Okkervil River. . . Pretension is in. Being a fucking idiot is, apparently , out. . .

 Music review: Okkervil River deliver an indie magnum opus

Okkervill River, I Am Very Far (Jagjaguar)
The Burg Staff on May. 11, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Rock songs that deal with the trials and tribulations of being in a rock band are a tricky business. I mean, do we really need any more songs about how hard life on the road is? And does anyone who works a 9-to-5 job really care that getting paid to play can have an adverse effect on the artistic temperament? Then again, we tend to have a certain fascination with the human trainwrecks who populate “reality” TV franchises like MTV’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and the rise/fall/redemption storylines that kept VH-1’s “Behind the Music” in business for so many years.
     Will Sheff, the main brain behind the Austin-based band Okkervil River, expertly tapped into the allure of the troubled artist on 2005’s “Black Sheep Boy,” an album loosely based on ’60s folk singer Tim Harden’s struggles with heroin addiction — a battle he finally lost when he overdosed in 1980.
     Sheff’s way with words, his storyteller’s eye for detail, and his moody demeanor all helped elevate him to a top spot among indie rock’s literati (see Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, and Win Butler of the Arcade Fire). And “Black Sheep Boy” not only inspired a sequel — the 2005 EP “Black Sheep Boy Appendix” — it also led Sheff to mine the lives of other tragically flawed artists, including the poet John Berryman (suicide, 1972) in “John Allyn Smith Sails,” and an obscure, probably schizophrenic glam-rocker Jobriath (AIDS, 1983) in “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Hotel Chelsea, 1979” (both from the 2007 disc “The Stand Ins”).
     So, yeah, it would be entirely fair to say that Sheff has rarely, if ever, shown any fear in the face of pretension. And he’s never wavered from the grand gesture, a tendency he exploits to its fullest on Okkervil River’s new “I Am Very Far.” (BTW: the band’s named for a short story by the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstoya.)
    There’s no overarching theme or concept uniting the 11 tracks on “I Am Very Far,” unless you count Sheff’s unwaveringly grim worldview. A dark shadow lies over the thump of “The Valley,” a wordy epic that finds a characteristically poetic Sheff watching “The sun switching in the sky off and on/While a friend stands bleeding on a late summer lawn/A slicked back bloody black gun shot to the head/He has fallen in the valley of the rock and roll dead.”
     For someone who’s always seemed more than a little suspicious of music industry machinations, Sheff’s got Okkervil River sounding suspiciously like Grammy winners the Arcade Fire on the neo-new wave “Pirates,” where he cryptically croons about “a murderess/Moved by writing a song/We agreed that it was wrong/And to believe in it,” and even more so on the urgent, orchestral “Rider,” a track filled with apocalyptic visions like “Over the ruins like we’re staggering apes/What we get is what we take/In a split open place where a man can get kinged/In a palace of panic and flames.”
     Sheff, who produced the disc, even does Win Butler’s two-drummers trick one better: “Rider” and the plaintively pounding “Wake and Be Fine” are fully stocked with two pianists, two bassists, seven guitarists, and, yes, two drummers.
     For all its arty extravagances — along with tympani, tuba, and bassoon, Sheff employs the found sounds of crashing cabinets, unreeling duct tape, and, on “Pirates,” a fast-forwarding cassette tape — “I Am Very Far” manages to stay within the bounds of indie-rock accessibility a la the aforementioned Arcade Fire and Decemberists. If that means Sheff may soon be dealing with some of the same pressures that ultimately undermined Tim Harden’s career, at least it’s a subject he’s studied well. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_okkervil_river_deliver_an_indie_magnum_opus
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg who teaches journalism at Randolph College, is the former music editor for the Boston Phoenix, the former reviews editor for CJJ New Music Monthly, and a fan of music of other cultural emissions.

Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

Music review: Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

By The Burg Staff on May. 04, 2011
By Matt Ashare

The career length for most rappers isn’t much longer than the wingspan of your average hummingbird. It’s not just that hip-hop tends to be a young man’s game: it’s that the biggest emcees begin diversifying their portfolios early on, moving into film and TV like Ice T and Ice Cube, opening restaurants and creating clothing lines like Diddy. Before too long, rapping becomes a secondary or even tertiary concern.
     Given hip-hop’s penchant for bravado, and the ginormous egos it tends to breed, the odds a rap duo or group will stay intact for more than a couple of Congressional terms are even slimmer. So even if you ignore all of their accomplishments — and up to the release this week of the new “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” there have been many — the mere fact that Beastie Boys, a trio who stumbled into hip-hop almost three decades ago after cutting their teeth in NYC’s punk scene, are still a functioning musical unit goes beyond mere anomaly. That they’ve managed to remain relevant since the first bratty stirrings of the now classic 1983 single “Cookie Puss” is just plain freaky.
     Of course, I’ve got my theories. (After all, that’s what I’m here for, right?) Maybe they’ve just been super lucky. But Beastie Boys have scored a veritable hat-trick when it’s come to capturing cultural zeitgeist in a bottle. With their 1986 chart-topper “Licensed to Ill” they joined Run DMC in finding that sweet spot between rap and hard rock that brought hip-hop its first mainstream success. Then, on its follow-up, 1989’s “Paul’s Boutique,” they hooked up with future Beck producers the Dust Brothers, and found themselves on the cutting edge of pomo sampling collage, a kind of hip-hop-meets-musique concrete aesthetic that presaged contemporary electronica. Almost 10 years later, rather than just holding steady, they took another major left-hand turn, jettisoning samples for straight up old-school-style hip-hoppery with muscular Mix Master Mike working two vinyl turntables while Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock deployed their rhyming skills. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the hip-hop DJ — all but an anachronism when “Hello Nasty” hit the racks in 1998 — and the art of turntablism was undergoing a major revival in the capable hands of masters like DJ Shadow.
     That’s not luck — it’s what I’d call “good taste” coupled with a genuine passion for the genre. Beastie Boys have always been into hip-hop more as style — a mode of expression, if you’ll excuse my pretension — than lifestyle. That’s one reason the Beasties never played much of a role in rap’s notorious East Coast/West Coast rivalry and you just never hear about any of them pulling an Eminem and getting arrested for guns or drugs. Not saying they’re choir boys, but the Beasties earned their stripes in the studio, not on the streets.
     Still, when the trio returned to their original positions (bass, drums, and guitar for MCA, Mike D, and Ad-Rock respectively) on 2007’s “The Mix-Up,” an all-instrumental romp through everything from fatback funk to noisy punk, I thought they were done with hip-hop — that they were ready to ride out their career emceeing larger concerns from the wings of their Tibetan Freedom Concerts. I was wrong. There may be extra-hip-hop excursions on “Hot Sauce,” but the Beasties are fully back to rapping in 2011. “Yes here we go again give you more nothing lesser/Back on the mic it’s the anti-depressor,” boasts Ad-Rock in his now vintage whine (it’s still a bratty varietal) on the disc’s opener, “Make Some Noise,” a wah-wah-organ funk-fueled affair that finds Mike D unabashedly repeating the hook from the Beastie classic “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” and Ad-Rock happily dating himself by referencing Ted Danson and dropping this giddy rhyme: “Leggo my Eggo while I flex my ego/Sip on prosecco dressed up in a tuxedo.”
     Too soon to tell whether the Beasties have again captured the zeitgeist. But the self-consciously stripped-down, lo-fi production of “Hot Sauce” suggests the Boys have been getting down with the underground — what the kids call indie-hip-hop. And the anything-goes infectiousness with which they incorporate everything from live instrumentation (metallic guitars), sci-fi samples, and DJ scratching on a track like “Say It,” along with the fearlessness with which they delve into reggae with guest singer Santigold on “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” return to punk-rocking out on “Lee Majors Come Again,” and indulge in some sensual instrumental dub on “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament,” may just portend the arrival of the global genre-hopping hip-hop band.
     Of course, as long as the Beasties are still with us, keeping their ears to the ground and their wordifying mouths on overdrive, we’ve got at least one trio who are practicing masters of the form. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_beastie_boys_bring_back_the_rap_on_hot_sauce_committee_pa
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix

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.