Colour Revolt rocks The Cradle at the Middle East, 9/12/10

 Click here or above, to watch the full set on Vimeo. The video quality is significantly inferior to the one I’d love to upload…If anyone knows of a great place to upload a ridiculously large video file, let me know. Preferably one that takes less than 33 hours, but I’ll take it either way.

Watching two lesbians tongue on a mechanical bull…

…Is a bit like listening to Colour Revolt’s new album, The Cradle. It’s aggressively captivating, intensely intimate, and so wrought with shameless passion that it’s almost impossible not to take in. In the face of unthinkable adversity, Colour Revolt produced a collection of their most lyrically direct and musically abrasive songs yet.

The Cradle does everything it can to validate two ideas around which rock & roll has revolved since its inception: 1) that the guitar is a limitless instrument and 2) that a band with nothing to lose is in its truest, most unadulterated, and, if the potential is already there, utterly unstoppable form.

After losing three out of five band members last year, duel vocalists, guitarists, and songwriters Jesse Coppenbarger and Sean Kirkpatrick wasted no time capsulating that feeling of loss in the form of standout tracks like “8 Years,” “Our Names,” and “Everything is the Same.” Now they’re out playing the majority of their outstanding, relentlessly loud, and small club-friendly new record in dives all throughout the U.S. with new band members and the same above-and-beyond energy that has become customary to Colour Revolt’s small but devoted following.

Turbo Fruits, a fun little rock band out of Nashville, kept the stage warm for Colour Revolt with their heavier take on surf-rock. Despite a few seemingly contrived leaps during guitar solos and a distracting (and well documented with my Flipcam) drunkard trying to rush the stage before his body promptly shut down at the very end of the set, Turbo Fruits set the energy level in the Middle East high enough for Colour Revolt to tip it right over the edge.

Soon after the guests of honor took the stage to set up, Coppenbarger began constructing a wall of guitar noise and ambience, methodically tapping his pedals and gently caressing his guitar strings. As he worked, the band finished tuning and they dived seamlessly into “Our Names” without producing the slightest splash. After a few light tweaks of their tuning knobs, the band went right into the scorching “We Don’t Talk,” complete with Coppenbarger’s signature spontaneous yelps and rusty guitar solo.

Without giving the momentum one second to die, Colour Revolt crashed into one of The Cradle‘s more daunting numbers, “Heartbeat”. Following a short pause, during which Coppenbarger introduced the band, charmingly adding “we’re from the South,” they met the many requests for old songs with “Our Homes are Graves,” one of three songs from the debut six-song EP that would rush off the stage during the set.

Coppenbarger and Kirkpatrick seemed to get an equal rush from their old songs, which also included “Mattresses Underwater” and “A New Family,” as they did from playing songs off The Cradle. The dual vocal screeches and spontaneous, demonstrative guitar lines were just as amplified, if not more so, as they were on songs like “The Cradle.”

But the new album’s lead single seemed to invoke a different vigor from the two founding members. Coppenbarger and Kirkpatrick’s tendency to insert blood-curdling screams where they seem totally unnecessary is most prominent in “8 Years,” the song Coppenbarger told AP he wrote the day his band went from a six- to a two-piece. “It got kind of surreal / I can’t believe that things got worse / Because one man’s limo is another man’s hearse,” Coppenbarger howled in a voice just a bit nervier than that of the album version.

The emotionally enhanced versions of “8 Years” and “A New Family” set up the standout Cradle track “Mona Lisa” to drive the set to an explosive end. The central lick of the song sees Colour Revolt at its absolute pinnacle of heavy guitar prowess, as Coppenbarger and Kirkpatrick trade chug for squeal before slipping into a classic rock-flavored verse. But for all its captivating guitar work, “Mona Lisa’s” best quality might be its starkly straightforward subject matter. Coppenbarger explains to AP:

This is about a bad night with a good girl (or vice versa). Once, I found myself on some anonymous bedroom floor. I was on Xanax with a girl and her friend, begging me to kiss her. She wasbegging for me to kiss her. I couldn’t understand why, until I found out weeks later, I had kissed her the night before while I was on Xanax. Don’t do Xanax. You don’t remember kissing hot girls.

That brash honesty is what makes The Cradle such a monumental album for Colour Revolt and an absolutely vital landmark in their frequently hard-knocked but feisty career. The Cradle shows that Colour Revolt is one of the few contemporary bands that gets it Their debut blood-sweat-and-tears-drenched full-length, Plunder, Beg, and Curse, by some standards, bombed, and 75 percent of their band quit. So what do they do? They made an album that helped them deal with what happened to their livelihood. What they did to reach other people is, though, I’m sure, welcome, purely coincidental.

However, a safe distance from any effort to further their career might have been what Colour Revolt needed to revive it. The Cradle is proof that if this band is not still blazing through our cities in a year’s time, it is through no fault of theirs. Colour Revolt has given the world a masterfully crafted product, whether the world still wants to be against them or not.

Circa Survive – Blue Sky Noise

In 2005, Circa Survive set themselves apart from the myriad of post-hardcore/experimental bands that saw their heyday in the heart of the 00s with their uniquely spacey and tastefully disjointed debut album, Jurturna. But Circa’s latest release,Blue Sky Noise, does nothing to set this once scene-worshipped band apart from the scores of others from the aforementioned myriad that have scraped the bottom of the pseudo-experimental genre so thin that they can’t help but fall through into blank space…

Read the rest of my review at WECBMusic.blogspot.com.

Album Review: Horse Feathers – Thistled Spring (Kill Rock Stars)

Sometimes I wish I was born into the setting of Where the Red Fern Grows or Shiloh just so I could move to Boston and let Horse Feathers serenade me into daydreams about my childhood in the country. With Thistled Spring, the Justin Ringle solo project-turned-duo-turned-trio-turned-quartet somehow manages to create something even more eloquently picturesque than 2007’s masterful House With No Home without changing a thing.

Read the rest of my review at WECBMusic.blogspot.com

Album Review: Dr. Dog – Shame, Shame (ANTI-)

It took me a few listens to figure out why everyone seems to be all about Dr. Dog lately. It has been a while since I crawled out of my everything-that-sounds-remotely-folky-and-underproduced-with-simple-chords-and-vocal-harmonies-is-awesome phase. For a while, I had a bit of trouble placing a divider between Dr. Dog and that all-too-ubiquitous style that has suddenly become uncool by becoming cool. I’m not sure if the band’s recent buzz made me try harder to like it or to hate it, but either way, I found the wrinkle that makes Dr. Dog worth a good deal of the praise they’ve garnered lately: it’s not the 60s-rock gimmick, but the songwriting and subtleties that make Shame Shame a downright pleasant listening experience…

Read the rest of my review on the WECB Music Report.

First Impression: Jonsi – Go

Very few contemporary musicians can get away with dressing like a bird and recording completely over-the-top orchestral music as a side project…especially when that contemporary musician is releasing said over-the-top orchestral music that is more extreme than and separate from his main band, Sigur Ros.

And even fewer can prepare to release such a collection without so much as an utterance of critical skepticism. With Go, Sigur Ros frontman spreads his wings (literally) and whets whatever creative taste buds he couldn’t satisfy with his day job (a scary thought, given Sigur Ros’s catalogue). The album, which was, in its inception, described as “acoustic,” is, as evidenced by his performance for Radio WYNC, borderline unrecognizable from whatever version of the album Jonsi must be hearing in his head. Seemingly omnipotent composer Nico Muhly’s arrangements swallow every acoustic instrument in sight, a style with which Jonsi is familiar and heavily associated.

Upon first listen, Go reads a lot like a Sigur Ros album: You remember how the songs make you feel more so than specific moments, phrases, and hooks. But make no mistake, they are there. It makes you want to listen over and over every time you get in your car in the morning and go to sleep at night…you want to get to know the songs and pick apart why they make you feel how they made you feel the first time you heard them. And by the time you’ve done that, you feel something completely different but even more beautiful.

But Jonsi’s individual influence shines through in a very obvious but can’t-put-your-finger-on-it kind of way. The songs are distinctly his work in that he exerts and even embodies a sense of frantic positivity that even Sigur Ros merely brushes on. With opening track “Go Do,” for example, Jonsi’s tribal bass drum pulses along with butterfly-wing flutes in a way that almost possesses you to do something meaningful, although you don’t know what because you can’t understand his words.

That’s the beauty of Jonsi’s music. Although he sings all the songs in English, it’s almost all indistinguishable from “hopelandic.” But perhaps that is a good thing (see “All Alright“). Jonsi’s music, with Sigur Ros, Riceboy Sleeps, and now under his own name, has always spoken for itself and penetrated human emotions better without decipherable lyrics. Elaborate strings, whisping woodwinds, passionate drums, and Jonsi’s signature emotion-soaked falsetto speak louder than words.

If there’s one thing that struck me on my first listen, besides everything I’ve mentioned already, it’s the closing track, “Henglias.” Reminiscent, in different ways, of both Sigur Ros album-closing tracks “Heysatan” and “All Alright,” the song is water-logged with low-end strings, only to be wrung out by Jonsi’s unmistakable, whistle-like croon. If this song doesn’t make me cry at some point in my life, I’ll know I missed something.

Go will be released internationally starting the week of April 5. It’s an essential addition to any Sigur Ros fan’s collection.