popwreckoning

PopWreckoning has been blessed with the opportunity to premier Saddle Creek artist Orenda Fink‘s new video High Ground, from her recent release Ask the Night. If you haven’t given this album a listen yet, you should. It is worth your spin.

Orenda Fink – High Ground from Saddle Creek on Vimeo.

There were bits of Panic! at Butch Walker‘s recently when superfan Brendon Urie spent the day at Walker’s after buying the $25,000 pre-sale for his new album. Turns out Butch (or should we say Butcher?) really does like it better when you have no heart.

Watch the “American Psycho” inspired video then pre-order I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart. Buying anything but the $25,000 pre-order is a safe bet.

God bless St. Vincent. And God bless Annie Clark, the band’s front-woman and my #1 girl crush, who quietly set up her own equipment before their Feb. 15 show at the Bottleneck in Lawrence. With zero fanfare, the slight, beret-clad lady tuned her guitar and joked with band mates. Minutes later, the same group returned to the now dimly lit stage to a bar-full of applause.

The opener, a Swedish all-percussion duo called Wildbirds & Peacedrums, managed to warm up half the crowd – most lost interest after the first few songs, instead watching the group’s countrymen compete in Olympic skiing on the bar TV.

For those paying attention, Wildbirds were mesmerizing. The female singer/steel drum player transitioned from husky jazz vocals to yelping scat and back again while her drummer/husband backed her up or spurred her on. Throw in occasional tambourine and cowbell and their sound could be described something like “tribal cabaret.” The couple’s final song “My Heart” ended appropriately on the repeated line “You see I’m lost without your rhythm…” Luckily they weren’t lacking in that.

St. Vincent took the stage and flautist (and saxophonist and keyboardist) Evan Smith launched immediately into “Strangers,” the first track from the new album Actor. The band’s latest
material treads the line between delicacy and distortion and “Strangers” with its fuzzy guitar over violin and flute duets is the perfect introduction to this technique. Clark followed it with track two, “Save Me from What I Want,” and Smith traded flute for funk with a switch to the saxophone.

Clark writes and performs songs with an earnest directness that also makes for a charming stage presence. In Lawrence, she shared stories from visits to her older sister at KU – at 16 and under more “dubious” circumstances, the now 27 year old admitted. Later she dedicated “The Bed” to family members in attendance. The anecdotes built an intimacy with the audience that made Clark feel like an old friend. We laughed over the mishaps of youth and cheered advice from her sister: “Never leave college” (though Clark dropped out of Berklee after only three years, understandably, to tour with Sufjan Stevens).

Clark silenced the rowdy audience with a gorgeous solo cover of Jackson Browne’s “These Days,” then rejoined St. Vincent for “Black Rainbow.” The song builds (again, the small/big theme) like a film score with pounding drum and guitar underscored by sinister violin only to come to an abrupt end and some of the loudest audience appreciation of the night – cheers that were renewed when the band next launched into the opening notes to “Marrow.”

St. Vincent’s songs tend to emphasize the instruments that make them unique – the variety of woodwinds or violin. Clark’s skill on the electric guitar could be easily overlooked. To make up for this, there’s “Dig A Pony,” the Beatles cover the band brought out for its encore. I’d seen clips of St. Vincent performing this at other shows, so it was a treat to see live (and by ‘treat’ I mean, it solidified my crazy love for this woman). It’s a perfect choice to demonstrate Clark’s control of her instrument.

The band ended the night with an all-over-the-place experimental version of “Your Lips Are Red,” chockfull of the night’s token distortion. Every band member played his or her own interpretation of the song’s midsection, before Daniel Hart on violin brought the group back together for a haunting conclusion. It was a divine set – worthy of the group’s religious moniker.

Set List:
Strangers
Save Me from What I Want
Laughing with a Mouth of Blood
Actor Out of Work
Jesus Saves, I Spend
Just the Same But Brand New
The Bed
These Days
Black Rainbow
Marrow
The Party
Encore: Dig A Pony
Your Lips are Red

Despite being exhausted from a late night of video making and having just wrapped up a sound check for a special Valentine’s performance in Kansas City, OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind was gracious enough to share with PopWreckoning his views on the holiday, videos, social media and so much much more. Check out the full interview below.

Bethany, PopWreckoning: You’re doing a Valentine’s Day show for free in Kansas City. Since it is a special holiday show, do you guys have anything extra or special planned for it?
Tim Nordwind, OK Go: Isn’t that enough? Nah. We always have special things planned for our shows, regardless of whether or not it is a Hallmark day or not. We always have special things and we have special things planned for our Kansas City audience tonight. Luckily, there’s an awful lot of love in our set, so we’re an obvious pick for a Valentine’s Day show. We love to love.

B: Did you find yourselves planning a special set list then? I’d argue that at least on the most recent album these are some of the most heartbroken songs as opposed to lovey dovey.
TN: Yeah. We’re playing all of them tonight. Only the most heartbroken ones this evening. We have given some thought to the show tonight and come up with a good set list. We’ll take the audience through all the different kinds of love this evening.
B: Excellent.
TN: It’s good to remember both the good and the bad parts of love to fully appreciate it.

B: So at your shows, I’ve seen you before, they’re big shows. You’ve had lots of confetti and extra marching drums. How much time in advance do you start planning these shows and figuring out what goes into your tours?
TN: The great thing about live performance is the connection that you make with the audience. We spend a lot of time figuring how to form different connections with the audience. Quite a bit of thought goes into our production and its fun stuff to think about for sure. We enjoy figuring out new ways to create a party for the people who come to the show. As you said, on this new record, there are a lot more heartbroken and melancholic songs and we were wondering how that was all going to work in the set next to the high energy, less melancholic songs. What’s interesting is that when you set up a mood, as long as everyone in the room is sort of feeling it together, it always feels good. If we’re playing a slightly sad song, as long as everyone can relate to that emotion and you can also go celebrate that emotion together, then everything seems to work fine. Yeah, the production really has to do with trying to line up these different moods throughout the night and that does take a little bit of timing.

B: When I saw you last time, I want to say it was in September in Denver, you guys did “This Too Shall Pass” and you did a kind of marching band thing almost. Later the video came out and you did a marching band thing in that. Do you guys plan out your videos that far in advance that you’re already thinking in terms of things like that or do they just come to you and you think, “Oh, this would be a cool idea.”
TN: Normally speaking, the ideas for our videos come a little bit in advance of the actual production of our videos. Yeah, in regards to the Notre Dame marching band, we saw them a year before and saw them perform “Here It Goes Again” for halftime at a football game. So we saw them do that and we were like, “Oh, we should do something together.” Then, it went from there. We planned a general plan with the Notre Dame marching band for about four months or so and then went to South Bend, Indiana to meet with them and do the video. What was nice was once we got to South Bend, once we met the band and once we could see first hand sort of what we were doing with even the idea we had spent a full months planning out, it changed a little bit now that we could see what it was like to be with them. We sort of realized all these different things that we could do once we got there. Some of what happens in our videos is very spontaneous and things you couldn’t plan out until you are actually experiencing whatever it is that we are doing, but most of the time we go through several stages of planning. A lot of what we are doing is setting up a sort of structured set so that when we are doing it we can be sort of spontaneous. How do you set up a strong enough structure so that you can play within it once you’re actually doing it?

B: Right now you guys are working on, or at least wrapping up, a second video for “This Too Shall Pass.” Why two videos for that song?
TN: The second video is for the studio version of “This Too Shall Pass,” which is on the record versus the Notre Dame marching version, which is a live version that we recorded with the Notre Dame band, so it is a different arrangement. We had this idea of “This Too Shall Pass” and we had two good ideas that we felt fit the song. Also, we saw it as an opportunity to make a different arrangement of the song, which seemed fun. The video we are shooting, we just got done shooting it last night [Friday], is for the album version of “This Too Shall Pass.”

B: When can people expect to see this video?
TN: I think by the beginning of March, hopefully.  We literally wrapped up at about 4 in the morning and then when straight to the airport for Kansas City. We haven’t watched any of the takes, really. We just shot and shot and shot and shot. Hopefully, we’ll be getting it put together and have it out be the end of February/early March.

B: Great. You guys seem to be a very fan first band. Like this girl in France made a YouTube video and was like, “Why no contest for France,” and within a day you guys responded and were like, “Here’s your contest.” Why do you believe it is so important to interact with your fans that quickly and that closely? And obviously, you guys use YouTube, but are you big advocates of other social media tools?
TN: We’re not a group of marketers. We’re a rock band and we enjoy making things and seeing things that people make. However it is that we see it, whether Twitter, MySpace or Facebook; however it is that they make it, social networking is fine, but what I care about is what I’m actually watching. We get excited when we see awesome things that people make and the video that girl made is just great. It’s really clever and fun and really well done. It seemed like she had spent a bit of time making it and it was a labor of love type project. Yeah, we appreciated the spirit in which she made that video. What’s nice is that we do have these social media networks where we can put things up and share them with fans and fans can put things up and share them with us. We have this nice sort of back and forth dialogue with them through all these different social networking platforms. At the end of the day, mostly what we care about is what’s being produced and that sort of creative output. When we see something that we like, we respond because it is fun. It’s fun to talk to people whose work you admire. We ended up meeting her in Paris. She came to the show.

B: Great. Ok, just two more for fun questions. It was announced in the past week that you’re playing Bonnaroo as well some other fests. What would you put in a festival survival kit?
TN: Most festivals are in the Summer or months when it gets hot, so definitely some sunscreen. Definitely lots of water. I think a map of the ground that you’re on because festivals are always super confusing and I always get lost. I would also invent a machine that would allow me to be in two places at once because at almost every festival, there are at least two to three bands playing at the same time and I want to see them all.  I may work on a machine that would allow me to be in two places at once and if I invent it, I’ll put it in the festival kit.

B: Excellent. For a final question, since the Oscars are coming up and you are so video savvy, who is your pick for best picture?
TN: “Inglourious Basterds.” Quentin Tarantino. I thought that was a really great film and very compelling. It sort of played out…I like Tarantino’s film because they always have a theatrical sense where there can be a seventeen minute scene where it’s really nothing, but dialogue and he is sort of a master of dialogue and building tension and release… at the moment of highest tension, there’s always a sort of amazing release. I thought that was a great film.

B: Alright. Well I’ll let you get dinner and rest up before the show tonight. I look forward to seeing you guys perform.
TN: Cool. Thank you.

Xiu Xiu‘s Dear God, I Hate Myself contains rushing, electronic pop melodies paired with dark, self-loathing lyrics. The perky goth album is chaotic and confusing, but calming and cathartic all at once.

Xiu Xiu

Jamie Stewart‘s dainty yet urgent vocal style allows his voice to wisp around the album’s chiming melodies. Stewart sings each word like it’s a hidden weapon. While the beauty of the lyrics draw you in, they cut deep. Angela Seo‘s (piano, synth, drum programming) buzzing electronic clicks and heavily syncopated beats accent each song, setting each track’s diverse mood.

Dear God‘s songs ooze tragedy and energy. Tracks go from painfully stressed, wanting ballads (“The Fabrizio Palumbo Retaliation”) to light, string picked folk (“Cumberland Gap” with John Dieterich). Dear God‘s title track has a sense of demented optimism; insanity and sadness with a tinge of underwhelming hope, and eternal dislike, as expressed when Stewart whispers, “and I will always be nicer to the cat.”

Don’t expect to know what’s coming next on Dear God or attempt to understand the point Stewart and company are trying to get across. The album’s tone shifts with each spin. A conglomerate of haunting, bothersome, upbeat, sex crazed and psychopathic feelings, all wrapped in a pretty little desperate package.

Track Listing:
1. Gray Death
2. Chocolate Makes You Happy
3. Apple For A Brain
4. House Sparrow
5. Hyunhye’s Theme
6. Dear God, I Hate Myself
7. Secret Motel
8. Falkland Rd.
9. The Fabrizio Palumbo Retaliation
10. Cumberland Gap
11. This Too Shall Pass Away (For Freddy)
12. Impossible Feeling

The Sasquatch Festival 2010 in Quincy, Wash. will feature united Pavement, Massive Attack, My Morning Jacket, Ween, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, Kid Cudi, LCD Soundsystem and many more.

The festival is Memorial Day Weekend from May 29-31. Tickets go on sale Saturday, February 20 at 10 a.m. PST at ticketmaster.com. Prices range from $70-$170.

With a band name derived from Chopin and songs inspired by the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Cameron Matthews is more than your average guy with a guitar. Though his true musical origins are a bit more humble than some of the biographies circulating on his web sites, the result is fairly epic: intelligent and refreshing songwriting from his band, Bear Ceuse.

Below, Matthews dishes on the challenges of being a rising Midwest musician and he describes the shape of indie rock music in a city known for its rappers. Read on.

Bethany, PopWreckoning: How are you today?
Cameron Matthews, Bear Ceuse: I’m good. It looks like you have a Kansas City number.
B: Yes. I’m in Lawrence, Kan.
CM: Cool. I like Kansas City and Lawrence very, very much. It’s my second home.
B: I have to admit that I don’t know St. Louis as well as I could living this close.
CM: Eh, there’s not much here.

B: Let’s start at the beginning. I was trying to do some research on you online, but there are mainly these “epic” background stories (in one story he went on a man journey in the wilderness in another EMTs saved him form the brink of death). What’s the true story?
CM: The true story?
B: Yeah. How did you really get involved with music? I’m assuming you are, in fact, from a small Missouri town and the flood of 93 probably did effect you.

CM: I am from Washington, Missouri, which is a town of about 13,000 people. I feel like the town was built around a Walmart and then people from outer laying towns just sort of started coming in and it got a little bigger. It’s still pretty small. There’s two high schools. I went to the Catholic school. I didn’t really get into music seriously until I got into college. I was very serious in high school, but I was a very different artist then. I wouldn’t classify myself as an artist then.
B: Like marching band stuff?
CM: I…I don’t even want to tell you my influences back then. It just makes me look bad, I swear. I was in a band that played around town a lot and played a lot of cover songs. We did a couple of really terrible originals. Basically, my motivation was to get paid and to show people that this is my job and this is what I do. I sort of got burned out on it after about two years. Once there were eight people in my band, I realized I was doing the wrong thing. I started focusing more on songwriting senior year of high school. I didn’t really want to go to college. I wanted to move to Nashville and pursue a career in music, but I”m really glad I didn’t do that because I didn’t know a goddamn thing. So I went to SLU. I graduated in three years. I work in a pizza place now. That’s my background story, sort of.

B: While at SLU, you entered an MTV competition.
CM: Yes.
B: And you won.
CM: Yes. When I was a freshman I entered the MTVU Best Music on Campus Competition and I got a call from this guy named Jeff at MTVU and he didn’t tell me I had won. He just wanted to know more information about me and he made me very nervous. I had never played that big of a show before. A week later, I found out that I had won. They flew me down to Austin and I opened for the Shins and a couple other bands. It was pretty awesome and pretty incredible.
B: Has that helped out with your music and launch your career? I know you’ve done a lot of college circuit showcases.
CM: Yeah. It, on a resume, musically, when trying to talk to people, it helps. But after I played the show, I didn’t play again for awhile. I sort of had a…not a writer’s block, but I went in a completely different direction. When I played that show, I played songs that I don’t even recognize anymore, but that I don’t even identify with anymore. I’m glad that happened that early in my career because I know I’m at a very different place right now and I’m at a different part of my life. I was kind of lost after I did the show because I had gone from playing little coffee shops a couple times a month to playing this giant showcase with the Shins. I didn’t know where to go then. After that I was a little upset because I felt like I had bolted myself too much in one direction and I wasn’t playing another show like that where I was playing with 5,000 people sitting in front of me. I just started focusing on school and I was doing the music thing, but decided to sort of take a break for awhile. By the time I was a junior…er a sophomore, actually, I started writing a new album and that summer we recorded it. The summer after we recorded that first EP, Bear Ceuse, that’s when I changed my name, etc, etc.

B: Where does the name Bear Ceuse come from?
CM: Berceuse is a French word for a night song or a lullaby. I thought it was funny. My girlfriend was flipping through one of her cello books and it was Chopin. Actually, a couple of different classical composers had different berceuse. It’s actually a style or a type of song. So I split the French word into two English words – ceuse being not English at all, but bear is. I thought it would be funny to make it my band’s name.
B: It fits well with the epic faux biography you have up on your site with the going into the wilderness with fish. It’s a better story then my guesses. I looked it up and all I could find was a small French town named Ceuse and I figured you did some study abroad.
CM: I’ve never studied abroad. I left the country only a few times and they were all when I was very young and don’t remember it. I barely know any French. I thought it was ironic. The people that know me think it is funny. I’m a goofball. I like to pretend certain things, but I”ll tell people like you the truth.

B: Thanks for the truth. You were an English major in college. Does that play into your songwriting process?
CM: It did for awhile. I was very focused on writing about literature for a long time and it still plays heavily in a couple different influences. I think that poetry, itself, is almost a higher art than music. Music, right now, can get bogged down by all these different types of aesthetics and poetry is very stripped down. Whenever you write a good poem, you know it. Whenever you read a good poem, you know it. There’s no hiding in poetry. I practiced and practiced poetry for a long and I became a student of poetry. I started with the beats with Kerouac and Ginsberg. I didn’t really like Ginsberg, but I liked William Carlos Williams. I started with exercises like that. I liked Ezra Pound and older stuff like John Dunne. I started compiling lots of poems by different people and studying them on my own and trying to relay them to songwriting. I think sonically that the sound of poems are very important. That’s the part I think I am good at. The words, the lyrics, of a poem, I’ll be working on my entire life. So yes, being an English major influenced me heavily.

B: So what are you working on right now? I know you’ve done several EPs. Some of which are still up for free download. Any plans for a full-length or tour plans?
CM: Currently, my bass player, Chris, he does all our recording. Anything that I’ve done in the past two or three years of good quality, he’s done. He just moved into a new house and we’re putting up sheet rock to sound proof a room in his house and start recording again. I don’t have any plans to record a full-length right now just because my first solo album that I did is 15 songs and it is all over the place. I realized what a band idea that was several months after I released it and I don’t think that a full-length is as important as it used to be. I’ll probably do a 9 or 10 song maximum from now on for albums because each song is supposed to convey an idea and each album is supposed to convey an overall idea and I’m just not good at that. I’m just not good at focusing, so the shorter amount on EPs that I release, anywhere from three to nine songs, I should be pretty good at honing in on what an EP is all about. That’s going to be model for awhile.

B: How about touring plans?
CM: We just played in New York at Arlene’s grocery and it went really well. We’ll probably start going to Chicago and Kansas City and Louisville and maybe Omaha within the next couple of months. We want to get out there and we just have enough money to go certain places once or twice a month. I don’t have a tour schedule or anything, but we will be making it to Kansas City and those other cities I just mentioned within the next couple of months.

B: I’m kind of dunce when it comes to St. Louis music. I know Nelly and now I know you are from there. What is considered more of the indie scene there? What are the indie venues?
CM: Ok. Here’s the thing about St. Louis music, and keep half of this…when I talk about “old people” keep it off the record because not everybody agrees with me on this, but if it sounds good, go ahead and use it. There’s a scene in town called the Chippewa Chapel crowd.  They’re all 35-60 years old. Maybe some of them are older. They sort of have a dominance over the town. They’ve been here for a very long time, they know everyone in local radio, they know everyone at the RFT–the Riverfront Times–who also own the Pitch in Kansas City. They’re both owned by the Village Voice. They have this little monopoly going on where they their own fanbase and they release their own records. Not all the records are good. It is hard to break into an “indie” scene in St. Louis because it doesn’t really exist for my age group. I’m 21 and when you are in a smaller town where there’s an older scene already established, you can’t break into it. There’s no possible way. There’s this weird competition between bands here to play venues. Indie venues include the Firebird, the Biliken club at SlU, Off Broadway, the Pageant which is like your guys’ Granada. Cicero’s is indie, but it’s not very cool. There’s a place called LEMP Art Center. It’s very different than any venue you could go to in St. Louis or anywhere in general. It’s kind of the birthplace of noise music. It’s kind of a sanctuary for indie rock and indie folk or anything weird that comes from all over the United States. It is a very little place and they sell nothing but tickets to the show. Sometimes very few people are there and sometimes the whole place is packed. It’s just this room where you go in and you play with one lamp on and it is incredible. I play my best shows there when I play acoustic. That’s the scene that I consider here. I could name drop a few artists?

B: Yeah. It would be cool to hear some of the younger artists’ names.
CM: There’s this girl here named Amanda Kofron who is one the best singers I’ve ever heard and maybe one of the best singers in this entire town. I can’t spell it, but she’s great. A folk-rustic sounding. We have a St. Louisian in Kansas City now named Matt Dill. Have you heard of him?
B: I don’t think I have.
CM: Matt Dill is one of the best artists I’ve ever heard. He got a bunch of St. Louis artists together and he booked at a little gelattoria that we all used to play at and then I took his job when he moved to Kansas City. We have a handful of people that will play the same shows here. Matt plays folk combined with experimental noise music. It’s so cool. His newest album called Lila Rasa, I’ve never really heard anything like it: the mixture is so cool. He’s on a collective label out of Chicago with another a Kansas City kid, Doby Watson. Have you heard of Doby?
B: No. Maybe I know more of the Lawrence kids.
CM: Manipulator Alligator? There’s a couple of them. They’re all really good. I love the Kansas City scene. I go there all the time because my girlfriend’s family is there. Kansas City’s cool. I’d love to do Lawrence more, but it is very difficult to play Lawrence. It looks like you need a label to play there for the venues I’ve looked up.
B: The clubs all have promoters they go through for booking.
CM: They’re real serious. I like that, but they’re not really taking a gamble on bands. They want to know for sure that they can bring out a crowd. Oh have you heard of the Radical Sons?
B: Yeah.
CM: Ben Goldstein plays with them and is from here. They live in New York now. My cousin, Nick, is the guitar player for the Radical Sons. Nick plays on the new Bear Ceuse EP, too. He’s all over that thing and is very good. Another band is Via Dove. Another is Art Majors. Also check out a very good friend of mine named Raphael Maurice, you can find him attached to the Bear Ceuse MySpace. He is a mixture of the Replacements, My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses and his own thing. He’s in a band called Miles of Wire that was popular in St. Louis a few years ago. He’s like the smartest person I’ve ever met and his music is phenomenal. So that’s the St. Louis scene.

B: Awesome. I have a lot of music to check out and catch up on. Well, let’s wrap it up here. Great answers. Thanks so much.
CM: Thank you.

Pop music has often, especially in recent memory, fought a civil war when it comes to image and authenticity. Think of Poison and Mötley Crüe: glitzy image with seemingly no authenticity. As a reaction to such bands, Nirvana and Soundgarden hit the scene with an unkempt slacker image just oozing with authenticity (real or contrived, depending on your viewpoint). In the 2000s, The Strokes were denounced for their garage band aesthetic but upper class backgrounds while choreographed boy bands filled the airwaves with formulaic songs of love and longing. As we enter the 2010s, danceable music, from MGMT to Ghostland Observatory to Girl Talk and everywhere in between, has become as ubiquitous as ironic moustaches.  All that to say this: it’s always refreshing when a band can be oblivious to what’s trendy and just write good pop songs. Rogue Wave has accomplished just that with their most recent effort, Permalight, which is set for release on March 2.

On Permalight, Rogue Wave manages to find a balance that seems to elude so many bands. Songs like “Stars and Stripes” and the title track are happy without being sugary-sweet, fun without being hokey, catchy without eventually becoming annoying. Of course, pop songs are always more rewarding if there is some substance beneath the toe-tapping surface. Many of the lyrics are hard to pin down, forcing the listener to commit attention and thought to what are otherwise effortlessly enjoyable songs. With the notable exception of “Good Morning (The Future)” – an upbeat tune with heavy synthesizers and electronic drums – the pacing of this album is on an incredibly even keel. Many albums are compared favorably to a roller coaster ride; this album is much more of a Sunday drive with the windows down, cruising familiar roads with good friends. New territory need not be explored when covering old territory is this much fun.

In the liner notes of Ben Folds Five’s album Whatever and Ever Amen, the Folds glibly states that “The lyrics or text were created to detract from the repetition inherent in modern instrumental pop music.” Permalight seems to have taken the opposite path, pushing the vocals out front in every song and making the melodies and lyrics the focal point of each track, so much so that the instrumentation often seems like an afterthought. This point is not meant to deride; in fact, Rogue Wave has the ability to hide their weaknesses (unremarkable guitar work, for instance) under their strengths (infectious melodies and intriguing words).

There is very little (if anything) about Permalight that doesn’t work; the production is slick, but Rogue Wave is not a garage band. There aren’t any shredding guitar solos, instrumental breakdowns, guest star rappers, foreign accents, color-coordinated outfits, interesting facial hair, or 4-track-in-my-grandmother’s-basement production values. Instead, we are given 12 tracks of well-crafted pop music that should not go unrecognized. Of course, a collaboration with Amy Winehouse couldn’t hurt either.

Track Listing:
1. Solitary Gun
2. Good Morning
3. Sleepwalker
4. Stars and Stripes
5. Permalight
6. Fear Itself
7. Right With You
8. We Will Make A Song Destroy
9. I’ll Never Leave You
10. Per Anger
11. You Have Boarded
12. All That Remains

Kansas City rockers, The Get Up Kids wrote a blog update announcing an April E.P. and the not so surprising news that Rob Pope wouldn’t be on their Australia and Japan tours (he’s currently touring with Spoon). But the April EP, Simple Science, is very exciting and welcome news as it has been six years since new music has been heard from the band’s camp.

Here’s the full message:

WE’VE GOT SOME GOOD NEWS AND SOME BAD NEWS….
We’ve got some good news and some bad news.

First, the bad news. Due to circumstances beyond our control, our bassist Rob Pope will not be able to join us on our upcoming tour of Australia and Japan. Luckily, our good friend Nate Harold will be filling in for Rob who will be rejoining the touring party as soon as he is able.

Now, the good news. The “Simple Science” EP is our first new
recording in 6 years!!!! The 4 song EP is going to come out in April
on limited, numbered and several different colors of 12″ vinyl as well
as a CD that we are releasing ourselves. It will be available
exclusively for download with Itunes. We’ll keep you in the loop once
we set a release date.

That’s all for now.
Thanks,
The G.U.K.

OK Go knows how to define originality and while that is pretty much a given when it comes to their videos, I can officially attest that this quality also applies to their live show.

The dance rockers recently gave Kansas City a special Valentine’s treat – a free concert for the annual Afentra’s VD Party sponsored by 96.5 the Buzz.

This show wasn’t a typical Valentine’s Day affair. There were no heart-shaped balloons nor rose petal and candle decorations. Instead of the sappy romance, the Buzz decked the Midland out as if it were a dating service run out of a Cirilla’s or Dr. John’s shop. Singles were given ID cards, they set up ridiculous games such as condom racing and giant penis inflatables for a cock ring toss, and they made drink specials such as the “Blow Me Brian.”

Though it was a free show for 18 and over, the event quickly “sold out,” meaning the venue reached its roughly 2,500 capacity just after the first opener, the rock/hip hop group Paper Tongues finished playing. The trio in the Crash Kings had the privilege of playing to a full house early in the night, a rarity at events such as this where most usually wait to show up just in time for the headliner. This is a group that seems like it would have been yet another one of the genius side projects cooked up by Jack White and they played as if they had the years of stage experience that White carries. Crash Kings weren’t intimidated by the crowd and quickly captured the attention for all with their vocally-driven rock tunes. The instrumentation was light in arrangement, but executed with great skill. Though only three in number, the group found fullness with the typical instruments (guitar, drums) and with the aid of a few tricks such as a whammy bar (yes, a whammy bar) on the keyboard. Ending out with current radio single “Mountain Men,” Crash Kings played a strong and memorable set that ensured Kansas City knew why they are the “kings.”

Buzz show favorites Company of Thieves took to the stage next. The indie rockers that sing of pop culture and authors have played many shows for 96.5 the Buzz in Kansas City, so their set was a familiar one. The audience knew when to clap and sing and even dance – at times even mimicking the frontwoman’s trademark windmill arm dance move. CoT did play a few new songs, but despite the change ups, the performance was lackluster compared to what they’ve done for KC in the past. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t mind blowing either: the main fault being that their songs have a tendency to blend and that the vocals were getting muffled in the mix hitting the house.

When Ok Go walked on stage to begin their set, the simple entrance was a modest understatement to the bigness that was to come. The guys apologized if they seemed tired after flying to KC following a 4 a.m. work session for their second video to “This Too Shall Pass” (they still had paint splatters on their shoes from the shoot), but apologies were unnecessary. As stated earlier, this band is the definition of original and they quickly showed that despite this modest start, their live show would be just as unique as their videos. As a giant homage to their videos, the main set piece was a video screen that sometimes showed wallpaper patterns, but for the most part showed the video angle from a camera attached to singer Damian Kulash‘s microphone. The ridiculous camera angles made a fun backdrop as Kulash danced with microphone singing “White Knuckles” and “Get Over It” to get the show started.

Unsurprisingly, the audience roared with excitement when the band hit their stride and performed “Here It Goes Again,” which holds its own live without antics. It’s a well-crafted song: great guitar riffs, nice beat, great vocal harmonies, so the audience praise is deserved.

The first half of OK Go’s performance was about proving that they were a quality band without the gimmicks. With “Here It Goes Again,” they had confirmed with their near flawless performance that they are musicians first. After that the band seemed more content throwing in their personal flairs.

“I live in the future and tomorrow is Sunday. So, we thought we’d play the instrument that God, himself, invented: the hand bells,” said singer Damian Kulash as a the rest of the guys carried a large table draped in red cloth and covered in a full set of hand bells to the front center of the stage. “You need OK Go to save you.”

Now while it’s questionable if OK Go music can actually save souls, seeing four grown men put on gloves and hold a packed venue’s attention as they played “What to Do” with hand bells is a sort of a miracle and probably made a few souls smile.

After that impressive display, the band played a few more tunes before taking a break before the encore. Now this is what an encore is all about. Picture this: the venue lights are dark, but then, lights come on spelling “OK GO” across the center of the stage. As the opening chords to “WTF?” sound out across the speaker system, the light up letters break apart and it is revealed to be the backside of the jackets of the individual band members as the guys swivel to face the audience. The fun light display doesn’t stop there though, as the guitars and bass are decked out in fuzz, lasers and a neon light outline. As the guys danced playing their instruments, they made the lights dance on the walls and in turn, made the audience dance all the more.

The final song of the night said it all. These guys are “Invincible” when it comes to fresh ideas and a great live show.

Set List:
White Knuckles
Get Over It
Shortly Before the End
I Want You So Bad I Can’t Breathe
Oh Lately It’s So Quiet
Don’t Ask Me
Here it Goes Again
What To Do (Hand bells)
Last Leaf
This Too Shall Pass
Do What You Want
///
WTF?
Invincible