Joking around

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An older, wiser, yet still harmonious A Lion Named Roar have released a new EP, Foreign Land, which they recorded over the past year. The pop-rock quintet celebrate with a show at Headliners on Dec. 7. LEO spoke with singer Chris Jackson and guitarist/singer Tyler Anderson.

Chris Jackson: Our last album came out in, I think, ’09? It was Americana folk-rock. We went in a different direction, trying to figure out what kind of music we really wanted to play … get back to the heart of why we play music.

Tyler Anderson: The cool thing about this EP is that we came together with very specific ideas in mind. We threw everything we could potentially be bad at out the window (laughs).

LEO: Your album Said & Done had a song called “Jazz Kazoo.” Why aren’t there more song titles like that on your new EP?

CJ: (laughs) That song was such a novelty, in our eyes, because we joked about it so much. Come to find out, a lot of people really enjoyed it. People would ask for that song more than any of them.

LEO: Your booking agent is named Keith Richards. How could someone with a name like that ever hope to make it in the music business?

TA: (laughs) I know, right! That is so incredible. When he came at us, we were like, “OK, OK. This is awesome. You are the man!”

LEO: You were called “MTV Buzzworthy.” What does that mean?

CJ: You tell us! (laughs)

TA: We’re really looking forward to being on VH-1’s “Pop-Up Video.”

CJ: We’re joking, but when we heard about “Buzzworthy,” we were like, “That is awesome. That’s really cool that they found it in their hearts to put us up on their ‘Buzzworthy.’” My internal 16-year-old who used to stay up till 2, 3 in the morning to watch music videos … it was an amazing accomplishment, for sure.

Find info, photos, inauthentic colas and more at facebook.com/alionnamedroar.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Matmos' mind games

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Louisville native Drew Daniel and his partner M.C. Schmidt founded experimental electronic duo Matmos in the mid-1990s, and they’ve become known for their high-concept works, like an album of music made from the sounds of surgical procedures.

Matmos released a new EP last month, The Ganzfeld EP. It’s their first release for Chicago’s Louisville-friendly Thrill Jockey label and serves as a teaser for a follow-up full-length album, The Marriage of True Minds, due on Feb. 19. The release of Ganzfeld celebrates the 20th anniversary of both the label and the couple.

Both recordings are based upon the concept of telepathy. Matmos subjected strangers and friends to the ganzfeld (“entire field” in German) experiment, which tests for ESP.

“Our work is almost always described as ‘conceptual,’ and our albums are always described as ‘concept albums,’” Daniel says. “I decided to try to push that logic as far as I possibly could and wanted to create a situation where a concept was somehow causally responsible for actions in the world.”

A telepathy experiment seemed to make sense, so over a four-year period, the duo filmed subjects who were isolated in rooms, lying down on a mattress with their eyes covered and white noise-filled headphones on their ears — “basic sensory deprivation,” Daniel notes cheerfully.

“We would be in another room, either adjacent or beneath them, send a signal out, and attempt to transmit the concept of a Matmos record into their minds,” he continues. “They were encouraged to relax and empty their mind, and just try to describe out loud anything they were seeing or hearing. We would record this, and then turn the transcripts into songs.

“Of course, there’s a tremendous amount of leeway about how you turn it into a piece of music, so, far from being constrained by what they generated, we found it really helpful.”

Though both electronic and experimental music are often seen as overly serious, Daniel — a professor of Shakespeare by day who has written a book-length essay about the British industrial music group Throbbing Gristle — saw the exercise as being “like a great sort of parody of artistic communication and of conceptual creation. It seemed like a nice way to isolate the thought and the mind of artists, and to send up the idea that that is what is creating music.”

Their subjects ranged from a teen to a 70-something, and by nature of their world, included some music people (a Pitchfork contributor, a death metal bassist and more). “That helps in some ways,” Daniel says, “because they already know how to describe something in musical terms. It’s bad, too, because you can feel like, ‘Oh, they’re just feeding me something that they know I want.’ So it’s not authentic, it’s somebody going, ‘Oh, an ostinato.’ Inside-baseball stuff.”

Instead, he hopes it works as “a wonderful return to a lack of control in that distance between what I hope people will get out of it versus the conditions in which they might actually listen to it.”

In an era where people treat music like files to be downloaded, Matmos’ response is to include moments that are raw, spontaneous and unable to ever truly be re-created. A tour planned for next year will incorporate onstage ganzfeld experiments at each stop, as the musicians play along.

Daniel returned to his hometown in September to speak at the memorial service for his late friend and collaborator, Jason Noble. (Noble’s group, Rachel’s, released a split record with Matmos in 2000.)

“Yeah, that was a really powerful day … So many people, I thought, rose to the occasion.” Daniel was glad so many paid tribute to how funny and grounded Noble was without sacrificing the integrity of his memory.

“I was definitely nervous about the risk of pretentious, over-inflated language, because funerals can make us want language to become sublime, to confront our terror about loss. I was really glad that people resisted that and instead kept the focus on Jason as a person. That was an amazing day. A really sad day, too, because the more we were reminded of Jason, the more we were reminded of the person that’s gone.

“It’s hard to talk about, because I get upset. I get angry.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

album review: Scott Staidle

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Scott Staidle
Nuts for the Holidays
SELF-RELEASED

You know those cheesy horror movies from the ’80s that show up on cable when it’s late at night, you can’t sleep, and infomercials are screaming at you but there’s nothing else — not even a “Law & Order” rerun — to watch? You know the ones with an evil Santa? Well, imagine that on top of a “Grand Theft Auto” Christmas edition (Is there one? How could there not be?), and you’ve already got its soundtrack. You’re probably wondering, do I need another Christmas CD? Of course you don’t. There’re 30,000 of them already, mostly horrible. Is this horrible? No. But it sounds like something to ice skate to, and impressive as it is that Staidle performs 10 of the 12 instruments heard here, the end result is as underwhelming as Grandma’s fruitcake on Jan. 2.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

L.A. punks in living color

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‘We Got Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California’ By David Markey & Jordan Schwartz. Bazillion Points Books; 288 pgs., $39.95.

In 1981, David Markey and Jordan Schwartz were teenagers in the right place at the right time. Los Angeles had become ground zero as punk evolved into hardcore, led by Black Flag and dozens of others who, while unknown to the mainstream at the time, would influence two generations of musicians and fans.

The duo began photographing the early Reagan-era scene, taking shots of bands like the Minutemen, the Descendents, Suicidal Tendencies, and Social Distortion. More than 400 of their best fill the book, originally published in their homemade zine “We Got Power!” In 1983, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening (then a little-known L.A. Weekly cartoonist) called the zine “Essential reading … the funniest of the local mags.”

All six issues of the zine are reprinted in the book, which also includes essays from others who were there, including Black Flag’s Henry Rollins, Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks, and SST Records’ Chuck Dukowski.

“The culture of fanzines was interesting — how information spread, and how it was interpreted,” Markey says. “There was no other way to get that information out. What you did with it was entirely up to you.”

It’s funny to look back at Reagan now, he says, after the various Bush eras and after Paul Ryan revealed himself to be a Rage Against the Machine fan. “Reagan seems like a warm, fuzzy memory in retrospect. I think Ronald Reagan really made hardcore happen, nationally. It was sort of a call-to-arms, something that everyone could agree on.”

Putting the book together has put Markey, who turns 49 in a couple of weeks, back in the mindset of himself as a 17-year-old, getting into music and learning about the world. “I’m totally filled with gratitude about getting to witness all of that. It really set me up for the future, in a lot of ways,” he laughs. “At the same time, nothing has ever really matched that. I’m not trying to recreate that — or that I only live in that era, at all. But I know that I’ll probably never get to see that kind of scene again.

“I wasn’t looking 30 years into the future back then,” laughs Markey, now a filmmaker who recently directed a Circle Jerks documentary, “My Career as a Jerk.” “I probably didn’t even anticipate there being a future back then.”

In the summer of 1991, he followed Nirvana and their friends around the festival circuit, capturing the band just before they became international stars. His documentary, “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” has become a music-movie classic. “Witnessing their whole massive overnight explosion, that was a trip, too. That came 10 years after, for me, from ’81 to ’91. I got to witness both things happening, and see just how different the outcome was.”

Before Nirvana, before the Internet, underground bands stayed underground. “If you sold 50,000-100,000 records, you were basically the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, of punk,” Markey notes. The bands seen in “We Got Power!” paved the way for today’s independent bands, sonically and in the way bands on that level are able to tour.

In the early ’80s, zines spread the word about bands too punk for mainstream magazines to have an interest in and helped grow that audience. “Rolling Stone? Forget about it!” he exclaims. “The whole generation that all came out of the ’60s counterculture — by the time the late ’70s and early ’80s came around, that counterculture had totally flipped. That had become the mainstream. It got just as conservative as the Woodstock generation turned into yuppies.”

All that festered for a long decade until Nirvana brought in a new era, followed quickly by Democrat Bill Clinton presiding over a so-called Alternative Nation.

Today, he cites the Russian group Pussy Riot as an heir to punk’s legacy, but asks otherwise, “Where’s the outrage? I don’t think this generation knows where to begin, or even has a clue as to what the hell’s going on.”

Perhaps forgetting about the Arab Spring, he continues, “I think now people are just really self-involved, and there’s no looking out. Everyone’s in front of a touch-screen. There’s this great tool that we have with the Internet — it should be an age of enlightenment. But you realize, there’s never been more corporate control.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Positive thinking

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Tom Boone is “61, and trying to act like a teenager.” He grew up in Louisville (DeSales High, since you’re wondering), lives in Lebanon Junction now, and didn’t start playing publicly until he was 50, which is about as old as he looks today. “Everyone always judges my age wrong,” he laughs. “I love that.”

Boone started playing the Hideaway Saloon six years ago, and he can be seen there every Monday night with his band, the Back Porch Pickers. His new album, Getting Back to the Old Time Ways, includes a theme song, “Hideaway Song.”

“I’m not good with fiction,” he’s learned. “If I write about what I know, what I’ve lived, most of the time it flows pretty good.”

His songs are mostly drawn from his life, though not entirely. “You got to make it a story,” he says. Boone discusses one song, “Ain’t Gonna Let It Bug Me,” inspired by a man he encountered who had a visible anger management problem. “I always tell everybody, the 11th Commandment is ‘Thou shalt not go through life pissed off.’” He didn’t think the guy deserved a song, but it inspired him.

Boone decided to pursue songwriting after listening to his favorites — Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne — for years. A Sam Bush concert inspired him to push past the stage fright he had been experiencing. “He had family there and a lot of friends, and everybody — the audience — was having a good time. That was my turning point. ‘If you’re gonna do this, have fun and forget about it.’”

Boone celebrates with a record release show at the Hideaway on Saturday. He’s been writing new songs for the next album. “This one took about three years, pecking at it a little here, a little there,” in between performing, working during the days and taking care of his mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. “I’m hoping this time it won’t be another three years in the making.”

Look up “Tom Boone and the Back Porch Pickers” on Facebook to learn more.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Wax Fang 2.0: This time it’s personal

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One day recently, Wax Fang’s Scott Carney glanced at a poster for the release show for his band’s most recent album, La La Land. The date was Nov. 17, 2007.

From the start, it was all too easy. Wax Fang’s first gigs in late 2005, before they even had a name, drew big crowds. The buzz spread quickly about the band led by a little-known singer/guitarist who wrote catchy but weird and glorious art-rock songs, supported by the powerhouse drummer who had toured the world with Elliott and the supple bassist who had recently left the popular Cabin.

They toured with My Morning Jacket, who mentioned them in The New York Times. Pavement invited them to play the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in England. They signed with indie label Absolutely Kosher. And then … not much happened.

Between real life situations (jobs, relationships, family issues, band dynamics) and music business situations, Wax Fang’s momentum began to stall.

“I started to feel like my soul and essence was being pulled in all these different directions,” Carney says.

A new EP, Mirror Mirror, was released last month, but beyond fulfilling promotional duties, the EP hasn’t been on Carney’s mind much. “My girlfriend texted me (that) morning, ‘Happy release day!’ and I didn’t know what she meant. I wrote back, ‘What’s release day?’ ‘Your EP, you idiot!’”

The songs were written in 2009 and ’10, mixing and mastering was finished several months ago, and the band is currently mastering their next record. “That project is, like, two projects behind at this point.”

Some of the frustrations he was dealing with at the time came out in the song “Dawn of the Dead of the Night of the Hunter,” which he jokingly calls “a jolly jingle — about zombies!”

The closing number, “In Memory,” was written after being present as his grandmother died, seeing her take her last breath.

Carney is ready now to begin the second phase of what will hopefully be a long life for Wax Fang. Drummer Kevin Ratterman left last year, busy running his successful recording studio, but bassist Jake Heustis remains, and the duo have been working with various drummers as they search for the next permanent member.

“We were literally playing the same set for, like, four years,” Carney notes, as the founding trio struggled to find time to work together. Carney and Heustis have enjoyed the casual nature of having musician friends sit in, and this week’s show will add former Cabin drummer Dave Chale and Jeremy Perry of the Deloreans on guitar and keyboards.

What’s next is the remainder of the “Astronaut” trilogy. The first song — a 17-minute journey into sonic space — was released in 2010. Carney was drawn to the concept by “the challenge of it. Just one simple idea, drawn out to … some giant monstrosity.”

It was also an inventive way to keep the band moving forward when they needed something to be excited about.

“At the time, when we finished part one, it was kind of a joke: ‘Yeah, maybe we’ll write a part two someday!’ The next thing you know, that’s what we were doing.” The story will be completed with two remaining songs added on the upcoming collection that Carney calls “a 40-something-minute concept prog-rock album.”

“Part two is probably the most similar to part one. And its length and scope probably takes it to the next level … if you can imagine that,” he says, sounding giddy at the prospect.

“Part one requires a lot of patience, I think, in places, like when you have a six-minute abstract section right in the middle of your song — where, in part two, there’s more momentum, it just keeps moving.

“Part three — there’s a lot more electronic influence in it. I went in a very different direction with that one … It’s got a lot of synthesizer and drum machines, electro-drum overdub things that are very ’80s, for sure, but it’s still, like, guitar/bass/drums. But it’s poppy, for us, as of late.”

It was also a way to expand the possibilities of what Wax Fang can be, he says, folding elements of other genres into their rock trio format. “Space has no boundaries, so why should I?”

WAX FANG WITH OLD BABY AND ANWAR SADAT
Saturday, Nov. 17
Headliners Music Hall
1386 Lexington Road
headlinerslouisville.com
$10; 9 p.m.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Jerry Douglas takes a vacation

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Jerry Douglas has made a lot of friends after 40 years in the music business. The 56-year-old, called the world’s greatest dobro (resonator guitar) player, has earned 13 Grammys after performing on something near 2,000 recordings, when he’s not at his day job as a pivotal member of Alison Krauss & Union Station.

The Nashville resident released Traveler, his 13th solo album, in June, his first with an outside producer and the first to feature his vocals. He also plays lap steel and slide guitar on it. The album features appearances by Eric Clapton, Dr. John, Keb Mo’, Marc Cohn, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, Del McCoury — and on his cover of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer,” not just Simon himself, but also Mumford & Sons.

“Those guys have been friends of mine for a few years,” he says. “We’d been planning on recording together at some point.” He stayed over in London after a Union Station tour to record with the then-rising band. When he thought it was finished, Douglas played it for Simon. “He wanted to play on it, too! My band opened for him a few years ago, and every night, Paul and I would end the whole show with ‘The Boxer,’” Douglas says. “So it’s sort of a mish-mashed version of his version and Emmylou Harris’ version, I’d say. Because the Mumfords knew it from Emmylou.”

Simon approved but wanted the recording to end the way he’d ended it with Douglas onstage. The recording also appears on the deluxe edition of Mumford & Sons’ hugely popular Babel, released in September.

Douglas says he doesn’t care about how that might affect him financially. “It’s more about friendship than dollars and cents … it’s music.”

He’s seen the occasional windfall before, like when the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack sold millions a decade ago. “Everybody’s ready for something honest, and they certainly are that.”

It’s been “a long time,” he says, since he’s played a solo show in Louisville. (Union Station’s 2002 Live album was recorded at the Louisville Palace.) He used to come back every year for the IBMAs, the bluegrass awards, until they moved to Nashville. “It’s a fickle bunch,” he laments. “Nashville’s actually the perfect place, I think, but I think it’s too expensive for a lot of the folks … it’s country music, and a lot of them just don’t like the big city.”

When LEO spoke with Douglas in October, he was in the Florida panhandle vacationing with his family and celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary before starting his current tour, which brings his quartet to the KCD Theater this weekend. “I’m on the beach — I’m actually in the water!” he said, sounding like a man who’s figured out how to make even a work phone call obligation into something fun.

“I’m on my first and last vacation of the year,” says Douglas. “Oh, man, it’s great, it’s 75 or 80 degrees here now. The water’s warm in the gulf. I’m watching schools of fish go by. It’s nice.”

On his vacation, he’s discovered a band who play Sundays at a seafood joint on the beach. Even off the job, he can’t help but sit in with another band.

“It’s a really great place to retire and start an empire,” he notes.

So, in your mind, retiring also involves a chance to do more work?

“Yeah! I’ll just have a revolving band I can play with — play what I want to.”

Jerry Douglas with Ashleigh Flynn
Saturday, Nov. 17
KCD Theater
4100 Springdale Road
kcd.org/theater
$35-$42; 8 p.m.

Photo by Jim McGuire

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

album review: Karass

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There’s something about the deliberate approach of most instrumental post-rock bands that is reminiscent of U2 guitarist The Edge. As the beginning chords of the opening track slowly begin to reveal themselves, stealthily approaching from some unseen vista far, far away, the clean, stuttering tone becomes engorged on the structure of all the rock music that’s come before it. The riffs become massive as the rest of the band — always a bassist, drummer and either a keyboardist and/or another guitarist — announce themselves to the world, wet as an otter. Those that don’t vary from the format don’t survive, roadkill, while the best — like Karass — turn the formula on its head, transmogrifying from the expected model to an interstellar, post-John Carpenter soundtrack immersion. Also, no Bono, often a bonus.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Punk President

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Anwar El Sadat was born in 1918 and served as the president of Egypt between 1970 and 1981. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in achieving the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, an act that led to his assassination.

Punk rock was developed in the United States, England and Australia in the mid-1970s. Led by notable acts such as the Ramones and the Clash, it is an oft-political form of music created in reaction to mainstream conventions.

The band Anwar Sadat is currently one of the most viscerally thrilling bands in Louisville. After touring last month, they will open for Wax Fang at Headliners on Nov. 17.

Vocalist/bassist Shane Wesley answered LEO’s very important questions.

LEO: What do you tell older relatives your band sounds like?

Shane Wesley: “Punk.” They know what that is, at least. I don’t think any of our relatives are too far removed from popular culture.

LEO: How did the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty influence your decision to form a band?

SW: It didn’t. We seriously just looked at the name, imagined it on a T-shirt, and decided that this was it.

LEO: If cassettes become “cool” again to folks like Pearl Jam and Urban Outfitters, would you still want to release cassettes?

SW: I don’t think whether something is “cool” or not factored into the decision of releasing a cassette. It’s mostly just really cheap to produce, and we needed something to sell on tour since we sold out of 7”s.

LEO: How do you feel about Wax Fang?

SW: Cool dudes who are very good at what they do.

LEO: If death is no vacation, then what is it?

SW: The last great unknown.

Listen to the music at anwarsadat.bandcamp.com.

Photo by Bryan Volz

c. 2012 LEO Weekly