The Moondoggies come to Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee tonight supporting Dawes. We’ve been quite fond of their album, Tidelands, and look forward to seeing them live for the first time. I got in touch with Kevin Murphy who offered four of his favorite sad songs for our continuing exploration into the favorite sad songs from our favorite artists.
Camper Van Beethoven – “Sad Lovers Waltz” (listen)
Camper Van Beethoven has written many songs that hold sentimental significance to me. Any opportunity to turn people on to them I’ll take.
Tom Waits – “Looks Like I’m Up Shit Creek Again” (listen)
It was a tossup between this and “Ponchos Lament, “also from The Early Years Vol. 1. Sad songs are something he does well, and I’m a sucker for them.
The Journeymen – “500 Miles” (listen)
I’m on tour right now so it’s an appropriate song. Not that I don’t enjoy it, but sometimes the mind wanders to home.
Dave Van Ronk – “He Was a Friend of Mine” (listen)
One of a hundred people to play this song; I like his throaty bellow.
It’s already time to start thinking about albums due in 2011. This year flew by, right? Anyway, we’re looking forward to the new offering from Telekinesis called 12 Desperate Straight Lines and scheduled to arrive 2/15 on Merge Records. With thanks to Spin, we’ve got a first listen to “Car Crash” below.
Catch Telekinesis at Schubas in Chicago on Friday, March 4th. No Wisconsin dates though. Bummer.
I was excited to receive a copy of forthcoming White Pines debut album, The Falls yesterday from Yer Bird Records. White Pines is Joseph Scott and you may have seen him in Milwaukee supporting Cotton Jones or at our 5th Anniversary show back in January. We’ve got a download of “Woods” for you below. Enjoy.
As a child of the 1980s, I was heavily influenced by mall culture, from school shopping and playing video games to visiting Santa and searching Topps rak-paks for Jose Canseco and Barry Bonds rookie cards at Thrift Drug or Kay-Bee Toys. In Madison, mall culture is still alive and well, with both malls still standing and relatively stocked with shoppers despite the economy. In other Midwestern cities, though, malls have downsized, closed, or outright demolished. These one-time paeans to commerce and consumerism sprung up in corn fields throughout the 1960s and 70s, as the car culture pushed stores and shoppers to the outskirts of town and the suburbs. By the 1990s and early 2000s, however, dozens closed as their infrastructure and store lineup became dated. This is the environment in which Michigan’s Frontier Ruckus grew up, in the once-thriving Detroit suburbs where fully-employed, well-paid workers from the Big 3 lived, played, and shopped, and whose civic decay inspires a riveting, exciting, and true-to-life brand of folk-rock. What John Cougar Mellencamp was to the rural blight and poverty of the 1980s and Eminem was to Detroit’s urban decay in the 1990s, Frontier Ruckus could be for the suburban decay in the 2000s and beyond. Bright, vivid, and well-written songs about a brand of nostalgia so recent that it usually gets shuffled to the bottom of the deck underneath the idyllic 1950s and the inspiring 1960s, but still holds meaning for those who grew up in its midst.
Wednesday night at the High Noon Saloon, Frontier Ruckus told many stories of this era, focusing on simple pleasures (like the local chain drug store) and abstaining from the anger that is omnipresent in other songs of prosperity’s demise. The sparse stage set-up was a key component to the wonderful sound this band has. David Jones’ banjo and lead singer Matt Milla’s voice/guitar taking up much of the space, but lying in the gaps is the trumpet and singing-saw of Zachary Nichols, adding a dimension reminiscent of Calexico, where the acoustic instruments take center stage but the horns take the sound to the next level. Having seen Horse Feathers at the Memorial Union on Saturday night, Frontier Ruckus was the second band in a week to incorporate the high-and-lonesome hacksaw, treating it much like a pedal or lap steel guitar, providing just enough fill to make an already emotional song even more evocative. The band’s songs serve as a guidebook for their Michigan home, pointing out the seemingly benign sights along I-75 and I-96 (a whole about a dentist’s billboard on I-96, actually) but all having special meaning to the band. The eight-minute “Pontiac, the Nightbrink” is where the band’s true message and talents shine, with not a note or a lyric wasted. At the end of the evening, as the crowd was thinning out, the band cast aside amplification, creating a living room-like warmth in the High Noon, and a connection between this rising Michigan band and their Wisconsin audience whose backgrounds and memories are not that different.
Dead Oceans readies the release of Akron/Family’s new album, S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT on February 8th. You can check out the album art here. The press release indicates in was “written in a cabin built into the side of Mount Meakan, an active volcano in Akan National Park, on the island of Hokkaido, Japan” and “was recorded in an abandoned train station in Detroit.” Most noteworthy is the promise that “this album will transcend the Internet.” Ok, we’re excited.
Check out the above video and the audio “sound fragments” below from the new album below.
