popwreckoning

Tonight, March 5, at the Beaumont Club in Kansas City, Miss., PopWreckoning is pleased to present a Pre-SXSW battle of the bands. Winners of the evening’s showcase will be given the funds to go to the 2010 SXSW festival where they’ll perform at the ATN showcase. Jeff Tafolla of Saddle Creek Records will judge.

Capybara are playing tonight’s show at the Beaumont. They go on at 9 p.m.

Capybara knows how to balance the serious and the absurd. They cite their mustaches as a primary influence for their keyboard-heavy tunes and are named after a large rodent, but they’re not so offbeat that they’re a wannabe Weird Al group. Capybara features Mark Harrison, Joel Wrolstad, Jared Horne and Darin Seal.

“Capybara sings to a capybara.”

Capybara: MySpace

Tonight, March 5, at the Beaumont Club in Kansas City, Miss., PopWreckoning is pleased to present a Pre-SXSW battle of the bands. Winners of the evening’s showcase will be given the funds to go to the 2010 SXSW festival where they’ll perform at the ATN showcase. Jeff Tafolla of Saddle Creek Records will judge.

Olympic Size are playing tonight’s show at the Beaumont. They go on at 8 p.m.

The hautning melodies of this act blends folk with electronic. Olympic Size features Billy Smith (Guitar, Vocals), Wade Williamson (Guitar, Keys), Kirsten Paludan (Vocals, Keys), Chris Tolle (Bass, Keys, Guitar), Chris Metcalf (Drums) and  Mike Walker (Trombone).

“Roland”

Olympic Size: MySpace

Tonight, March 5, at the Beaumont Club in Kansas City, Miss., PopWreckoning is pleased to present a Pre-SXSW battle of the bands. Winners of the evening’s showcase will be given the funds to go to the 2010 SXSW festival where they’ll perform at the ATN showcase. Jeff Tafolla of Saddle Creek Records will judge.

The Grisly Hand are playing tonight’s show at the Beaumont. They go on at 7 p.m.

The  female-fronted Americana act the Grisly Hand features Jimmy Fitzner, Lauren Krum, Chas Snyder, Johnny Nichols, Andy Davis, Mike Tuley & Ben Summers.

“Paris of the Plains”

The Grisly Hand: MySpace

Tonight, March 5, at the Beaumont Club in Kansas City, Miss., PopWreckoning is pleased to present a Pre-SXSW battle of the bands. Winners of the evening’s showcase will be given the funds to go to the 2010 SXSW festival where they’ll perform at the ATN showcase. Jeff Tafolla of Saddle Creek Records will judge.

Dreams Are For Rookies are playing tonight’s show at the Beaumont. They go on at 6 p.m.

The Kansas City pop rock group features Adam Chiarelli (guitar, vox, mouthharp), Steven Garcia (cello), Tyler Vann Yager (guitar), Raymond Dreamquest (drums) and Adam Goff (bass).

.“Sad Girl”

Dreams Are For Rookies: MySpace

It’s finally here! A few weeks ago, PopWreckoning announced that we would be hosting a battle of the bands competition to help bring local Kansas acts to play at a national showcase at the 2010 SXSW.  That showcase is happening TONIGHT!

These are the bands and set times of the bands playing tonight:

6:00 pm – Dreams are for Rookies
7:00 pm – The Grisly Hand
8:00 pm – Olympic Size
9:00 pm – Capybara
10:00 pm – Roman Numerals
11:00 pm – Thieves

Whether you are in KC and planning on going to the show or elsewhere in the country, click on those links for the above ands. They are all fantastic and we’d bring them all to SXSW if we could.

However this is a competition and to keep things fair, we will have a special guest judge selecting the winner’s of the evenings events. Jeff Tafolla from Saddle Creek Records will have this honor.

The winners of the showcase will then play at SXSW during the ATN Showcase, the only showcase where bands can be sure their music will be heard by MTV. This showcase also helps the great Invisible Children organization.

There are still tickets will be $10 at the door. A $2 minors fee will be added to anyone 18 and above, but under the age of 21. Come on out and support a great night of local music at the Beaumont Club.

We hope to see you there!

Australian band the Middle East is flying high these days. In early February, the group’s track “Blood” was tipped by two major BBC radio shows in Britain – Steve Lamacq‘s drivetime program on the now threatened with closure BBC6music station, and Radio2′s evening show hosted by Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie. Talk about ringing endorsements. So it should come as no surprise that with this momentum, the band has announced American festival appearances for the spring, with a proper tour of North America to follow.

Fittingly, the band will begin the tour – with darlings of the London folk scene Mumford and Sons in tow – at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 14. That tour ends on June 10 at Dallas’s House of Blues. I’ve been telling people the March UK tour line-up of Mumford and Sons with Fanfarlo couldn’t be beat, but I guess someone upstairs heard me! I couldn’t help myself, both bands are so wonderful, I wanted to share videos from both with you. Watch, listen, and enjoy. And catch the bands at a venue near you.

The Middle East – “Blood”

Mumford and Sons - “The Cave”

Tour Dates
Mar 14 – NX35 Music Conference / Denton, TX
Mar 17-20 – South by Southwest / Austin
Apr 18 – Coachella Music Festival / Indio, CA
May 13 – Cabaret du Musee Juste Pour Rire / Montreal
May 14 – Middle East Downstairs / Cambridge, MA*
May 16 – Fillmore at TLA / Philadelphia*
May 18 – Webster Hall / New York City*
May 20 – 9:30 Club / Washington, DC*
May 21 – Beachland Ballroom / Cleveland*
May 22 – Wexner Center / Columbus*
May 24 - Lincoln Hall / Chicago*
May 25 – Varsity Theatre / Minneapolis*
May 29 – Sasquatch Music Festival / George, WA*
May 30 – 560 Club / Vancouver*
May 31 – Aladdin Theatre / Portland*
Jun 03 – Great American Music Hall / San Francisco*
Jun 04 – Henry Fonda Theatre / Los Angeles*
Jun 07 – Rhythm Room / Phoenix*
Jun 09 – Antone’s / Austin*
Jun 10 – House of Blues / Dallas*
* with Mumford and Sons

The Middle East: myspace
Mumford and Sons: website | myspace | MP3 Minute: Mumford and Sons Cover Vampire Weekend

BBC Live Lounge always encourages visiting artists to cover other current acts. Sometimes the covers ho hum, but for the UK folk rock act Mumford & Sons, we got a beautiful acoustic cover of Vampire Weekend‘s single “Cousins.”

It starts off with a slowed down intro to the song. Harmonies are extra stand out as they are only accompanied by guitar. Then the drums count out a speed in double time. Then its like a good ole jamboree with the remaining song. Notes plucked on the guitar in this sped up half of the song are plucked and open sounding – not the washed blur of notes like you get in the Vampire Weekend. This cover is breathtakingly crisp – and to think it is live!

The energy that makes Vampire Weekend so great is there and the cover isn’t so out there that you’re wondering to whom in the world they’re giving homage, but the definitely made this their own.

I know people have mixed feelings about Vampire Weekend, but hipster points aside, I think you’ll have to admit you love this cover.

Mumford & Sons will be coming to the states in early summer to play music festivals and brief tour. Be sure to check them out. Maybe we’ll get to hear the cover in addition to their awesome debut album. Fingers crossed.

. Mumford & Sons cover Vampire Weekend’s “Cousins”

A death in the family has caused all Black Joe Lewis tour dates to be cancelled.

The shows will be rescheduled in June. Tickets will be honored for the rescheduled shows or they can be returned to point of sale.

Our thoughts go out to the Black Joe Lewis family/crew.

Admittedly, I am only a recent Avett Brothers fan, drawn in by their 2009 album I and Love and You. So when I got a ticket to see them at the Missouri Theater in Columbia March 2, I went to a veteran listener for his opinion on the band’s live performances. “Totally different experience,” he told me. “Much more raw: punkish even. Harmonious, mountain-man punk.”

The Low Anthem, a folk-rock group from Rhode Island, opened with a wild variety of instruments and the male singer’s impossibly high vocal range on the soft ballad “Charlie Darwin.” Other members took turns on clarinet, saw, something called a Tibetan singing bowl and cell phones. Explanation: Before playing one of their final songs, the group asked for audience participation. Without describing what the effect would be, crowd members were told to take out cell phones, call their seatmates on speaker phone and hold the phones together. Skeptical. In the end, though, in the darkened theater and accompanied by the hushed final strains of the song, this phone trick produced something like the sound of dozens of electronic crickets. It was a lush end to a set that had started quiet and escalated into raw, funky Americana.

Again, being new to the Avett obsession, I wasn’t expecting the level of joyous anticipation and raucous appreciation from the audience. The band opened with “January Wedding” from I and Love and You, but the remainder of the hour-and-a-half set jumped all over their decade-long career. Every one seemed to know the words. Every one had some obscure request from a 2003 EP. Other selections included “Offering,” “Bella Donna,” “Hard Worker,” “Tin Man” and “Kick Drum Heart.”

Midway through the main set, the Avetts brought out the title track from I and Love and You, which ends on the forlorn harmony of those three words. The sold-out crowd was more than singing along—rather, each member seemed to be expressing its fanatic love for the group on stage.

Punk was a good word to describe it as the three (or four or five, depending on the song) band members jumped around with guitar, banjo and upright bass during “Shame” and the rowdy finale of crowd-favorite “Laundry Room.” The experience also resembled some kind of Southern church evangelization. The band’s infectious enthusiasm and shouted lyrics fed the giddy, beaming crowd. Guitarist and sometimes-vocalist Seth Avett took the stage for the “Slight Figure of Speech” encore with the graciousness the band displayed throughout the show. He said, “We would love nothing more than to play another! Thanks for asking.”

Editor Jess recently got in touch with Brooklyn’s Javelin, an almost indescribable duo thanks to their unique musical methods and eclectic tastes. The pair kicks off a national tour this week, so we’re excited to have gotten to speak with the fellas before they hit the road hard.

Jessica McGinley, Popwreckoning: You guys have been making music as Javelin for 5 or 6 years now — while it’s great to hear that you’re “one the most notable acts to emerge this year” from the likes of the LA Times, is this sentiment at the same time frustrating since you’ve been making music for so long?
Javelin: We can’t blame anyone but ourselves for that one– it took us a long time to “throw our hat into the ring.” If we had pushed our music out there before “it” was ready (our music OR the world) maybe things would have happened differently… We like how it worked out.

JM: No doubt. I’m glad it got out there at all myself! How has the move from your native Rhode Island to Brooklyn helped push Javelin forward? Do you ever regret the change of address?
Javelin: We miss our friends and loved ones who we don’t see as often. I don’t think we regret moving to Brooklyn as many beautiful things have happened as a direct result.

JM: David Byrne‘s Luaka Bop label will be releasing your first full-length, No Mas, on April 20th. How different was the process of creating and recording No Mas from the self-released Jamz and Jemz demos and the Thrill Jockey 12″s?
Javelin: Well, Jamz n Jemz was recorded over a long period of time and was always changi

ng around, like a greatest hits album. We wanted the Thrill Jockey and Luaka Bop releases to be distinct from one another and cohesive in a way J+J wasn’t (by design, mind you). It still feels like channel surfing the radio, but maybe on a good day where the radio knows what’s going to go with what.

JM: You have such a variety of sounds and have said you’re not trying to figure out “your sound”; has this helped or hindered with trying to find a core audience?
Javelin: We have yet to see the result of our practices on a mass scale, but I think our sound is more cohesive than we think. When I describe how different we think we sound from song to song, many friends tell me it all goes together and to stop worrying. We are starting to realize that old truth that whatever you make, it’s yours. Our core audience maybe has been built by our live show, which has a way of making everything gel.

Javelin – “Oh! Centra”

JM: After giving No Mas a few spins, I would definitely agree that its very cohesive. Oh, and awesome. For the recently released 2 12″, you allowed fans to send in their own record sleeves, which you screen printed and then, for a another $5, you also screen-printed a provided t-shirt or hoodie for custom merch. Who came up with this great idea and how challenging was it to actually execute?
 What was your favorite record sleeve from all the submissions?
Javelin: Bettina who runs Thrill Jockey came up with the idea for people to send their records and t-shirts in– The Wall Street Journal actually called and was interested, which is an achievement for any enterprise. We haven’t seen any of the sleeves that were sent in yet, but the good folks at TJ are documenting the entire run. The sleeves we have seen really look amazing.

JM: The Wall Street Journal? Yowah. Thanks for still talking with me! From what I’ve read, your live show is something very special and very unique. Does anything in the live show match up to what you’ve recorded or is there a lot more improv based on whatever cassettes you’ve been able to find in the thrift shop that day?
Javelin: Well, there is definitely a lot of cohesion between our live / recorded musical thing. That video to which you are referring (where we take thrift cassettes and make a song out of them) is only partially representative of how we work– it is maybe one way that we work, but then we usually add way more of our own sounds and take away even more sounds that aren’t ours.
But YES improvisation takes place throughout our live performance. Tom [van Buskirk] gets on the mic and improvises lyrics, sings lyrics that were once improvised, or straight steals other peoples’ vocal parts and lays them over Javelin beats. And George [Langford ] plays electronic drums standing up and dances, which livens our songs up big time. But all the songs we are playing now in our set are songs that, if you’ve followed our releases, you will have heard before.

JM: I’ll be at the Philadelphia show on Friday, so I’m definitely excited to see you fellas do your thing. How did you get involved with playing at one of my favorite museums, MoMA, and what was that experience like?
Javelin: We were invited by our friends Graffiti Research Lab to play at the screening of a movie they had made for a Poprally event. We brought along our dancer friends from Providence, who were at the time known as Jazz Hand Job. It was surreal. One of the male dancers’ homemade underwear snapped open, revealing serious junk shots every now and again. Our moms were present!!!

JM: Whoa! Sounds like quite a show. You guys just finished up a tour with Yeasayer in the UK and this week are hitting the States hard for the next couple months. With less than a week in between tours, how do you unwind and then psych yourselves up again?
Javelin: Time at home with our lovely ladies, Miami weddings, hanging out with our pets. Then go!

JM: “Miami weddings” sounds like a show on one of those lady networks…that my roommates and I may or may not watch all night long on Sundays…But back to the topic at hand: How does touring in the UK differ from touring in the US?
Javelin: The audiences are, in general, a bit more reserved (as you would imagine). But ultimately people really love music and pay attention to good music there so it isn’t as if they are ignoring you. Plus we totally lucked our way onto a deluxe tour bus with Yeasayer so that will soften any bruised egos.

JM: I am stoked to see you Friday in Philly at the Trocadero with local favorites Man Man. What can Philadelphia expect from your performance?
Javelin: Sweat stains and hollerin’.

JM: That’s how we like it here! You join up with Yeasayer again in April — after having toured the UK with them, are you excited to get back together through the US?
Javelin: Very much so. Those guys still owe us money.

JM: Ha! Lastly, after doing a search on music scrobbler site last.fm, I found three other results for bands with the name Javelin: a visual kei (glam metal according to Wikipedia) band from Japan; a metal band from Germany; and a stoner/doom metal band from Boston. Has this caused any problems? Some long-haired dudes in sleeveless shirts looking to head bang and looking all confused from the front row.
Javelin: No mishaps yet. We were thinking about throwing a show in New York where we invite every band named Javelin and any band with the word Javelin in their name (Javelins, The Javelins, Javelina…). Maybe once we get them all into one room there would be a free for all, a meleé– but the idea is that we are all in the same gang.

JM: I like it. Bold move. If you can do it anywhere, New York is the place. Javelina is local, so maybe your people can talk to theirs and get that party started. Thanks for talking, guys. See you Friday.

Friday, March 5, 2010
Javelin with Man Man and The Skin Cells
@ The Trocadero
1003 Arch Street, Philadelphia
8PM | all ages | $14

Check Javelin’s MySpace page for more upcoming tour dates!

Javelin: website | myspace | @ DC9

Live Photos: Mary Chang