“It’s Christmas Eve, babe / In the drunk tank.” Find me a better opening to a holiday song than that.
I usually use this segment to pimp new stuff, but ’tis the season, etc. (plus the labels don’t release anything of major importance after the middle of November), so I present to you my all time favorite Christmas song. Have we mentioned lately how awesome Kirsty MacColl was, and how much we miss her? We should just rename this site iheartkirstymaccoll.com. ‘Cause we do. Big whole bunches.
Road Warriors 45
San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival is set for February 26 through March 2, and more artists have been confirmed for the event. New performers just announced are British Sea Power, Panther, Holy Fuck, Jeffery Lewis & The Jitters, Darker My Love, and Minipop. Other acts already confirmed include Magnetic Fields, The Mountain Goats, The Gutter Twins, Cursive, Blitzen, Trapper, Fu Manchu, Kelly Stoltz, and Saviours. For more information, please visit www.noisepop.com
London based four-piece rock band Switches are coming to the US for a tour after the New Year with NYC based synth rockers Bravery. Switches will be touring in advance of their album, Lay Down The Law, due out March 18 on Interscope. Here are the confirmed dates:
January
16 Boulder, CO – Fox Theatre
17 Denver, CO – Bluebird Theatre
18 Aspen, CO – Belly Up
19 Salt Lake City, UT – Club Sound (formerly Bricks)
22 Boise, ID – The Big Easy
23 Spokane, WA – The Big Easy Concert House
24 Vancouver, BC – Richard’s on Richards
25 Seattle, WA – Neumos Crystal Ball Reading Room
26 Portland, OR – Aladdin Theater
28 Sacramento, CA – The Boardwalk
29 Anaheim, CA – House of Blues
30 San Diego, CA – House of Blues
31 Las Vegas, NV – House of Blues
February
01 Tempe, AZ – The Clubhouse
02 Tucson, AZ – The Rock
05 Austin, TX – Emo’s
06 Dallas, TX – Granada Theatre
07 Houston, TX – Warehouse Live
08 Baton Rouge, LA – Varsity Theatre
09 Atlanta, GA – Roxy
12 Toronto, ONT – Opera House
13 Detroit, MI – Magic Stick
14 Cincinnati, OH – 20th Century Theatre
15 Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall
16 Cleveland, OH – Agora Ballroom
18 Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
19 Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
22 Philadelphia, PA – The Fillmore at TLA
Hellyeah, one of the most successful new rock bands, have just announced the second leg of their national headlining tour which they are calling Balls, Volume, Strength Tour. Machine Head, Nonpoint and Ankla will be supporting. Hellyeah’s self-titled album entered Billboard’s Top 200 at #9 earlier this year and has sold over 250,000 units. Here are the upcoming tour dates with more to be announced Continue reading »
After three years on major label Columbia Records, New York City based singer/songwriter Ari Hest is on his own again, and is embracing his independent status. Following an alarming trend of artists who feel the need to emancipate themselves from the major label machine to pursue more control and artistic freedom, Hest is launching a subscription based service on January 7 called “52.” The premise is that the prolific artist will deliver to his fans one new song per week with access to blogs, lyrics, interactive voting polls and more.
“After an amicable departure from my record label this summer, I decided it was time to try something a little different,” he said. “It feels great to be an independent artist again, and I’m more inspired than ever to write and record. ”
At the end of 2008, Hest will take the most popular songs from “52,” and record a new album with those tracks in 2009. There will be three levels to the subscription service, and fans can find out more by visiting Hest’s website at www.arihest.com
The former lead singer of Madness takes a stab at a song from the former lead singer of The Smiths. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s still a fun listen.
After tumbling down the remix rabbit hole in the mid to late ’80s, the unthinkable happened: the scene changed on me. By the early ’90s all hell was breaking loose in the clubs. House music pretty much wiped my favorite kinds of dance records off the map (mostly dance oriented rock, or DOR as they once called it). That, combined with my remix hero Shep Pettibone’s sudden retirement, left me in no man’s land. EMF producer Ralph Jezzard made some nifty mixes, but he didn’t make enough of them. I slowly stopped paying attention to remixes at that point.
Then one day my old DJ buddy Paul MacDonald sends me a dozen cassettes with assorted remixes and such on it. One of them was called Techno Mixes. Techno, at one point, meant New Order and Nitzer Ebb. By this point it meant Orgy and Moby. This new techno frightened and confused me, but I pressed on. Most of the tunes were pretty harmless, really. They stole lines from movies, TV shows, educational films, what have you, and surrounded them with shrieking synthesizers. There was a tune called “Sesame’s Treat” that amused me. “LSD is the Bomb” had a cool drum track, and someone even sampled the theme to “Halloween” for a song. Meh.
And then I heard “It’s Grim Up North,” and my jaw hit the floor.
Officially credited to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, “It’s Grim Up North” is the KLF in disguise (though not really in disguise). Released in late 1991, the band had made some inroads on the American charts earlier that summer, but “Grim” was playing a completely different sport than their Top Five hit “3 A.M. Eternal.” Those songs were bouncy: “It’s Grim Up North” was industrial grit, complete with screaming steam whistles. Bill Drummond’s lyrics are nothing but lists of cities in northern England (you can find a list on the song’s Wikipedia page), spoken in bleak monotone. And then, after pummeling and pounding the listener for eight minutes, the drums give way to the hymn “Jerusalem,” steam whistles still screaming in the background. Hell, yes.
The song didn’t convert me to the then-new techno scene, but it did serve as one hell of a last hurrah to my golden age of dance. “Sesame’s Treat,” on the other hand, hasn’t held up so well.
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