2007

In the 10 months since our inception we’ve received albums from many artists, but none of them have caught my ear like New Monsoon’s latest release, V.

I’d really never heard New Monsoon’s music before listening to the album, but after one listen I grew most intrigued. What particularly struck me was the variety amongst the tracks, as each song seemed to be cut from a completely different fabric from the last. Some of the tunes on V are incredibly catchy, as I just can’t get Copper Mine out of my head. Legendary producer John Cutler of Grateful Dead fame produced, mixed and engineered the new album.

New Monsoon came into existence in 1998 when Penn State classmates Jeff Miller and Bo Carper reconnected in San Francisco. For the last few years the band has been extending its fan base further and further thanks to their dynamic live shows and multiple festival appearances each year. Miller was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about the V release:

Scott Bernstein: The first two tunes on the album have completely different sounds. Was that your plan?

Jeff Miller: It wasn’t necessarily “the plan,” but it seemed to be a great way to start the record. We wanted the first two songs to grab you and set you up for the rest of the record. We had compiled many different versions of the song order and felt these two tunes were best first.

SB: Did the songs on V develop in the studio or on the road?

JM: The songs developed mostly on the road. Our intention was to make a record of the the songs we felt were “road tested” but had yet to be given the proper studio treatment. It was a thrill to get inside these songs in the studio and make them sound how we envisioned them. I think we accomplished that.

Read on after the jump for the rest of our interview with Jeff Miller…

Well then, you’re in luck: New fall tour dates are rolling in to Hidden Track Headquarters faster than a Joba fastball, and many of these tours are requiring hefty amounts

Those of you looking to partake in some schwillage in the PNC Bank Arts Center parking lot before Wednesday’s Allman Brothers & RatDog show can forget it. More than a

From the people that brought you the face-melting, seizure-inducing Bustle In Your Hedgerow comes the next great quasi-tribute band: Tragedy makes its debut at BB King’s Blues Club this Thursday

So Blender.com brought some fancy shit to Lollapalooza and filmed many of the festival’s performances. They’ve been kind enough to slap a commercial on the front end and post some

Neil Young on Friday continued a tradition he started in 1969, when he played material from his new album for about 100 people at his record label in Burbank. Young has recorded 10 songs for a new album entitled Chrome Dreams II. Word from the meeting is that two of the songs are monsters that clock in at over 10 minutes each. Look for Reprise to announce a release date for it soon…

We’ve got plenty of links from the weekend, so let’s get down to bid’ness:

• Gothamist interviews John Vanderslice about his blog tour
• Apparently Aquarium Drunkard likes The Faces as much as we do
• Producer Brendan O’Brien talks about the new Springsteen album
• Amoeba Records is releasing a Gram Parsons show from 1969
• Kermit The Blog re-envisions the top 25 college football teams as albums
• Medeski, Scofield, Martin and Wood, ALO and New Monsoon are among the artists playing Earthdance in Laytonville, CA on September 14-16
• TV Squad unearths the Beastie Boys’ infomercial from 1998
• Sam Bush’s new DVD shows off his musical schizophrenia
• The Wall Street Journal examines the origins of a few hybrid genres
• A.V. Club counts down the 15 Masters of Onstage Banter
• Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright speaks to Billboard about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn 40 years after it was originally released
• All hell broke loose at the DMB concert at SPAC after a mother served Grey Goose vodka to her underaged daughter and three of her friends
• San Francisco’s Mobile Beat blogger took in a Tea Leaf Green show
• Our good friend SuperDee advises that air guitar is here to stay
• JJ Grey & MOFRO and Los Lobos headline the Blackwater Sol Revue
  

And, as usual, after the jump we’ve got all kinds of setlists from the weekend, including the Allmans, the Crowes, Cake, Zappa Plays Zappa and many more…

Judging by the well-deserved $31.2 million opening-weekend haul, I’m guessing many of youse also patronized to the local cineplex to see Superbad at some point. Donning my Captain Obvious cape