theo|digital

The latest issue of Innocent Words is out today, including my review of Brooklyn-based Anthem In.

Today is also my first official day of classes, and I’ve already mentally moved to writing arcane run-on sentences in academic style. It’s always hard to make the shift. I’ll probably have to come back with the editing pen and cut out all those illegal contractions and pop-culture references. Sigh.

Also: hoola hoops.

THE BQE- A Film By Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

If you know me, you know Over the Rhine is one of my favorite bands.  Not the least because they write like being human depends on rich description and late night adjectives (maybe it does).   Checking e-mail here in the early afternoon felt a little bit less to-do list ish because Linford sent an e-mail that warmed up gmail enough to make me want to share parts of what he wrote:
(the photo of Linford is when they played here in Chicago on 5 Nov 08)

His PS was great:

My favorite disc in December (and maybe for the year!) was Hannah, an unsigned title by The Age of Rockets.  They’re Postal-Service-like, but I think better in more ways than one.  Innocent Words , the online indie music rag, has a new issue posted, so you can check out my review .

So if you Google for reviews on The Submarine’s second album, you don’t even get the one I wrote (maybe if you kept up, but I only looked for five pages). And it’s all because of this Apple ad:
So this is my post where I strut and say that I was way ahead of everyone being all cool—I wrote my review this past summer, giving these super-poppy kids the thumbs up. Hardly shook up the world.  But hey it’s my blog, so I gotta work the cred any chance I get. 

Anyway, here’s what I said then (for Innocent Words):

The Submarines
Honeysuckle Weeks
(Nettwerk Records)

Hip-SoCal-popsters are all over The Submarines, the Weepies-like, boy-girl duo that showed up via (sigh:) Grey’s Anatomy and had done the NPR interview and released an iTunes exclusive cut before most 20-somethings could get an intelligent blog post sketched up in draft.

The sound is Fiest meets Postal Service with a touch more cheese, which is what you’d expect from a love-struck couple that produced their first album by breaking up and simultaneously penning songs about it. Back together, their second effort Honeysuckle Weeks proves that John Dragonetti knows his programming—his beat loops and square-wave tones (beep! boop!) provide the arcade layer and fun, while Blake Hazard (she’s the girl) slips the in the poppy charm. Though both sing, Hazard’s vocals dominate the tracks with cute-smart lyrics about a relationship that went bad for a time but is happily back on course. Occasionally gag-able (Every day I wake up ~I chose love ~ I chose light) , but not infrequently insightful (maybe we’re strong, but maybe, maybe we’re wrong), the pop duo finds the hook buried in every song and charts it with las, ahs, and the occasional underwater glockenspiel.

While I could do without a few of the extra claps, the couple is enigmatic (she’s the great-granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald) and have an electronic whiz-kid thing that’s tightly produced and even Beatles-aware. Toss in a few more socially conscious themes (“You, Me, and the Bourgeois” dogs plastic bottles and sweatshop clothing) and The Submarines dive deep enough for a second play.

It’s rumored that Steve Jobs hand-picks all the Apple songs for their commercials.  I’d like to pick on him for that, but I were in his position, I’m sufficiently self-inflated about my own music taste that I probably would too.  (although on Honeysuckle Weeks, I gotta say track 5—”The Wake Up Song” is even better than “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie”).

Over the Rhine played a private show at North Park University on Wednesday evening, 5 November 2008. They’re one of my favorite bands—an intimate fusion of folk, soul, bluegrass, and jazz set on an Mid-Western landscape.

I still don’t have a good lowlight lens for my digital SLR, so many of these aren’t the greatest shots… but they capture the spirit of Linford, Karin, and their current band (which retained the bass player and insanely good drummer from last year, but added a great slide/electric guitarist). The show, being private, was undersold, and it was a bummer, because most of the audience that did come wasn’t familiar their work. At times, I felt like I was one of only three fans in the whole room, embarrassingly the only one yelling for songs I recognized as they began. I know OtR felt it. At one point, Karin leaned into the mic, smiled, and said “mmm… you guys are so well behaved.” Which, translated from her charm and professionalism meant: “wow, I can’t believe how you’re just sitting there.”

I had that urgent desire to stand up waving my hand like an idiot saying—I’m not with them! Really! I like it! Keep going!

They only played one short encore, which my fellow-fan Tim pointed out, was the shortest he’d ever seen them do.

But regardless, the music was, as usual second to none.

Earlier the day, Linford was invited to speak at the North Park chapel service. I posted some quotes.

Linford Detweiler, one half of the folk-jazz-pop- bluegrass-acoustic duo Over the Rhine, spoke last week at North Park University.  OtR usually comes up on my “top 3″ favorite bands list for a long list of reasons, but the not the least that they project a view of the world that sees doubt as part of faith, winter as warm, and back-roads as essential to human experience.

I’d never seen Linford speak more than a few words (he doesn’t talk a lot at concerts, usually letting his partner Karin Bergquist hold down center stage).  His topic was on faith and art, which he approached mostly by storytelling through parts of his childhood.

Some quotes (not quite verbatim, cause I was sketching them with my thumbs on my Treo keyboard—which can also be thanked for the blurry picture—but pretty accurate).

All good art involves getting caught up in a story that’s bigger than you.

My father grew up in Amish community.  No tv, no radio, no electricity.  He was restless.  The first thing he did that was unusual was sketch faces along the whitewashed barn.  People from the community came by and recognized themselves.

At one point [my father] discovered the reel to reel tape recorder.  He’d take it out to the woods and point that microphone at the swamp, the insect symphony, that extravagant useless beauty that’s all around us.

At breakfast he take these recordings and play them for us as we leaned over our hot cereal.

Linford explained that in the religious tradition he grew up in, instruments were not allowed (with the exception of a harmonica, which he didn’t understand. Was portability a criterion?). The piano, Linford’s home instrument, was considered a sin, and he didn’t know immediately what one was.

The first time I heard a piano:  My mother took me to visit an adopted boy. He was sitting at a small wooden house with pedals like a car…

The first time I heard the trumpet: ” It pierced me.  It was like I was thinking my first thoughts.  And one of them was: I’m out here. That sound is coming from up there. I need to be where the sound is coming from

On advice to young song writers:

“Are there powerful early memories that you have that you need to take care of?”

“Write the song that someone would listen to on the next to last day of their life. Maybe that’s the song you’re called to write.”

Before I recently wrote a review of Kasey Chamber’s newest album Rattlin’ Bones, I didn’t know a lot about her, except of her few more popular songs in the US.  The country singer is a down-home Australian (really) whose pop-country is enough off the mainstream to like her.  I can’t post my review cause it hasn’t been published yet, but I’ve gotta note her video of her 2004 single Pony, which I can’t stop watching.  Chambers bats happy, expressive eyes to be simultaneously five years old and all grown up.  The video makes the song.

There’s something about Kasey here that makes me think “little sister”—which makes me think of my fake little sister Heidi (something about her facial expressions) and my real little sister Erika (who is hardly a country fan, but I think will like this anyway).

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemies eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing:
“Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!”

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt, and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can’t explain
Once you know there was never, never an honest word
That was when I ruled the world
(Ohhh)

It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in.
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People could not believe what I’d become
Revolutionaries Wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

Hear Jerusalem bells are ringings
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
I know Saint Peter will call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world
Oooooh Oooooh Oooooh

What does it mean?

Regional rag Innocent Words Magazine reviews indie music nationwide, with an emphasis on Illinois and Chicago scenes. I’m still enjoying doing some writing for them. Here’s my last.

Butterfly Pinned
Monster in the Machine
(2007 Emotional Syphon)

Funny thing about titles like “New Wave” – the “new” always overstays its welcome. Classed as the backlash to disco, the early-80s-keyboards -plus-reverb-snare genre is fun for lunchtime radio, but otherwise is appropriately semi-retired. Of course, there are always some for whom the wave still rolls. Enter Bowie-inspired Shannon Crawford, the chain-smoking keyboardist-guitarist-painter (really) who’s released a 2007 new album with a new band to go with it –complete with (not so new) synth lead.

Butterfly Pinned is Crawford’s eye-shadowed brainchild, and though it’s band-attributed to Monster in the Machine, Crawford’s accompaniment seems about as permanent as INXS’ lead vocals – recording bassist Doug Ardito and drummer Josh Freese aren’t even touring.

The lead man probably doesn’t mind using replacements – his tracks are soaked in melodramatic vocal flair – whispers, echoes, counterpoints, and falsetto croanings that evoke the show-stealing emotional vibrato of a 1985 Danny Elfman (Oingo Boingo). And here comes the synth! Fat pads and programmed arpeggios barrel us into the (“new”) electronic age of music in luscious detail. “Helicopter” doesn’t make it a minute in before succumbing to a dream sequence of fading vocals and spinning effects under the heady influence of the pitch-blend wheel. And hand-keyed pan flutes (whee!) show up in at least three tracks.

The 80s-is-back-I-Heart-Duran-Duran crowd (check out “Dot on my Soul”) will enjoy Butterfly Pinned as an admittedly skilled revival entry in the New Wave. But those who don’t like it so thick should run sideways to the tenured and original Of Montreal. Unless you’re producing an over-sexed new 80s film. In that case, Shannon Crawford’s got your walkout credits covered.

~ Chris Ridgeway
(more reviews at www.innocentwords.com)