Sufjan Stevens - Put the lights on the tree

Tis the season and all that…

Time to get out the colouring pencils

Via the Matablog.

Belle and Sebastian are giving fans the chance to design an album cover for a limited edition version of their recently released BBC Sessions. Seems like a pretty cool idea, check out the details here.

If you were to pick another band to design an album cover for who would it be? (please leave a comment below) For me, I guess it would be a toss up between Pavement or Deerhoof. Either one would be loads of fun.

Vampire Weekend interview

They stand accused of exploiting African music, of capitalising on economic oppression and of being over-hyped. In response they tell Karl McDonald “you can’t win with some people”.

How important is it really, in the après punk era that we live in, to pay your dues? Why is it that so many people need to see the false starts and battle-scars before they will admit to liking a band’s music? How easy is too easy?

Vampire Weekend adorned the cover of Spin Magazine before they had even released their debut. Nine months later, questions still abound about their bona fides. As Columbia University graduates, they are denounced as rich boys. The blog-based mega-hype monster that slung them into the public eye is derided as artificial. And the fact that these wealthy, upstart college kids could have the gall to incorporate the celebratory melodies and rhythms of African music into their sound has annoyed no small number of people, whether they be internet commentators or lead singers in indie rock bands.

Nick Thorburn, former Unicorn and frontman of Islands, was quick to separate his own African-influenced music from Vampire Weekend’s, which he denounced as “parroting the genre”. Stephen Malkmus was less critical of their music, but did feel that they “had it easy”. Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound pulled no punches, painting the band as the beneficiaries of economic oppression.
But politics, as is too easily forgotten, cannot play the guitar. And no matter how many people come out with criticisms of the band’s class or the legitimacy of their African influence, Vampire Weekend still made a clever, refreshing and addictive album. That is something that is too rarely factored into discussions on the matter.

This writer has been engaging in that discourse on the Analogue blog, in print and in the pub with his friends for as long as he has been aware of the band, and has found that there is no such thing as a neutral reading of Vampire Weekend. For this reason, and because the conversation was interesting enough to allow it, the interview will be left in mostly unedited question and answer format. To allow the band to speak for themselves, as it were.

So how’s touring going?

Chris Baio (bassist): It’s been good, we’re in the first week of the tour. It’s our last big tour for this album in Europe. We started in Iceland, in Reykjavik, which was really cool, and then we’ve been in the UK and the shows have been good.
Were you in Iceland before or after the collapse?

C: Yeah sure, the banking stuff. Well it’s hard to tell something like that when you’re just there for a day, but they were saying that the tickets were selling for the festival, and people seemed to be in good spirits.

Have you been playing any new stuff?

Ezra Koenig (singer and guitarist): Yeah, we’ve been playing a couple of new songs, but we’ll have a lot of work to do when we finally get home and start working on another album. We haven’t wanted to do too much stuff live.

One of my friends saw you play in Sweden, and he said that one of your new songs sounds like Animal Collective?

C: A little bit.

E: I could see that, yeah. Definitely more so than some of the older songs.

Is the rest of the stuff a lot different?

E: Well, we still have to work on it, because especially when you get into the studio, there are so many ways you could approach a song. Even if you have ideas for melodies, or little parts, you’ve yet to see how it’ll turn out. But I think the song that he’s probably talking about is fairly different in that it uses some electronic beats. But then, at the end of the day, the way the song is written has a lot in common with what we’ve already done.

Did a lot of the last album only come together in the process of recording it?

C: Some songs, yeah, I think it would depend on the song. We played Oxford Comma at our first show and it’s pretty much identical to how it’s recorded. But then there’s a song like “Kids (Don’t Stand A Chance)” where we didn’t really know where it was going to go until we started recording it. There was a lot of editing and Rostam added a string arrangement later on. The same with “M79”, Rostam finished writing it that morning and we recorded it. So it varies from song to song.

I was wondering, you get a thing with rappers where their first album is all about the struggle on the streets, and then their second album is just about money, because they’re not out there any more… if the first album is based in and around college then…

E: Our first album is kind of about money too. So I don’t know what the second album will be about. But you’re right, a lot of the first album was about college itself specifically, and being college-aged, and all sorts of the issues that surround that age. I mean, our lives have changed a lot since we made that album. That was reflective of what we were doing at the time, which was being students, and having all the time in the world. After that we had jobs, our first real jobs, and then we had this, starting out being a band, being on the road and travelling everywhere. So things have definitely changed. It’s still coming together so it’s hard to say exactly what it’ll be about, but hopefully it’ll still reflect the mental state that you’re in, a few years after the stuff that’s on the first album.

Do you have an opinion on the idea of hype and backlash in general?

E: I think it’s almost become this concept that people are talking about too much. Like I saw this thing recently where people were talking about if there’s going to be a Tina Fey backlash. I don’t know if people follow that here, but her impersonation of Sarah Palin is like this huge thing in America, and she’s really at the top of her game. And people are like, uh oh, there’s going to be a Tina Fey backlash around the next season of 30 Rock [i.e. Fey’s US sitcom]. You get to that point where anything that becomes successful, people start plotting its backlash, it’s almost like a cliché that people repeat. I think it’s very true that some bands can get over-exposed before they’re ready to release an album, and I think if you have all sorts of people criticising you, and breathing down your neck, and you haven’t even released an EP yet, that’s a lot of pressure. And I think some bands have wilted under that pressure. For us, we’ve had people hyping us up as the band you need to hear, your new favourite band, and also saying we’re never going to be able to sell out a two-hundred person venue, since the beginning. So at that point it’s like you instantly have hype and backlash. And I have a feeling that people are going to be talking about hype and backlash with us forever. “Oh Vampire Weekend, they’re still over-hyped”… it’s like, you can’t win with some people.

Do you think it puts undue pressure on the next record?

C: I don’t think so. At the end of the day, it’s going to be us making the record. We didn’t get to where we’ve gotten by worrying about hype or backlash, so why would it matter now?

You get a lot of artists, in our magazine and elsewhere, expressing opinions about you, or about how you came to popularity. Some people say you got it easy, some people say they have no opinion on the matter. How do you react to that, if there’s an artist you listen to, and they’re complaining about Vampire Weekend?

E: I mean, I find it, I don’t know, a little bit pathetic when artists start talking shit about other artists. It’s okay to have an opinion about things in general, and we try to be positive, but when I’ve seen people get into this NME-style shit-talking and bringing that into the world of indie music or whatever you want to call it, it just seems so silly. I think it undermines what you’re trying to do as an artist if you’re just constantly being negative, it’s pointless.

What about Nick Thorburn’s comments?

E: People ask us about that guy, but the truth is, we’ve actually never had any interaction with him. None of us know him, we’re only vaguely aware of his music, and the only time we ever had any interaction with anyone connected to him was other people in his band coming up to us at a festival saying how much they liked us and saying he was an asshole. There are always going to be people who have to get their anger out and express themselves negatively, and usually if you just let them say their piece, it fades away.

I don’t want to keep going on about this, but I have a quote from Bradford Cox from an interview he gave with us a couple of months ago…

E: Sure, let’s hear it.

“Indie rock to me is safe, like college rock in the 80s. It has a lot to do with economic oppression. It has a lot to do with rich kids. When I think of indie rock I think of the sort of bands whose names I won’t mention, appropriating African music.”

E: Well, he’s someone that we’ve met…

C: He was nice in person.

E: Yeah, he was very nice in person. So the truth is, if you hear people pretending that they’re some sort of class warrior, and that they view us as indicative of some sort of economic oppression, and then when they meet us, instead of saying “hey, what’s your background, I’m interested in talking about this”, they just say “hey, you guys are really good”, I mean, that just goes to show how shallow their feelings are about these things. I found that people who are actually interested in understanding what they perceived to be our background, or problems with our band, whether they were journalists or musicians, ended up talking to us, and usually ended up understanding better. I don’t know why someone would want to make those assumptions based on the way we dress or our lyrics. I think as an artist, they need to give people a little more credit than that.

That’s just Bradford I think. He went after a lot of people in that interview.

E: Those people exist outside of music too. They usually have some insecurities, and they express it through demeaning other people, rather than making positive statements about what they want to do. The truth is, if you’re a musician and you think music is boring, all you have to do is make interesting music. And the people who talk about it so much are usually, I find, not the ones who are pushing things forward.

In the context of that comment about oppression, but even outside of it, I was wondering about the idea of taking music born in really harsh circumstances and relocating it to a metropolitan, wealthy situation. What do you think about doing that, should it attract criticism, or should it not be read into that much, to take African music and relocate it to Cape Cod or wherever?

E: I think it’s worth talking about. I think the idea that listening to African music from the perspective of someone who is fortunate enough to live in America and making music that reflects your interest in it is somehow negative, is this twisted, angry way of looking at the world. Again, I find that people who are genuinely interested in talking about class difference and the inequalities of the world economy, tend to look at things in a more positive way, about how you could change things. And one small step towards making the world even a tiny bit better is just to stop thinking about different parts of the world as off-limits or exotic. I think the idea that you can only appreciate African music by associating it somehow with poverty is just as ridiculous as saying you can only listen to African music if you’re some rich safari hunter. It really is nothing to do with it. I hope that people who listen to African music, just because they like the sound of it, would also take it upon themselves to be a moral, ethical person. But, you know, those are two separate things. I find that the people who get angry about an American band being interested in African music aren’t offering any alternative. They tend to be the people who exoticise African music, and ghettoise it, as something that can only be appreciated in this particular way. And that’s not how we talk about the Rolling Stones, it’s not how we talk about Bob Dylan.

So how do you guys relate to African music then? You get a lot of British ska bands in the late 70s, early 80s, talking about bringing something that is sort of ghettoised to other people. And people would complain that they were just white boys ripping off the music, but they considered that they were just bringing the music to people, rather than trying to parody it or whatever. Do you see anything like that in what you’re doing?

C: We’re always quick to acknowledge albums that have influenced us, whatever the genre is, so I think that’s part of bringing it to other people.

Did you form as a band to do African music, or did you just form and it happened to come out that way?

E: More the latter. I mean, we formed as a band with an interest in a lot of different types of music, and one of them was African music. Part of the connection with African music is as simple as playing electric guitar. I mean, if you grew up playing electric guitar, why shouldn’t you be interested in a guitar tradition? Besides British blues rock or something. Like, why not? Why should that be off-limits to your listening or to your influences?

Is there any other influence outside of that that you wished people would notice more?

E: I think on the album, classical and baroque music plays just as much a part as African music, and I think it’s indicative of the mindsets of journalists that people would rather only talk about African music, because for them it seems like this kind of juicy talking point; because they can make it a little controversial, or try to weave in some lightweight politics around it. But the truth is, there are songs on our album where if you listen to the string arrangements, you’d probably be thinking of Beethoven or Mozart.

Did Peter Gabriel ever do the “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” cover?

E: He did, and we’ve heard it, and we’re very excited for it to come out. It’s just been getting delayed as it’s being worked on, but we know it’s going to come out some time.

Did he say “Peter Gabriel” in the song in the end?

C: You’ll have to see.

MBV, Spiritulized & more added to Primavera 2009 line up

Looks like pretty good value for €90! I’m considering going just to see the Vaselines and My Bloody Valentine…

Barcelona, 17th of December 2008.- New names are added to the line-up of Estrella Damm Primavera Sound 2009. My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, Damien Jurado, Gang Gang Dance and Alela Diane will be among the artists performing at the open-air music festival, which will take place next year between the 28th and 30th of May in Barcelona.

To these acts we have to add the previously confirmed artists on the line-up: the british pianist Michael Nyman, Extra Life presenting their debut album “Secular Works”, the young brothers Kitty Daisy and Lewis, The Soft Pack’s american punk pop, the veterans Throwing Muses - also from the United States- and the indie cult band The Vaselines.

The full-festival tickets for the 2009 edition are already available for sale at 90 € (+ booking fee) and can be purchased at the following sale outlets: Tick Tack Ticket network (www.ticktackticket.com), Cd Drome shops in Barcelona (Valldonzella str. 3) and Madrid (Pozas str. 6), Seetickets (www.seetickets.com), Fnac France (www.fnacspectacles.com) and PayPal.

ALELA DIANE
The author of “The Pirate’s Gospel” is often pigeonholed in the “New Weird America” label, although her sound is also imbued with country and guided by her own particular voice. Friends with Joanna Newson, she has toured with Vashti BUnyan and The Decemberists and made a spot for herself on the American DIY scene. This will be her first visit to Barcelona.

DAMIEN JURADO
Hailing from Seattle and active since the mid 90’s, Damien Jurado has carved himself a solid career on the least festive side of folk rock, radiating sensibility and emotion. But it seems that things have changed on his newest work, “Caught In The Trees”, a record where his music turns heavier and rockier, albeit not losing that touch which has gained him a good legion of fans.

GANG GANG DANCE
“Saint Dymphna”, the fourth work by this New Yorker experimental outfit, will be the one pushing them towards a bigger limelight. The main features of the project led by Lizzi Bougatsos are still there, although they have decided to tinge their sound with a clubbier direction.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE
This band led by Kevin Shields will perform twice at Estrella Damm Primavera Sound 2009, once in the Auditori and once on the open air stage. My Bloody Valentine have proven this year that a reunion tour isn’t necessarily an exercise in nostalgia, but an eardrum bursting spectacle on both sides of the Atlantic.

SPIRITUALIZED
Jason Pierce’s band released on 2008 one of their finest works. “Songs In A & E” summarizes perfectly their career; a sound orgy where gospel, psychedelia, drones and sixties rock fuse with pop, something they’d already successfully attempted on key works from the 90’s such as “Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space”.

CONFIRMED ARTISTS:
Alela Diane
Damien Jurado
Extra Life
Gang Gang Dance
Kitty Daisy and Lewis
Michael Nyman
My Bloody Valentine
Spiritualized
The Soft Pack
Throwing Muses
The Vaselines

New Mumblin Deaf Ro songs

The wonderful Mumblin Deaf Ro has put two new songs up on his myspace, Cade Calf Call and The Harm. Definitely worth checking out if you have a chance. Both songs were recorded with engineer Peter Sisk over at Red Tape Audio. Peter also recorded the Land Lovers album and is currently mixing Herm and Dust (epic crunching down tempo rock).

Mumblin Deaf Ro’s album ‘Senor, My Friend . . .’ will be re-released by the trailblazing Irish net label Indiecater Records some time early next year. In Ro’s own words, the album “will have a couple of previously unreleased songs; alternative unreleased versions of old songs; and some extra background on the album.”

Mumblin Deaf Ro playing in Road Records for International Record Store Day…

Photo used above by Mark at www.whitenoisevisuals.com

Back in Black

After being hacked with some nasty malware and down for just over a week, Analogue is finally up and running again! As you can see we’ve used the downtime constructively to pimp our site with this shiny new black theme. Our previous theme, Analogue 1.0 served us well but it’s time to move on and take it up a notch. Sure we couldn’t let State win ‘Best Music Website’ practically uncontested for a second year running…

As you can see, the site is at best 70% there. I’ve taken the usual Analogue ramshackle approach to revamping the site, ie. get it half working rather than hang around waiting for a slick web designer to miraculously come into my life and do it for me. I’ve had a little help along the way but most of what you see at the moment is me trying to learn PHP on the fly. Well ok, I’m not exactly learning it per se… I’m practically just moving around code and hoping for the best! Oh well, God loves a trier and I reckon it’ll come together into a pretty nifty site over the next week or so.

So yes, this is Analogue trying to take things up a notch. Expect more regular posts, engaging writers and more dynamic content in 2009.

Birdy Nam Nam

Brendan McGuirk chats to DJ Need from the French turntable crew about their beginnings, working with Yuksek & Justice on the new album and why they “want to create a riot in the crowd”.

How did the four of you come together to form Birdy Nam Nam?

Before, we were all competing in a DJ competition (DMC), so we were doing the world championships as individuals and a team as well. We formed a team in France and won the French title and in 2002 we won the DMC world title. That’s about it. We were competing before and after winning this championship in 2002, we stopped doing battles and did the album. That was released late 2005.

Did you find it hard for the four of you to come together and find a middle ground between each of your styles and influences to enter the competition and work together?

The first thing that Birdy Nam Nam is about is that we have a lot of different influences but the point where all our influences are linked together is Birdy Nam Nam. We know that we can’t use all of our ideas in Birdy Nam Nam, but like any other band, some ideas can’t be used. So they can be used in a solo project or on another side project. It’s mainly kind of a democracy, everybody has to be ok and sometimes three of us are ok and the one who is not sure at the time is ok.

Do you find sometimes you’re fighting your corner for a little more jazz or hip hop in the mix or are you all pretty much on the same wavelength?

No, no… at the moment we are pretty much all on the same wavelength. After doing the first album, which was mainly downtempo music, we toured a lot. So we only played the tracks that had some kind of energy. After that we also did new music for the live versions and played that because we wanted people to enjoy it; we weren’t on stage just to play jazz music. We wanted that kind of energy. Now with the experience of doing a lot of concerts, we did a new album that is more electronic in its sound and there are also a couple of dancefloor songs on the album.

With your new album, Manual for Successful Rioting, are you still working from the traditional point of view with turntable as before? Nowdays a lot of people are using Ableton. One thing that is very distinct about Birdy Nam Nam is that you haven’t done that before.

On the first album, we did it with only turntables and a multi track recorder, recording on pro tools. The moment the first album was finished we already knew that the next album would not only be turntables, we knew we wanted to use synthesizers and program the beats and that’s what we’ve done on the new album. I guess most of the songs begin from samples manipulated or played on the turntables, but most of the beats are programmed on a computer. Some are played live, some hit hats, some effects are played live to keep that human groove, but there is a lot more programmation [sic] and we also created our own sounds, recording synthesizer.

So the album definitely has a lot more composition to it and is a little less sample based than your debut album…

Yeah we tried to make our own sounds with the drum machine and stuff like that.

Earlier you mentioned that you couldn’t play a lot of songs off your first album when you were playing live because they were too downbeat. Is the new album taking a more electro approach? Is there a slightly more upbeat electro feel to it?

Yes but the goal was not to do electro music - it’s to do modern music. Music that adapts to this time, we did the first album in Crazy B’s place and we were using only records, most of his records and we also brought our own too. He has a record collection of 10,000 - mainly jazz, soul, disco…mainly black music. That’s why the first album has a lot of sax, contra bass and flute samples. After that, we realized playing live that we wanted the kind of energy that’s in rock n’ roll music and electro music. We used vintage synthesizers and drum machines [on the new album], so now the sound is more electronic. We didn’t want to do electro music, we just wanted to have a modern sound and powerful sound and a lot of energy in the music.

Yuksek has been producing the album. Is that right?

Yeah.

Has that helped to bring things forward a little more and make the sound more modern like you spoke about?

Yeah, we tried to mix it on an analogue mixer in the studio with only analogue things and the sound was not what we were looking for. Because we’re on the same label and Yuksek did a remix of “Trans Boulogne Express”, we asked him - because we weren’t happy with the first mixes of the album - if he would be down for trying to mix some of the tracks. And after he had done a mix, we gave him the right to touch things. When you are always working on the same songs, you don’t really know what is good and what is wrong. That’s what Yuksek brought, a fresh point of view. Sometimes he changed an intro or an outro, or structures. He also mixed the thing and sometimes he added one or two melodies or arrangements. So we can say he produced it but most of the songs were already done when he arrived, but he changed enough things to be considered a producer.

After working on the album for however many months, are you content with it?

Yeah definitely, before we weren’t feeling that we had an album but now for us it seems like being an album from beginning to end and it’s telling something [sic].

Just to go back to the title of the album, Manual For Successful Rioting. Could you explain what the concept behind the album is and where you got the title from?

We liked that word, “riots”. We have this energy when we are doing the music and playing the music live. I guess we act like a rock band, jumping on stage and giving it a lot of energy. That’s how we see ourselves playing on stage, we want to create a riot in the crowd. That’s also how we want people to hear the music so it’s logical to have this word [in the album title] because it’s the kind of energy we want to give on stage. At the time of the first album, a lot of people were telling us that they weren’t finding the same energy on the album compared to the live version. We hope for new album that people find that energy on the disc itself.

You also worked with Justice on a song for the album. How did that come about?

The last song of the album is produced by Justice. At the time of our first album, they weren’t as known as they are now and we were talking about doing a remix already and we didn’t, unfortunately. This year we played on the same stage a couple of times and the first time they saw us, they told us they liked the live thing. And at that moment we were thinking about finishing the album with Yuksek. They told us one or two songs that they liked and they were two songs that we didn’t plan to add to the album. We gave them the separated tracks, mainly the live version where a lot of elements were played live and they produced it their own way and added a melody, an electric piano melody. We were really happy, it’s the last song of the album and it’s a great outro for the album. A great ending.

Tags: Birdy Nam Nam, Dj Need, Justice, Yusek

Analogue presents: Dublin Duck Dispensary, Percolator, Katie Kim

November 17, 2008 by Brendan McGuirk  
Filed under Anablog, Analogue presents...

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Dublin Duck Dispensary
“self-serving tosh… truly frightening stuff… self-conscious smartarse indie pop-rock from somebody trying hard to come on like a really mad bastard…” Jackie Hayden, Hotpress

Percolator
“Chestnutt’s slick indie-boy vocals are ably backed up by some of the sweetest low-slung instrumentation you’ll hear all 2008. ” MP3hugger, www.mp3hugger.com

Katie Kim
“…subtle, slow-burning magic.” Jim Carroll, The Irish Times

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Issue 7 out today

November 11, 2008 by Brendan McGuirk  
Filed under Anablog

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Issue 7 is out today. You can pick it up in the usual spots… Or read it on issuu.

Get your own - Open publication

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Peek! An earful of Irish Underground now available on Vinyl

November 8, 2008 by Brendan McGuirk  
Filed under Anablog

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It took awhile but the Peek! compilation has finally arrived on 12″ Vinyl. It was pressed in the Czech Republic where apparently there’s a little bit of a waiting list due to the fact that’s it’s one of like two or three pressing plants in Europe. It’s now available for free in Road Records, Freebird Records, Beatfinder and City Discs. It should also be available in BPM in Waterford and Plug’d in Cork but not until later in the week.

Just a reminder you can also download it here.

Tags: 12", analogue compilation, peek!, vinyl

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