My favorite album of 2008 by a long shot was Consolers of the Lonely by The Raconteurs, so I was thrilled to see that Jack White, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence
We’re still basking in the post-show glow of Phish’s Super Ball IX festival in Watkins Glen, listening back to the tapes, sharing stories and checking out some of the pictures tweeted over the weekend. Once again the @Phish_FTR feed was firing off images of the band and crew from backstage and beyond.
Several tweeters were equally prolific supplying illustrative insights into weekend’s festivities check them out below and send @Hidden_Track a tweet of your #SBIX shots.
Day 1
READ ON for more great photos from Super Ball IX…
Over the past couple of years, Tea Leaf Green pressed on through some major obstacles from losing a founding member in bassist Ben Chambers to Scott Rager seriously injuring his ankle three days before a CD release show, but with the release of Radio Tragedy!, they are not only confident the band is at its all-time best, but they’re pissed off, fed up with the industry and ready to kick ass on their own terms.
Radio Tragedy! lays it all right out there: the music industry, the crap on the radio and the celebrity culture in the music business, it’s all bullshit. They are tired of being pigeonholed as generic jamband fodder and having doors closed because of the preconceived notions that come with being part of this scene. In speaking with Josh Clark about the album, he really opens up about the frustrations the band faces in dealing with, as he calls it, the “death label” that is the jamband. Perhaps most ironic though is that the album is radio friendly, song-oriented and without question the band’s best studio effort yet, by far.
Hidden Track: I didn’t see too much written about the new album yet. Would you mind just starting with the basic background on the process in terms of where you recorded, who produced it, and over what time-frame?
Josh Clark: It started with the making of our last record, Looking West, which was over a year ago. We recorded it in Oakland where a couple of our friends run Coyote Hearing Studios. It’s actually Cochrane’s studio, our latest addition to the band on drums. He’s part owner. Also, Jeremy Black the drummer for Apollo Sunshine, who ended up producing Radio Tragedy! is part owner.
We never really have a plan when we go into the studio. We have songs, lots of them! In fact, we laid down more songs than we can fit on one record. We basically made a double album. So a lot of the songs off Radio Tragedy! were first conjured in those Looking West sessions. Those are the newer songs, the stuff people hadn’t really heard yet. We ended up selecting the stuff that had been part of the repertoire for years for Looking West and saving the new stuff, because we wanted to focus and really push the Radio Tragedy! record. So, a few songs on this record are from those sessions, some songs we came up with later in the process that are way brand new, and some we kind of rerecorded.
We actually worked on this record longer than we’ve ever worked on any record before, because we really wanted to make it something special. It wasn’t a case of “we need to get this out by this date” or a case of money being involved, it was really our record. So, we took our time with it to make the record we wanted to make. In the past, there has always been something that has kind of inhibited that, whether it’s trying to get something out because you’re you’re “hot right now” or whatever, but we really had the opportunity to make a great piece of art. Every single person had to be satisfied with this. The other records were some sort of compromise, you know, “Okay, whatever, we have to get this out.” So, there are elements on the other ones that are hard to listen to. This one, I love this record. I’m super proud of it. We’re all really proud of it.
“When we came up in the jamband scene, it was some of the most amazing, dynamic musicians I’d ever heard. It’s too bad it’s become this suffocating blanket term, because if you think back to ’97 or ’98, there was no Bonnaroo or cool hybrid festival, it was all jambands and it was thriving. Everything grew out of that, yet for some reason now, if you’re a jamband, you’re the kid picking your boogers and eating them on the playground.” – Josh Clark
READ ON for more of our chat with Josh Clark of Tea Leaf Green…
Umphrey’s McGee @ Red Rocks (July 3) and Boulder Theater (July 4)
Words: Emily Alderman
Photos: Matthew Speck
While Many bands are blessed with the opportunity to perform at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, very few can fill the vast space with sound and compete with the natural beauty around them. On Sunday night, Umphrey’s McGee easily accomplished this challenge with Jefferson Waful manning the light rig as they returned to the gorgeous venue for the second year of Red Rocks and Blue.
[All photos by Matthew Speck]
Opening the first set with a melodic Jazz Odyssey that filled the amphitheater with sounds that tingled auditory senses and lights that sent chills up your spine, the thousands of fans in attendance got a taste of what they were in for. Umphrey’s started off set one with some classic “jammy” tunes, playing songs such as Bridgeless and Professor Wormbog early in the show, but as the evening progressed they showcased some of their new prog-heavy originals – Puppet Strings, No Comment and Deeper. Even though these newer songs definitely have a different feel to them they still continue to showcase the outstanding musical abilities of the members of Umphrey’s McGee, from the soulful belting vocals of Brendan Bayliss to the rock-god shredding of Jake Cinninger, each member had an opportunity to flaunt their talent in mini solo jams sprinkled throughout the set.
Just as everyone began to become restless from what seemed to be a never-ending set break, Umphrey’s returned for set two with one of their newest songs, Nipple Trix. A composition featuring a slow build up, Nipple Trix almost seemed to be a cue from the band to stand up and stretch out those rock fists to get ready for what they had prepared for us…and oh boy did they have a treat for our rock fists. With special guests Curtis Fowlkes and Jennifer Hill from Easy Star All-Stars on horns, Umphrey’s kept the second set moving with their cover of the Peter Gabriel classic Sledgehammer. As the horns echoed throughout the amphitheatre, the crowd shouted the well-known lyrics and pumped their rock fists.
READ ON for more on Umphrey’s Colorado run…
The Chicago-based Company of Thieves keeps their momentum barrel rolling with a new video for Death of Communication, a song that pinpoints both the breakdown of face-to-face communication and the
In his latest book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, a coming-of-age teen memoir set to the music of Duran Duran, Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Madonna, Lita Ford, other 80s staples, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield takes readers through his formative years as a loyal devotee to all things New Wave.
In his acknowledgments, Sheffield mentions in passing, “Cheers to those who who remember it differently – as Paul Westerberg would say, your guess is more or less as bad as mine.” Well, herein lies the reason I had so much fun reading this book – which took all of about three days on vacation last week – I remember these things entirely differently. This is not to say I disagree with the viewpoints, but rather I was too young in the 1980s to really debate the merits or cool or lame, punk or new wave, poseur or not.
In fact, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever even talked in any depth with someone who was really into ’80s music, seeing shows, and actually thinking critically about the genres. It’s relatively simple to stumble upon barstool conversations with hardcore fans of ’70s classic rock with epic sagas of seeing Zeppelin at the Garden, Genesis with Peter Gabriel, the original Wall tour, or infinity Dead shows, but what happened to all the die-hard ’80s music fans? I guess they probably all deny it. Well, Rob Sheffield is one of the few, the proud, the remaining and Talking to Girls about Duran Duran provides an often hilarious look at the ’80s from the perspective of a serious, active fan’s perspective with no shortage of self-deprecating humor.
READ ON for more on Rob Sheffield’s book…
Frustrating, then, is Holland’s newest work, Pint of Blood. So much of the raw building blocks are present for this to be a superb record. Holland’s voice is in fine form, gliding between thoughts and words, melisma intact, bending and caressing notes to forge them into wholly new beings and shapes. But these songs feel emptier and more hollow than Holland’s previous work.
Peter Case takes nothing for granted, no doubt why he keeps so busy with touring (solo and in collaboration with assorted like-minded musicians), his songwriters workshops, recurring reunions with The Plimsouls and since his recuperation period, the researching of his archives; the first fruits of which are The Case Files collection just out in May. He qualifies as a renaissance man.
Chromeo, is announcing a string of 34 new Fall tour dates, aptly titled the ‘Night Falls’ tour, in addition to their many upcoming festival appearances throughout the globe this year.
The Scottish indie band from Glasgow were formed by cousins James and Rab Allan in 2003. The band received critical acclaim for their debut album Glasvegas which was released in September 2008, reaching No. 2 in the UK Album Charts and was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in September 2009. Rab sat down before their gig at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago to discuss the new album Euphoric///Heartbreak\.
