Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

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It's been almost exactly three years since Ted Leo and the Pharmacists released their last album, Living with the Living.  Such a period of silence is unheard of from a man whose tireless commitment to recording and performing has become a defining part of his music.  Throughout a career that spans nearly 20 years to his early days with D.C. trio, Chisel, the regularity of Leo's output has often matched his energetic hardcore hooks and his seemingly relentless touring schedules.

Last week, Leo -- now 39 -- returned with his sixth solo album, The Brutalist Bricks, his first with indie heavyweight Matador Records. Fortunately, even a cursory listen to the new effort reveals Leo has lost none of his old dedication and that has his songwriting hasn't suffered a bit from the break.  The songs are tight and focused, his assessments of the current political landscape as vitriolic and urgent as ever, suggesting the time away has done the singer nothing but good.

Ahead of tonight's show at First Ave, Gimme Noise caught up with Leo to find out what he's been up to. The most obvious place to begin was with the karaoke record release party he and the band played last Tuesday in Brooklyn.

B Fresh Photography

Mmm leather...

​Valentine's Day is soon approaching, and Gimme Noise decided to visit the Smitten Kitten to ensure that your romp in the bed (or wherever you may choose) will be an informed, safe and fun time. Sex educator Alicia Steele sat down with us to break the ice about sexual knowledge, fill us in about what the Smitten Kitten is all about, and give us the inside scoop on staff-tested items and products (see slideshow). If you are a veteran of the vibrator or still are wondering where the G-Spot really is, the welcoming staff will answer any questions you have, and you can rest assured that you won't be judged.

Check out our sexy slideshow tour of some of the store's finest merchandise.

​There are some things you just can't mess with. For instance, when you put organic jazz textures together with electronic dub beats, the groove is bound to be sick. If you throw in layers of percussion with Fela-style keyboards and mix it all together, you're onto something serious.  On his debut full-length, New Love, local artist Mike Swoop does just this, and while he keeps things smooth and relaxed, the results are as funky and irresistible as you would expect.

Swoop's isn't a name most people are familiar with, but he's been producing for over eight years.  He got his start DJing with Diametrix and performing at Dinkytowner's Battle of the Beats, even though he was underage.  "It's hard to perform when you're young in general," he says. "Venues give you static for being young, so you're not generally surrounded by what's going on or really involved in it."

Nonetheless, Swoop, who grew up in St. Paul and relocated to Minneapolis in high school, worked his way up, opening for Twista at the MYTH as a few years back and collaborating with the likes of Big Quarters and Rhymesayers emcee Toki Wright, both of whom appear on New Love.  Recently, he's made appearances at Fifth Element's Last of the Record Buyers.

Ahead of tomorrow night's release party for New Love, Gimme Noise caught up with Swoop to learn more about his background as a producer and the making of his first album, which sees him expanding on his hip hop roots with an eclectic collection of ambient instrumentals.

B Fresh Photography for City Pages

​You might remember Sarah White as one of the first female lyricists putting it down in the Twin Cities hip-hop scene, working with the likes of Black Blondie, Kanser, and countless other artists and groups. A mother, wife, singer, emcee, photographer, writer and blogstress, White moved to Brooklyn several years ago with her family to continue feeding her already-thriving music and artistic career. White's current fusion sound mixes up a bit of soul, hip-hop, triphop, nujazz, rock and even folk. The streets of New York inspire her to stay on her game more than ever, and she has a brag list to prove it. City Pages took the C train to Brooklyn to see what she has been up to since relocating, and caught a behind the scenes glimpse of her recording in the studio with Rico/Dj Don Cuco.

Courtesy of Nemer Fieger

​In case you didn't know, I'm kind of an expert when it comes to machismo. 

What's that? You've never heard of machismo? Allow me to hook you up:

Machismo - A display of extreme masculinity, typically found in dudes wearing leather vests, Biff from Back to the Future and monster truck drivers. (Author's note: I'm pretty sure that if Biff from Back to the Future drove a monster truck while wearing a leather vest, the world would implode from the sheer amount of machismo all in one place.)

This Saturday night, one of these three pillars of manliness will be on display at the Metrodome when MONSTER JAM rolls through Minneapolis, crushing the living Christ out of everything in its path.

​Over the course of the last decade, San Francisco group Tea Leaf Green established themselves as one of the heavyweights in the ever-growing jam band community. Formed in 1997, the quartet built a devoted following on the strength of solid songwriting and funky, psychedelic improvisations that owe much to such luminaries as the Grateful Dead and Weather Report.

While 2009 saw the release of the live Coffee Bean Brown Comes Alive, it's been almost three years since Tea Leaf's last studio album. However, taking a break from it's normally hectic touring schedule - averaging 130 or more performances most years, they played only half that in 2009 - has revitalized the band as it sets out on its current One New Day tour.

"It's the first time I've had more than a month off in, like, over seven years," guitarist Josh Clark said over the phone. "We needed to take a little break, but it's been good for us. We've gotten back to basics."

Ahead of tonight's show at the Cabooze, Gimme Noise caught up with Clark - who occasionally splits his time with the band Particle - as he and his band mates prepared for a show at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado.

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Recently landing a pair of spots on national television, Minneapolis' Estate is continuing to expand its audience outside of the Midwest. Recently speaking to Gimme Noise about the new found exposure, the duo of Dan Kramer also Josh Johnson also spoke candidly about their unique approach to performing live and their affinity for creating remixes.

Gimme Noise: For those who haven't seen you live, how would you describe the mix between media and music in your shows?

Estate: Like the question implies, our live shows are a blend of audio and synchronous video which was created by both our friends and ourselves. Each song has a unique video made to fit the mood and feel of the song. They're edited to the rhythm and feel of the music. We really like how they reinforce each other both on stage and on screen at home. During the show we project the video on a large screen right on stage with us. We like when other groups give the audience options on what to pay attention to. Watch the band, chat with friends, dance, watch the video, or all the above. It's up to you.  

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This weekend the TC electropunk scene is celebrating the release of its fifth compilation with a show at Club Underground. In preparation for the event Gimme Noise had a few words with Todd Millenacker of Avenpitch, the band which will be headlining the show. In addition to giving away free copies of the new album to fans who attend the show this weekend, the collective is also offering each of the previous compilations as free downloads via tcelectropunk.com.

Gimme Noise: How has electropunk evolved in the Twin Cities since the first compilation?

Todd Millenacker: I don't know if really has. For me, it's still a motley bunch of musicians throwing stuff against a wall and seeing what sticks! In terms of the "Electropunk Scene" bands just keep coming out of the woodwork. Over the course of five years TC Electropunk has been associated with 43 acts and it seems like interest just keeps on expanding.

​Har Mar Superstar is in town to play back-to-back shows tonight and tomorrow night, the latter of which is a CD-release show for his latest effort, Dark Touches. To get ready for his show, we sat down with Har Mar, aka Owatonna native Sean Tillmann, to ask him some questions about his crazy rockstar lifestyle. In addition to the Q&A printed in this week's edition of City Pages, see below for some bonus questions in our online-only extended interview conducted by Chris DeLine.

​In a world where everyone from Balloon Boy to Jon Gosselin can be considered a celebrity, there are very few people who can still be considered legitimate pop-culture icons. Hulk Hogan is among that group.

This past Friday, hundreds of Hulkamaniacs of all ages packed the Mall of America to meet the man as he stopped by to sign copies of his new memoirs, My Life Outside the Ring.

Before he let Hulkamania run wild on the M.O.A., however, the Hulkster sat down with Gimme Noise to talk about his relationship with the tabloids, his family, wrestling and Rocky 3.

Photo by Darin Back

​There's something inherently mysterious about the Pines' dusky, timeless folk music--the way it sinks into the listener's bones like a deep winter chill, the way it only improves with time and age like a bottle of wine forgotten in the cellar for 50 years and then unearthed and uncorked. Even more mysterious is the process of watching the music emanate from the players' mouths and hands live, as Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt make for a rather unnassuming pair--a couple of Iowa farmboys who just so happen to have a knack for creating expansive, emotive, and brooding Americana. The duo have been part of the Minneapolis music scene for years now, and the fact that they don't seem to fit neatly into any of the similar-sounding local scenes--the traditional West Bank folkies, the hipsters-turned-old-timey revivalists, the bleeding-heart singer-songwriters--speaks to their ability to transcend trends and labels and press themselves into something unique and incomparable.

Their latest CD, Tremolo, released this weekend, finds Ramsey experimenting with vocal vibrato and falling in and out of time with the rest of the music, adding another dreamlike nuance to this band's already dense and foggy mystique. We sat down with Ramsey and Huckfelt recently to talk about their new album, their relationship with local label Red House records, and their position in the local music community.

Photo by Stacy Schwartz

​By Ray Cummings
 
At the tender age of 24, St. Paul resident Ryan Potts is living the underground-muso dream: he's married, he runs a small label (Rest + Noise), is on the verge of issuing his second minimalist album as Aquarelle (Slow Circles), and writes occasionally for Skyscraper. In a late September telephone interview -- which we present below in its entirety, though some excerpts appear in the print story -- Potts opens up about Aquarelle, his distain for traditional live performance venues, and why Slow Circles is arriving three years after debut Of Memory and Momentum.

Photo by Phoebe Streblow

​At the twilight of a decade in music that produced innumerable left-field success stories, Why?'s journey from alt-rap obscurity to indie scene heavyweight is one of the more compelling. Early in the new century front man Yoni Wolf introduced the Google-stumping moniker Why? as his rap alias while sharpening his teeth with the Anticon hip-hop collective. Since then Why? has morphed from a bedroom project into a full scale band that provides a completely organic canvas for Wolf's provocative rhymes. 

After a pair of overlooked records, Why? found their audience with 2007's Alopecia, recorded in Minneapolis. It was an immediate success, garnering rave reviews and making it the best selling Anticon release to date. The same studio sessions that produced Alopecia birthed the recently released Eskimo Snow, an album so far removed from Yoni's beginnings that a new listener might not pick up on the hip-hop influences.

In anticipation of their show tonight at the Triple Rock, City Pages spoke to Yoni from his family home in Ohio. 

​Three years after their well-received You in Reverse, Built to Spill and bearded bandleader Doug Martsch are back. The 11-track There Is No Enemy picks up where Reverse--an album many consider among the band's best--left off.

The band's fifth studio album for Warner Bros. finds Built to Spill content and stretching out with new recording techniques and a host of guest musicians. Their ever-revolving lineup has solidified around Martsch and familiar faces Brett Nelson, Jim Roth, Scott Plouf, and (oddly enough) Brett Netson, all of whom are present on Enemy.

Nearly 20 years on, Martsch's quirky indie rock vision lives. While the act never truly reached mainstream status, its ability to sustain a rabid fan base with consistently genuine and compelling material has provided staying power. This approach would appear to have benefits over the hit-and-fizzle of overhyped one-hit wonders.

Photo by Brian Tamborello

​Every kid who straps on an electric guitar and stands in front of his (or her) bedroom mirror before he or she can barely play an open chord is dreaming of universal acclaim. But when Sunny Day Real Estate's 1994 debut album Diary suddenly made them college rock darlings and found them branded with tags like the next Nirvana (an easy enough association since they were also from Seattle, even if they had little in common with grunge), the young band cracked and broke under the strain, with label Sub Pop barely managing to release a second album variously called LP2 or Pink or just Sunny Day Real Estate--it was submitted to the label without a title or artwork by the rapidly fracturing band. Members departed for the Foo Fighters (bassist Nate Mendel remains with them to this day) and solo careers before they returned in 1998 with How It Feels to Be Something On and 2000's The Rising Tide. Without Mendel, though, it wasn't the same band and soon they had broken up again.

People call Tucker Max a lot of different names.

Misogynist. Hero. Asshole. Best-selling author. Now the 33-year-old is adding another title to his resume: filmmaker.

Opening this Friday, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is Max's first venture into feature film. Based on his book of the same title (an autobiographical collection of drunken, sexually-charged adventures), the movie follows Tucker (played by Matt Czuchry) as he manages to lie, drink and screw his way in and out of trouble during a bachelor party gone wrong while trying to find his way back into the good graces of his two best friends.

Last week, Max came through Minneapolis as a part of his 31-city premiere tour where roughly 300 fans (and two lonely anti-Tucker Max protestors) were able to catch an advanced screening of the film and meet the man himself. Afterwards, Max took a few minutes to chat with Gimme Noise about the film, his writing and embracing his narcissism.

​My column this week is about my recent conversation with Ani DiFranco, who happens to be one of my all-time favorite musicians. You can read my giddy recounting of our interview in the print version of my column, or see below for the straight transcript of our conversation. Ani plays tonight in Rochester, tomorrow night in Duluth, and at First Avenue this coming Sunday, September 20, with Gregory Alan Isakov.

Are there musicians or writer or artists that have affected your life in a profound way?

Definitely. People like Greg Brown, Utah Phillips, my folk singing comrades. I think Suzanne Vega was a super early influence, and also an acquaintance when I was a kid. Then it was Thelonius Monk, just the way he phrases, and Betty Carter, this jazz singer, later on in my singing--she was my singing teacher. At some point, I stopped playing guitar and singing along, and really started singing. So many. So many people along the way. Maceo Parker, when I was hanging out with him, he really got me on the groove side of life. I can hear my music from the time we were hanging out, it's just total emulation. And then later on, incorporation.

​When Todd Rundgren returns to Minneapolis tomorrow night to play the State Theatre, he's pulling out all the stops. Not only will the concert feature a complete performance of his 1973 masterpiece A Wizard, A True Star, but Rundgren is promising an over-the-top theatrical spectacle with videos, dramatic lighting, and costumes from his original '70s tours. His current tour will only stop in five cities, and all reports indicate that it's going to be a memorable, mind-blowing show.

Tickets for tomorrow night's show are still on sale; visit the Hennepin Theatre Trust website for more information. In preparation for his stop in Minneapolis, Rundgren took a few minutes out of his busy rehearsal schedule to chat with Gimme Noise.

​Schlepping gear back and forth between the practice space and Big V's. Learning how to book gigs. Whittling away hours at the Turf Club. These are just a few of the situations that pop up in Keith Pille's webcomic, "Nowhere Band," which chronicles fictional local rock underachievers the Awesome Boys as they feel their way through the music scene. As fans of the strip, we sat down with Pille to ask a few questions about his webcomic, his inspiration, and his own life as a local musician and writer.

Where did the idea for creating a webcomic come from?

Keith Pille: I was a writer for a long time... local music writing, human-interest journalism, and some (mostly really bad) fiction. Then, maybe five years ago, comics just sort of took over my brain. I'm the kind of guy who, once I start enjoying something, feels like I have to give it a try myself.  So before long I'm trying to learn to draw, and it just kind of moved from there. For a while, I did comic-short-story stuff (one making fun of the world of literary fiction, one adapting a Jim Walsh story about shooting the members of Fleetwood Mac in the head), but after that I thought it'd be fun to switch to something long-form, dealing with the same ongoing cast of characters.

Photo by Colin Crowley, courtesy of www.myspace.com/digitata

Photo by Phil Knott

French pop-rock group Phoenix are bringing their incredible live show to Minneapolis tonight on the heels of the band's fourth release, last month's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The band spent much of the past two years working on the album, which, despite being their first without major label backing, still managed to shoot them into the mainstream.

Over the past two months, Phoenix has found time amidst a busy touring schedule to appear on both Letterman and Saturday Night Live, which is as good an indicator as any that they've made it. The sold-out concert at the Varsity Theater tonight will likely be one of the last times you'll be able to catch Phoenix in such an intimate setting. Also playing will be Brooklyn's on-the-rise art rockers Amazing Baby.

City Pages spoke to guitarist Christian Mazzalai by phone before the show about the meticulous recording process that was Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and their big breakout year.

Photo by Michael Wilson

In this week's print edition of City Pages, freelancer Rick Mason interviewed legendary New Orleans songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint, who is headlining the Twin Cities Jazz Festival tonight in Mears Park. Rick's interview with Toussaint went much longer than what we could fit into print, and we wanted to give readers a chance to delve deeper into their conversation -- here is the rest of the the interview transcript.

City Pages: What did you hear growing up that had an influence on you?

Allen Toussaint: As a youngster I was listening to whatever was on the radio, and there were things like boogie-woogie, and popular songs and even a lot of hillbilly music-Red Foley, Jimmy Dickens, Ernest Tubb. On Sundays my mother would play classical radio all day long, so I heard a lot of that. And it all seeped in. I can recall feeling when I first started playing, I thought whoever played piano played everything that I was hearing. And I thought everyone knew that except me. I attacked everything that I heard, and ever so humbly, of course, in most cases. I tried to play everything and every genre. Of course, later I learned that there were specialists who played this and not that. But that early innocence helped me to develop a taste for a wide range of music. But I was hearing mostly what was on the radio generally as opposed to pursuing the jazz idiom.

Photo by Elli Rader

Greg Kot

Prior to their music forum last night at the Cedar Cultural Center, Sound Opinions hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot sat down with Gimme Noise to chat about -- what else? -- music criticism. Given the changing landscape of journalism in general and music journalism in particular, and taking into account the wild success of their national Sound Opinions broadcast (which is now being syndicated nationwide via American Public Media), Jim and Greg seemed like the perfect candidates to opine on what, exactly, we can do as writers to maintain an open dialog about the music we love so much.

Disclaimer: this Q&A strays toward the meta, but if you have any interest in writing, media, music criticism, blogs, or what Jim and Greg think about iPods, then this discussion is for you.

Chairlift are one of the many bands to recently emerge from the Brooklyn music scene and find themselves in the national spotlight. Like some of the other bands selling records far from their burrow (Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer, and Grizzly Bear to name a few), Chairlift got a lot of attention in the online music blog world that eventually got them fans all over the country. They got their biggest break, however with a savvy marketing campaign that catapulted them into the mainstream.

The band's enormous boost came last year when their song "Bruises" was picked to introduce a new line of iPods. This shot the song to number 1 on Billboard's Bubbling Under Singles list and sent hordes of people online to check out the band behind the infectious tune.

Now signed to Columbia, Chairlift are coming to Minneapolis, a city this constantly touring band is familiar with, in support of Peter, Bjorn, and John. Before coming to town Chairlift's Patrick Wimberly spoke to City Pages by phone.

Dark Dark Dark photo by Tim Piotrowski
Interview by Ryan Warner

The wandering, romantic collective that is Minneapolis-based Dark Dark Dark are as poised as they are well-equipped to become the city's next big thing. That is, if they decide to continue calling Minneapolis their home, something the group seems to be at odds with internally. To the band's credit, their fleeting nature has more to do with a desire to experience the world and less with the grandeur of indie fame. After interviewing Dark Dark Dark over the course of the past few months, it's apparent that even if they weren't in a band, they would probably still be hopping trains or floating down rivers in homemade boats away from the Cities. It's this passionate longing mixed with the group's out-of-time European folk aesthetic that makes them so charmingly engrossing; even if it means we won't be able to convince them to settle down.

Photo by John Lindquist
Written by Duke Shin

Is indie pop-tart Lykke Li is just another kewpie-faced ingénue with a delicate voice?

She hails from what seems to be the new home of indie classicalism, where sparsely tuneful arrangements extract criminally efficient hooks that conquer the Blogsphere, then advertising, then motion pictures and soccer moms. We're talking about Sweden, whose previous pop-life gave us the likes of ABBA and Ace of Base, and whose current reincarnated cultural commodities are talented musicians of a different sort, like Jens Jenkman, Peter Bjorn and John, and now Lykke Li.

Like the spoon and cherry and frozen heaps of snow, Ruth Adams and The World's Most Dangerous Polka Band are icons of the Twin Cities. Every Friday and Saturday since the '70s, Ruth and her band tear up the stage at Nye's Polonaise Room with their effervescent, and at times supremely strange, polka music.

Annuals photo by Autumn de Wilde.

Initially lauded as standouts amongst a pool of grimly labeled "blog bands," Raleigh, North Carolina's Annuals are now relative veterans amongst a continually shifting indie rock landscape. Following a string of EPs, the band released its full-length sophomore album late last year, entitled Such Fun. The album signaled a shift in direction for the Annuals, showing more restraint and concentration compared to the overpowering sound of the band's debut, Be He Me.

Bassist Mike Robinson recently heeded some questions from Gimme Noise in preparation for the group's upcoming Minneapolis date. Discussing the band's growth over the past few years, Robinson also expanded on the group's decision to return to a venue they last played in October. The band will kick off a 34-date tour this Tuesday at the Varsity Theater--important then that Robinson also detailed how the group is taking the nation's bleak economic conditions into consideration as the tour rolls out.