The promoters of the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park on July 18-20 have announced the "second third" of the acts for the fourth installment of the summer music celebration.
The new acts include Dinosaur Jr., Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, Ghostface & Raekwon, the Apples in Stereo, Jay Reatard, Ruby Suns, Dirty Projectors, Cut Copy, A Hawk and A Hacksaw, F--- Buttons, King Khan & the Shrines and Occidental Brothers Dance Band International.
In addition, legendary art-punks Mission of Burma will perform all of their album "Vs." as part of the Friday night concert co-sponsored by All Tomorrow's Parties as part of their "Don't Look Back" series, joining the previously announced Public Enemy playing "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back."
Other previously announced acts are Animal Collective, Spiritualized, !!!, M. Ward, Boris, Vampire Weekend, Dizzee Rascal, No Age, Atlas Sound, Fleet Foxes, Extra Golden and El Guincho.
Tickets reportedly have been selling quicjly via www.pitchforkmusicfestival.com at a cost of $30 per day, with a limited number of two-day passes for $50 and three-day passes for $65.
First published in 1980 and subtitled “Look, Muffy, a book for us,” Lisa Birnbach’s satirical overview of old-school, deep-pockets, upperclass WASP society was packaged as a straight-faced “reference guide” full of tips on how to dress (heavy on the golfer’s pants, pastel Lacoste polo shirts and monogrammed sweaters), where to study (Ivy League colleges the only choice, of course) and how to indulge in such typical demerit-worthy bad behavior as smoking and drinking (complete with “20 Verbal Expressions for Vomiting”). Noticeably short, however, were any picks for the perfect preppy music.
If only Vampire Weekend had existed when Birnbach was compiling her classic comedic tome: The New York quartet’s recently released, much-hyped debut album would have been the perfect CD to package between its garish plaid covers.
Vampire Weekend came together in early 2006 when guitarist-vocalist Ezra Koenig linked up with bassist Chris Tomson, keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and bassist Chris Baio. (The band is now sometimes joined by additional guitarist John Atkinson.) All of the members are Columbia University graduates, with majors including English literature, music, Russian, film studies, math and economics.
“Some might think it’s a weekend where you sleep all day and stay up all night, but that’s not what we’re going for,” Koenig said when asked about the band’s name during an interview with The Blue and White, Columbia’s undergrad magazine. “Me and my friends from home made a movie after summer vacation with a plot that someone’s country is being taken over by vampires. [The character] Walcott has to go to Cape Cod to tell the mayor that vampires are coming.”
The buzz about Vampire Weekend began to build from its first gigs at university literary societies and frat parties, was fanned by D.I.Y. recordings widely floated on the Net and had become nearly deafening by the time the band played several shows at the CMJ Music Marathon last fall. Propelled by an appearance on the cover of the March issue of Spin (“The Year’s Best New Band… Already!?”), the group was the must-see act at the recent South by Southwest Music Festival. (Anyone shut out of Sunday’s sold-out show at Metro can console themselves with the fact that the band will be back to play the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park July 18-20.)
Having made no secret of my dislike for this band, several of my friends have accused me of class bias. Given that I survived this paper’s tenure under Lord Conrad Black, I have plenty of reasons to be wary of ostentatious displays of wealth, but I’m professional enough to check such biases. Others have suggested that I’m reacting to the hype, but hey, I’ve disliked this group since I first heard it via its MySpace page, and neither the hyperbolic blather nor the musicians’ pedigrees ever stopped me from championing the Stokes.
No, my beefs with Vampire Weekend are mostly musical and lyrical.
Jokingly calling their sound “Upper West Side Soweto,” Vampire Weekend builds a carefully constructed hybrid of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and melodies (Koenig has cited Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Kanda Bongomen, reggaeton and Bachata music from the Dominican Republic as his main influences) and well-mannered indie-rock or orchestral pop a la the Decemberists or Belle & Sebastian.
“The ideal avatar, preppy African with equal parts of fresh and clean,” Koenig said when The Blue and White asked him to describe “the ideal Vampire Weekend.” “Preppiness with West African guitar pop, a perfect fusion of happy world music with Western, New England preppiness.”
By no means are those disparate cultures natural bedmates. The best African and Caribbean pop is a joyful celebration of life issued in defiance of oppressive political forces, poverty and disease, or pretty much the exact opposite of the inspiration for the soul-searching of most preppy artistes. This is not to say that preppies can’t make great art. But Koenig is hardly following in the footsteps of J.D. Salinger, John Updike or John Irving by illuminating the profound emptiness hiding behind the cheerfully privileged facade; he is celebrating the superficialities.
“As a young girl/Louis Vuitton/With your mother/On a sandy lawn,” Koenig sings of an object of his affections in “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” “As a sophomore/With reggaeton/And the linens/You’re sitting on… Can you stay up/To see the dawn/In the colors/Of Bennetton?”
And let’s not even talk about the obsessions with Cape Cod and geeky academic trivia (“Oxford Comma” is a song inspired by the correct use of punctuation, while “Mansard Roof” pays homage to an architectural style famously seen on the Louvre), or the attempts to “keep it real” by contrasting such nerdy references with calculated name drops ranging from worldbeat pioneer Peter Gabriel to foul-mouthed rapper Lil’ Jon.
“Calculated” -- ultimate, that word is at the heart of what bugs me most about Vampire Weekend, and my gripes crystallized at SXSW, where the band members were ubiquitous, walking the streets wearing their Dockers and polo shirts, with white cardigans casually but carefully tied around their necks — in Texas, in the day time, with a temperature of 92 degrees.
Surely sweating a bit is preferable to being caught poorly dressed. “Oh your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts/Absolute horror!” Koenig sings at the end of “One (Blake’s Got a New Face).”
In the end, just as Kiss had its thunder, fire-breathing and makeup, the indie-rock heroes of the moment have their synthesized strings, guitars that sound like African thumb pianos and overarching preppy shtick. And me, I just like to keep my favorite comic books and satires separate from my rock ’n’ roll.
FACTS Vampire Weekend, Yacht
9 p.m. Sunday
Metro, 3730 N. Clark
Sold-out
My second favorite Chicago "brother act" after the Neil Young-loving Braam, the indie-pop quartet Filligar has been kicking around the local scene for several years now, since the group was formed by then-teenage siblings Pete, Teddy and Johnny Mathias and their childhood friend Casey Gibson.
The group issued its second self-released album last year, "The City Tree," and it's a strong showcase for its poetic lyrics, keyboard arpeggios and genteel but winning melodies, which hone to the right side of twee (a la Belle & Sebastian at its best) while avoiding the smart 'n' sensitive preppie shtick of indie-rock heroes of the moment Vampire Weekend, despite the boys' Ivy League pedigrees (all three Mathias brothers attend Dartmouth, while Gibson goes to Hamilton College).
The band doesn't have any local shows on its schedule at the moment — we'll have to wait until school's not in session — but you can check them out at
www.myspace.com/filligar or
www.filligarband.com.
Demo2DeRo is a weekly column reviewing the first-time demo and indie recordings by new Chicago bands. Got a demo you want reviewed? Email Jim.
Reserving the right to change my mind (on R.E.M. or anything else)
Never trust a critic who doesn't on occasion double back on him- or herself. You live with music and your relationship to it changes. That is true of all of us.
Yesterday, an anonymous reader posted the following comment after my review of R.E.M.'s 14th studio album, "Around the Sun":
In 2004 you called "Around the Sun" the band's "best new album since the early 90s." Now it's "dreadfully dull"?
The implied question: How do I square those statements?
The band’s 13th studio effort is not a departure from the bulk of its canon, but that is part of its charm: As its members approach age 50, they have dropped the electronic experiments and the vain attempts to rock out which marred recent releases, focusing instead on what they have always done best: quiet, melodic, heartfelt folk-rock.
The harbinger of this return to its roots was “Final Straw,” the song R.E.M. released for free on the Internet when America invaded Iraq. The tune found Buck trading his Rickenbacker for an acoustic guitar and Stipe singing with more passion and conviction about the state of the world than he has since “Green” in 1988. When the rest of the album arrived a few weeks ago, it was just as vital.
Yes, Berry is still sorely missed, and Mills is oddly absent in providing his signature keyboard colorings and harmonic counterpoint vocals. But songs such as “Leaving New York,” “The Worst Joke Ever,” “Aftermath,” “High Speed Train” and “Electron Blue” are better than anything that R.E.M. has recorded in more than a decade. And while it certainly isn’t the creative force that it once was, it’s good to have some semblance of that group back again.
Now, I do indeed maintain that "Around the Sun" is dreadfully dull. So what happened?
Critics aren't really any different than fans -- that's why we became critics, because of our passion for music -- and I have been an R.E.M. fan since 1981. I very much want any new recording from the band to match the brilliance of the music it released from '81 through "Automatic for the People" in 1992. Very little of it has, though at first it has often seemed to.
As a critic, you receive an album advance a week or two before its release (at best; other times, you get it the day before). You listen as many times as possible, and then you present your emotional reaction in the intellectual form of a written review. (Some people would say there's very little intellect involved with some critics, but you know what I mean, I hope.)
After that, like any other fan, you live with that album for two weeks, two months, two years... and sometimes your opinion changes. Sometimes, you realize, "This just isn't holding up." For me, with "Around the Sun," that happened by the time I saw R.E.M. perform its long-awaited theater tour, during its stop at the Auditorium Theatre in 2004.
Now, when I reach for an R.E.M. album from the shelf full of them in my collection, there are half a dozen or more that I turn to first -- "Murmur," "Automatic," "Reckoning," "Document," "Green," "Lifes Rich Pageant," "Out of Time," even "Dead Letter Office" and a couple of sweet live recordings I've amassed through the years -- before even considering the likes of "Around the Sun," "Monster" or "Up." And I realize I'd be happy if I never heard those later discs again. Like new Rolling Stones albums, they now strike me as mere product issued to get the fans excited about the new tour, heavily hyped at the time, and initially well-received by fans eager for the band to reclaim its past peaks.
Anyway, this time, I've been listening to "Accelerate" pretty much non-stop since I returned from seeing the band at SXSW. I didn't want to be snookered again. Before this new disc, "Around the Sun" was the best album the band had released since "Automatic," but that was never saying very much. Now, "Accelerate" has that honor, and this one I may even play again after the current tour. But to be sure, it still is not the equal of "Automatic" or any of the albums that preceded it.
News came yesterday that tickets go on sale for R.E.M.'s Chicago show at the United Center on June 6 at 10 a.m. on April 5 through Ticketmaster (with the usual egregious service fees tacked on) or at the box office (where you can avoid the fees); prices are $85, $65 and $37.50. Maybe the band will get it together to deliver better in concert than it did when I saw it a few weeks ago.
Album review: R.E.M., “Accelerate” (Warner Bros.) [3 STARS]
This hasn’t been an easy decade for fans of R.E.M. The favorite sons of Athens, Ga., haven’t made a beginning-to-end great album since “Automatic for the People” in 1992. Even guitarist Peter Buck now admits the band has been on a “downward slide.”
Mind you, that hasn’t stopped the musicians, their long-time record label or their tireless boosters from hailing every new release as the one that recaptures former glories or “the record where R.E.M. rocks again.” And so goes the corporate line on “Accelerate,” the band’s 14th studio album, which arrives in stores on Tuesday.
We’ve heard this before -- with “Monster” (1994), with “Up” (1998) and even with the dreadfully dull “Around the Sun” four years ago. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t entirely true now. But “Accelerate” is at least the band’s most consistent and focused effort in 16 years, and with 11 songs breezing by in a little more than half an hour, it also has the healthiest pulse.
It’s only fair to compare R.E.M. to U2, the other guitar-driven, politically active and wonderfully rousing quartet that bridged the gap between the indie-rock ’80s and the alternative explosion of the ’90s, and the other peer band that made the leap from the college circuit to the arena -- though U2 were always better suited to the latter.
With a producer recommended by Bono --Jacknife Lee, whose previous credits include Snow Patrol and Bloc Party -- “Accelerate” was largely recorded in Dublin, home base for you-guessed-it, and Mr. Hewson and his mates apparently cheered their American cousins’ progress. If we ride this riff to its logical conclusion, “Accelerate” is supposed to be R.E.M.’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” But if you’re a fan of both bands at their best, that isn’t a compliment.
Yes, singer Michael Stipe (48), bassist/multi-instrumentalist Mike Mills (49) and Buck (51) are cheerfully hearkening back to the more rollicking sounds of their youth, circa, say, “Reckoning” (1984) or “Green” (1988). In case anyone misses the “reclaiming our history” angle, Stipe even sprinkles references to earlier lyrics and song titles through the new “Sing for the Submarine.” (“It’s for you electron blue… Lift up your voice, feel gravity’s pull.”) But in reaching back, the band is only coming up with generic echoes of its finest work. Something important is missing.
The harder-rocking moments of “Accelerate” went down pretty well when R.E.M. performed at South by Southwest a few weeks ago. The rollicking “Living Well’s the Best Revenge” and “Mansized Wreath,” the ode to teenage geekdom and first single “Supernatural Superserious” and the angry, vaguely political barn-burners “Mr. Richards” and “Horse to Water” were appealing enough as they sped by -- nothing new, but as worthy as any of the outtakes compiled on an odds ’n’ sods collection such as “Dead Letter Office.” But then, midway through the set, the band rolled into “Fall on Me,” and the shortcomings of its new material became apparent.
A tune from “Lifes Rich Pageant” (1986) about acid rain in particular and oppression in general, “Fall on Me” has an engaging ambiguity and a gripping emotional heft that the new tracks lack. And just as sorely missed are Bill Berry’s distinctive tom-heavy drum patterns and the layered harmonies and counter-melodies that he and Mills once added to the mix, and which were always as important as Stipe’s lead vocals.
Just think of how great that “All you sad and lost apostles/Hum my name and flare their nostrils” line from “Living Well’s the Best Revenge” would have sounded with the old trio vocals instead of the now-prominent Stipe lead and buried Mills backing. It surely is no exaggeration to say that Berry’s departure was an even greater blow to R.E.M. than the deaths of Keith Moon and John Bonham were to the Who and Led Zeppelin; the latter were merely phenomenal drummers, while Berry was that as well as an astounding singer and songwriter.
No, I don’t expect R.E.M. to live in the past, even when that past was as extraordinary as the 11-year run from “Chronic Town” to “Automatic for the People.” Asked by Pitchfork whether “Accelerate” was a conscious return to “classic R.E.M.,” Buck reportedly cringed and replied, “You try to avoid repetition. I could probably rewrite ‘Murmur’ every day, and that would be a little less than interesting.”
Sorry, Peter, but I don’t buy it. When fans say they long for a return to the R.E.M. of old, they’re missing the magical band camaraderie and the mysterious but undeniable poignancy of the old songs, not the particular chord patterns, jangling guitars or mumbled vocals. If R.E.M. really could write another “Murmur” or “Automatic for the People” whenever it wanted, I wish for once it would.
For music lovers, the key scene in the recent animated film “Persepolis” comes when the young heroine Marjane risks the wrath of the new regime of Islamic radicals in order to buy a black-market Iron Maiden cassette on the streets of Teheran. She hears those heavy-metal sounds as nothing less than the embodiment of freedom, life and truth.
Persian-American singer Haale Gafori had a similar experience while visiting Iran in 2003. “I was hanging out with my cousin, and everyone was riding around with Nirvana playing in their car, or Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.,” she says. “They can’t buy it in stores, but they’re burning it for each other, and it just comes down to human beings waking up and trying to have a nice day, playing some music and getting to work or whatever.”
There is an argument to be made that great music remains the most potent diplomatic tool capable of uniting the West and the Middle East. It is one that Gafori -- who performs under her first name, pronounced like “halle-lujah”) -- certainly believes, though she didn’t start her career with the global merger of sounds heard on “No Ceiling,” her recent debut album.
“I was born here in New York, and I heard all kinds of music growing up. I was definitely more interested in the Western mainstream or alternative rock, and I only became interested in the Persian music much later, although it had been in the background like wallpaper for most of my life.
“Initially, I was just singing songs in English, and I had a straight-up rock band,” Haale continues. “But a few months before 9/11, I was in the pine forests of France, running around with a musician/builder and his wife, who was a poet. There were instruments all over the house, and on the very last night we were there, I saw a dotar [an Iranian stringed instrument] hanging on the wall, which is related to the setar, which I play on the album. I’d been there for 10 nights and hadn’t seen it, but on the 11th night I saw it, pulled it down from the wall, started playing it and said, ‘I’m going to go back to New York and get a setar and start singing in Persian!’
“It was something I always wanted to do, but I thought I would do it maybe when I was 50,” the 28-year-old artist concludes. “It felt like something that needed that kind of experience behind it. But what I found was that once I started singing the songs I had heard through my childhood, it sort of came naturally, and the next step was just to try and weave the two worlds together.”
To that end, Haale’s reputation as an extraordinarily powerful vocalist had been building even before “No Ceiling” or the pair of strong EPs she released in 2007: She had already recorded with Sean Lennon on “Before the Skies” and performed at festivals such as South by Southwest, Bonnaroo and France’s Mimi Festival. But the new disc -- produced by percussionist Matt Kilmer and featuring several songs co-written with Dougie Bowne (Cibo Matto, Chris Whitley) -- represents the marriage of modern psychedelic rock and ancient Middle Eastern drones that had captivated her since she first heard the Beatles’ “Revolver.”
“When I was a kid listening to the Beatles, the song that popped out for me was ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ It was my favorite song, and I had no idea at that time why it was so droney or that it was one of their most Eastern-based songs -- it was just something I gravitated towards. There’s an element of hypnosis that happens with certain types of music that we call psychedelic, and for people like me, it’s something to push you into a space of letting go. It pushes me further, whether it’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the Velvet Underground.”
The timeless appeal of the drone is helping Haale connect to a lot of diverse audiences, from jam band festivals to techno raves to rock clubs, and she hasn’t experienced any hostility anywhere because of her heritage. “We were in Hot Springs, AK, playing the Valley of the Vapors festival, and it was amazing, it was such a warm response. I think part of it is there are so many rock bands out there with drums, electric bass and electric guitar singing in English that people like hearing a new spin on that, with a different language, different vocal techniques, different drumming. People get excited about the sonic quality of it, and that lets them feel what’s in there emotionally.”
The emotions expressed in Haale’s songs are as warm and inviting as the sounds, and part of her appeal is that she sounds like a cross between a hippie and a mystical poet when describing them.
“For ‘A Town on the Sea,’ the last song on the album, we were out doing a festival -- our European debut at the Mimi Festival last year in July on an island off the coast of Marseilles -- and it was so incredible being on this island, so breathtakingly beautiful, that we all just jumped in the water after soundcheck. And then I got back to the mainland, to Marseilles, and there was an old man sleeping under a sign, and just that little image started the song.
“It’s kind of a somewhat elusive song lyrically, but that image of that homeless man sleeping there, and us being in this state of utter bliss and relaxation -- how do you put these two realities together? He was sleeping next to a port full of yachts. The person who experiences these things, how do we process it? The world is so intense and such a big collage.
“I sing in Persian at the end of that song, and that part I didn’t fully translate for the lyrics in the booklet, because sometimes Persian poetry, which is so beautiful in the language, can sound a little self-help-y when you translate it. I just translated it quickly as ‘love, evolve,’ but the actual Persian translation of the end of ‘A Town on the Sea’ is, ‘Traveler, there are so many paths you can take/The path of transformation, the path of love, is your best bet.’
“It was just a kind of playful experience, but it was catalyzed by that one moment.”
FACTS
Haale, Lamajamal, DJ Warp
9 p.m. Saturday
Kinetic Playground, 1113 W. Lawrence
Tickets $12 in advance, $15 at the door
(773) 769-LIVE
Album review: The Raconteurs, “Consolers of the Lonely” (Warner Bros.) [1.5 STARS]
The Raconteurs made their 2006 debut with “Broken Boy Soldiers,” a delightful burst of power-pop enthusiasm that found Jack White showcasing his range as a songsmith by partnering with fellow singer and songwriter Brendan Benson to find a much more expansive and challenging setting for his talents than the now well-defined blues-rock minimalism of the White Stripes. The problem with the follow-up is that White was so eager to go in the opposite direction that the Raconteur’s second album topples under the weight of its own maximalist bombast and hollow filigree.
Yes, with “Consolers of the Lonely” -- rush-released in all formats on Tuesday to prevent leaks (though leak it did) -- the Raconteurs have made the sort of art-rock record that gave art-rock a bad name, heavy with pretentiously tinkling grand pianos, overwrought guitar solos, those mariachi horns that White loves so much (“The Switch and the Spur”), sawing fiddles that give way to rampaging Moogs (“Old Enough”) and (egads!) an absolutely wretched orchestral homage to Queen at its very worst (“Many Shades of Black”).
Echoing the arguments self-indulgent art-rockers such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer made for flawed epics like “Tales from Topographic Oceans” and “Works, Volume 1” back in the day, the Raconteurs issued a press release stating that they “prefer that fans buy the album as a whole instead of breaking up the tracks” (’cause genius just can’t be carved into three-minute blasts for your iPod, doncha know). The irony of here is that “Consolers of the Lonely” is one of the least consistent album-length rides from a major band in recent memory, and the few good moments -- including the more typically effervescent single “Salute Your Solution” or the bouncy “Attention” -- are best appreciated via exactly that sort of cherry-picking.
Yeah, there's still snow on the ground. But the regular-price Lollapalooza tickets go onsale at 10 a.m. Tuesday via the concert's Web site, and prior to the full lineup being announced on April 7.
Rumored headliners include Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Wilco and one other act said to be of the same caliber — though, as always, Texas promoters C3 Presents refuse to confirm or deny that list or any other act before their official announcement. (One thing's for sure: This rumor is probably unfounded. We hope.)
For now, three-day passes will be available at the "early-bird" price of $175 per ticket. The concert takes place in Grant Park on Aug. 1-3.
No one will ever be able to accuse 30-year-old singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Stolie — raised in suburban Deerfield as Rebecca Stoelinga — of being unduly narrow-minded when it comes to the musical styles she embraces. On her third D.I.Y. release, "Between the Fake and Real," she flits from coffeehouse jazz ("Humpty Dumpty") to ill-advised rap ("Tendency") to alt-country ("Long, Long Way"), and the leaps can sometimes be jarring.
But when she focuses her prodigious talents (she played all of the guitar, piano and bass on the new disc, programming everything else with her computer) on endearingly skewed pop songs that keep the spotlight on her wispy vocals and literary eye for lyrical details, it's hard to deny that she's the real stuff.
"We spent the night / In the back of the Target parking lot / And you kept me warm / In the back seat 'til the sun came up," Stolie sings in "15 Below." "Before long you wanted to go / It was nearly 15 below / And your car was completely covered in snow / I said, 'That's the way it is in Chicago.' "
Stolie celebrates the release of her new disc at 10 p.m. Saturday at the Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western. Visit her on the Web at
www.myspace.com/stolie or
www.stolie.com.
Demo2DeRo is a weekly column reviewing the first-time demo and indie recordings by new Chicago bands. Got a demo you want reviewed? Email Jim.
