Previously: Review: The Avett Brothers – Barrymore, Madison

Buy: The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You

I first saw Haley Bonar opening for Andrew Bird at the High Noon Saloon in 2006. I was hooked and have since lost count of how many times I’ve played her fabulous album, Lure the Fox. Since then, Madison has been fortunate to have Haley return on many occasions, most recently behind her equally great album, Big Star.

Haley Bonar returns to the High Noon Saloon for a $10 show on Friday, November 20th. Haley was kind enough to share with us 5 of her favorite albums, one of them being her own. I have no problems with artists feeling proud of their own work, and her selection is one we have no problem lending our recommendation to.

Nirvana – Nevermind
I got this record from my cousin when I was all of 12 years old, and remember listening to it on headphones while laying in bed at my grandma’s house. It was one of the best feelings I have ever had about music. It was so loud and naughty and I barely understood it at all. And there was a naked baby fetching a dollar bill under water. It seemed so… wrong. I loved it. When “Something In The Way” came on at the end, I remember thinking it was so strange to end a loud, bizarre record with a song with a cello in it, and then those last haunting notes of Kurt’s voice. I thought it was the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard. I don’t think I slept without listening to Nirvana until I was about 16, when I discovered Low.

Low – Secret Name
I bought it on vinyl when I was 16 and visiting a relative in Duluth, MN, where I eventually moved to go to college. I had heard some of their songs, but never owned any of their records. I chose this one in the store because I liked the pretty flowers on the front. When I listened to it back in my room in South Dakota, I felt like I was the only person in the world who owned it, like it was my secret. I felt alone, but comforted. The first song, “I remember” is so strange and beautiful, especially to a girl who knew little or nothing about “indie rock music”. But then “Starfire” comes on, and you feel like you are riding through a cold night in a car without a roof, the sky opening up above, stars shining bright, driving toward something great and unknown and amazing. “Two Step”, which was one of the first Low songs I had heard, is another song that transports you to another place. When Mimi Parker’s voice comes in, its like a blanket. Their harmonies never cease to amaze me to this day because they are so simple and yet no one can sing quite like they do together.

Joni Mitchell – Blue
My mom used to put this record on when I was little, and Joni’s voice may as well have been an alien it sounded so strange and foreign and fluttery. I only remember how high she could sing, and how I was neither impressed nor annoyed by it, only used to it and the reedy sound of the piano and guitars. I must’ve been about 18 when I purchased it for myself, and it took me a long time to warm up to her style. But once I got there, it was like “where has she been?” Or, “where have I been?” Sure, Joni Mitchell is pretty famous, and regarded as one of the moret important songwriters of the 1960′s and 1970′s, but for some reason, I think she is highly underrated. Is it because she’s female? Is it because a lot of people need ‘warming up’ before they fully comprehend how truly amazing she is at writing, playing, and singing? To this day, nobody sounds like her. Joni Mitchell is royalty. Blue is the people’s record. Her metaphors for the worship of a lover are unlike any I’ve come across- “I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet” or “he’s the warmest chord I ever heard, play that warm chord, play, stay”. Or one of my favorite verses on the record, from “My old man”, “But when he’s gone reeling lonesome blues collide, the bed’s too big, the fryin’ pan’s too wide”. I think I listened to “Carey” on repeat for a month. She’s political, but never preachy, love sick but never desperate, complicated but never over the listener’s head, and always honest.

John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band
Growing up listening and obsessing about the Beatles is a rather common story, and mine is no different. Though I loved the McCartney jams, I usually favored the more brooding songs of John Lennon, and when a friend played this record for me when i was 19, it knocked my socks off upon the first listen. Apparently, this was Lennon’s “therapy” record- there were issues from his childhood that he hadn’t dealt with, along with breaking off from the crazy fame of The Beatles. He rages, swears, lays it all out on the table raw, and manages to pull it off without a completely sour taste in the listener’s, or his own, mouth. Songs like “Look at me”, “Mother” and “my mummy’s dead”, reveal the sad and innocent side of him- just look at that haunting picture of him as a little boy on the back- while songs like “God” (‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me’), “Working Class Hero”, and “Isolation”- (‘I don’t expect you to understand after you’ve caused so much pain, but then again, you’re not to blame, you’re just a human, a victim of the insane’) reveal the dark, at times bitter, bleeding heart. And then you have the song “Hold On”, for Yoko Ono, where a growly and panned voice says “cookie”? I do not, however, like the digitally remastered version that includes the incredibly annoying “Do the Oz” and “Power to the People”. Stick with the original master and you’ve got yourself a solid work of art.

Haley Bonar – Lure the Fox
Not sure if I’m allowed to write myself in here, but oh well. This is one of my proudest moments as a musician. It was recorded at the famed Pachyderm studio in Cannon Falls, MN, a small, semi-industrial town about 50 minutes south of St. Paul. I was under a fair amount of stress before it was recorded, having already recorded it and in Duluth a year or so before, had it mixed, mastered, and decided that I couldn’t live with it the way it was. So I decided to redo it. I had no money, no label, and a woman named Mary Lewis (Mike Lewis of Happy Apple/Andrew Bird fame’s ma) came to one of my shows and said she wanted to make an investment and pay for my record. Things fell into place in their own magical way, and this record was recorded and mixed in one week, on tape, while we camped out in the dilapidated 1970′s Pachyderm Mansion 20 yards from the studio. But it’s not just about the experience. Years later, every 6 months or so, I put this record on my headphones and find new things that I like about it. Not that I don’t feel a certain amount of pride or nostalgia for my other albums, but for some reason this one’s solid mood throughout stands out to me. It’s no pop record, not really folk, or ‘neo folk’, or rock, but just a bit of it all wrapped up into one weird little disc. I hope to release it on vinyl someday.

Previously: 5 Questions with Haley Bonar
Previously: Photos: Haley Bonar + The Dodos – Terrace, Madison

Buy: Haley Bonar – Big Star
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Myspace: Haley Bonar
MP3: Haley Bonar – “Something Great”

By Jon Stone | @jwstone

Over the weekend I saw three shows in Champaign-Urbana. Each show was a good show–great even. But wow, were they different experiences. This disparateness is one of the things that makes thinking and writing about music appealing: parsing through the musical experience looking for clues and connections of their quality with our resulting affinity. My goal here is to review each of these shows but also make a larger argument (that includes some theorizing–sorry: academic alert) about why it is we like the music we do and what makes for large-scale success.

That argument, however, requires some set-up. (Skip down to the reviews if you have no patience for such things. No one will know!). My friend Cory and I see a lot of live music together and we frequently find ourselves in friendly though sometimes heated discussion about the bands we see. One of the things we’ve been kicking around lately is this question of what makes a band appealing on a large-scale. In development is a theory of musical archetypes. These archetypes are broader than genre classifications: As you’ll see below and probably already know, it’s becoming more and more difficult to map genre within popular music–and likely, the easier a band is to classify, the less interesting they are. Again, these archetypes are much bigger, more general “types” and are also, therefore, difficult to name.  For now, I’ll explore two–a pairing– and call one “sing” bands and the other “think” bands (corny, but I’m looking for simple terms that sum up the central tenants of the archetype). It is likely that you love bands that belong to either archetype, which I will now attempt to explain:

“Sing” (or “oral”) bands dominate the music industry. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the genre designation “pop” encompasses most “sing” bands, but surely not without numerous exceptions (and “pop” bleeds over profusely into the “think” bands [and vice-versa], as you will likely see). “Sing” bands are those that we, (duh) sing along to. We feel the music and the melody on our lips. We hum along. We whistle later. We sing in the car. We we walk down the street singing even though we have our earbuds in, and most of all, we SING at the shows. “Sing” bands are great–they actually have it a bit easier than “think” bands. It’s not that the singer is the only thing going on in the band, but those words and vocal melody is, perhaps, the most important element. We connect with the band though that voice and lyric. It’s the first point of contact.

“Think” (or “aural”) bands are a little bit difficult to explain, but you’d know one if you saw/heard one. I’ll argue (and you may disagree) that we primarily experience these bands on an aural (non-speech)/cognitive level and because there isn’t a dominant oral cue to pull us in, the musicians have to get us there in some other way. Some do so in a display of technical skill, others with sonic experimentation, while still others figure some other non-oral ways of connecting with the audience. Whatever the case, these bands are usually best experienced live. Watching them do their thing seems important to the process (you frequently hear the description “I can’t believe they pulled that off live!”), but also, as I experienced with first band I’ll review below, there is something very corporeal to the experience. In other words, our minds and bodies respond.

Ok, on to the show reviews. Sorry to put you through that, but it seemed important to get off my chest for some reason.

Maps & Atlases:

I’m not really a math guy. Maybe that’s why I find the phrase “math rock” off-putting. I read somewhere that Maps & Atlases were math-rockers, and I was like, what, they play their set with TI-89 calculators or something? (ooh, bad joke.) Seriously, though–if math rock were the the term to describe the kind of intricate, syncopated (and wow! fast!) phrases that Maps & Atlases employ in their set, wouldn’t that make Les Claypool the father of math rock?  His imagined response to such a label is enough to again question its validity. And I don’t know that the guys in Maps & Atlases could (or would want to!) corroborate that genealogical shot in the dark.  Math-rock, indeed.

And man, Maps & Atlases are good! The show on Friday night at the Courtyard Cafe in the University of Illinois student student union was the first full set I’ve heard from the band, though  I saw them play as a part of our Pygmalion fest earlier in the year kind of on a whim. It left me wanting more. I think their first song at Pygmalion was the dizzy waltz titled “Ted Zancha” (see below) and I loved that drummer Chris Hainey was playing the glockenspiel and the drums at the same time. He really sets the pace in Maps & Atlases and he has to in a band so percussive. Dave Davison and Erin Elders play their guitars as if they were instruments of rhythm. Their dueling fret-tapping plays out on stage like an intricate dance–joined frequently in a trio by bassist Shiraz Dada.

It was during their Friday set that part of that above theory started to be formulated. Davison wasn’t knocking me out with his live vocals–which are unique to be sure, but get a bit buried in the other amazing stuff going on during the live set. But they got me dancing and thinking and counting (damn! math!–but seriously, I’ve never heard so many syncopated triplets [or whatever they were] inside an up-tempo, 4/4 measure). These guys have something really special going on and you can hear it on their latest EP You Me and the Mountain and you should, but you MUST see these guys to really understand. Take a little peek below to see what I mean, care of their MySpace page.

I got a chance to visit with Davison and Dada a bit before their set. I wondered about this hammered semi-acoustic, arch-top that Davison uses sometimes. He told me it’s a Harmony “Rocket” and was the first guitar he ever bought–$40 at a pawn shop. It had been his second-string guitar until he decided to take it on tour (rather than the beautiful 50′s era Gibson–his main axe–on a plane). Anyway, Davison knows the guitar tech who does work for fellow-Chicagoan Andrew Bird. “He took it and made it ring,” Davison said– and wow, did it ever.

Buy: Maps & Atlases – You, Me, and the Mountain
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Myspace: Maps & Atlases

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Elsinore:

When I first moved to Champaign a few years ago, I immediately tried to get a feeling for the local music scene. I didn’t know yet how amazing our little college town was at attracting interesting acts, and in Phoenix, AZ where I moved from there only seemed to be two options for live music: the unbearably huge arena shows and the small, under-appreciated local bands at semi-deserted Phoenix and Tempe clubs. I first saw and was impressed by our local band Elsinore at Urbana’s Corn Festival late in the summer of 2007, though they’ve been playing together for over five years now.

It wasn’t, however, until I saw Ryan Groff (lead-singer & songwriter) play a solo show that I started to get excited about his band. For all Elsinore’s musical prowess, it’s Groff’s work as a vocalist that makes the band a standout. And for those of us who fancy ourselves musical, his voice is truly cause for envy: It’s BIG with dynamic range that reaches higher than you think it should into the falscetto stratosphere. But along with the voice, his song-writing is strong and there is some real technical skill in the craft that you can see on display both at Elsinore shows and when performing solo.

I saw Elsinore (which I so hope was inspired by Strange Brew–”I’m taking you to the loony bin, eh.” “Take off, eh! Take me to the brewery!”) on Saturday night back at the Courtyard Cafe. Elsinore is currently on tour warming up material from their as-yet unreleased new album “Yes Yes Yes”.  From the material I’ve heard online and at shows, it’s going to be fantastic. Elsinore works well as an example in the “sing” archetype. You just can’t help it.  Near the end of “Wooden Houses,” for example, Groff starts singing the refrain: “This is how hunger strikes begin.” I promise that you will be hard pressed not to be singing along by the end of the song. Groff frequently introduces the song, as he did Saturday night, as a song about getting married while George W. was president. He may have even dedicated it to those of us who got married in that era. Dedication accepted.

Here’s a great clip of the band singing my song on the streets of Boulder and a link to them playing it in a more traditional setting. Check this band out, folks. They’re not just for mid-westerners. I wish them all the luck I can muster and promise to write again here when the record comes out.

Buy: Elsinore – Nothing For Design
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Myspace: Elsinore

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The Walkmen

After the Elsinore set was over, I wandered over to the beautiful Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Krannert hosted the incredible guitar festival Ellnora a few months ago where we were graced with the talent of (to name just a few) Jerry Douglas, Bill Frisell, The National and National side-project “The Long Count” (which featured Kim and Kelly Deal and Shara Worden) as well as hosting the headliners from our amazing Pygmalion Festival each year that I’ve lived here (Andrew Bird, Yo La Tengo, and Iron & Wine).

Krannert is piece of art on its own and the Walkmen added to it by playing an incredible (free!) show on Saturday night. They played every song you might have hoped to hear and tried out several new ones (see the set list below). I’d never seen them before and I was so impressed by their focus, their musicianship, their unique style, and Hamilton Leithauser’s voice. Wow. The Walkmen have that it that is easy to hear but so difficult to write about. And they have received praise and success relative to that it. This actually becomes the most important part of my argument that I started above: this “it” is created by just the right mixture of the above sing/think archetypes. The Walkmen do this. Their set had me rapt: vintage instruments, mid-set instrument switching, one guitarist that sounded like three, impossibly fast, intense drumming, songs that I have had in my head ever since. It was all there. Radiohead and Wilco are the best examples I can think of in our modern music sphere. But think any respected band where there is a fairly wide-spread consensus on their quality. These are the bands that make us sing and make us think. They change and mutate the boundaries of our tastes. They make us want to research and explore their influences. They become our favorites.

Granted, some folks will disagree. And others have tastes that hard-line on either side and just can’t see what the big deal is about bands that fall outside of their particular leanings. To be clear, also, all of the bands I have discussed above have a mix of attributes from either archetype. There were fans SINGING along at the Maps & Atlases show and if you’ve seen Groff operate a loop pedal or analyzed the complexities of his vocal melodies you’ll realize how smart his music is. But sometimes bands just play their one note and that’s it and they seem happy to do so. For me, that’s just not enough.

The Walkmen’s set:

On the Water / In the New Year / new song /Canadian Girl / Four Provinces /What’s in it For Me / Thinking of a Dream I Had / Postcards From Tiny Island / new song / The Rat / new song / Donde Esta la Playa / All Hands and the Cook / Little House of Savages

Buy: The Walkmen – You & Me

We’ve teamed up with MSOE and 91.7 WMSE to bring The Hood Internet to Milwaukee for a Saturday night get down next month. The new masters of the mash-up mix-tape play The Todd Wehr Auditorium on Saturday, December 5th. Tickets are free for students of MSOE, $5 for anyone with a student ID, and $10 for everyone else. Please note, there are only 100 tickets available for the general public, so get them now before they’re gone.

If you have not downloaded their Mixtape Volume 4, do so now. It’s free.

Buy Tickets: The Hood Internet | Todd Wehr Auditorium, Milwaukee
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Download: The Hood Internet :: Mixtape Volume 4

Califone will open for Wilco at Overture Hall in Madison on Saturday, February 20th. The show is already sold out, but this announcement should certainly be a pleasant addition to ticket holders, ourselves included.

Myspace: Califone
MP3: Califone – “Funeral Singers”

+Bookmark our Wisconsin and Chicago shows pages for all your concert announcements+

Rogue Wave will release their 4th studio album, Permalight, on March 2, 2010 on Brushfire Records. The album was recorded at Sweet Tea Studios and produced by Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello). The good news continues with the tour dates announced below, including dates in Madison and Chicago.

ROGUE WAVE TOUR DATES:

Mar 1 Boston, MA Paradise Rock Club
Mar 2 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
Mar 3 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom
Mar 4 Philadelphia, PA First Unitarian Church Sanctuary
Mar 5 Washington, DC 9:30 Club
Mar 6 Carrboro, NC Cat’s Cradle
Mar 8 Atlanta, GA The Loft
Mar 9 Nashville, TN Mercy Lounge
Mar 10 Birmingham, AL Bottletree
Mar 13 Orlando, FL The Social
Mar 15 New Orleans, LA One Eyed Jacks
Mar 16 Houston, TX Warehouse Live
Mar 17 Dallas, TX The Loft
Apr 7 Santa Cruz, CA Rio Theatre
Apr 9 Portland, OR Wonder Ballroom
Apr 10 Seattle, WA Neumo’s
Apr 13 Boulder, CO Fox Theatre
Apr 14 Lawrence, KS The Bottleneck
Apr 15 Minneapolis, MN Fine Line Café
Apr 16 Madison, WI High Noon Saloon
Apr 17 Chicago, IL Lincoln Hall
Apr 20 Columbia, MO Mojo’s
Apr 21 Tulsa OK Bobs at Cain’s
Apr 23 Albuquerque, NM Launchpad
Apr 24 Tucson, AZ Club Congress
Apr 27 Solana Beach, CA Belly Up
Apr 29 Los Angeles, CA El Rey Theatre
Apr 30 San Francisco, CA Fillmore

Buy: Rogue Wave
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Myspace: Rogue Wave