Culturespill

Bill Fox with The Mice in the 1980s (Far Right)

Trying to find Bill Fox these days is a bit too much like trotting the globe in a hot air balloon in search of Amelia Earheart’s plane. And trying to find an actual album of his? Well, it’s kind of like stumbling upon Atlantis, only to realize it’s just a foil reconstruction accompanied by a crayon map to the real deal.

Some swear his 1998 masterpiece, Shelter from the Smoke, is available on iTunes–so you click that stupid iTunes icon in the lower-left screen of your mp3-crippled laptop in a frenzy, only to find, yet again, absolutely no trace of this brilliant phantom. Then you read that something called “Scat Records” actually talked to the man–which, after all this time, sounds a lot like that dude who took publisher McGraw-Hill to the cleaners with his bullshit story about how Howard Hughes had chosen him to write his autobiography. So you dig a little deeper and find a story about how Shelter and his other solo gem, Transit Byzamtium, are actually going to be reissued, and that Shelter’s due out in September (as in, like, now.)

Then you go to the Scat Records website and find a tossed-off note explaining that “Bill Fox’s Shelter from the Smoke is going to be an ‘09 release” now, because they “couldn’t get the art together in time for the deadline.” This along with a stale promise that “Bill stopped writing and performing music a few years ago, but has plans to start back up again relatively soon.” Emphasize “relatively,” of course. The saga of Bill Fox’s mystifyingly difficult journey to the wider attention he so richly deserves continues, relegating him now to that dreaded remainder bin of American culture–the one marked “cult status.” Wonderful.

About 9 years ago, when I began this half-life of a music dork, I took some buddies of mine to a record sale being held up in NYC to benefit a favorite college station of mine, and stumbled upon an album called Shelter from the Smoke by a guy named Bill Fox. I had never heard of him, but the dutiful indie elves pitching CDs for their label “Cherry Pop” pushed it hard, and I bit–in the same way I bit and bought a bootleg box set of Dylan’s so-called “Albert Hall” shows with the promise that it wouldn’t have the garbled, “recorded from ten-thousand leagues under the sea” sound of most bootlegs, only to find, 200 dollars later, that it had the “recorded from ten-thousand leagues under the sea” sound of most bootlegs.

Bill Fox with “The Mice” in 1988

Fortunately, however, Fox’s album was no tinny bootleg; it was a masterful onslaught of 18 folk-pop diamonds mined in Fox’s own apartment, often with little more than a guitar to accompany a voice full of honey and heartbreak–a lachrymose and vaguely effeminate wail so eternally young that it brings to mind a nest of just-hatched birds clamoring for a worm. Many great ghosts haunt these songs–Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Eliot Smith, Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Nick Drake. You can hear Dylan’s “My Back Pages” calling from the chorus of “Junked Lot Serenade” where Fox sings about how “all the stars form their tragedies at ten.” Shades of The Byrds’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” color the lilting and bare-bones folk revival of “I’m Not Over Loving You,” and I think Tim Hardin dies somewhere in the distance of “Brittany Goes Right Down,” an instantly hypnotic dirge worthy of its own spot on the Velvet Underground’s Loaded (preferably in the capable hands of Nico.)

For whatever reason, I hadn’t listened much to the album since then, and hardly even gave it a second thought until Dave Eggers’s magazine The Believer came out with a piece by a guy who called himself “lefty” and went on a not-entirely fulfilling pursuit for the ephemeral Bill Fox, who had by then retreated back into telemarketing hell in some soul-choking cubicle wilderness of Cleveland, Ohio, banished to a bitter self-exile from unattained dreams. “I’m dying to lay some tracks down somewhere,” he would say in 1998, shortly before his comprehensive vanishing act from the music scene, “I’d love to record a rock ‘n roll record, but I’m not in a position to put up my own money right now.”

He’d long-since abandoned the local punk outfit he fronted with his bro on the drums, Cleveland’s “Mice,” back in the mid ’80s. “No longer was that garage-pop thing relevant for the kind of songs I was writing,” Fox told the Seattle Weekly ten years later, “I just kinda let it crumble.” He would learn not too long thereafter–to the dismay of the artist and to we who might have heard all the albums he never could afford to cut–that what will crumble will crumble whether or not he cared to “let it.”

In another prophetic concession published by Seattle Weekly in 1998, he would say “”I’m able to go a few months without working with the money I got from SpinArt”–the label the picked up Shelter from the Smoke after Cherry Pop released it to absolute critical and commercial disregard a couple years prior–”But I’m a telemarketer, and I’ll end up in that business again when the money runs out. Just living and writing songs.” All of which came true, except for the whole “writing songs” part: rumor has it that the man no longer even owns a fucking guitar, so complete has his disgust with the industry’s blindness to talent become. How fitting it is, then, that we too are left clinging to the very hope the man himself apparently abandoned so long ago, the thin likelihood that we may someday hear all those tracks he was “dying to lay down somewhere,” someday, somehow.

One More Track:

Over and Away She Goes

Hear an interview with Bill Fox (1998)

Bill Fox Fan Page on Myspace Here.

Praise For Bill Fox:
Things I’d Rather Be Doing: “It’s a shame that Fox has soured on music, because he’s awfully good at it. On his two solo discs, he offers a total of 36 songs, and nearly all of them are keepers . . . This is folk in spirit more than sound, the songs so well crafted as to feel like public domain wonders rather than 10-year-old pop tunes recorded in the basement on weekends by a 9-to-5er.”

The Narrative Review: “Stylistically, it perhaps hearkens back to early Dylan, only it has a more polished sound despite the fact that Fox recorded it at home. Fox is accompanied by nothing more than his own guitar, but he manages to flesh out the sound through his superb playing. Fox’s voice however is not like Dylan’s nasal twang, but is surprisingly effeminate. There’s something Nico-esque about it, although it’s nowhere as a deep or given the fact that he’s from Cleavland, Germanic. However, given my literary predilections, what gets me most about the song is the craftsmanship of the lyrics.

Rakes Progress: “I’ve been clued in and listening to Bill Fox’s albums Shelter from the Smoke & Transit Byzantium. They’re pretty wonderful, I think, especially the latter. I might not go so far as to call Fox a lost genius, but he seems to have a healthy respect for the Great American Songbook and knows his craft, which makes for great pop music (that unfortunately isn’t popular at all, but could or should be).”

The Driftwood Singers Present: “It’s hard to know why Bill Fox didn’t emerge as one of his generation’s great songwriters, but we hear tell of personal dilemmas that set him back and sidelined him from the music business altogether. Mental and emotional fragility infuse his songs, which are often the sound of idealism dog-paddling to stay above the cynical waters of modern life.”

She Wants Revenge

In our willfully sarcastic, postmodern age, we sometimes become so impressed with our own wit that criticism of any particular band or album becomes less an opportunity to inform people than it is a chance at demonstrating how boundlessly hip we are. The poet W.H. Auden cautioned critics against writing reviews of bad books, because “it is not possible to review bad books without showing off.” The same applies to criticism of albums we do not particularly like—what is to be gained by banging a band around for the length of an entire review, other than to massage your own ego in a public forum? That is especially the case with a relatively new group called She Wants Revenge, a darkwave band hailing from the San Fernando Valley whose 2006 debut spawned a video directed by Joaquin Pheonix for the single “Tear You Apart” (as well as another video featuring Garbage’s Shirley Manson for “These Things.”)

The crime this band commits, apparently, is that they sound like other bands. “Come on, people,” some anonymous worm spews in an amazon.com review, “Spend your money and time on the Best Of Joy Division, Bauhaus, or Sisters Of Mercy instead of this recycled/redundant nonsense that’s basically a way for the band to pick up chicks.” Oh, how clever! How ingeniously “cheeky,” as my English friend used to say. Thank God you found this band to pick on, because we otherwise might never have known how interesting you are.

Then there’s always this kind of thing: “I picked this up for four bucks thinking I was getting a great deal, having heard that they were similar to the Killers and drew influences from the Cure. However after one listen, I put it aside and actually felt regret for parting with my $4.” But if it was a Cure or Killers album you wanted, why not buy a Cure or Killers album instead? It’s like picking up a volume of poems by some contemporary poet whom, you heard in passing, draws influence from Emily Dickinson–and then burning the book on your grill in the back, convulsing with guffaws of disdain as you douse it with gasoline and fumble for a blow torch in the shed because you didn’t find any Emily Dickinson poems in it. It’s called “crazy.” This is why comparing bands to one another can be as fatal a blow to both of them as the most acerbic (and, of course, incomparably clever) CD review.

She Wants Revenge: “Tear You Apart,” She Wants Revenge (2006)

If anything is more useless than reviewing those “bad books” Auden talks about, it’s criticizing a band for having influences–as if there is any such thing as a band whose sound and ideas do not at least in part derive from the work of prior groups. Criticism of She Wants Revenge as a derivative product of obvious influences is nonsense. Influence is an inescapable fact of the artistic process; a work of art that is entirely independent of all influence would have to consist of nothing more than utter silence. Simply put, it is impossible. All art derives from influence; great art does something new with it. Once this is recognized, the only possible legitimate criticism one can level at these guys is that their influences are too obvious, and that they therefore fail to achieve a sound of their own. This is a more rational criticism that, unlike the absurd and irrelevant complaint that She Wants Revenge are infuenced by other bands, actually has some grounding in logic and is open to a diversity of opinion.

The real test is this: are these guys able to incorporate their many influences into an original sound that they can rightly call their own? Many obviously feel that the debt She Wants Revenge owe to Devo, New Order, Interpol, etc. is so significant as to be distracting. But the vast majority of people who have seen them live–an opportunity I enjoyed recently when they opened for another great band called Electric Six–will come away from the show with the understanding that they are too good, too full of energy, and too certain of their creative identity to be tossed off as mere imitation.

Some bands do indeed fall prey to their influences, while others are able to blend them into a unique sound. She Wants Revenge do just that; they are talented players whose music is more textured, layered, sophisticated and fresh than most of the influences critics nail them to. I am certain that their debut marked the beginning of a fascinating creative journey for She Wants Revenge, and I know that there is more great music to come from these guys. Crybabies whose tastes are stuck in the 80s can feel free to dust off their 25-year-old Devo and Cure albums as I gladly set foot in the future of rock ‘n roll–and I won’t be looking back.

Every once in a while and usually out of the blue, an artist comes along who seems so uninterested in being anyone other than who he is that even some of your most favorite bands seem like pretenders by comparison. I think of J.J. Cale back in 2004 on his first tour in forever and with a rare new album in stores, uttering not a single word about the new material and playing not one track from the CD the whole damned night. I think of The Velvet Underground, Bell & Sebastian, Josh Rouse, Mark Knopfler—artists whose only objective is to be true to their own vision despite any cost that authenticity may entail. But it’s time to put those Bright Eyes CDs back on the rack and check out a new guy on the block (well, new-ish—you just haven’t heard of him yet): Peter Salett, whose promising new album, In the Ocean of the Stars, is due out July 22^nd.

Even bands of such indisputable integrity as Velvet Underground or Belle & Sebastian can seem stuck in a bit of a shtick after a while; that you can so assuredly turn to them at any time to deliver exactly the kind of sound your latest mood craves is great, but it’s also the kind of reliability that mars the work of bands who cling to what works rather than challenging themselves to expand their creative arsenals. Soon, that favorite band of yours just doesn’t catch you off guard any more; every song’s move and gesture inhabits its own permanent room in your memory, and you start to wonder where the groove went.

That’s when you turn to artists like Peter Salett, whose work at once appeases and surprises, delivering a steady serving of cool-minded folk pop that’s laced with the occasional, unanticipated flourish—a distant twang of lap steel silvers the edges of the song, or the funky tear of an amped-up guitar fractures a ballad’s fragile beauty to reveal something even more powerful and, it turns out, wholly unexpected. Suddenly you remember what it felt like when you fell in love with that one favorite band all those years ago.

Peter Salett: “With Anybody Else,” After A While (2004)

Unlike most of those established favorites, though, there’s something mildly brazen in Salett’s delivery that promises to never go stale. Listening to an entire album of his—a rare feat in this age of the mp3—reveals a range of impressive breadth and confidence. “Heart of Mine,” featured on the soundtrack for 2000’s Ben Stiller flick Keeping the Faith (yes, Salett’s been at it for a while now—question is, where have you been?), smacks of a kind of wizened Ben Folds or the charged piano pop of Mark Malman. But just when a folk-pop masterpiece like “With Anybody Else” tempts you to suspect that you’ve got Salett’s number, he digs for the devastating depths of “What A Beautiful Dancer” from his upcoming Ocean of the Stars, an uncharacteristically rocking tune that incorporates elements of surf rock and Neil Young’s Crazy Horse into his bright acoustic brand of indie pop. It’s a trippy piece of rock ‘n roll that picks up where the last Sparklehorse album left off–think “Mountains” or “Knives of Summertime.”

Like “Heart of Mine,” Salett’s new single, “Miss You,” sleepwalks breezily into a gorgeous acoustic soundscape that floats through its too-brief couple of minutes by force of its own mildly embittered longing. As if to make the much-needed suggestion that “indie” isn’t necessarily synonymous with self-loathing, though, Salett is careful not to linger in those sentiments too long. He quickly rebounds (oh, the puns!) with the sweetened melancholy of spare pieces like “Safe” or the album-closing “Sunshine,” a tune that captures the wistful daydreams of Salett’s sound and songwriting as accurately as anything he’s put to tape. Ocean of the Stars doesn’t depart in any measurable way from Salett’s proven recipe of laid back folk-pop with the occasional edge you never saw coming, but that’s because he neither needs nor intends to change. He is who he is. And, anyway, with a musical palate as wide as his, there’s really nowhere to depart to that he hasn’t already been.

by Stephen Foster

Tim Fite’s music is a pastiche of at least this: hip-hop, especially hip-hop; folk; Uncle Tupelo country; rock, calliope sing-song, and much of it is suffused with electronic scratch, whir, chirp, and beep. A few of his songs are eerily similar to Tom Waits’ as in, say, the industrial shout of much of Bone Machine. His hip-hop voice and tendency toward the sarcastic is about as close to Eminem as you can get. His singing voice, on the other hand, is reminiscent of Randy Newman’s—Fair Ain’t Fair is heavy on Newman-like piano, too. And finally, his song writing is what you might get from collaboration between Beck and Joe Henry.

That Fite is all of these, and yet coherent, is hard to believe, but true. It’s also what makes Fite’s music so broadly and breathtakingly original, yet accessible. Listening to Fite is not unlike looking at the late collagist Robert Rauschenberg’s work: a lot is going on and it’s competing for your attention, but it’s not distracting; in fact, its multiple stimulations focuses rather than distracts you.

The nearest female analogy would have to be M.I.A, who bends genres as easily and often as Fite, the difference being that Fite will not only blend but break and reassemble diverse sounds; and yet, also like MIA, he does not abandon melody. Nor, though, is he a slave to it.

As far as I can tell, he’s a slave only to his unique (and likely demented) muse.

Interviewed recently about his music, Fite credited hip-hop as being his prime influence, and it shows, especially in his previous release—but not as conspicuously as he might think. He clearly has hip-hop inclinations—obvious, but held at bay, on almost everything he does on Fair Ain’t Fair. He’s like early Eminem (same sense of humor, too) but with more musical influences banging around all over the place.

Tim Fite Clip: “Yesterday’s Garden,” Fair Ain’t Fair (2008)

In that same interview, he drew sharp distinctions between Fair Ain’t Fair and his previous release, Over the Counter Culture, which, pre-Radiohead, was given away on the Web. That album, he said, was his angry shout-out against all the craziness he saw all around him: the war, poor people who just get poorer, government-sponsored thieves, the usual suspects. And that this one, Fair Ain’t Fair, was not as angry nor as harsh as Counter Culture. That may be, but I’ve listened extensively to both and he still has anger to burn on Fair Ain’t Fair, yet another reason it is a compelling release because I think anger—an un-ironic righteous indignation—is his true muse.

He’s right about Over the Counter Culture: the opening song on that work, “Place Your Bets,” kicks things off with plenty of angst: “One more dead/One more dead/Can I get a holler for one more head/One more head for one more hand/One more bet for one more man.” There’s more than a fair amount of ire on Fair Ain’t Fair; but Fite’s correct that it’s a lighter piece of work than Counter Culture. To Fite’s credit, it’s not always easy to know whether there’s glee lurking around the next phrase, or melancholy.

The best way to describe Fair Ain’t Fair, and Fite in general, may simply be to say his work is the musical equivalent of trying to find the seams in a jigsaw puzzle created by Dali. In one of the standout tracks on Fair Ain’t Fair, “Big Mistake,” he sings: “Show me the best that you got and I’ll show you one better/Show me your reddest rose and I’ll show you one redder…Everyone gets to make one big mistake/And if you’re waiting on me I guess you’re gonna have to wait/Cause I’m saving all mine up for one special day/So I can fuck it all up in some spectacular way.”

None of Fair Ain’t Fair is fucked up. It’s a smorgasbord of an album, musically and lyrically.

Including whimsy, too. In “Yesterday’s Garden,” over banjo—there aren’t many instruments Fite won’t use—he sings: “I guess you know that yesterday/I ran your garden over girl…I ran your garden over girl, just yesterday/Eight in the morning/Late for work again/Ain’t looking where I’m going/Just wondering where I’ve been….How could a woman with a thumb so green/Be in love with a man who’s become so mean?”

What a fine musical kaleidoscope.

I’d like to welcome you to the Tim Fite show.

The Spill on Time Fife’s Fair Ain’t Fair . . . 

The Fix: “The line between woefully inept and intentionally goofy can be difficult to discern. Fortunately, Tim Fite usually stays on the right side of that equation . . . “

New Music Nation:  “An eclectic mix of junkyard, stompin’ hoedowns; twisted, carnival-esque romps; breezy acoustic guitar or piano reflections; whimsically funky grooves and more . . . “

Punk News:  ” Lacking in instant appeal, the album is a grower, seeping into the mindpsace days after you have your first listen . . . ”

Pop Matters: “Of his three full-lengths, this is his most experimental sounding yet seemingly natural. Fair Ain’t Fair is a clear step forward for Tim as a growing artist . . . “

Prefix Magazine:  “The greedier side of the soul is familiar territory for Fite . . . “

Metro Mix:  “If you can’t decide whether you’re a little bit country or a little bit rock ‘n’ roll—or even a little bit rap—don’t worry. Tim Fite can’t, either, and this album is parked neatly in the intersection . . . “

Hartford Courant: “The album is loaded with arresting musical touches . . . “

Aversion: “The obvious thing about Tim Fite’s music is that he doesn’t ever conform to a set of rules. He does it his way, and it shows . . . “

AMG: “varying in moods from positively gleeful to terribly melancholy . . . “

Dusted Magazine: “The slacker ditty “Big Mistake” is as sweet as the blood-and-dirt spiritual “My Hands” is chilling . . . “

The Action Design

Alright, so it may be released on the rather less-than-tastefully named “Pop Smear Records,” but, thankfully, The Action Design’s debut LP conjures more visions of jubilant midsummer drives to the beach with your windows down and streaked hair blown into a frenzy on the highway than it does of pap smears–and that’s a good thing. In a way it’s unfortunate that Never Say is slated for a post-Labor Day release (Sept. 23) because, much like Ted Leo’s great Living with the Living last year, the album really has a “record of the summer” feel to it.

But their MySpace page features a generous helping of tracks from that upcoming record, a sample that’s fascinating to hear alongside older material like “The Scissor Game” from their 2007 EP Into A Sound; the comparatively self-conscious and staid production of that prior work showcases a band that’s undergone an extraordinary creative evolution since, you know, all the way back in, uh–last year (because a 12-month-old song might as well have been recorded in the Mesozoic period these days–to quote Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, “that’s like SO last season!”)

Much like the aforementioned Ted Leo, tracks like “Landmines” live up to their titles by exploding from the stereo with an anthemic fury that might be downright threatening to members of the Emo persuasion, a manic exultation that approximates the rapture of The Long Winters’ “Rich Wife” or The Golden Dogs’ “Birdsong.” By the time you get to tracks like “Ten Feet of Snow” or “The Crossing”–songs on which it sounds as if the band decided to forgo the usual amps and plug their guitars into a passing thunderstorm instead–you realize that this shit should come with a warning label–”if you have a heart condition or listen to Coldplay, consult your physician before purchasing.” Or perhaps one of those disclaimers some dude reads on the radio so fast it fries your eyelids: “this band is not responsible for any sudden tremors of the nervous system, fidgety eyeballs, or inexplicable rushes of rapture.”

The Action Design in Studio

In an industry that increasingly believes money is made by categorizing bands into corners like “hardcore” or “pop” (whatever the hell THAT means anymore–is “pop” the new “indie”?), it’s particularly delightful to hear a band that does both with equal skill and passion, a band that enjoys a synth riff as much as the meaty crunch of electric guitar. Emily Whitehurst’s full-throated wail–a voice reminiscent of that neo-Mama Cass, The Gossip’s Beth Ditto–dresses the new-wave leanings of “The Crossing” in a silvery whisper poised to sneak up on you at any given moment with an unanticipated roar.

If lyrics like “once I was yours and I will be yours again” don’t threaten the thrones of Leonard Cohen or Townes Van Zandt, that’s because this is an “indie” record that does not openly cater to the falafel-and-tofu-crunching crowd of Emo vegans for whom music is a means of statement rather than joy. It’s a record for people who don’t feel guilty about turning to music for fun. Never Say, judging from those of the album’s tracks available on their MySpace Page, is indeed an unashamedly joyous record–something we could use a lot more of in a musical climate that too often identifies “indie” as a synonym for “mopey.”

In a label-obsessed scene saturated by so many genres that entire web pages are devoted to defining them, The Action Design’s Never Say offers another one for the pundits to savor: Post-punk-indie-dance-pop. It might sound like something that should come with a bubble-gum center and hard candy shell, but if any album ought to be sold with a blow-pop attached, this is it. Check them out on tour this summer and see for yourself:

Jun 19 @ 7:00P Glasshouse Record Store CD RELEASE - Pomona, California

Jun 20 @ 10:00A Pomona Fairgrounds Warped Tour - Pomona, California

Jun 21 @ 10:00A Pier 30/32 Warped Tour - San Francisco, California

Jun 22 @ 10:00A Seaside Park Warped Tour - Ventura, California

Jun 23 @ 5:00P Jillians w/Alesana, Evergreen Terrace, The Bronx, 1997 - Las Vegas, Nevada

Jun 25 @ 10:00A Cricket Pavilion Warped Tour - Phoenix, Arizona

Jun 26 @ 10:00A N.M.S.U. Practice Field Warped Tour - Las Cruces, New Mexico

Jun 28 @ 10:00A SLC Warped Tour - Salt Lake City, Utah

Jul 13 @ 8:30P Bottom of the Hill w/ Girl in a Coma - San Francisco

Jul 19 @ 8:00P The Knitting Factory w/ Girl in a Coma - Los Angeles, California

Aug 13 @ 10:00A Save Mart Center Warped Tour - Fresno, California

Aug 14 @ 10:00A San Diego Warped Tour - San Diego, California

Aug 15 @ 10:00A Shoreline Amphitheatre Warped Tour - Mountain View, California

Aug 16 @ 10:00A Sleep Train Amphitheatre Warped Tour - Sacramento, California

Aug 17 @ 10:00A Home Depot Center Warped Tour - Los Angeles, California

Aug 30 @ 8:30P Bottom of the Hill - San Francisco

Sep 5 @ 8:00P Los Angeles, California – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 6 @ 8:00P San Diego, California – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 7 @ 8:00P Phoenix, Arizona – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 9 @ 8:00P El Paso, Texas – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 10 @ 8:00P Austin, Texas – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 11 @ 8:00P Houston, Texas – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 12 @ 8:00P New Orleans, Louisiana – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 13 @ 8:00P Birmingham, Alabama – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 14 @ 8:00P Atlanta, Georgia – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 16 @ 8:00P Charlotte, North Carolina – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 17 @ 8:00P Wash DC, Washington DC – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 18 @ 8:00P Philly, Pennsylvania – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 19 @ 8:00P New York, New York – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 20 @ 8:00P Boston, Massachusetts – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 21 @ 8:00P Cleveland, Ohio – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 23 @ 8:00P Chicago, Illinois – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 24 @ 8:00P St Louis, Missouri – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 25 @ 8:00P Kansas City, Missouri – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 26 @ 8:00P Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 28 @ 8:00P Denver, Colorado – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 29 @ 8:00P Salt Lake City, Utah – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Sep 30 @ 8:00P Boise, Idaho – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Oct 1 @ 8:00P Seattle, Washington – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Oct 2 @ 8:00P Portland, Oregon – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

Oct 3 @ 8:00P Sacramento, California – Co-Headlining Tour with Killola

When Franz Ferdinand followed up their brilliant, eponymous debut with that frenzied and self-conscious clunker of a second album, You Could Have it So Much Better (how right they were), it seemed that we had another one-trick pony on our hands, that what glories they had brought us in 2004 were not the kind of thing that comes around every year–or every ten, for that matter. As much as I hate to describe one band by discussing another–comparisons do a lot more to confine bands than they do to illuminate them–Young Knives, a geek-rock outfit out of England that look and sound every bit as “Young” as their band name suggests, are both picking up the torch that Franz left behind and taking it to the places we expected them to go. If Ray Davies is correct in his theory that a band’s third album is really the one that shows you whether or not the kids are for real, then Superabundance, the third Young Knives album (if we’re counting their 2002 EP–and why not?), documents the arrival of a potentially great band.

Nothing on the band’s previous and comparatively straightforward releases foreshadowed what Superabundance serves up: an onslaught of excellent indie pop that’s not afraid to show a fang now and then with tougher tracks like “Up All Night” or “Terra Firma”–a kind of exceedingly English Hot Hot Heat–but only kind of. Speaking of “exceedingly English,” this is perhaps the most shamelessly English group since Syd Barrett was cutting tracks like “Astronomy Domine” with Pink Floyd–”Knives” is British for “Knaves,” for instance, which is exactly how they got their band name. These tweed-clad Brits made a rather auspicious entry onto the scene by declaring themselves “Dead” on their debut EP, The Young Knives . . . Are Dead. But they’re not, you see. Last year they were nominated for the really important-sounding “Nationwide Mercury Prize,” and now they’re giving geek rock a good name on tour in support of an album that debuted at the 28 spot on the UK Charts (you know, over where good music actually makes the charts–ah, the luxuries of being English!)

Young Knives: “Terra Firma,” Superabundance (2008)

I’m not sure what makes a “geek rock” band other than looking really geeky. For the most part, these guys look like a bunch of overdressed potato farmers from the Ukraine–which makes sense, since they’re featured delivering carts of produce to one another in the supremely weird video for “Terra Firma” as they shout “Fake rabbit! Real Snake!” (hopefully those items aren’t also on the menu.) Appearing in public only in tweed suits and coming from someplace called Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire probably doesn’t help much either.

But, geek or no geek, give the “Terra Firma” video above a little look if you doubt for a second the comparisons to Franz. The song is an incorrigible fit of post-punk revival sweetness that drives relentlessly through an adrenaline-overdrive of manic guitars laced over a backbone of disco that puts a lot into perspective: Why, for instance, a previous label of theirs was called “Shifty Disco,” or why an acoustic take on “Turn Tail,” one of several singles the album has spawned, was recorded directly to vinyl all in one take at London’s Westbourne Studios–something that hasn’t been done commercially since people like The Partridge Family could actually make a living in music. In other words, it’s been a long, long time.

Young Knives: “Turn Tail,” Superabundance (2008)

But that’s OK–like so many great young bands, Young Knives are looking back to find what worked rather than storming blindly ahead to repeat what hasn’t; and the results, despite a few baffling missteps along the way (the tossed-off and boring “Flies,” for instance, or the totally discordant “Back to Back”), are marvelous. While the Franz comparisons work, Superabundance is hardly some derivative replica of albums that have already been done. The string arrangements on “Turn Tail” elevate the song to a sublimity that has never factored into Franz’s play book–the song is an absolutely gorgeous and cleanly produced pop-rock masterpiece–no wonder it’s both the opener and one of the record’s several singles. Other tracks betray a kind of pop sensibility we might expect of Teenage Fanclub or Phoenix. The sum of all these parts is a band with their influences in check and a vision of their own to master–and it is our boundless fortune that we get to listen in as they try to do so.

The Spill on Young Knives’ Superabundance . . .

Pitchfork: “Comparable bands have toyed with similar tweaks, but what the Young Knives have going for them is a lower profile– even if it’s about the equal of the follow-ups from the Gang of Four gang of four (Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, Futureheads, Maximo Park), it’s more likely to be seen as a part of a journey as opposed to an endpoint after a fantastic debut . . . “

Drowned In Sound: “Despite intimations to the contrary, The Young Knives aren’t the humdrum bunch some people have them pegged as . . . “

Contact Music: “Superabundance steals the show and proves to be an incredibly infectious and breath-taking album . . . “

Soundbites: “Their trademark post-punk-i-ness and sense of humor are still intact, but the new album finds more melodicism, and a strong psychedelic influence in some of it’s deeper cuts . . . “

Soundcheck Magazine: “Superabundance, the second full-length release from England’s Young Knives, is a surprisingly exciting album . . . “

The Guardian: “The follow-up to 2006’s Voices of Animals and Men is a slick collection of darkly sketched Britpop that combines in-jokes and jagged pop riffs . . . “

Mog: “Probably the most rewarding – and just generally well crafted – sophomore album from a British band in a very long time indeed . . . “

Music Remedy: “A muscular clatter of pulsing guitars, head-spinning percussive thuds, and harmonic, brotherly vocals provide the backbone to a rich throng of giddy, excited ideas and ageless, wry lyrical themes . . . ”