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August 17, 2006
If this is the party at the end of the world, then sign me up.
I love Muse and and here's why. You can see the official version of this review at http://www.junkmedia.org.
In certain circles, saying you're a Muse fan is about as acceptable as admitting you like Styx. While bands like the Mars Volta get props for making prog cool again, Muse has been unfairly pegged as Radiohead wannabees since releasing their first album Showbiz in 1999. Maybe there was a brief interval where Matt Bellamy's keening falsetto and dramatic musical mood shifts could be compared to Thom Yorke & Co., but Muse have spent the past seven years shaping their own identity as a ferocious riff-oriented rock band with classical overtones and apocalyptic themes that's taken them far away from Radiohead's more cerebral electronic approach. With their latest CD Black Holes and Revelations Muse has steered the way back machine even further into the proggy depths and produced a work that says yes to every over-the-top musical notion the band could dream up. Jeff Lynne/ELO-like walls of violins? Check. Queen style choruses? Yep. Mexican mariachi trumpets? Why not? Conspiracy theories about government/extraterrestrial collaborations? You betcha. Spacey danceable funk to rival Prince? Sure. It sounds like it should be a mess, but damned if it doesn't work because Muse has the chops and self-belief to pull it off.
In order to understand Muse's appeal you need to know what they're not. They're not punk. They're not emo. They're not folk or neo-folk or twee or even three chords with a four/four beat. They're old fashioned rock in the Wayne and Garth spazzing in the car to "Bohemian Rhapsody" sense and half the fun of being a Muse fan is allowing yourself to bask in their virtuosic musical excess. I defy you to stand in front of Matt Bellamy, watch him recreate the bone-crunching, head-banging riffs in "Stockholm Syndrome" and not scream yourself hoarse singing, "Forget you? I wish I could!" And what could be more cathartic than belting, "This is the end of the wooooooooorld" in a sweaty club during "Apocolypse Please" three days after the disastrous 2004 presidential election?
Muse is massively popular in Europe, headlining festivals and selling out multiple nights at arenas like Earls Court in London, but here in the States, due to little radio or video exposure, their fan base has been slower to build. That means those savvy enough to seek out music through the internet or other sources have been privy to seeing the band in the kind of venues that make our European friends weep with envy. On their last trip through Massachusetts, Muse sold out the 2000 capacity club Avalon in Boston in November of 2004 but filled not even half of the 4000 seat Curry Hicks Cage at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for the MTV Invasion tour in spring, 2005. This time around they played the 5000 seat Bank of America Pavilion in Boston. While there were a number of empty seats, the majority of those in attendance seemed like hardcore fans, singing and fist pumping to every song, with new tunes like "Supermassive Black Hole" and "Starlight" receiving as much enthusiasm as old favorites like "Time is Running Out" and "Hysteria."
The stage setup was as stark and white as a spaceship. Dom Howard's drum kit was transparent, with only its silver rims and brass cymbals visible. Three clear plastic tubes, perhaps thirty feet tall and ringed with spirals, stood at the back of the stage like giant vertical hamster tunnels. Before the show we speculated whether Bellamy, Howard, and bassist Chris Wolstenholme would ascend through holes in the stage into the tubes, Spinal Tap fashion. (They didn't.) The visuals consisted of freaky skeletal images and geometric black shapes projected onto three large screens behind the band. One of the video camera operators told me in the photo pit before the show that every onstage light doubled as a projector and the images from his and the other video camera were fed into them and manipulated by the lighting director. One very cool result was Bellamy's image projected onto the back of the piano as he sat playing stage right during "Sunburn."
The show opened with "Map of the Problematique" from Black Holes and Revelations and then kicked it up ten notches with "Hysteria" from 2003's Absolution. Anyone who wasn't already drenched in sweat from the 100 plus degree temperatures (one of the hottest days on record in Boston) could not help but be reduced to a puddle. The next song – "Supermassive Black Hole" received a huge roar of recognition, despite being the single only in Europe. The crowd even sang to the three songs played from 2001's Origin of Symmetry ("Bliss," "New Born," and "Plug in Baby,") which was never released in the States. The pace and energy level never let up and even though the band played for an all too brief 75 minutes, no one went home disappointed.
Muse's songs are fierce. Even the ballads grip you by whichever set of privates you possess and apply pressure. The band's m.o. is to build tension relentlessly and not release it until your irises have disappeared and you've lost control of your ability to swallow. It's glorious agony, but not for the weak.
The new songs, so production heavy on the album, all translated flawlessly to a live setting. "Starlight," which is a bit too polished and MOR for my tastes on the CD, had more guts live. "Take a Bow" was epic and "Knights of Cydonia" was so deeply prog-erific it bordered on Close to the Edge territory. If you think Muse take themselves too seriously you need only to watch the video for "Knights" (Low bandwidth or High bandwidth) which simultaneously parodies spaghetti Westerns and Sci-fi and kung fu movies, as well as takes the piss out of the band's so-called pretensions.
Muse is off to Europe for a run of festival dates for the rest of the summer and then back in the States for a few select shows in September. Catch them now while they're still playing theaters. They're a guilt-free pleasure. And so much better than Styx.
Posted by Laura at 05:23 AM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2006
Winterpills
Here's an interview I just did for http://www.junkmedia.org with Philip from the sublime Winterpills.
Sure it's the middle of a globally warm summer, but what better time to chill out with the Winterpills? The Northampton, Massachusetts group combines Elliot Smith-like melodic sensibility with Simon and Garfunkel-esque harmonies to create a lush world of lo-fi heartbreak. We caught up with frontman Philip Price by phone as he and bandmates Flora Reed, Dennis Crommett, Dave Hower, and Jose Ayerve navigated rural Pennsylvania in support of their self-titled debut on Signature Sounds.
Junkmedia: What are the best and worst things about touring?
Philip Price: The best things are pretty much what you'd imagine which is just getting out in the world, getting out of your little safety zone and making new fans. The worst things are pretty much what you'd imagine too. (Laughs.) Long drives, the stress of travel, being away from home. I'm really lucky in that Flora is here with me because she's in the band, but not everybody can bring their partners along with them.
It doesn't get stressful being in a band with your significant other?
It hasn't yet. It's been great actually. I suppose in theory it sounds like if you live together and work together and do everything together that eventually you're going to drive each other nuts, but when we're back on land, she has her day job and I've got what I do, and we're apart all day. It's not like we're in the same house together all the time.
What kinds of things are you listening to in the van?
Well, I think you better not put this in the article but… No I won't tell you what we just listened to.
Oh come on. Tell me.
Well we did just listen to a little Grateful Dead, but no one here is a deadhead.
(Laughs.)
None of us listen to the Dead except for one album but we just happened to put that album on. You busted us.
Everybody's got their guilty pleasures.
We have this problem right now where we're in a rental van that we can't play our iPods through so we're listening to a smattering of CD's. It's not really representative of what we'd be listening to with our million gigabytes of music on our iPods.
What else have you been listening to?
Let me look… The Books, Cat Power, the New Flaming Lips album, Jose Gonzalez. (Calls to rest of band) "Everyone yell out one thing you've been listening to lately." Dave says "Bob Marley." Flora says "Link Wray." Dave says the new LL Cool J sucks, but I guess he's been listening to it. Kings of Convenience. Jose says Sonic Youth Sonic Nurse. Magnetic Fields. Dennis has been listening to himself a lot.
That's always dangerous.
It's fun. I go through periods where all I listen to is my own music.
Really?
Well if I'm trying to figure something out about it. I'll listen to it for a day and go, "is this any good at all?" Then I go, "Well I guess it's all right" and I listen to something else.
I'm not a musician, but with my writing, once something's published I can't look at it.
I understand that too. Songs that like demos, I'll listen to endlessly as I'm working on them but once the finished product is out… like today because we hadn't had a chance to rehearse in a couple of weeks we played the Winterpills album so that Jose could click on his bass track and I was listening to it while sort of dozing and all I could think of was "God, this sucks." But you never know, sometimes I'll hear one of our songs on the radio and for some reason my brain hears the one in a different spot so I don't recognize it as a Winterpills song. It sounds like someone else completely and it always catches my ear and I'll go "That's really good and familiar. And then I go "oh my god, it's us!" I get a little temporary distance from the song. I get to hear it the way the rest of the world might hear it. At least the rest of the world if it were me but not having written any songs.
So does that make you think about how people listen to your music?
I hope other people have that reaction.
I was coming home from Mexico a couple of months ago and it was one of those days where you wake up after three hours of sleep and you have to travel for fourteen hours and you're on a plane forever. I was really wired, tired, and restless and I put on the Winterpills on my iPod and it was the perfect music at that moment. It completely chilled me out and took me out of my irritation.
So it has therapeutic qualities. Well, who knew? That makes me feel pretty good. Thanks for telling me that. Now we've got to think about the next one.
Are you writing?
There are songs that were already written when this album was made that we didn't record that are waiting for us. We've been playing them. We play about five or six songs that aren't on the album that will definitely go on the next album, so that's half an album right there. I have a lot of new stuff; we just have to decide whether we want to do Winterpills versions of them.
Was there one time in your life when you decided you were going to be a musician?
Yeah, it was 1992. I'd been doing music for a while but I decided I wanted to try and make a commercial go of it. It was after I had had a period of deciding whether I wanted to be a screenwriter or a musician. Then I somehow ended up becoming a journalist for two years which killed all my desire to write. I was a terrible journalist. I got fired from my job. I was a good writer but completely undisciplined as a journalist. They had me covering all kinds of things. If I didn't want to cover something I just wouldn't go. (Laughs) They'd be like, "You didn't cover that thing?" and I'd say, "Nope." "Ok, you're fired." It was sad because I really liked writing and my dad was a writer, but I just couldn't write after that. It made me also vow that I would never get a job in the music business doing music related work like engineering. Maybe a little production would be ok because that's more creative, but I wouldn't become a music industry drone and still have ambitions to become a musician on the side. I had to completely be a musician and be poor and work in some other unrelated job. Some people want to stay close to the business but frankly the business makes me crazy. I don't like it.
I don't even like hanging out with a lot of musicians. (Laughs.) I want to hang out with people who don’t just talk about music. That's one thing I love about the band – everyone's into different stuff. We're all in the music business but everyone has other interests and reads and likes movies and good wine and food and we all talk about that kind of stuff. It's not just constant shop talk. One of my primary outside interests has been my kids.
It's hard to be self centered when you've got kids.
It can be managed (laughs) but it's much harder. It's interesting because my youngest daughter applied for this summer arts program and she had to write an essay for part of the application. I got to read it and part of it was about, "I've watched both my parents struggle with trying to find a way to be successful in their art over the years and the sacrifices they've made" and she was incredibly perceptive. It's not something we'd ever talked about very much but I had a sense of her perception of me and her mom. Her mom's an artist too. And I thought maybe we don’t look like such selfish assholes to her. The arts are very selfish.
But it's selfish in the name of creating something to share.
That's true too and I realize that. There's a real dichotomy in that I have to have enough ego to think that I have something worthwhile to share so I'll do that, but there's this dance between ego and generosity. How do you be a good guy in such a cutthroat business? It's a constant struggle and something I think about a lot.
I always have a hard time watching people who seem to have the most success and are not necessarily the most talented, but are the ones who are best at self-promoting.
Yeah, they're better business people. The better business people will make it far and away above the less business oriented, likely less talented.
For a lot of people music is a big social thing, and certainly when you play it it is but it isn't really when you write it. Not for me. I don't write in the company of other people and I always feel weird bringing what I write to other people. I'm afraid it's going to get damaged or changed. Often it ends up getting changed for the better. But there is a trepidation there.
I think most people listen to music by themselves, especially now with all of the mp3 players. Everybody's got headphones and they're all in their own little worlds. It's all about how you relate to the music and what it says to you. It's weird because in one way it's really direct communication – you write a song, it's deeply personal, it's intensely felt. But then you put it out and people who you don't know, who you'll never meet listen to it, but they listen to it and it becomes personal for them.
Totally.
So it's one way communication but it's not.
I have a lot of respect for that. I get angry at some musicians who don't seem to understand that the songs they made really belong to other people now. I had this issue with Iron and Wine when I went to see them early last year. I really love the records, at least some of them anyway. A lot of his stuff is this incredibly intimate, it's very personal the way the albums were recorded and the arrangements were made. And he's up there onstage and he plays a couple of songs and they sound right. And then it's obvious he's become bored with playing the songs live and decided he wants to alter the arrangements dramatically. To me only Bob Dylan is allowed to do that because you just can't stop him. Most of [Dylan's] songs were caught in that particular form and were totally different before and were never played the same after but not everybody's like that. [Sam Beam] mutilated all the arrangements to his songs because he was obviously bored with them. And I thought, "You're betraying your fans." There were people there who were just like "Ugh, what is he doing?" Not to mention they were horrible changes he made. As a performer I want to be professional. I want to give people not something that's sterile, but I think they need to hear that familiarity of what they've grown to love. The arrangements can't help but evolve somewhat live, but I like to crack the whip and keep them pretty much close to what we have.
Have you heard any of Elvis Costello's newest CD? He just made all these jazzed up versions...
I heard about it, yeah. Jazzed up versions of his own songs?
Yeah.
I haven't heard it. Do you like it?
No. I've only heard "Watching the Detectives," but I don't like it. And I often don't mind when musicians rearrange their songs. I like it because I listen to music so obsessively that I can get tired of a song the way it is. I'm all for changing it around and doing something different, but it's too big band-y the way he did it.
It's almost like he's kind of a show off. He's been that way his whole career so it doesn't surprise me, but he is enormously talented so you don't mind as much.
It's just not right, especially that song. Those first two albums of his were such breakthroughs in terms of where punk rock went after the Sex Pistols, that's kind of sacred ground to me. Watching the Detectives is like, why mess with that?
Don't mess with perfection. It's like, "Here's another version of the Mona Lisa. It's a cubist version now." But you get too close to your art you don’t know what you're doing. You've got to get away from your material.
Posted by Laura at 02:01 AM | Comments (0)