This Will Destroy You

Texas is a weird place. But not necessarily a bad place, regardless of what knee-jerk rich-kid college politicos might lead you to believe. It’s bigger, and consequently so are the egos and companion prick-ery, but go to LA for a long weekend and tell me which one you prefer. Getting back to the whole big thing, lots of things are bigger in Texas: LBJ’s cock, Brahma bulls, and, of course, the rock. This Will Destroy You is not the big rock from Texas that ZZ Top is, moreso the wide-open grandeur that is Explosions In The Sky, but they leave a Texas-sized impression with their eponymous debut.

I’m sure both parties are getting tired of the comparisons, but when you have the unlikely success that Explosions have, one party better be grateful that somebody cares after eight years and the other should be damn happy that the door was held open for them. Not that there’s any beef between the two and with Explosions going on extended hiatus, I suspect a torch may very be passed.

The last two years have been prosperous ones for Team TWDY. Their dazzlingly cinematic sound has been used in a host of documentary works and even popped up in a Pentagon briefing video. How’s that for placement? It’s not Friday Night Lights, but it certainly gets the tongues wagging. All the talking is in danger of overshadowing the music, which really is wonderful. And beautiful, too. TWDY use dynamics and space masterfully. It’s obvious that there is someone, if not all of them, in the franchise that is familiar with composition and scoring.

Magic Bullet sure have scored with this one. They have always been known for working with innovative artists, but this is definitely a record that I can see bringing a lot more people toward their catalog. This Will Destroy You have geared up for some serious road work behind their first full-length. and I can’t think that it’s not going to bear fruit for them. For once it seems to be happening for the good guys. This Will Destroy You is not for everyone, but in an ideal world it would be.

This Will Destroy You will be on tour with Lymbyc System in September. Check them out in Brooklyn on 9/15 at Union Hall and 9/16 in Manhattan at the Knit. Tix are $8 in advance.

www.myspace.com/thiswilldestroyyou
www.magicbulletrecords.com

The Tim Version - Decline Of The Southern Gentleman

All is not Gainesville in the No Idea world, even if it may seem so a lot of the time. Var and Co. rep G-town to the fullest and luckily for us, it's not in an irritating 'Go Gators' sort of way. First a zine, then a label, and now purveyors of one of the best music fests ever, No Idea is making all the right moves. Hell, The Fest is rapidly even deposing SXSW as the go-to in my festival travel schedule and I’m no fan of shows in Florida. At all. Call it a Yankee thing. The Tim Version is from Tampa, but I’d break my FLA rock moratorium to go to their town, too.

The Tim Version sound a lot like their Gainesville brethren in Hot Water Music, but truth be told both bands (and a lot of the No Idea roster) owe a huge debt to the U.K. majesty that is Leatherface. Sunderland’s own Frankie Stubbs and his compatriots have combined Husker Du and Motorhead for some time now and while they may have flown below most people's radar on this side of the pond, their sound certainly has not gone unnoticed by Florida’s punk cognoscenti. The Tim Version boys even dare to up the ante and add some Replacements to the mix, which is never a bad move in my book. Decline Of The Southern Gentleman is more Sorry, Ma than Tim, but the band is named after the ‘Tim Version’ of Mats classic Can’t Hardly Wait, so I think we can call safely call them fully Mats compliant.

And pretty fucking great, to boot. The Mats influence is there: not only in the drunken guitar bends and loose arrangements, but also in the great songs and raw energy. This is not an overdub record: this is four guys, five or six cheap beers in, playing the fuck out of great punk rock songs with big ol’ hooks. Decline is a twelve-pack of hits and much like beers at the Tim Version rehearsal space, they pass quickly in a little over a half hour. Believe me, when it‘s done, you’ll want more.

No Idea has persevered from its humble beginnings to become the high water mark for punk labels today. They have weathered the loss of Hot Water Music like a champ and continue to expand their roster of great bands, most recently with Off With Their Heads, but with a host of other up and comers as well. Decline Of The Southern Gentleman is notable for being one hell of a great punk record in general and a great No Idea record in particular. It’s only short-coming might be that Team Tim have just released a comp of all their older, hard to find material called Still Have The Nerve To Call Themselves A Band on A.D.D. In it’s wake, Decline comes off a little weaker, but in the same way that The Thing is weaker than The Hulk. Either way, The Tim Version pack a hell of a punch.

www.myspace.com/thetimversion
www.noidearecords.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~timversion

Off With Their Heads - From The Bottom

I got into Off With Their Heads around the same time I fell for the Hold Steady and Banner Pilot. Not sure how, although it's probably even money on the Nate Ganglehoff/Rivethead/D4 connection. Either way, I played the shit out of the Hospitals EP. There are few better ways to get some shit off your chest in an empty apartment than to crank that puppy and shout along. My neighbors may beg to differ.

Ryan from OWTH is as DIY as he is crazy (which is probably as big as an understatement as the fact that I date crazy ladies). He lives at Alamo House in Minneapolis where he and the roommates do a lot of house shows. Maybe house shows are more fun in the Midwest, but in NYC it can get a little terrifying. Case in point would be the show in Bushwick with The Ergs, Four Letter Word, The Arrivals and Off With Their Heads. Not that it wasn't a blast, but the prospect of seeing another show in a firetrap messenger house is not something I look forward to. That said, it was a lot better than standing around in the backyard of Sealab 187 and being pelted by garbage or waiting around crappy Greenpoint bars for three or four hours to not see them play. I do so love punk scheduling.

Not that I was smart enough to learn anything from the experience, as I bought a ticket to Insubordination Fest seconds after I found that Ryan and the boys would be playing. It was rumored that they would have copies of their new release for No Idea with them and I, for one, was not going to miss snagging a copy. As Insubordination Fest got closer, more and more info about the new record came down the pike: old stuff was going to be re-recorded, there weren't going to be more than one or two new tracks, blah, blah, blah. As I have moved past my vinyl era, it worked for me. I'm way beyond working too hard to get stuff I'm just going to digitize anyway. In doing some digging, most of the re-records were precipitated by the last Fall's infamous OWTH tour of Japan with Yoshi from Snuffy Smile. After Ryan and Yoshi butted heads and the shit-slinging started, Ryan vowed (and I believe this is a pretty exact quote) that he would 'rather be face-fucked sideways than have those songs be available exclusively through Snuffy Smile'. Such eloquence!

Rehashed or not, From The Bottom is a rager from note one to note last. If the boys were redoing crappy songs to fill things out it would be one thing, but if you are going to save me some cash and give me a gang of great songs for $7, I am there with bells on. From The Bottom ain't long, but it sure is great, especially the re-record of For The Four. That itself is worth the price of admission. You're not going to hear any of the tracks here at your next positive affirmation meeting, but if you fall on the more cynical and/or nihilistic end of things, you'll be shouting every word.

R

www.myspace.com/offwiththeirheads
www.noidearecords.com

Hiram Bullock (1955-2008)

As a young bass-playing dork and big fan of the NBC era of Late Night With David Letterman, I pretty much always checked in to try and steal riffs or whatever from Will Lee. Around the same time, I started getting into music magazines and was able to put the pieces together as to why Late Night's band was called The World's Most Dangerous Band. Granted it was in the early 80s and the cats (save for Paul, perhaps) were not especially well known outside the session scene, but when you have a four-piece band with Steve Jordan on drums, Will Lee on bass and Paul on keys, you better not slouch on the six-string spot. And slack they did not. Every time the Late Night intro cut to the studio and panned to the right, Hiram Bullock was there, barefoot and in cut-off sleeves with battered Strat in hand, straight killing it from stage right.

Hiram had played with Will in the 24th Street Band prior to working with the Brecker Bros and was pretty well known as hot shit at the University Of Miami, where he came up with heavy hitters like Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, as well as Will Lee and WMDB adjunct David Sanborn. He hit the session scene hard and did a lot towards ushering in the Strat with PAFs era. The battered sunburst Strat became as associated with Hiram as Blackie was with Clapton and even was honored with a signature model in it's later years.

After leaving Late Night in 1983 (I started to treat it like a job and was forgetting to show up, he remembered) he continued to play on a gang of session and sideman gigs while trying to get his own band off the ground. He was well-recieved overseas and did much more work in the Far East than the States, but would pop up around town with various incarnations of the band. In recent years, he quit a lot of the vices that he was known for and ended up putting on a lot of weight, but still kicked a healthy amount of posterior regardless of his girth. There was a lot more movie work as he grew older, including an appearance in Under Siege, but in recent years rumors of his being ill started to trickle out. After Michael Brecker's passing, word came out that Hiram was fighting cancer. He confirmed it in a post on his web page in March and downplayed his illness in typical fashion, remarking that he needed to lose weight anyway and that his treatments would help. Ominously, he also mentioned that he had lost his ability to taste.

This past Friday, Dave and Paul took a moment to remember the guy who had been such a huge part of the show in it's early years. It was only a couple minutes, but taking into account that Hiram had left the show almost twenty-five years previously, it was a pretty classy move on their part. There was a memorial service on 8/4 and his family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to nature and animal conservation organizations.

Thanks for the good times , Hiram!

R

www.hirambullock.com
www.worldwildlife.org
www.greatbear.org

The Sainte Catherines - The Soda Machine

Canada has been trumping our rock in spades in recent years, what with quality franchises like Fucked Up, Fifth Hour Hero, Weakerthans and Chixdiggit hailing from North of the Border. The Sainte Catherines hail from Montreal, as you might surmise, and ply their trade in smelly guitar-driven punk rock, heavy on the Leatherface. You don't have to say that twice to get me to take notice. Vanessa at Fat had sent me Dancing For Decadence a couple summers ago. It was their debut for the label and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they weren't a third rate Lagwagon rip-off. They were no stranger to a NOFX-y dischordant key change, but all in all, it just reinforced how boring most bands were in comparison.

Soon after, I made my first trip to Montreal and ended up catching Sainte Catherines alter-ego Yesterday's Ring down the street from my hotel. In between stupid fights with my (now-ex) companion, I ended up getting my mind blown by the countrified version of their sound. I picked up all three of the Yesterday's Ring releases while I was in town and vowed to scarf up The Sainte Catherines back catalog as well.

I managed to get virtually everything in their catalog fairly quickly, save for their debut Those Stars Are For You. That record and the early seven-inches are almost impossible to come by, depending mostly on your knowledge of the murkier areas of the Internet. The new Sainte Catherines release The Soda Machine takes a couple steps toward making it a little easier to get the out of print stuff. The Soda Machine is actually the title of the documentary by band confidante Sophie Fortier. That it self is worth the price of admission, but the DVD also comes with a cd compiling 25 b-sides and cast-offs and therein, mes amis, is where things really get fun.

The Soda Machine documentary is well done, exposing such gems as the fact that frontman Hugo is 25(!!!) and that they really had an unhealthy fixation with The Broadways in their early days. The companion cd further exposes the Leatherface adulation, including a pretty great cover of Sour Grapes. The Soda Machine cd has pretty expansive liner notes for most of the songs, with funny insights into their forays into hair-metal acoustic balladry and penchant for baiting Simple Plan. It's packaging like this that makes bypassing I-tunes all the more worthwhile. The whole package is cross-released between Indica Records, D-Tox and Outside Music, but most easily picked up at the Indica website for $15. Can't beat that price for twenty-five songs and a DVD.

The Sainte Catherines are currently touring Mexico and threatening more dates behind The Soda Machine in the Fall. Keep an eye on the sites below for dates and enjoy the DVD while you wait. Look out for a new Yesterday's Ring record, too.

R

www.thesaintecatherines.org

www.indicastore.com

myspace.com/thesaintecatherines

www.yesterdaysring.org

www.fatwreck.com

www.daretocarerecords.com

Daturah - Reverie

Instrumental metal has always been tough for me to get a handle on. Having come up as a serious devotee of Yngwie Malmsteen and the Shrapnel label, it's kind of hard for me to listen to twenty years down the line. Heath got me into Pelican and Isis and Greg at Academy recommended a couple other selections and before I knew it,  I was harvesting instrumental tracks with wild abandon. I got a pretty good Envy fixation going and started working my way through the Temporary Residence roster. I saw a bit of Explosions In The Sky when Wilderness opened up for them at Bowery a couple years ago and thought they were pretty boring, really. Not that they suck by a long shot, but the contrarian in me prefers This Will Destroy You. They are really two sides of the same coin, but any way you slice it, there are some bands that are doing some pretty interesting things with clean amps and delay in 2008. 

Cue Daturah. Graveface sent me a copy of the record through Burning Angel. I could (and will) poo-poo the lack of full packaging, but there was (and is) a whole lot of ass-kicking ambient metal in that simple paper card sleeve. There's talk of them coming to the States early next year, but in the meantime, check the review reprinted from Skyscraper #28 without asking permission from Andrew. You'll doubtless want to own my wisdom in tangible form, so pick up an issue online or from your favorite retailer. Subscribe even. Buy the Daturah records, too. Read on, hombres.

Instrumental metal music can be a slippery slope. If you fall on the Shrapnel end of the spectrum, you can get a bunch of guys speed-picking their way through their favorite arpeggios on quadruple neck guitars. If you go Favored Nations, you can end up with a bunch of guys in pirate shirts approximating whale music. Daturah plays the type of instrumental music that our friends in Pelican and Isis purvey, but with a soupcon of This Will Destroy You and Mono to keep it interesting.

Daturah hail from Frankfurt, a city widely held as the financial center of Germany. Makes sense, as Daturah are money in the bank. While Reverie runs a little bit under an hour, there are only six songs. That's no real shocker for bands of this ilk, the trick is in filling up the space without overstaying your welcome and becoming the musical equivalent of a run-on sentence. Daturah break things up with samples and other audio tweakery, another concept that is far from new to the genre but used tastefully by our German freunds. They've also gotten a bit of a name for themselves for incorporating video installations, adding a sixth member for live shows. It makes sense, Daturah has a cinematic scope to their tracks that a lot of lesser bands lack. They don't come as hard as Hydrahead fare like Isis. There is nary a double bass drum roll to be had, but the relentlessness push and pull the Daturah rhythm section displays maintains the same quite intensity. Coupled to as many three guitars, you might expect that there is quite a wall of sound when the louder parts kick in. There is, but there is also a Juno vibe to the quieter three guitar parts that work rather nicely on Reverie, each player adding a part to the sonic arabesque and making the song more powerful without resorting to played-out shred wankery or 'notice me' histrionica. There is a dreamlike component to Reverie, and while the record lives up to it's name, it is hardly abstract. Daturah are the kind of thought you want to bemuse you.

www.daturah.de

myspace.com/daturah

www.graveface.com

www.skyscrapermagazine.com

Motley Crue - Saints Of Los Angeles

It’s kinda odd to see all my favorite bands from Middle School back on the arena circuit in 2008. Modern technology has kept most of the major players in hair and plastic surgery does an admirable job of filling in the rest, but watching Eighties metal gods age can be tough, especially when the lyrical content is pretty much the same and the guys are as old as my Dad. Then again, Nikki is dating Kat Von D and still looks absolutely bad ass and Tommy still looks pretty good. Mick was never young and his reverse Dorian Gray syndrome is truly unsettling. Our Vince may very well be the luckiest of the bunch. He doesn’t write any of the songs and the band only makes money when he’s on the mike, giving him the latitude to rarely sing in tune and fall off the wagon four or five times a tour. It's a pretty easy equation: so long as he and Tommy stay apart, Motley runs pretty smoothly. This, my friends, is why the good lord gives us separate tour buses.

The fact that Motley is still relevant today is due almost exclusively to rock and roll Renaissance man Nikki Sixx. Since kicking Class A drugs for good around the turn of the century he has been an absolute dynamo, founding photo and recording studios and helming Eleven Seven Music in between celebrity divorces and doing charity work for street kids. Exclusive of the Crue, he’s worked up a couple side projects and does a fair amount of songwriting for a lot of artists that you might not expect, like the Backstreet Boys and Meatloaf. Nikki might think globally, but he also acts locally: His work with DJ Ashba and James Michael has spawned Sixx AM as well as most of the songs on Saints Of Los Angeles. Michael produced SOLA as well, keeping everything tied up just the way Nikki likes it.

It’s not all post-recovery hubris on Sixx’s part either. Saints Of Los Angeles is hands-down the best Motley record in a decade, maybe since Shout At The Devil. Every song is crisp and 21^st century compliant without seeming forced or cheesy and there hooks every goddamn place you turn. I would have never thought that The Crue would even come close to putting together a record this good in 2008. And did I mention that Tommy and Mick are playing their asses off? Whatever disease that is eating Mick has shrunk his height by six inches in recent years, but he’s still a fucking colossus with the riffs. While their live debut on Jimmy Kimmel was hampered by a gang of guest stars from their summer package tour, their set on Letterman was highlighted by Mars absolutely fucking killing it. Motley Crue is definitely out to show the new jacks that they aren’t going anywhere.

We’ve waited ten years for a new Guns and Roses record that may not even drop before year’s end. The stuff I’ve heard is decent, but certainly not worth the wait. Axl may regret not releasing it earlier, as Motley Crue definitely have one of the best rock records of the year with Saints Of Los Angeles, whether you consider it a comeback or not. Save for a small misstep with that Just Another Psycho song, Saints Of Los Angeles seems to be poised to remind the haters that even as they creep up towards their 30^th year as a band, Motley Crue is as relevant as any rock band today.