The Stumps - That with the greatest mass (Will be indicated) (7.90 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)There is, however, no guarantee whatsoever that we will sound anything like that tonight.
Over on the Wellingtonista I also pimped the very excellent Garbage and the Flowers' show tomorrow night at Happy.
Also The Stumps are playing at Happy with the Windups and others on Saturday night.
Nina Nastasia's rare gift of a voice is an intimate, winged presence that is able to either freeze or melt your heart, that can powerfully soar and twist, or brush ultra-gently against you, suddenly summoning goose bumps. Mojo commented on its ability to "suck the air out of the room". Picking over themes of love, longing and loss, childhood, dreams and human dramas, her beautifully concise, hook-laden songwriting and the spare arrangements of her band have a certain gritty, rustic charm and intensity. Simultaneously tough and fragile, her songs crackle and smoulder with an intimate emotional honesty and a dark undertow.
Just how beautiful? Remarkably beautiful, though it's far from a smooth train ride. Backed by a skilled cast of musicians who take on the standard rock band instrumentation plus. Nina Nastasia spins her lazy, elegantly adorned tales with a voice that effortlessly slips into your ears. Lines like "I want you...I want you...I want to strike you" fall from her mouth as if she doesn't want to wake the slumbering partner lying next to her, conflicted between lust and dread. This record flows so easily that it sounds as if it made itself. Engineer Steve Albini should be commended. Intimate, delicate, and laced with greatness, one of those records that only takes one listen to be justly evaluated as special and timeless. The pain is sweet.
It's not often you get to use the word "cat" about a fellow human, but then it's not every day you come across someone like Pop Levi. And Pop Levi is one strange cat.
Born in London, with musical roots in Liverpool, a stint playing with Ladytron and a home in Los Angeles, Pop Levi likes to describe what's good about pop music as "astral". His debut album, The Return To Form Black Magick Party, is, fittingly, worthy of the term. Although the most obvious precursor of his sound might be Mark Bolan, listen carefully and you'll hear touches of everyone from Jack White, Prince and Hendrix to Dylan, Lennon and Beefheart in there. But rather than being any kind of eyebrow-raised pastiche, this is what Pop describes as "channelling" - an album of such complete conviction, flair and energy (plus a lorryload of hooks) that it is utterly irresistible, a stack heel pushed right down on the accelerator.
Few live acts make me drop my beer. When the King Brothers played Auckland a couple of years ago they did just that and left a trail of blind worshippers in their wake, setting rock'n'roll music and anything else in their path on fire.This incredible live act make notorious leather-stovepipe nutjob rockers Guitar Wolf seem like Scots sadcore drips Belle and Sebastian. They take the blues into primal scream territory, and in the live setting they gleefully pound your face in the resultant flaming gloop.
Richard Buckner is the true 'American Wanderer'. The American landscape is the backdrop he moves against (literally as well as figuratively; he's been traveling the North American continent for two decades now) and his relationship to it is shifting and ambiguous, a complicated state of existing within and without a country that is impossible to escape from unscathed. He's worked alongside and recorded with Calexico, Giant Sand, Neko Case among many others, and he's been described by Howe Gelb as having "one of the finest voices on the planet".
Edith Frost walks a fine line, musically speaking, between sanity and utter madness. Since the nineties she's been taking the conventions of introspected folk and alt.country and cramming it with such kitsch oddities and childlike arrangements as occur to her along the way. Her voice is the dusty, low pitched croon you might expect of an old-time country heartbreaker, but this is a woman who also digs on Blondie and has no qualms about forcing the glaring city lights of New Wave onto the quiet country and folk roads that underpin her music. Edith featured on the Drag City super session, alongside Bill Callahan, Brendan Murphy, Rian Murphy and Jim O'Rourke.
Oh man, this is going to be so fckn sweet. I love this band. If you're not familir with their work, I have in the past ad with some success described them as Cream meets Fushitsusha; that seems to do the trick. Download Punk describes them as "dark and damaged acid rock served in a crude and blown out speedball of Blue Cheer, High Rise, James Williamson, and a shit-faced-drunk Brian Eno-era Roxy Music" and promises "methamphetamine and Schnapps-drenched lullabies takin' it straight into a sonic shit storm, shifting from 4/4 power-rock to imploding free-form"."" Ethan Miller and Ben Flashman formed Comets on Fire (wiki) just prior to the turn of the century in the drug-infested hippie town of Santa Cruz, California. Their original intent was to create a rock group free of commercial pretensions or genre trend; one that simply dealt in pure bombast, attack, overwhelming distortion and chaos, and yet possessing a shameless love for anthemic choruses, shattering hooks and riffs, and the smoke and magic of yesteryears' rock and roll iconoclasts. They now number five members, and live and work in San Francisco and Oakland, but have retained their original directive -- harnessing the most crucial elements of freeform classic rock, AM gold, and the never-ending, occasionally psychotropic possibilities of their combined instrumentation. ""
""Jon Auer is co-founder of one of the most critically-acclaimed power-pop bands, The Posies, and has also spent a good deal of time in the legendary Big Star with the granddaddy of all 'em power-popsters, Alex Chilton. He also finds time to be the self-confessed number one solo sadcore artist in the world.
With his exceptional songwriting, eminently-hummable melodies, and unique musical vision, he takes listeners to sonic and emotional territories far beyond the expected parameters of the pop genre.""
Global itinerant, national treasure and one-man-band extrordanaire Pumice is in town this weekend. Fresh from an extended tour of the US, he is playing two shows this weekend. Pumice (aka Stefan Neville) has been involved with the local underground avant-music scene for many, many years now. He has recently released a series of acclaimed albums such as "White" (on Stabbies), "Raft", and "YeahNahVienna" (on US labels Last Visible Dog and Soft Abuse respectively). He has played in Ohm (with Campbell Kneale and James Kirk), Chris Knox's band The Nothing, and is RUMOURED to have played in Thee Ideal Gus (with Clayton "CJA/Armpit" Noone among others). He currently also drums in The Coolies.
