UK's Sharks celebrate "The Joys of Living 2008-2010

England’s Sharks bring “The Joys of Living” to the US

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 27, 2011
By MATT ASHARE

“It’s very sarcastic, isn’t it, punk?," says Sharks singer James Matlock

It’s Saturday evening in the British Midlands town of Coventry and James Matlock, the 20-year-old frontman of Sharks, is in good spirits — “Out and about,” as he puts it when he answers his cell phone. He has reason to be happy. Less than a month ago, Rise released The Joys Of Living 2008-2010, the young punk foursome’s full-length debut (it compiles 14 tracks from two limited-edition, self-released EPs plus a couple singles).
     Prior to that, Alternative Press featured Sharks in its “100 Bands You Need to Know in 2011.” And, in less than 24 hours, Matlock and his bandmates — guitarist Andy Bayliss, bassist Cris O’Reilly and drummer Samuel Lister — are headed to the U.S., where they’ll begin their first American tour with a monthlong stint opening for Social Distortion. (They’ll be at the NorVa in Norfolk on May 17 and the National in Richmond the following night.)
     To judge from sentiments expressed in his lyrics, Matlock may also be more than a little relieved to have found a ticket out of Coventry. “How pathetic this must sound/To a hope of finally getting out/To someone who doesn’t even know/He’s bored of this town,” he screams a cappella into a dark void at the start of “Trains,” a sneering Clash city rocker that takes a vividly poetic turn on the refrain “Another night arrives/Slice open your eyes/Dream between the lines.” Matlock’s “bored” again in the serrated sing-along “Three Houses,” which coalesces around an insolent yet romantic chorus of “Travels underground make time for other things/including dust settling shackles to be broken free.” And in the pounding “Glove In Hand,” a sly homage to the Smiths (and their song “Hand In Glove”), Matlock growls “I can’t believe I’m jailed in neighborhood/I can’t believe I lived to stomach it” before an atmospheric and dreamy break in the guitar distortion opens and he intones, “I engage to take on every passing day with true hate.”
     “I’ve always lived around here,” says Matlock, who started Sharks with Bayliss when the two were in high school. “When I was growing up I was with different parts of my family. My parents left and I was in Coventry with my grandparents. That was a little rough and emotionally confusing. But really the town I live in is nice. It’s just a bit dull. There’s nothing to do. Boredom is the main incentive behind the band. If we weren’t in a band I have no idea what I’d be doing.”
     Punk’s been a potent outlet for teen angst for at least three decades, and Matlock was a quick study. “I can’t name any punk bands who were active when we got started, apart from the British bands who are still going from back in the day,” he admits. “I got into it from digging up old records. It was more of an American thing that I discovered from bands like Green Day and Rancid. Then I dug deeper and found their influences and I got my head around the history of the big punk family tree.”
     The Joys of Living is more than the sum of those borrowed parts. There’s precocious promise reflected in the philosophical premise of the disc’s title track, the wistful tenor of “More Blue,” and the sardonic humor of “The Light At the End of the Tunnel Is Hell.”
As Matlock concludes, “It’s very sarcastic, isn’t it, punk? It’s satirical. A lot of our lyrics are quite dark, but we don’t want to take it too seriously. After all, we’re just a band, aren’t we?” http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/englands_sharks_bring_the_joys_of_living_to_the_us
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix.

TV On the Radio Lose Gerard Smith to Lung Cancer

TV ON THE RADIO'S GERARD SMITH LOSES BATTLE WITH CANCER 
April 23, 2011

I wish I had something profound to say right now, but I'm just at a loss. Nine Types of Light, the new album by the Brooklyn band TV On the Radio has been in heavy rotation on my playlist for weeks now. I wrote about and have been foisting it on friends, acquaintances, and, well, anyone who will listen ever since. First saw the band at the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago a few years ago, playing a late-night party that I won't soon forgot. Wrote about their great 2006 album Return To Cookie Mountain and it's still a favorite, as is their 2008 disc Dear Science. 
     I knew Gerard Smith, a multi-instrumentalist in the band, had been battling cancer. But I was not expecting to wake up this morning to discover that he has passed on. There's a tersely worded statement on the the TVOTR website (http://www.tvontheradio.com/splash/) — "We are very sad to announce the death of our beloved friend and bandmate, Gerard Smith, following a courageous fight against lung cancer. Gerard passed away the morning of April 20th, 2011. We will miss him terribly." (Apparently, I'm not the only one at a loss for words.) It's just really unfortunate and, while I never had the opportunity to meet Smith, I am saddened by the news. 

There is a full-length video movie of Night Types of Light that you can watch right here:

And back in 2006, I had this to say about Return To Cookie Mountain:

TV on the Radio

Return To Cookie Mountain | Interscope

By MATT ASHARE  |  October 10, 2006

TV ON THE RADIO, RETURN TO COOKIE MOUNTAIN" alt="photo of 'TV ON THE RADIO, RETURN TO COOKIE MOUNTAIN'">

 3.5 Stars

KINKY: If it weren’t on Interscope, Return to Cookie Mountain would probably be the indie album of the year.

Fearful that a major-label deal has ironed the kinks out of this Brooklyn-based collective? Not to worry. Singer Tunde Adebimpe and multi-instrumental partner David Andrew Sitek have used the extra cash to refine their electro-organic complexity and take their electro-punk to a new level of sophistication. The core band add visceral live drums to the programmed beats, deep-bottomed bass to the grooves, and everything from flute and cello to an already eclectic soundscape that changes texture without warning, moving from soulful to sad, ominous to angry, and discordant to dreamy. Adebimpe has a voice as malleable as Sitek’s sonic palette, and he’s as comfortable delivering his impressionistic lyrics in a deep, haunted croon that often brings to mind Peter Gabriel as he is layering falsetto harmonies with an almost choirlike effect. Indeed, when David Bowie’s voice first emerges on the duet “Province,” it’s easy enough to mistake it for just another of Adebimpe’s many guises. If it weren’t on Interscope, Return to Cookie Mountain would probably be the indie album of the year. Experimental without sacrificing anything in terms of hooks or melody, passionate yet never overbearing, and clever without giving in to the urge to indulge, it places TV on the Radio on a plane with no peers. There’s so much to take in that the lyrics might not resonate immediately. “I was a lover before this war” is all Adebimpe says in “I Was a Lover”; the rest of the song’s anti-war sentiment is written into his tone.

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/24496-tv-on-the-radio-return-to-cookie-mountain/#ixzz1KMB3moh2

Bobby Dylan at Brandeis: 1963

Music review: Pre- “Freewheelin’“ Bob Dylan “In Concert” at Brandeis

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 20, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

The release this week of “Bob Dylan In Concert: Brandeis University 1963” might very well be a mere footnote in the context of Sony/Legacy’s ambitious and ongoing campaign to reissue remasters of the entire Dylan catalogue. Recorded at Brandeis University’s First Annual Folk Festival in May of ’63 — just two weeks before “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” elevated the 21-year-old singer/songwriter to prophet-like status — the recently discovered tape looks like meager fare next to the expansive “Bootleg Series” collections, which hit “Volume 9” last October with the arrival of the two-disc, 47-track “The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964.“
     There are just seven songs here; that includes the two minutes of an incomplete “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance” that starts the set. No “Blowin’ In the Wind.“ No “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.“ No “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.“ But, as Dylan scholar Michael Gray puts it in the liner notes, “This is last live performance we have of Bob Dylan before he becomes a star.“
     Gray may be understating his case: “Freewheelin’“ didn’t just make Dylan a “star,“ it began the rapid process of enshrining Dylan as an icon of the ’60s protest movement, a mantle he bristled under, profited from, and eventually disavowed. As Dylan notoriously wrote in his 2004 memoir “Chronicles, Volume One,“ “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.“
     I’m not so sure about that. But in light of the recent criticism Dylan’s been subjected to for taking what Greil Marcus has dubbed his “Never Ending Tour” to China for two dates earlier this month, the “Brandeis” recording suggests we should consider cutting the dude some slack. Even if Dylan’s embrace of the burgeoning neo-folk scene of the early-’60s was opportunistic, he played his chosen role awfully well.
     In his “Brandeis” performance of “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,“ for example, he strikes the right tone of bemused innocence to satirizes the rabid American anti-communism of the era. “Following some clues from my detective bag/I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag,“ he sings with a knowing wink before delivering one of several well-timed punch lines, “Oh, Betsy Ross. . .“ Nobody ever did Lenny Bruce as folk troubadour better than that.
     Dylan registers a more somber tone for “Ballad of Hollis Brown,“ a seven-plus minute dustbowl murder ballad that would later turn up on 1964’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.“
It stands as a timely reminder that the young Dylan was more than just a “protest singer.“ Then again, there’s something eerily and devastatingly prescient about “Masters of War,“ an anti-military salvo delivered with chilling defiance here, over a year before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution marked the official start of the war in Vietnam.
     Regardless of his intentions, in ’63 Dylan was in the midst of perhaps unwittingly penning songs that would inspire, embolden, and even embody the anti-war and civil rights movements that would go on to define the decade. Indeed, a big part of what makes the “Brandeis” set such a compelling document is the sense you get that the audience, and maybe even Dylan himself, can already feel that the times are a-changin’. Given the continued power of his presence, one can at least hope that Dylan’s performances in China, whatever the motivation, might have a similar impact. As “Brandeis” intimates, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix.http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_pre-_freewheelin_bob_dylan_in_concert_at_brandeis

You Bette I did. . .

	BETTE MIDLER OLD SCHOOL RULES
	BOOGIE WOOGIE BETTE: the Suicide Girls don't have anything on Ms. Midler. Getting me to commit to a Bette Midler show wasn’t all that easy — just ask my mom. She had wanted me to take her to Midler’s first swing through the FleetCenter a couple months back, but I was out of town (that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it). So I really had no choice when Bette made her triumphant return to the Fleet this past Monday. It’s one of the lesser-known commandments: thou shalt take thy Jewish mother to see Bette Midler if the opportunity presenteth itself. And presenteth it did.      So, yeah, Midler’s not exactly my cup of tea. When she pours it on, you can generally count on an audience that skews a little older, as in people who applaud at the mere mention of Rosemary Clooney’s name, and a lot female, as in large roving bands of women, and gay, as in smartly dressed young men who really ought to have the right to marry. After all, it’s not as if heterosexuals had been doing such a great job in that department. But I digress . . .      Of course, Midler does a fair amount of digressing herself. And that’s actually one of the best things about seeing her perform. Never mind the big, booming voice that’s always comfortably and confidently on key, — her singing is often incidental to what she does when she gets in front of an audience. She’s an old-school entertainer, as in lots and lots of topical stage banter, plenty of punch lines, and a quick costume change every 15 or 20 minutes. She was also quite a bit racier than I’d expected, dropping more f-bombs than Axl Rose the last time I saw him at the Fleet, and almost as many as Ozzy Osbourne. And as she herself pointed out right before her band kicked "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B" into high gear, "I opened the door for trashy singers with big tits." Which is another way of saying that a fair degree of burlesque fuels any Bette Midler show. She even had a trio of big-bottomed dancing girls along to drive that point home. The Suicide Girls don’t have anything on Bette.      On a stage set up to look a little like Coney Island back in the day, Midler arrived by descending slowly astride a carousel pony, whereupon she indulged in a some playful double entendre singing/slinging ("Check out my chassis") that ended with a rousing "Kiss my (gr)ass." The backing band swung hard enough to teach the Royal Crown Revue and Squirrel Nut Zippers a lesson or two. And before the first round of applause had died down, she was off and running with the first of many monologues: "Just between us, I’m not sure I could run the world, but I sure wouldn’t fuck it up as bad as the men who are running it now." Bad-dum-bah. Ballads and more banter followed. And even a serious number or two. But mostly it was just Bette being Bette in front of crowd happy to revel in all that is Bette. And for one night, that included me. BY MATT ASHARE
	Issue Date: March 19 - 25, 2004

Foo Fighters "Wasting Light"

Music review: Foo Fighters Move Forward with Wasting Light

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 13, 2011
By Matt Ashare
Is it finally time to stop referring to Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl as that guy who played drums in Nirvana? Sure, his powerhouse backbeats were integral to the explosive drive of 1991’s landmark Nevermind — you might say, Grohl put the hard in Kurt Cobain’s rock.
But that was 20 years ago. And it’s not like he’s been even the least bit idle since Cobain’s 1994 suicide: The Foos emerged as a fully-formed modern-rock entity in the spring of ‘95 and, with the release of Wasting Light this week, they’ve now got seven studio albums to their credit. Indeed, given the number of lineup changes the Foos have endured, they’ve shown a remarkable consistency, artistically and commercially, over the past decade and a half. (Unless you count the acoustic side of 2005’s 2-CD In Your Honor as some kind of major deviation, which I don’t.)
     And in his spare time, Grohl has found time to team up with guitarist Josh Homme, returning to the drums for Queens of the Stone Age’s metal epic “Songs for the Deaf” in 2001 and then partnering with Homme and former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones as Them Crooked Vultures. (The super-trio’s self-titled debut came out in 2009 and they’ve reportedly got another one on the way.)
     Wasting Light is already being hailed by some — Rolling Stone comes to mind — as the best FF disc since The Colour and the Shape (1997), and it very well might be. But it’s definitely not simply a return to the form of that disc — to the tightly wound pop-punk of “Monkey Wrench” or the brooding power-balladry of “My Hero.” That much is apparent from the muscular guitar riff that introduces the disc’s first single, “Rope”: It certainly owes more to the retro-alloys Homme mines in Queens of the Stone Age than anything Grohl’s done on his own before, and probably more still to the “Black Dog” wizardry of John Paul Jones. There’s even a drum solo refrain leading into an heroic guitar solo that’s just so early-’70s arena rawk, if you know what I mean.
     Grohl hasn’t completely gone over to the dark side. No, he’s simply put together what stands as the Foos’ most musically ambitious album to date, an amalgam of grunge, punk, metal and power-pop that’s never too fractious. “Rope,” for example, wouldn’t be a single if it weren’t for its sugary — yet never quite syrupy — chorus, which builds to a nice melodic climax before those serrated guitars return.
     Unrequited love mixes with ambivalence, bitterness even, in “Dear Rosemary,” a kiss-off of sorts bolstered by a wall of anthemic guitars and the kind of clever-enough refrain (“Truth ain’t gonna change the way lie/Youth ain’t gonna change the way you die”) that’s been Grohl’s stock-in-trade since the first FF disc.  But “White Limo,” with its screamed vocals and dark, churning guitars is twisted metal through and through. It really wouldn’t seem out of place on one of Homme’s Queens discs.
     And, yet, the ghosts of Nirvanas past can’t help but haunt Wasting Light. Not only did Grohl bring Butch Vig, the engineer who helped mastermind the alt-rock breakthrough of Nevermind, back to produce the disc, but Nirvana adjunct guitarist (and former Foo Fighter) Pat Smear has rejoined the band. As if that weren’t enough to make the connection, that’s Kirst Novoselic’s anchoring the angst of the wistful “I Should Have Known,” which rises to a screaming crescendo with Grohl repeating the pained, “No, I cannot forgive you yet…” He may be talking about Kurt, but I kinda doubt it. . .
Ashare is a freelance writer based in Lynchburg and former music editor for The Boston Phoenix.

TV On the Radio's Nine Types of Light

TV On the Radio Get Romantic on “Nine Types of Light”

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 06, 2011
By Matt Ashare
TV On the Radio may just be the best American band you’ve never heard of. Or not.
After all, the Brooklyn band’s last album, 2008’s “Dear Science,” led critics on such a desperate grasp for superlatives that the disc wound up at the very top of year-end lists in Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, and The Guardian. Even the wiseacres at The Onion and the snarky kids at Pitchfork had to agree.
     Perhaps TVOTR’s landslide 2008 “victory” was something of a belated prize for a masterfully mercurial musical entity who’d shape-shifted their way through the art-schooled, new-wavy experiments of 2003’s “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” before scaling to very nearly uncharted electro-organic terrain three years later on the unsettlingly gorgeous “Return to Cookie Mountain.” (A huge collective sigh of relief: America has found an answer to Radiohead, or something like that.) But “Dear Science,” with its seamless, yet expansive conflations of pixelated programming, oblique beats, skewed-soul, Eno-esque atmospherics, and slanted guitar riffs — not to mention the horn and string section embellishments — really was that good. It was remarkably easy listening from a willfully difficult band; it was The Future of Music, or at least one very compelling blueprint for The Future of Rock.
     All of which has created quite a bit of anticipation among those in the know for TVOTR’s forthcoming “Nine Types of Light” (out this Tuesday, April 12). That may explain why the band alighted from Brooklyn to record the new disc in LA. No worries, though: TVOTR apparently eschewed fun-in-the-sun Cali and spent the better part of an introspective month toiling away in resident producer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek’s left coast home studio exploring the various facets of unrequited love. In fact, “Nine Types of Light” might just as easily have been titled “Seven Shades of Blue,” such is the dominant tone of the album.
That’s not to suggest that “Light” is a total downer. The disc opens with deep-voiced Tunde Adembipe casually confiding, “Confidence and ignorance approve me/Define my day, today/I’ve tried so hard to shut it down, lock up, and walk away …” against the sparsest of backdrops (droning strings, a skittering beat, a humming synth tone).
     Adembipe’s internal monologue eventually takes a turn for the defiantly romantic (“While you define/Your heartless time/I’ll defend my love forever …”), but not before surging guitars bring him damn close to transcendence (“And then the light shines/It’s gleaming like a bottle/And love knows I’ll tackle it full throttle/May I illuminate the nameless face of saints of these odd and open graves?”) and Kyp Malone’s insistent falsetto brings “Second Song” to a soulful crescendo.
     And then Adembipe really shows his hand on the disc’s first single, the thumping, measured, melodic “Will Do,” crooning in a voice that brings to mind a young Peter Gabriel: “It might be impractical to seek out a new romance/We won’t know the actual if we never take the chance/I’d love to collapse with you and ease you against this song/I think we’re compatible/I see that you think I’m wrong.”
     TVOTR, who play the Jefferson Theatre in Charlottesville this Saturday, are ultimately too excitable to get mired in melancholy. The no-wave, funked-up “No Future Shock” is a furious dance-punk workout; drummer Jallel Bunton’s stuttering beat invents what might be called “skip-hop” on the deep, throbbing, horn-laced “New Cannonball Blues” and “Caffeinated Consciousness” closes out the disc with some serious riff-rocking accentuated by a dreamy, optimistic refrain.
     To say TVOTR are hard to pin down would be an exercise in serious understatement. But it’s no overstatement to suggest TVOTR remain the best — or at very least the most interesting — American band you ought to hear.
Ashare is a freelance writer based in Lynchburg and former music editor for The Boston Phoenix  http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/24496-tv-on-the-radio-return-to-cookie-mountain/
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/tv_on_the_radio_get_romantic_on_nine_types_of_light 

Randolph College Visiting Writer Series Features Anthony D'Aries Feb. 2

Randolph College: Randolph College Visiting Writer Series Features Anthony D'Aries Feb. 2