Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

​As part of the Whole's continuing Making Music series at the University of Minnesota, Doomtree producer Lazerbeak will make an appearance next week. "At 8 p.m. on Thursday, November 19th, he'll talk about his beginnings as a beatsmith's apprentice, his rapid ascension through the ranks, and his current position as the master of his own forge," reads the press release "Attendees can expect a bit of local history, a demonstration of Beak's techniques, and the definitive definition of a 'lavabanger.'"

Admission is free. The Whole is located in the basement of Coffman Union.

Photo by Stacy Schwartz

​We recently got the news that Beth Engleman -- who some might recognize as a former clerk at the Electric Fetus and all-around music lover -- was involved in a hit-and-run accident on her bicycle that left her seriously injured. Beth's friends are reaching out to the community-at-large to raise money for what will likely be some astounding medical expenses, and will be gathering donations for a raffle and benefit that will take place Monday, November 23 at the West Bank Social Center.

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Sporting the most aliases this side of O.D.B., the most wildly uneven discography since Zappa, and the most revered name in his field since Henry Ford churned out the Model T, Kool Kieth, aka Dr. Octogon, aka Black Elvis, aka Dr. Dooom, will perform tonight at the Triple Rock.

​Mute Era will be holding it down every Thursday night this month as part of the November Minneseries, a revolving local artist residency at the Nomad World Pub. Check the flyer for details -- openers will include bands as far-ranging as Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles, Baby Guts, and 2009 Picked to Click finalists Dante and the Lobster, Leisure Birds, and Teenage Moods. All of the Minneseries events are free.

​Tonight kicks off the first Triple Double Tuesday of November at the Triple Rock Social Club, featuring WZZ Winship, Jonathan Ackerman, and TRL. Check the flyer for all the details, and preview the upcoming weeks' lineups for this recurring DJ night and 2-4-1 drink special extravaganza -- which you may recognize as a reference in the POS single "Optimist" (listen here, he gives a shout out at around 1:50).

​Sad news for fans of the Canadian rock group: The Tragically Hip have announced an illness in the band and canceled a pair of tour dates, including tomorrow night's show in St. Paul at the O'Shaughnesssy Auditorium. Their website indicates that one of the members has the flu, but as Chris Riemenschneider points out, it's probably not SWINE FLU OMG since their tour will resume on Friday. Ticket refunds are available at the point of purchase.

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Our readers know well and good that we're partial to the Turf Club and the T-Rock. To shows where they hand out earplugs, not programmes, at the door.

But by God, where would we be without Ludwig what's-his-name and all that, you know, stuff he did?

It's probably easy for the twenty-somethings to forget that not too far from the 7th Street Entry lies a venue of infinitely greater history and class, and two hours inside its doors are probably worth more in cultural currency than a year of weekends at the Triple Rock. Tonight, one of Ludwig Van's most well known compositions will be delivered in peerless Technicolor by the peerless Minnesota Orchestra.

Photo by Steve Cohen

​Just when you thought you'd never have the chance to hear "Surfin' Bird" live, it turns out that seminal '60s garage rockers the Trashmen will play a rare show at the Turf Club next month. The band, which was very active in the '60s and then reunited briefly in the '80s, has been more active in recent years, playing gigs throughout the US and Europe in 2009 and ending up back in their hometown for this show at the Turf with the Neanderthals, a group that includes Eddie Angel from Los Straightjackets.

For more on the Trashmen, check out an article that City Pages freelancer Erin Roof wrote back in July about the "Surfin' Bird" icons and their Soma Records labelmates, the Castaways.

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After gaining fame in the 90s as launchpad of female singer-songwriters like Sarah McLachlan, Liz Phair, and Suzanne Vega, Lilith Fair, the all-woman festival inexplicably ceased activity, despite huge earnings and a good rep.

Well, fear not, you XX owners and advocates-- Lilith Fair will return in 2010, touring the U.S., with a Minneapolis stop.

Andrew Bui
​Andrew Bird--violinist, singer, being of supreme leisure.

There are few artists as ethereal, as heady, and as hard-working as Andrew Bird. He's been touring his 2009 release Noble Beast, trotting across the globe and across the domestic heartland for entire seasons, and he has now announced that his final shows will be acoustic, instrumental performances of unusual intimacy and atmosphere.

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The death of a friend is never an easy thing, especially when it's a slow agony, one you can see coming a mile away as it lumbers inexorably towards its final singularity.

For the Uptown Bar, the fabled Hennepin venue that has been the nursery of local music talent for decades, that singularity will fall on Sunday, November 1, when the bar will woefully pull its plug.

But until then, they're going out with an old fashioned Irish wake, a hurrah of final shows that will do final justice to the bar that's housed so many for so long.

Head below the jump for info on the final shows, and for more adroit metaphors about death and resurrection.

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Some bands have all the luck. Some bands get to play floating wooden rafts, adrfit on the tempestuous Mississippi. Some bands get to perform out of the back of cargo vans at a half dozen venues in a single night. Some bands get to busk outside First Avenue to people on line to get into the Doomtree Blowout.

And some bands, like Gay Witch Abortion, get to do it all.

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Those Doomtree lads (and lasses) sure know how to stay busy.

After Cecil Otter performed at the Uptown Bar as part of the fabled venue's farewell run, Sims goes solo tonight at the Turf Club. Vocally, Sims is the Q-Tip of the Doomtree collective, the easy-breezy, rasped upper register rap that manages to be menacing and non-chalant in the same rhyme.

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Columbus brought smallpox to the New World. Enola Gay brought the A-bomb to Hiroshima. And The Toasters brought third wave ska to the United States.

In one of the great musical disasters of the 20th century, ska put trombones into the hands of jilted punks world wide. After a thriving first life in Jamaica and England as a legitimate musical art form, ska turned lemon when it hit the domestic shores, and became a fashion statement that, at the least, swapped grimy leathers out for a vest and fedora.

And tonight, The Toasters are playing the Triple Rock. Which means that attendees will do well to stretch out their skanking muscles which likely haven't been used in over a decade.

​Shortly after announcing a US tour that included a November 6 date at the Triple Rock with Free Energy, UK rockers the Rakes have announced that they are canceling their tour and disbanding. The following statement was posted on the band's website and sent out to press this afternoon:

As days of the week go, Wednesday isn't just the innocent whipping boy that Monday is. It's the cruel matron of the midweek, that loveless bastard one must fight through to get to Thursday and Friday's welcoming arms. There's rarely any shows, and drinking on a Wednesday just feels kinda obligatory.

Leave it to Leisure Birds, your knights in shining armor. Tonight, the Picked To Click'ers are bringing one hell of a local bill to the Turf Club in an attempt to turn Wednesday around.

[photo by Crackerfarm via Barsuk Records]

​News just came in that Mates of State would be performing at the inaugural installment of the WAMplified! at the Weisman Art Museum. WaMplified! is a late-night series that "presents a live performance by a band or musician with a thematic connection to the major exhibition in the galleries."

Included in the $22 ticket price ($18 for students and Weisman members) will be food, drink, a video game lounge, and a midnight tour of the exhibition led by curator Diane Mullin and artist Lisa Bradley. Fun, right? The event will be held December 12 and tickets go on sale today at 10:00 A.M.

Additionally, the Kansas-based duo recently released a digital edition of their Re-Arranged: Remixes Volume 1 EP (which was limited to 1000 copies when it was originally released on 12" vinyl). The EP can be purchased at the Barsuk store, but if you'd prefer to take a sample of the music first, here's the Mae-Shi's remix of "You Are Free."

Mates of State "You Are Free (The Mae Shi remix)" (mp3)

​From Barred For Life's Myspace page.

Are you one of the legions of Twin Cities hipster punks currently sporting the black bars? Perhaps a reformed straight edger that still finds solace in the iconic logo of Black Flag? Maybe just a graphic designer who found the logo irresistably simple and iconic?

Whatever your excuse is, if you've got the flag bars tatted on you anywhere (and we do mean anywhere), get yourself to the Triple Rock tonight. Barred For Life is a future book project about the proliferation of the classic punk tattoo. They've been on tour for three weeks, with one week to go, and tonight they'll be doing photo shoots and quick interviews tonight at the Triple Rock.

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Is it bad to admit that we were hyped? That we were scouring Ragstock to replace that Def Leppard shirt we left at an ex-girlfriend's house so many years ago? That we'd spent the last few weeks playing "Animal" on repeat, honing our one-armed air drumming to surgical precision?

Well, consider us crestfallen as all hell. After a death in a member's family (identity currently undisclosed), Def Leppard has canceled their November 6th show at Saint Paul's Xcel Energy Center.

Courtesy of the Uptown Bar

​It pains us to even post this, but Uptown Bar booking manager Brian McDonough has sent out the final list of shows slated to take place at the ill-fated club, running up until their last night of business on November 1. Stop in while you still can -- and if you're planning on catching one of the very last shows next weekend, you might want to consider pre-purchasing your tickets on the Uptown's website.

Here's the complete schedule of events:

Photo by Peter Yang

​Recent Columbia Records signees Motion City Soundtrack have announced a special hometown show at the Triple Rock Social Club on Halloween Eve, October 30. The group is touring in support of their new single "Disappear" (which is available on iTunes starting today) and will be drumming up interest for their forthcoming major label debut, My Dinosaur Life, by hosting a "Best Dinosaur Costume" contest at their Minneapolis show.

​Smiles, everyone! Mastodon.

Put Adult Swim's Dethklok beside real live rockers Mastodon, and let's run down the basic differences, shall we?

One is a cartoon. The other is, as far as we know, flesh and blood.

One is the ham-fisted satire of heavy metal's most tried and true tropes. The other is a logical extrapolation of those tropes to an absurd infinite.

But close your eyes, and you'll find what sonically separates the two is but the finest of musical hairs. And tonight, along with Converge and High On Fire, they'll be putting on a display that is as metal as mainstream American music gets this side of Anthrax in 1985 (pipe down, all you black metal fiends--I'm talking topside material).

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Ask Gene Simmons, and he'd tell you that rock and roll musicians do it for the money and the girls. Jaded, sure. But consider the source--Simmons has gone through more of both in his 30+ years in greasepaint than almost anyone before or after him.

But how would Simmons explain Grant Hart? A guy who's been playing rock and pop music since he was 13 years old? Who founded one of the most tumultuously successful local rock bands of his time, Husker Du? And who, after a tempestuous bout with heroin and the dissolution of his fabled band, was unable to wrest himself from the music that had been such a mercurial force in his life?

The answer? Simmons wouldn't. He'd just count a triple thousand stack and bang Shannon Tweed.

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Is it an act of absurd serendipity or an unholy union forged in cursed blood?

It was announced late yesterday--Metallagher, the local Metallica-cover band featuring a Gallagher-impersonating frontman, will be performing with the real live Gallagher (yes, he of the watermelon and the bad pun) on December 10 at Station 4.

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It's a given that a good art show needs a good space, and that the best art is often viewed in unexpected places. Just look at Banksy for proof--his work would be infinitely less engaging if it hung sanctioned in the Louvre than it does posted under cover of night on a public wall in London.

Which is why the ongoing art show, curated by Minnesota local art phenom Matt Bakkom, has such a buzz around it. The abandoned lot that once housed Shinders, the powerhouse of local magazine and comic shops, has been hosting an art show of local pros like Bakkom alongside lesser-knowns, like Cecilia Aldarondo and Morgan Adamson.

​Canadian twin sisters Tegan and Sara will play the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis on Wednesday, March 24. Though it may seem far off, fans will have a chance to purchase tickets to the show this week -- get your trigger fingers ready, because the pre-sale starts tomorrow at 10 a.m. (according to the T&S website, password is "Sainthood") with the public sale starting this Friday, October 16 at 10 a.m.

In the meantime, sample the single off their forthcoming record, Sainthood, below.

mp3: Tegan and Sara, "Hell"

​Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker will be taking on a new venture this winter, collaborating with dance choreographer Morgan Thorson for a small series of dates. According to the band's site, Thorson's new project, "Heaven," will feature vocal orchestration and music by Sparhawk and Parker. "Heaven examines the trinity of dance, music and light while exploring the various manifestations of ecstasy in religious practices and the ritualistic nature of dance," the website reads. Thorson was voted best choreographer in City Pages just last year.

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No one, not even GWAR's most hardened fans, would likely argue too loudly for their credentials as musicians. But as a spectacle, as an all out piece of choreographed mayhem that approaches high art, GWAR stands head and shoulders above the rest, as Gene Simmons eats his cold, black heart out with a spoon.