popwreckoning

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

“Do you know what ‘moto’ means?” singer Esau Mwamwaya of the Very Best asked the crowd at DC9 Monday night. (I presume he was asking if we knew what it meant in his native Chichewa, the national language of his homeland, Malawi.) The crowd, smiling back at him, collectively shook their heads. “It means ‘fire’!” Funny you mention something incendiary, Esau, because on a cold Monday night in Washington, the “band” from London figuratively lit a fire under the audience at the sold-out DC9 with their brand of African tinged dance music and turned the club into an all-out dance party.

The opener for the night was the Brooklyn-based duo Javelin. Not sure where they got their name – maybe cousins Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford were good at track and field in high school? These days, I imagine the two must be flexing their muscles carrying all their gear around – a whole table full of electronics including several synths and a drum pad, colorfully painted boomboxes they call “boombaatas” that form large speaker totems, and a collection of maracas and cowbells.

Javelin’s brief but entertaining set of pop / hip hop / electronic music at times lifted lyrics from songs of days gone by like Mariah Carey‘s “Fantasy.” Another example: they commandeered the words from the children’s lullaby “Frere Jacques” and turned into something completely different. Who would have guessed that song could ever be so dancey? And with humorous song titles like “Lindsay Brohan” and “Soda Popinski,” you’d have to smile. My faves from the set were “Twyce” and “Vibrationz,” the latter name-checking Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Marky Mark (aka Mark Wahlberg when he was a singer way back when). If you’re going to name your song “Vibrationz,” it’s totally appropriate to give a nod to the only two songs from popular culture that also mention such scandalous quivering.

The Very Best is a trio comprised of singer Mwamwaya and the London-based DJ/production duo of Radioclit (Swede Johan Carlberg and Frenchman Etienne [DJ] Tron). I first became aware of them when the title track of their first official full-length album, “Warm Heart of Africa”, was added to the BBC 6music playlist. The song was an instant hit with me, buoyed by the gaiety of vocals from Mwamwaya and guest Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend (who incidentally also cowrote the song) and joyous instrumentation. I was a little skeptical how this live exhibition would turn out when Carlberg first came onstage and immediately broke out a large album full of CDs and popped a disc into his Philips player. Thankfully though, my uncertainty quickly dissolved as the band got going.

For the live performance, singer Mwamwaya alternately stood, danced, and interacted with fans directly in front of Carlberg, who played DJ and assumed additional audience warm-up duty for the evening, waving his arms back and forth vigorously to get the crowd going during songs. For added oomph, they even brought with them two energetic dancers, resplendent in jackets that read “TVB” on the back; Mwamwaya proudly announced that the girls had come “all the way from the UK!” “Julia” and “Warm Heart of Africa” from their official first album were warmly received. So was “Tengazako,” a track from their 2008 free-to-download mixtape that featured an obvious sample from M.I.A., causing everyone in the club to do the gun-toting moves that I have only recently learned are requisite when hearing her “Paper Planes.”

Generally, you can expect a headlining act to play for a significantly longer period of time than their opener. Unfortunately for those of us gathered to see this band at DC9, this wasn’t the case. The two of them were clearly not prepared for such a lively reaction from their Washington area adoring fans and as such weren’t equipped to do more than the eight songs they played us. At the tail end of their set, Carlberg asked the audience what song they wanted, and after some random shouts and murmurings, it was decided that the Very Best’s cover version of Vampire Weekend‘s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” would be the tune. After Mwamwaya left the stage, (the crowd didn’t want to let him go), Carlberg stayed behind to spin records, and the audience continued dancing to the pulsating beats on offer. I think if they keep this up, the Very Best could very well be the next global phenomenon.

The Very Best: myspace
Javelin: website | myspace