrics give a little wink and smile with their cleverness. Echoes of funk and soul, as well as Wagner’s rarely used, strange falsetto, pop up on “Grumpus” and “What Else Could It Be,” while a gospel choir help make “Up with People” a grand spectacle, and the pinnacle song of the band’s long career. 

Over the course of the record, things start off sedately enough, and the narrative threads wind toward a happy peak. But that’s just the middle of the album—a point made more apparent in the vinyl’s two-sided incarnation than on the original CD—and the album slides southward from there, eventually ending in the darkest of places. It’s laid out perfectly that way, with ups and downs feeling like you’re floating in a sea where things are starting to get worse. Jack Probst

Album Review: Superchunk, Indoor Living (reissue)

Merge Records

For those of us who were around but not actually listening to Merge records in the ‘90s, Superchunk existed as kind of an urban legend. You might see the bespectacled David Cross on Mr. Show with Bob and David wearing a Superchunk shirt but, this being life before the internet,  you’d have no clue what it meant. I’ll admit that was my experience with the band until 2011’s Majesty Shredding—their ninth—made me track down their back catalog. 

The new reissue version of 1997’s Indoor Living is manna from the musical heavens. Contrasted with The Laughter Guns, an EP released in 1996, this version of ‘Chunk is far less punk-driven and more expansive. There are also elements that weren’t there on older Superchunk albums, like the piano that shows up on the excellent yet somber “Under Our Feet.” 

But what’s more apparent now is the existential angst of the lyrics, dealing with love lost and hearts destroyed. On “Unbelievable Things,” lead character Mac McCaughan bitterly describes a relationship between “a queen with several kings / and I, a bird without wings,” and deep cut “Every Single Instinct” burns with resentment.  On the technical side, yes, much of Superchunk’s signature, ear-bleeding guitar work remains, on tracks like “Burn Last Sunday,” where a jangly riff builds inexorably to a mountain of noise—but you can also more clearly hear the low end, as John Wurster wrestles a coherent drum phrase out of thin air on “Nu Bruises,” and Laura Ballance provides “The Popular Music” with graceful bass. 

Especially entertaining in the reissued edition of Indoor Living is the appended live disc, Clambakes Vol 8: We’d Like to Thank the Homecoming Committee – Live at Duke 1997. It’s a great encapsulation of the band’s live show at the time, which was nearly as cuttingly funny as the band was tight.  Jason Robinson

Album Review: Ellen The Felon And The Mattronome, Bang Bang Bang

 

Self Release

Ellen Cook, quite simply, is a woman born during the wrong time: Bang Bang Bang should have been the punk album of the Big Band era.

Ellen The Felon And The Mattronome’s debut album defies any specific genre in the best way possible. Starting strong with “Crazy Psycho” and “Where the Heart Is,” the album really hits its stride by third track “Chaos,” where the band sounds like they could’ve backed Miles Davis during the Birth of the Cool sessions. Drummer Matthew Reyland and saxophonist Dave Farver are on fire, Cook’s lyrics flow like Beat poetry, and the music evokes images of Gaslight Square in the ‘60s on a long-gone Friday night.

Songs like “Cross Marketing” and “Party Girl” showcase Cook’s masterful arrangements. From the start, “Cross Marketing” feels like the love child of Frank Zappa and Amanda Palmer, and “Party Girl”’s tender shuffling introduction gives way to a delicious melody that sets up a chorus part riot grrrl and part cabaret.

Bang Bang Bang sounds fresh and exciting, like a band giving everything it has while having the most fun possible. From the poppiness of “Crazy Psycho” to the cha-cha melody of “Oh Timothy” or the weirdness of closing track “Temple,” glimpses of the band’s source material flash by. Cook’s voice is in top form from start to finish, Reyland and violinist Abbie Steiling are the perfect complement to Cook’s piano, and this might just be the classiest, campiest and most vulgar album of 2013. Rev. Daniel W. Wright

Album Review: Tonya Gilmore Phantoms, Fill the Sky

Ravens Flight Records

Oregon-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Tonya Gilmore may just be this century’s premier murder balladeer.

Several of the 14 songs on Phantoms Fill the Sky have appeared  in other forms on Gilmore’s previous releases, but all of them have been thoughtfully revisited and re-polished for the new album. And while she does capably play the bulk of the album’s rhythms and melodies—on vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, and hand percussion—a pirate’s crew of about eight other multi-instrumentalists really brings Gilmore’s tunes to a whole new level. The whole album feels meatier as a result—oh, and did I mention there’s a guy, Mark Powers, who is credited with playing the goat toenails, along with drums and percussion?

This is not an album for the light-hearted. The closest Gilmore comes to being even remotely upbeat is on a couple of new songs, namely “Brittle Bones” and the down-tempo, piano-driven waltz “Casino Night,” in which Gilmore calmly proclaims her certainty that “I’ve no god above to call it sin / or to do me in.” 

Where Gilmore truly shines is in her lyric writing and her vocal delivery. With a frequent and at times frantic vibrato, she exudes power while slipping effortlessly between vocal registers. She has an innate ability to capture the dynamics of the lyrics within her delivery, so that she embodies the loss, death, ghosts and betrayals of which she sings. It’s definitely dramatic material, and she works it like Edgar Allan Poe writing for musical theater. The songs are often layered with metaphor and thick with images, like short stories you have to read in their entirety to understand what’s really going on—though she can be unsettlingly specific too, as with “Pitchfork and a Torch,” wherein the narrator croons darkly to her lover, “I know the vein in your neck better than the rest of your head.” Suzie Gilb

Album Review: Aquitaine American, Pulverizer Pt. 2

self release

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that sequels are, with few exceptions, bad ideas. This is not the case for STL’s own Aquitaine (formerly Supermoon) and their follow-up EP to 2012’s American Pulverizer. There’s a lot that will be familiar to fans of the first, including sharp guitars seemingly pulled directly from the hands of The Jam’s Paul Weller, and vocals out of Peter Murphy’s back catalog driven to post-punk speed. Fans of classic British mod/new wave will have plenty to enjoy here, not the least of which is the guitar riff for leadoff track “Robotson,” the closest you’ll get to those quintessential sounds without actually riding a time machine back to 1977. 

But the Brit-leaning stuff isn’t all there is to enjoy; drummer Chris Luckett bashes and crashes without losing momentum, finding weird little pockets of interesting stuff; bassist and band leader Dave Collett brings the heat to the low end; and former guitarist Gerald Good (now replaced onstage but not on this record by Graham Day) shines as both riff writer and singer on the unexpectedly sentimental “Meteor Showers. “ A smattering of familiar sounds cue more of the group’s influences—The Kinks, Pulp, Johnny Marr, The Who—but the resulting mixture is purely theirs. The only real problem with this fine disc of rockers is that it’s too short. Take that as a compliment.  Jason Robinson