Ready for a healthy dose of Minnesotans-made-good? Here's a quick update on two locals who have received national attention this week:
Still on the road with P.O.S for the "Every Never is Now" tour, Doomtree MC-turned-solo artist Dessa has caught the attention of Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard, who featured her on yesterday afternoon's New Music Report. Though we're happy that Rolling Stone is catching on to our local talent, we have to admit his critique of her new album had a few questionable points.
This just in from Peter Pisano, lead singer of Peter Wolf Crier: The up-and-coming local duo have just been signed to Jagjaguwar (also home of Eau Claire breakout Bon Iver and the new regional supergroup Gayngs), who will re-release their debut, Inter-Be, internationally on both vinyl and CD on May 25. It should give the band a nice push as Pisano and drummer Brian Moen head down to South by Southwest later this month, where they are set to play two official showcases and at least three other shows at the industry-heavy festival.
As a side note, this is also exciting news for photographer and Gimme Noise contributor Stacy Schwartz, who shot the album cover art. Congrats to Stacy and to the band, this is huge news!
We're expecting an official release from Jagjaguwar later today, and will post more information about the release at that time. (UPDATE: There's more info on the Jagjaguwar site.)
Earlier this week, the indie-centric recording site Daytrotter posted their session with local singer-songwriter Jeremy Messersmith, who has been hard at work finishing up his new album this winter (which is due out this sprint). Head to the Daytrotter site to stream the four songs that Jeremy recorded, which are posted alongside a lovely and quite poignant story by one of the studio workers of what it was like to meet Messersmith and listen to his music.
Over on his own site, Jeremy wrote what he refers to as a "Twitter-length novel" about his visit to the Daytrotter studios in Rock Island, Illinois: "It was cold," he writes. "The studio had a February chill and I sped through a slow song. The thought labeled 'redo' popped up, but I put it aside and embraced the cold coming through my fingers, accepting it as part of the sound, the document."
Jeremy will play the Electric Fetus benefit this Friday at First Ave, where he says he will debut some of his new material and play with a four-piece band for the very first time. "I have rock and roll tentatively scheduled," he joked on his Facebook page.
Each year City Pages publishes the Minnesota Music Directory (MMD), an industry resource for bands, bookers, retailers, venues, and other music-type people. For many on the scene it is a great resource used throughout the year. The MMD is published as a handy booklet, but it is also found online on our site. Are you a band looking to get listed? Friday is the deadline. Basic listings are completely free.
Do you love seeing shows at the Cedar, but can't keep up with their schedule on the go? There's an app for that.
The famed Cedar Cultural Center just released their free iPhone app. The app will allow users to view a full list of upcoming shows, watch videos of scheduled artists and past performances, and listen to a monthly newsletter podcast.
Dessa has certainly been making some waves lately. The local hip hop artist of Doomtree fame just embarked on a extensive 39 date tour to support her new album, A Badly Broken Code. The album in question also just topped the Electric Fetus's Local Top 10 List for the second consecutive week.
It should come as no surprise to anyone clued into the local music scene this month that the most-purchased local album at the Electric Fetus last week was Dessa's solo debut, A Badly Broken Code. We ran an interview with the hip-hop emcee, singer, and poet last week (along with just about every other news outlet and music blog in town), and it looks like the widespread coverage of her CD release must have resonated with the purchasing public. Let's hope this translates to a successful national tour as well, as Dessa and her Doomtree crewmate P.O.S. are about to embark on a joint tour behind their solo projects.
Here's a list of the 10 top local sellers from the Fetus's One Stop, which supplies local discs to independent record stores throughout the regional area:
The biggest news rippling through the local music community this past weekend was an altercation that abruptly ended the Twin Cities Hip-Hop Awards show, which was held in the First Ave mainroom on Friday night. According to reports from several witnesses, a fight broke out between emcee Boima Freeman and an unidentified stage crasher immediately prior to Illuminous 3's set, and the fight escalated into an all-out brawl when audience members jumped up on stage to intervene and throw their own punches.
Larry Lucio, Jr. over at Amplified Life has the most comprehensive report of the incident posted on his blog, including his play-by-play of how the fight broke out:
I'd be lying if I pretended to have the slightest clue about football. I don't even really know where we are in the season, though I seem to remember Bruce Springsteen doing his knee slide into the camera during the Super Bowl halftime show around this time last year. But judging from how riled up Mayor RT Rybak is about this Sunday's game against the New Orleans Saints, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess it's a big deal for the Vikings to win. Something about an "NFC championship game."
(Please don't explain it to me in the comments. I honestly don't care.)
What I do find interesting, however, is that the mayors from the teams' respective cities -- RT Rybak from Minneapolis and C. Ray Nagin from New Orleans -- have started placing friendly bets on the game, and RT's first wager was a selection of three local CDs.
We've just learned that tonight's Low concert at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown is being postponed due to illness. As with most breaking news we receive these days, this update comes via the Varsity's Twitter feed.
Low (1/15) postponed due to illness. Make up date announced soon. Tix for 1/15 honored at the new date & refunds available at p.o.p.
We will post more information as soon as we receive it.
UPDATE: The "Quiet, Please" Low concert has been rescheduled for Thursday, May 6. Tickets from tonight's show will be honored.
One might not expect to find much going on at the 7th St. Entry on a Thursday in the depths of winter, but there was more than just Ritmo Caliente spicing up First Avenue last night. The stylings of Lighted, Take Acre and Brute Heart brought a multitude of reasons to believe that avant rock is alive and well right here in the Twin Cities.
Mother Of Fire has been lurking around the local music periphery for months and months, playing an intriguing game of hide and seek with its prospective listeners. At long last, their vinyl full length Lambs is now available at your finer record dealers, with the official word that the album is now in stock at Eclipse, Treehouse, and Hymie's.
Any fan of strident, atmospheric rock and roll with a good pop anchor would do well to check them out. Head below the jump for more thoughts on the release.
A Pitchfork review is something like the Swiss Franc of music criticism--it takes a graphing calculator and some long division before you can adjust its relative worth in your own musical economy. Essentially, a Pitchfork zero is worth three stars in Rolling Stone, and album of the year in the Pioneer Press.
So when Red Pens scores a 7 for their track "Weekdays," it's pretty much like cashing in a fistful of Euros at the Mexican airport.
It's Wednesday, which means the non-blogged, actual paper copies of City Pages hit the stands today. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present our print music section, Gimme Noise: The Dead Tree Edition. In this week's issue:
Blood, Sweat, and Tacos: Hanging with hardcore band In Defence By David Hansen "There's so many bands talking about sexism and racism and antiwar," says guitarist Tom Burt. "You can say that stuff and no one bats an eye. But try talking shit about pizza. It gets them out of their seat."
A local cast will put a new spin on the popular play RENT for a short run from February 3 through February 21, including a pair of familiar faces from the music scene: Puerto Rican hip-hop and R&B artist Maria Isa will star as Mimi, and Far From Falling vocalist Harley Wood will play Roger. The play will be set in the expansive, 6000 square foot warehouse space of the Lab in the North Loop of Minneapolis.
Thanks to Allegra Oxborough for alerting us to some cool news (who, by the way, some might recognize from the lyrics of P.O.S.'s song "Optimist": "I made this beat for Allegra Oxborough/She taught me how to do the thing with the cups"). Allegra's father, Paul Oxborough, was recently accepted into the British Portrait Awards for his portrait of P.O.S., and several of his other Minnesota-inspired paintings are on display as part of an exhibit he is showing at the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in Soho, NYC.
Colin Johnson reclines at left with Vampire Hands.
Colin Johnson is at the Town Talk, talking about the process of securing a second guitarist to tour with his currently singular project Capricorn Vertical Slum (or "Slums"--Johnson isn't quite sure yet).
"If anyone reads this," he says, "I'm taking applications. I don't drive, I'm never sober cab, I treat you like horseshit. I'll pay you, but I'll charge you for every mistake, and there's always mistakes, and conveniently, it's the same amount of money that I would have paid you."
It'd be a shit deal if Johnson's new music wasn't so immediately engaging.
By the time the Triple Rock doors open at 8 P.M. tonight, you'll have made it. You might be bloodied, you might be dazed, you might be questioning your genes, but you'll have survived. and goddammit, that deserves a reward.
Enter Arzu Gokcen, her inexhaustible library of karaoke tunes, and more whiskey than a sane man should drink, be it Christmas or no.
Have you heard about the Lifter Puller reissues, but aren't quite sure what all the fuss is about? Do you want to know what the band was really like, maybe with some footage of them playing on a local television show on campus at St. Cloud State back in the late '90s? Okay.
Thanks to Pitchfork, for this week only we have the opportunity to watch an hour-long video of Craig Finn playing with his Lifter Puller crew back in 1997. Below is a clip of the first song, "The Bears," and you can head to Pitchfork: TV for the full 14-song set.
First things first: Have you guys been reading this new LOL/OMG blog? As you can probably guess by the name, it's a fairly lighthearted approach to local gossip, and it's run by a few of my favorite Twitter users and bloggers. While it may not seem that the Twin Cities has a dire need for a gossip blog, these ladies do a nice job of keeping things fun (read: not bitchy) and pointing out some local tidbits that they've discovered via their various social media sites. It's worth adding to the blog roll -- after all, you might end up in their Weekend Twitterings roundup just by tweeting something harmless like how you accidentally cut your finger on a toilet seat.
Last night, LOL/OMG pointed us to the fact that former Hockey Night bandmates-turned-DFA signees Free Energy have been receiving some positive press lately, including being named a "band to watch" in 2010 by SPIN. In their roundup of 10 Artists to Watch in 2010, SPIN writes that Free Energy are "as replete with cowbells, Thin Lizzy riffs, and soaring choruses as it is devoid of ironic winks."
The Star Tribune is reporting that the 10,000 Lakes Festival, a popular annual jam band gathering, will not occur in 2010 and may be done for good. Though a crowd of 15,000 flocked to Detroit Lakes this summer to see headliners the Dave Matthews Band (who, honestly, we were shocked to hear could still draw such a crowd), headliners on the other two nights of the festival, Wilco and Widespread Panic, saw smaller turnouts, causing founder and promoter Randy Levy to determine that the yearly event wasn't making enough money to sustain itself.
Brother Ali will join the Roots as a special guest performer on tonight's episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. According to a press release sent out today, it will be a "rare collaboration/jam session" between Ali and the Roots rather than a straightforward performance. The show airs tonight at 11:35 p.m. on NBC, and will available online afterwards via the NBC site.
After much deliberation, Grumdahl decides on "vibes."
It's more than years that separate the Selby Tigers, the Twin cities most raucous rock act of the previous musical epoch, and the Bombay Sweets, Nathan Grumdahl's new one-man band. Where the Selby tigers were the bratty, punk-postured rock icons that defined their days in the scene, Bombay Sweets is a sneakier, softer touch on garage rock themes.
Today, the Sweets released a quick, DIY video to accompany Grumdahl's song "I Don't Wanna Be Your Soldier Anymore," a compact and intriguing three-chord single. Head below the jump to check it out, and to read a few of Grumdahl's words.
Bruce C. Allen, best known as the guitarist for local rock band the Suburbs and as a graphic designer responsible for iconic images like the logo for Twin/Tone records and the album art for the Replacements' Let it Be, will be taken off life support this evening at the age of 54.
Friends close to Allen say that he had been struggling with health issues for many years, including a triple bypass surgery last year, issues with kidney stones, and symptoms of hemophilia. Allen was hospitalized at HCMC beginning last week for uncontrolled bleeding, and subsequently suffered internal bleeding and organ failure.
A little while back. Gimme Noise published reviews akimbo of Haley Bonar and Skoal Kodiak as a testament to just how bizarre and exotic our musical ecosystem is.
A glance at Electric Festus' Top 10 local albums for this week brings things to even more unexpected extremes. Included in the list is Sing With Me, the outstanding children's album by Haley Bonar, and Wookiefoot's latest release, which is, you know, a Wookiefoot album.
Head below the jump for more odd pairings, and a glimpse into what's moving units at the Fetus.
According to Rich over at Switchblade Comb, local punk rockers Off With Their Heads have recently signed a deal with Epitaph Records, which has housed national acts like NOFX, the Offspring, and owner Brett Gurewitz's band Bad Religion. The band will reportedly start recording their new album for Epitaph next month. For those unfamiliar, Off With Their Heads is one of the most underrated pop-influenced punk bands to come out of the Twin Cities in recent years -- despite maintaining a fairly low profile at home, they spend a significant amount of time on the road and have toured both the US and Europe with great success.
Some of you may have seen this over on MNSpeak already, but the McNally Smith hip-hop program, a 45-credit study in hip-hop business, music, and history which was just formally launched this fall semester, was featured in a recent issue of the New York Times. Things we learned from the paper's profile of the school: The St. Paul private college has a scholarship for music technology studies funded by Ice Cube; of the 14 students enrolled in the new program, only two are female; and Doomtree's Dessa Darling's real name is... Well, we'll let the Times spill the beans for us in that respect.
Speaking of Dessa, the Doomtree collective MC has announced that her forthcoming solo album, A Badly Broken Code, will drop January 22 with a CD-release party at the Fine Line.
It's not their official logo, but it kinda should be.
Heart of a Champion, in addition to having one of the best label names in recent memory, has long been a fierce pugilist on behalf of the unheard. Works by major names like Sean Na Na and Lifter Puller have always been anchored by subterranean valuables like Lucky Jeremy and Die Electric!
And this morning, Heart of a Champion announced its winter and spring release plans to the public. Head below the jump for the details!
Has it already been 10 years? Was it really a decade ago that this Gimme Noise correspondent was being sneaked into the Turf Club, hiding his underage visage behind a bass drum, to see Malachi Constant?
Indeed it has. And today on Modern Radio's website, the label announced its celebratory plans for its 10 year anniversary. Head below the jump for details.
1 comment(s) / Post a Comment
