Dub Trio: "Illegal Dub" Video
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Dub Trio: "Casting Out the Nines [Live]"
TThree distinct personalities functioning as one unit, Dub Trio seems capable of making all manner of sounds. The three gentlemen collectively known as Dub Trio bring noises into this world that are unique, decidedly new and fresh. Drawing on music at large, rather than forcing a marriage of two things that were never quite divorced, they bring an eclectic and attractive take on the term "new music." Primarily just drums, bass, and guitar, but the "job description" for each member varies from track to track. Staying away from overtly clich?d genre restrictions, Dub Trio is free to bring you to the dance floor, to tears or at least give you a peek at the three minds at work. The drums function as a section, rather than as one instrument in the hands of Joe Tomino. You will hear this section transform over the course of a record or live show, the pulse never wavering yet morphing into drum machine-esque sounds, then suddenly, to big rock drums assault. The inspired moment to moment decisions acting as a foil to the three way cat and mouse game that the band brings nightly to the stage. The bass is the foundation. Stu Brooks delivers low end like it is a weapon. One moment like a telephone pole swinging towards your gut and the next moment a playful rump shaking pulse locked in with Joe as they let it roll. The bass also changes faces many times in a performance, but never loses the pocket. Amazing that "feel" is measured in milliseconds when Stu is at the controls of a big oceanic sound. The guitar in Dub Trio, played by DP Holmes, always seems to be the device for cueing a response in the listener. Dave makes shapes, colors and devices for emotional control one moment, then is careening down the highway at 120 mph in a rusty Chevy Nova the next. The medium becomes the message when the distortion kicks in. Aggressive, dreamy, liquid and solid. There is a command of the elements in the guitar section. With this second record, New Heavy, Dub Trio shows us a more aggressive side of life. Special guest vocalist Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Ipecac Recordings) lends his voice to "Not Alone," the album?s standout hit. Heavy, moody, melancholy music at its best. This is a record to be enjoyed LOUD!
In the summer of 1998 ? brought together by a slew of disparate-yet-alluring musical reference points ? high school friends Eddie Baranek (vocals/guitar), Mike Trombley (drums), and Mark Leahey (bass/vocals) formed The Sights. The trio began playing around their hometown of Detroit shortly thereafter, around which time Trombley, founding drummer, headed to California for what would come to be a three-year respite from the band and also the impetus for a revolving door of drummers, bassist and keyboard players. Undaunted , The Sights took to the studio and began recording their debut album, Are You Green?, at Jim Diamond?s Ghetto Recorders in Detroit . Originally released in June of 1999, Are You Green? was picked up by L.A.-based Fall of Rome Records and re-released the following year. Never big on rest, The Sights went to work on their sophomore album, Got What We Want (released in 2002). With this, the band?s freakishly precocious ability to blend frenetic garage rock, Motown and 60?s pop into something equal parts classic and catchy got them noticed. Got What We Want was released in the U.K. a year later, garnering them some very nice words from both the British press ("Got What We Want is a revelation - a treasure trove of sparky and wildly immediate songwriting." --NME) and the not-so British press ("At last - a new Detroit-garage band that comes in colors." --Rolling Stone). The Sights hit the road for a year of touring both countries, including a 10-week stint sleeping inside the group?s 1991 Ford Econoline van and stealing bagels for sustenance. In the spring of 2004, The Sights - now including relative newbie Bobby Emmett as organist/bassist and Keith Fox as drummer- caught the ear of ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, who signed them to his own Scratchie Records ( an imprint of New Line Records). And with that, the band headed back to Ghetto Recorders to record their self-titled third LP, The Sights, due out in April 2005. No small feat, the album combines the unobtrusive honesty of The Band with slivers of influence from The Sights? own personal record collections: Ike & Tina, Solomon Burke, Everly Brothers , Bob Seger, Tim Hardin and all manner of raucous songwriting. The end result is an album that?s classic, not derivative?filled with swagger and deference?and ridiculously catchy. Really.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Decibully is a band's band. Featuring numerous multi-instrumentalists and having earned a strong reputation for their live performances, Decibully brandishes a wide variety of influences, mixing a rich blend of finely interspersed layers tinged with country-esque flourishes, subtle electronic twinges, and rockist undertones. Formed as a trio in Fall 2001 by William J. Seidel (vocals, guitar, percussion, Rhodes), guitarist W. Kenneth Siebert and keyboardist Nick Westfahl, the group soon added Ryan Weber (lap steel, synths, guitar, percussion), bassist Justin Klug, and drummer Jason Gnewikow to further round out their sound. Decibully spent the rest of 2001-02 practicing when time could be found, touring and self-releasing their debut album You Might Be A Winner, You May Be A Loser, But You'll Always Be A Gambler. When Gnewikow moved to New York, he was replaced on drums by Aaron Vold. At the same time, banjo player Eric Holliday joined the band. Following a successful January 2003 tour, Decibully returned to the studio to begin working on their second full-length, the tentatively-titled When We Learned How To Dance. In late May 2003 Westfahl was replaced by Nicholas Sanborn on keyboards and the band began looking for a label. Prior to Decibully, Seidel and Weber were founding members of Camden. In 1999, Camden recorded demos with Chris Rosenau, guitarist for Pele and Collections of Colonies of Bees. Based on their prior relationship and having seen Decibully live numerous times, Rosenau contacted Polyvinyl Records via a two o'clock in the morning phone message lauding the band. A few days later, an unmastered, incomplete version of the album arrived by mail. Band and label began talking and, following a return to the studio, the album was released as City of Festivals on October 14, 2003 followed by a self-booked national tour and an appearance at Polyvinyl's 2003 CMJ Showcase. With nearly a hundred shows played in support of City of Festivals, Decibully again returned to the studio to begin recording their follow-up album to the Polyvinyl debut. City of Festivals had been a mix of different songs written while the band was undergoing personnel changes. A little over half the songs had been written before the band became the solidified line-up that toured in support of City of Festivals. From the initial roughs sent to Polyvinyl, it was obvious the dividends from touring were paying off in the studio. Sing Out America! (scheduled for release March 8, 2005), Decibully's third album, is the first one to be written entirely by the band as a cohesive septet from start to finish. Although more stylistically varied than previous albums, the continuity of Sing Out America! reflects the consistency that can only be found by a band spending so much time on the road together. Sing Out America! is the most representative work the band has turned in to date, bringing their recorded output in step with their live show.
The Cave Singers: "Dancing Graves"
Here is the mystery of Seattle's Cave Singers: They never listened to much folk music, they never intended to play folk music, and more importantly, their guitarist never picked up the instrument until recently. Yet, this strange trio is writing and performing some of the most hypnotizing folk music we have today.
THE ADORED combine elements of discopunk, new wave, and pure power pop to create an intelligent yet catchy, different yet danceable sound. Inspired by the likes of The Clash, The Jam, and Blur, scenepointblank.com calls them Garagey, catchy, and as much as I hate the word, sassy. The Adored were born when four best friends and bon vivants joined up to make spiky party music. What came out draws from the more angular elements of early punk & postpunk and the less pompous elements of fin-de-siecle Britpop. Ryan (vocals) and Nat (drums) met in the mid-90s in NorCal and both played with a locally legendary punk band before moving southward. Max (bass) and Drew (guitar) met as students in Boston, studying media, all the while dreaming of a Los Angeles pop life. The four finally came together in LA and never looked back. So far, their adventures as Hollywood golden boys have included shows with eclectic artists new and old like Supergrass, The Zombies, Ima Robot, Bow Wow Wow, The Futureheads and Les Sav Fav. The Adored have also performed at parties hosted by members of buzz bands Mount Sims, Interpol and the Moving Units. The band has also appeared in clips on the UK?s Channel Four and Southern California?s Fox 11 ---as the current LA ?it band?! With mentions in the NME, the California press, and a grassroots network of blogs and webzines have all helped build an international fan base for the Adored. Again and again, they have performed in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Californias beach counties, bringing their music to grateful, music starved suburban scenesters and leaving their mark on the West Coast. The boys finished a successful 4-night mini-tour to New York City this spring and a weekly residency at Sunset Strips KEY CLUB. Following a 4-song demo in 2003, the Adored recorded a 5-song EP for V2 Records in fall 2004, with producer Dave Trumfio and a special guest vocalist friend and mutual fan Pete Shelley [Buzzcocks]. Due in stores January 2005. These 2004 LA WEEKLY MUSIC AWARDS BEST DANCE ARTIST nominees deceptively simple lineup of guitars, drums and three vocals help the four lovely lads produce a rhythm unique to the California scene -- the first stage in their plan to induce global simultaneous Adorgasm.
Brendan Benson: "Cold Hands, Warm Heart"
Brendan Benson is a band. Sure, it?s also the man?s name. But as he wrote the songs that would become his dazzling new CD THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE, he never stopped imagining the two guitarists trading licks, the back-up singer adding harmonies, the bass drum booming through his spine -- never mind that he does all that stuff himself. Brendan Benson is a one-man band, but, he says, "band is the operative word." He's neither a singer-songwriter (though of course his music is impeccably constructed and observed) nor a simple pop musician (though every note he's ever played is catchy as all get-out), and even "cult artist" doesn't cut it anymore, given the way fans, critics and DJs in both the U.S. and U.K. embraced 2002's Lapalco. Three years later, you could even say THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE is long-awaited. And from the revved-up guitar chug of ?Spit It Out? to the Wall of Sound swoon of ?The Pledge? to the haunted piano tones of ?Biggest Fan,? it doesn't disappoint, offering up a dozen shimmering examples of dynamic rock'n'roll that's both joyous and bittersweet ?as you might expect from someone whose publishing company is called Glad Sad Music. Benson flies solo in the studio so he can work whenever inspiration hits, with "collaborators" who are always on the same creative wavelength. "It's childish," he admits. "It's hard for me to hand the sticks over, or sit there and listen to someone else and not just say, 'do it like this.'" But that's the way the Michigan/Louisiana native has always recorded, going back to his teenage years overdubbing one track at a time on a regular home stereo. Those bedroom sessions, and some recording in L.A. with producer Ethan Johns and Jellyfish's Jason Falkner, eventually evolved into Benson's mythological debut One Mississippi. But when that 1996 Virgin release (reissued by StarTime in 2003) left him as another critical success story on the verge of getting dropped, he retreated to Detroit's Belle Isle neighborhood, using what was left of his second-album advance to fill a big old house with vintage recording equipment and well-used instruments. It was there he made Lapalco, which the Times of London dubbed "an album of such radiant beauty and wrist-slashing introspection that it puts all other pretenders to the Beatles/Beach Boys mantle firmly in their place." Entertainment Weekly, NME, Details and Mojo ("some records are so perfect they make you worry") also fell in love with it. THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE feels like the precisely calibrated offspring of its predecessors ? brighter than Lapalco, not quite as big a sugar-rush as Mississippi. "It's a nice kind of blend of the two," Benson says. Despite his professed allergy to singer-songwriter syndrome, Benson has been doing more acoustic gigs the past few years, which played into the songwriting process. And while the songs are mostly about love, heartbreak, and connection, the context isn't always romance ? Bensons also draws on harder life experience, like being abandoned by his father, and the death of his grandfather who raised him. "A lot of times it might sound like I'm singing about a girl, but it just might be about someone or something entirely different," he says. If Lapalco brought to mind certain dark-night-of-the-soul records from the late '60s and early '70s, Benson has found himself listening to things like Calexico, the Cars and the Pretenders lately. But if you were to hit him with that old standby of a question, "what are your influences?" he could give a unique answer. "A lot of times I'll record or write a song because I've got a new amp, or someone?s left a guitar at my house, or I?ve acquired a new microphone. I just have a real fascination with the sound of things." He even traded in some of the stuff that figured on Lapalco -- THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE was recorded on relatively newer stuff, digital as well as analog. "I don?t have a lot of conceits when it comes to recording music like, 'no computers were used in the making of this record,'" he says. ?Computers make things easier. But drums and acoustic guitars, I believe, sound notably better on tape." The record's intricate sonic imprint also stems from Tchad Blake's mixes. The producer/engineer, best known for his work with Mitchell Froom (Los Lobos, Latin Playboys, Elvis Costello, Crowded House) is a longtime fave of Benson's. "Oh my god, my hero," he says. "We just talked a few times on the phone. I said, do whatever you do, make it sound good! And he did. Some tracks, he kind of produced retroactively. When I heard them with headphones on I was laughing uncontrollably. I was so pleased." THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE is a headphone record among other things, from the Spectoresque bombast of "The Pledge" to the mind-bending harmony and call/responses of the title track. Other highlights include the amiably wobbly "Cold Hands Warm Heart," which is already a live favorite, and the album-ender "Between Us," which lays the raw emotion of a woman's post break-up answering machine message over an almost-psychedelic anthem. Then there's the deceptively sing-song "What I'm Looking For," which offers up a worldview ? about art, life and love -- in just 18 words: Well I don't know what I'm looking for but I know that I just wanna look some more. "That's pretty much it," Benson says. "That's me." Which is not to say he lacks focus. If anything, he's too focused -- exclusively on rock'n'roll. When he's not doing his own stuff he's producing other bands (including V2 labelmates Blanche and the next record by Cincinnati garage-rockers the Greenhornes) and he and Motown compadre Jack White are working on a duo record." I could happily spend the rest of my days doing something with music," Benson says. "If I'm not working on music, anxiety sets in. Maybe it's not so healthy-to stay locked away in a studio?you've gotta live a life to write a song. But in Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke said if you were in jail, cut off from the world, with nothing but a view of the sky from a small window, you'd still have your memories to write about. I love that."
Brendan Benson is a band. Sure, it?s also the man?s name. But as he wrote the songs that would become his dazzling new CD THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE, he never stopped imagining the two guitarists trading licks, the back-up singer adding harmonies, the bass drum booming through his spine -- never mind that he does all that stuff himself. Brendan Benson is a one-man band, but, he says, "band is the operative word." He's neither a singer-songwriter (though of course his music is impeccably constructed and observed) nor a simple pop musician (though every note he's ever played is catchy as all get-out), and even "cult artist" doesn't cut it anymore, given the way fans, critics and DJs in both the U.S. and U.K. embraced 2002's Lapalco. Three years later, you could even say THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE is long-awaited. And from the revved-up guitar chug of ?Spit It Out? to the Wall of Sound swoon of ?The Pledge? to the haunted piano tones of ?Biggest Fan,? it doesn't disappoint, offering up a dozen shimmering examples of dynamic rock'n'roll that's both joyous and bittersweet ?as you might expect from someone whose publishing company is called Glad Sad Music. Benson flies solo in the studio so he can work whenever inspiration hits, with "collaborators" who are always on the same creative wavelength. "It's childish," he admits. "It's hard for me to hand the sticks over, or sit there and listen to someone else and not just say, 'do it like this.'" But that's the way the Michigan/Louisiana native has always recorded, going back to his teenage years overdubbing one track at a time on a regular home stereo. Those bedroom sessions, and some recording in L.A. with producer Ethan Johns and Jellyfish's Jason Falkner, eventually evolved into Benson's mythological debut One Mississippi. But when that 1996 Virgin release (reissued by StarTime in 2003) left him as another critical success story on the verge of getting dropped, he retreated to Detroit's Belle Isle neighborhood, using what was left of his second-album advance to fill a big old house with vintage recording equipment and well-used instruments. It was there he made Lapalco, which the Times of London dubbed "an album of such radiant beauty and wrist-slashing introspection that it puts all other pretenders to the Beatles/Beach Boys mantle firmly in their place." Entertainment Weekly, NME, Details and Mojo ("some records are so perfect they make you worry") also fell in love with it. THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE feels like the precisely calibrated offspring of its predecessors ? brighter than Lapalco, not quite as big a sugar-rush as Mississippi. "It's a nice kind of blend of the two," Benson says. Despite his professed allergy to singer-songwriter syndrome, Benson has been doing more acoustic gigs the past few years, which played into the songwriting process. And while the songs are mostly about love, heartbreak, and connection, the context isn't always romance ? Bensons also draws on harder life experience, like being abandoned by his father, and the death of his grandfather who raised him. "A lot of times it might sound like I'm singing about a girl, but it just might be about someone or something entirely different," he says. If Lapalco brought to mind certain dark-night-of-the-soul records from the late '60s and early '70s, Benson has found himself listening to things like Calexico, the Cars and the Pretenders lately. But if you were to hit him with that old standby of a question, "what are your influences?" he could give a unique answer. "A lot of times I'll record or write a song because I've got a new amp, or someone?s left a guitar at my house, or I?ve acquired a new microphone. I just have a real fascination with the sound of things." He even traded in some of the stuff that figured on Lapalco -- THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE was recorded on relatively newer stuff, digital as well as analog. "I don?t have a lot of conceits when it comes to recording music like, 'no computers were used in the making of this record,'" he says. ?Computers make things easier. But drums and acoustic guitars, I believe, sound notably better on tape." The record's intricate sonic imprint also stems from Tchad Blake's mixes. The producer/engineer, best known for his work with Mitchell Froom (Los Lobos, Latin Playboys, Elvis Costello, Crowded House) is a longtime fave of Benson's. "Oh my god, my hero," he says. "We just talked a few times on the phone. I said, do whatever you do, make it sound good! And he did. Some tracks, he kind of produced retroactively. When I heard them with headphones on I was laughing uncontrollably. I was so pleased." THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE is a headphone record among other things, from the Spectoresque bombast of "The Pledge" to the mind-bending harmony and call/responses of the title track. Other highlights include the amiably wobbly "Cold Hands Warm Heart," which is already a live favorite, and the album-ender "Between Us," which lays the raw emotion of a woman's post break-up answering machine message over an almost-psychedelic anthem. Then there's the deceptively sing-song "What I'm Looking For," which offers up a worldview ? about art, life and love -- in just 18 words: Well I don't know what I'm looking for but I know that I just wanna look some more. "That's pretty much it," Benson says. "That's me." Which is not to say he lacks focus. If anything, he's too focused -- exclusively on rock'n'roll. When he's not doing his own stuff he's producing other bands (including V2 labelmates Blanche and the next record by Cincinnati garage-rockers the Greenhornes) and he and Motown compadre Jack White are working on a duo record." I could happily spend the rest of my days doing something with music," Benson says. "If I'm not working on music, anxiety sets in. Maybe it's not so healthy-to stay locked away in a studio?you've gotta live a life to write a song. But in Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke said if you were in jail, cut off from the world, with nothing but a view of the sky from a small window, you'd still have your memories to write about. I love that."
Love Trio in Dub feat. U-Roy: "Lovers Rock"
Hearing a compilation containing a track by U-Roy, the legendary Jamaican dub master in Sweden when he was 13 years old, Ilhan Ersahin, in what was one of his first record purchases was transformed by his experience, realizing in that moment that music would be his calling. With the accusation of a tenor saxophone and a latter ticket to gotham, his fate was sealed. A nine year apprenticeship at downtown Gotham's then?famous Sweet Basil led to association with outstanding denizens of the jazz world and weekly workshops with the like?minded. These nine years were to culminate in a shift to the Lower East Side and Nublu. The genie was now out of the bottle. From this long gestation, Love Trio was born. Among those making the trek east with Ersahin were bassist Jesse Murphy, a young California native who would become bassist with Brazilian Girls, and drummer Kenny Wollesen of Tom Waits renown. The music the trio would make would seek to defy genre. It would be, as Ersahin would insist - just music - his music: "It's the city - its also where we live. I live here, and on the road, and there is the night life mixed with studio life; in a way also DJ life gotten to our compositions because every where we play there always electronics and DJs. In the culture now, it is really a part of everything. I am just trying to live in the moment, in what is now." Borrowing from the dub and rock steady beats of his earliest influences in programming the various keyboards and electronica added to his oeuvre as well as the jazz legacy of his apprenticeship and the sonorities of his ancestral Turkey, the result of the varying styles as an approach to the music the trio would make has been broadening of the possibilities of his composition and trio's improvisation. Working often with guest artists among whom have been the aforementioned U-Roy, trumpet legend Eddie Henderson, vocalist Marla Turner and DJ Logic as on their seminal, eponymous recording, Love Trio, the music arrived at suggest a hypnotic journey through a spare yet muscular landscape that might best be described as a quest in a minor mode - the ethereal quest for the fabled Nublu. A land far away from Tin Pan Alley.
?Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome The Catheters! Though the words may have you hoping your caregiver is scrubbed and sober, these Catheters are nothing like a cheerful nurse with a plastic tube. They are, in fact, more like a garbage truck crashing into a burger joint: drums stomping like the footfalls of helpless diners running for their lives, guitars all stinky and full of chunks, bass a diesel rumble, and a guy in the cab of the truck hollering about how pissed he is that somebody put a burger joint in his way. Add some kids wiping out on banana peels beneath a hail of flying beef and you?ve got the basic idea. It?s what the young folks call the Rock and Roll, dig? Being relatively young folks themselves, The Catheters bring real energy to a genre that's too often about going through the motions.? (Courtesy Matt Wright ? Gas Huffer) Formed back when they were just toddlers (1995), and taking a band name completely at random (??cause it sounded punk?), and generally creeping into the consciousness of a very tired rock & roll community, these bratty, young wonderpunks present a powerful punk & rock synthesis as filtered through the sensibilities of kids that don't know any better.
"South Beach Sounds: Miami Music Week, Volume 1"
South Beach Sounds-Miami Music Week Volume 1 is a sensory souvenir of the world's largest dance and electronica event, the Winter Music Conference. Recorded in 2005, the DualDisc (and separate DVD, both released on March 21st via Immergent) captures the magnitude of the weeklong event, where over 10,000 people from 60 different countries came together for round the clock parties, industry panels, and cutting edge technological demonstrations. Electronica fans and professionals alike attend the conference, now in its 21st year. The DualDisc version of South Beach Sounds is dominated by tracks from some the conference's most electrifying acts. Trance master Steve Porter, house duo Murk, the jarring and intense Australian electronica trio Infusion, and the influential British DJ Pete Tong offer a dizzying sample of what the best performances of the conference were like.
