Search Results - "Jesse Sykes "
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
Wild Flag is pretty effin’ wild
John ClarkEven before anyone heard a note, there was little doubt that Wild Flag would be fantastic. With two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney in Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein, Mary Timony of Helium and Rebecca Cole of The Minders, they had about as unimpeachable a pedigree as any band really could. And yet, as history has shown many times, a lot of things look good on paper but don’t live up to expectations in reality. Wild Flag is not one of those things.
I was able to confirm their collective awesomeness at SXSW where their mid-afternoon set was a glorious flurry of duelling guitar solos, scissor kicks and general rock’n’roll fun, and even though pretty much every song was being heard for the first time, they were memorable and considerably more immediate and accessible than either much of Sleater-Kinney’s output and most of Helium’s ever was.
But hell, don’t take my word for it. A couple weeks ahead of the September 13 release of their self-titled debut, the entire album is now available to stream in its entirety at NPR. That, incidentally, is where Brownstein worked as a blogger for years following SK’s hiatus. Considering her focus on writing as well as comedy and acting in the last five years in lieu of music and the fact that Timony hasn’t put anything out since 2007’s The Shapes We Make, it’s no wonder that they collectively had so much rock pent up inside. Rock that they’ve now gifted to us. Fire it up, yo.
They toured through the Spring, but the Fall leg will finally bring them to Toronto for a show at Lee’s Palace on October 12… and alas I won’t be there. But don’t feel bad for me (not that you necessarily would) – I saw them at SXSW and I’ll be in Iceland at the time so… yeah, I’ll be okay. But if you’re here or in one of the other cities on the itinerary, don’t miss them.
MP3: Wild Flag – “Romance”
MP3: Wild Flag – “Glass Tambourine”
Stream: Wild Flag / Wild Flag
Phantoms, the long-awaited new album from Austin’s Ume, is out today and available to stream in whole over at Spinner. There’s also a streamable radio session with the band over at KDHX and an interview with frontwoman Lauren Larson at The Horn.
MP3: Ume – “Captive”
Stream: Ume / Phantoms
Billboard talks to Zach Condon of Beirut; The Rip Tide.
Stereogum checks in with Mates Of State about their new record Mountaintops, out September 13. They’re at The Phoenix on September 28.
The Drums’ new record Portamento is now up and streaming; the record is out September 13 and they play The Mod Club on October 1.
Stream: The Drums / Portamento
Paste has a stream of Blitzen Trapper’s new long-player American Goldwing, also due out September 13, as well as a new video. They play The Opera House on October 30.
MP3: Blitzen Trapper – “Love The Way You Walk Away”
MP3: Blitzen Trapper – “American Goldwing”
Video: Blitzen Trapper – “Love The Way You Walk Away”
Stream: Blitzen Trapper / American Goldwing
NPR has premiered the first new Olivia Tremor Control song in nigh on a decade and has an interview with Will Cullen Hart. The OTC reunion hits Lee’s Palace on September 16.
Stereogum is sharing an MP3 from the new Ivy album All Hours, out September 20.
The Guardian has a feature piece on Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, in town at Lee’s Palace on September 24.
Check out another track from the new Dum Dum Girls record Only In Dreams, due out September 27. They play Lee’s on October 16.
MP3: Dum Dum Girls – “Bedroom Eyes”
Babelgum is hosting a US edition of Black Cab Sessions with Strand Of Oaks, who will be at The Drake Underground on November 8 opening up for Crooked Fingers.
Though best known as a country-noir crooner outfit, thanks to her recent dalliances with Sunn O))) Jesse Sykes of Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter has got some prog-metal cred. We’ll see if any of that has rubbed off on their latest Marble Son when they’re here on November 10 for a show at The Drake before hitting the road with The Sadies. There’s features on Sykes at Seattle Weekly and Willamette Week and you can stream a recent radio session at KEXP.
MP3: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter – “Come To Mary”
Confirming that it is, indeed, time to get paid, Jeff Mangum has launched a new, official Neutral Milk Hotel website and will be releasing an elaborate vinyl-only box set including unreleased Neutral Milk material on November 22. Head over to Pitchfork for details and spend some time poking around walkingwallofwords.com as Mangum has loaded it down with content.
DIY has an interview with Dayve Hawk of Memory Tapes.
The Daily Star talks to Nikolai Fraiture of The Strokes.
Friday, July 4th, 2008
I’d never heard of Spanish site Buffet Libre before, but they’ve made a hell of a first impression with their enormous, 58-song ’80s covers and remixes compilation entitled Rewind, all available to download for free (and legal). The majority of artists are unknown to me but range from around the world and there are some familiar names in the mix – Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin throwing some massive synths at XTC, Electric Soft Parade tackling Pet Shop Boys and We Are Soldiers We Have Guns paying tribute to The Go-Go’s. I can’t imagine I’ll ever get through everything in this collection, but it’ll (hopefully) be fun to try.
MP3: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – “Another Satellite”
MP3: Electric Soft Parade – “Jealousy”
MP3: We Are Soldiers We Have Guns – “Our Lips Are Sealed”
That last act is the current project of Sweden’s Malin Dahlberg, also of Douglas Heart, and her debut album Get Up, Get Out is out July 28. I’m losing hope for a new Douglas Heart record any time soon – I’m not sure when the two rough mixes on their MySpace went up but I’m betting it wasn’t recently – so this record will have to do. It’s interesting how much less introverted Dahlberg sounds outside the context of Douglas Heart’s dreamy aesthetic. It’s still certainly bedroom wallflower pop, but sunnier somehow.
MP3: We Are Soldiers, We Have Guns – “November”
MP3: We Are Soldiers, We Have Guns – “Songs That No One Will Hear”
MP3: We Are Soldiers, We Have Guns – “Damn Those TV Shows, Damn Them Straight To Hell”
MP3: We Are Soldiers, We Have Guns – “Tourists In Our Hometown”
Video: We Are Soldiers We Have Guns – “The Line Is A Dot To You”
Stream: We Are Soldiers, We Have Guns / Get Up, Get Out
MySpace: We Are Soldiers We Have Guns
Drowned In Sound talks to Sarah Assbring of El Perro Del Mar.
Though almost a third of the spots for this year’s Virgin Festival remain unannounced, they’ve made some progress in filling out what’s going on the weekend of September 6 and 7 by announcing the DJs for the Bacardi B-Live tent. Not being a dance/electronic music guy, most of the names meant nothing to me, but the big one certainly did. were announced this week with a bunch of names I don’t know and one that I do – Moby. My arch-nemesis – my great white whale, if you will – will be spinning on day two. There will be a reckoning. Oh yes. But first, hopefully there’ll be some more performers announced sooner rather than later.
Also happening on Toronto Islands this Summer is Wakestock, running July 24 to 27. There’s usually a passel of bands of the punk rock variety along for the ride and this this year they’ll also have the likes of Metric and We Are Scientists to soundtrack all the extreme sporting.
JAM, NOW and OnMilwaukee.com talk to Alejandro Escovedo about his new record Real Animal. He’s in town Monday and in addition to his show at the Mod Club that evening, he’s doing an acoustic in-store and signing at the HMV in Yorkville at 12:30 PM. And congratulations to Neil who won the passes to the evening performance.
Mogwai have offered up the first taste of their next album The Hawk Is Howling, out September 23. They’re at the Kool Haus on September 24.
MP3: Mogwai – “The Sun Smells Too Loud”
JAM chats with Adele.
Spin reveals what the cover of The Verve’s forthcoming Forth – due August 19 – will look like. Well, I suppose we should be thankful there’s not a rainbow.
Pitchfork finds out what Rose Elinor Dougall – aka Rosay – is up to as an ex-Pipette.
Jane Vain & The Dark Matter will be back in town at month’s end with two shows at the Horseshoe – one on July 26 with The Coast and a free one that following Tuesday, July 29.
Forest City Lovers have been keeping a tour diary for Exclaim! as they traipse across the continent on tour. Follow along at home! Vue Weekly also chats with singer-songwriter Kat Burns.
Joey Burns of Calexico discusses the back to basics creative process behind Carried To Dust with Beatroute while John Covertino talks to Metro Times. We’ll hear the fruits of their labours this Sunday night when they play the Mod Club. Also on the bill are Woodpigeon, who talk to eye about the state of the arts in their native Calgary. Congratulations to Joe who won the passes to the show.
Nashville Scene talks to The Black Angels. WOXY is also sharing a studio session with the band.
Black Mountain will be returning to town on September 27 with Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter in tow – that show will be at the Opera House.
Grizzly Bear update Billboard on the status of their next album. They’re at the Molson Amphitheatre with Radiohead on August 15.
Matablog points to a number of recent Shearwater radio sessions to stream.
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse have been near the top of my ever-shrinking list of current acts who I’d never seen live and could realistically expect to for a while, but for the longest while – namely the five years following 2001’s It’s A Wonderful Life – it seemed for a long while that the odds of there being new material let alone a tour to promote were getting more and more distant. But lo and behold, Fall 2006 brought us the long-awaited Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain and Winter 2007 the North American tour to support so to say that my anticipation was high for Friday night’s show at the Mod Club would be something of an understatement.
I was expecting a rather smouldering, low-key set from openers Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter – at their show at the Rivoli in September 2004, Sykes spent pretty much their whole show seated and with her long hair hanging down in front of her face. Thankfully, Sykes has since discovered the benefits of being upright and their set was not only performed standing, but with a surprising and welcome amount of energy. Drawing largely from their new album Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul, they were really rather terrific. I mentioned last week how complimentary Sykes’ hickory-smoked voice and Phil Wandscher’s twang-tacular guitar were on the record – live, it’s even moreso with he lifting up her earthy songwriting and she grounding his runaway fretwork.
Conventional wisdom dictates that when you’re touring in support of a new record, you play material from that record. But as anyone who’s followed his career knows, Mark Linkous is hardly conventional. Instead, on this tour Sparklehorse have been drawing from the greatest hits playbook and the set list leaned far more heavily on the back catalog, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and Good Morning Spider in particular – Light Years was only represented by a couple of songs (give or take, I don’t have an actual copy of the set list) Whatever the reasoning – maybe the early stuff is easier or more interesting to play live – I wasn’t complaining since I’d never heard any of it live before and being reintroduced to the older songs, which I haven’t listened to much lately, was a treat.
On record, the snap, crackle and hiss production is a fundamental part of the Sparklehorse vibe, creating the distant, otherworldly vibe that’s the band’s trademark. But trying to reproduce that atmosphere live would be folly so the like ‘Horse experience strips away that AM radio filter and instead sounds a good deal fuller and more conventionally “rock” than one might expect but which still sounded marvelous. And for one with such a well-chronicled distaste for touring and generally being in public, Linkous exuded no small amount of onstage charisma (helped out by the fan at the front of the stage blowing his hair around all rock star-like) even if he didn’t seem especially comfortable being up there.
And maybe it’s that unease that’s the reason behind the suprising and somewhat disappointing brevity of the set – even including the one-song encore, Sparklehorse still played for less than an hour. Considering the catalog-spanning nature of the set list, there was certainly no shortage of material to draw on but no – with a minimum of banter and downtime between songs, they barreled through their set list, said their thank yous and were gone. To be fair, their efficiency meant that they still played a full set’s worth of material – it’s just that after waiting so long to see them, I was sad to see them gone so soon and with BrooklynVegan reporting that Sparklehorse may be a casualty of label mergers (which wouldn’t surprise me at all), who knows when they’ll be back?
Sparklehorse’s tour continues through next week and they’re also slated to headline the Astralwerks showcase at SxSW on Thursday, March 15 at Antone’s, for which I note that the organizers have allotted an hour and a half. Hope they’ve got some DJs handy. The News Observer talks to Linkous in advance of his sort-of homecoming show in North Carolina and Minnesota Public Radio has a studio session with the band from last week available to stream or download.
Photos: Sparklehorse, Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter @ The Mod Club – February 23, 2007
MP3: Sparklehorse – “Shade And Honey”
MP3: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter – “LLL”
Stream: Sparklehorse – “Don’t Take My Sunshine Away” (ASX)
Stream: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter / Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul
MySpace: Sparklehorse
MySpace: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter
The Guardian gets a tour of Denton, Texas from native sons Midlake.
Drowned In Sound and The Event Guide get acquainted with The Hold Steady, who wrap up their Europe-demolishing tour in Dublin tomorrow.
The Enquirer Q’s, Richard Thompson A’s.
Ex-Refreshment and current Peacemaker Roger Clyne will be in town on April 30 for a show at the Horseshoe, though it’s unclear if it’s with band or just him listings indicate it’s Clyne & The Peacemakers – full band goodness. I used to love The Refreshments and still think they deserve better than to be forever known as the band that did the theme to King Of The Hill, though I certainly don’t begrudge them the cheques that surely brings in. Anyway, tickets for that are $10.50 and on May 12, Swedes Mando Diao are at the ‘Shoe with Pop Levi and The Films for an evening of too-tight pants rock.
Toronto’s Tokyo Police Club are next up in the Daytrotter queue, offering up both an interview and downloadable studio session. There’s a new song in there that sounds pretty dang good and with them having sold out two dates at the Mod Club for April, it looks like 2007 is the year that they grow into the buzz and expectations that’ve surrounded them for the last few years. Good on them.
The National’s new album has a name – look for Boxer May 22. The label people at Beggars say it’s amazing, and even though it’s their job to do so, I believe ’em.
PopMatters celebrates the coelacanth. No, it’s not a band. It’s a fish.
If you stopped by this weekend or tried to, sorry about the downtime. Entirely out of my control but my hosting seems to be behaving itself now. Knock on wood.
Update: I KNOCKED ON WOOD, GODDAMMIT (posted at 6:30PM after another five hours of downtime).
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
“The Sweet Hereafter” is more than just the name of Jesse Sykes’ band – it’s actually a very fitting descriptor of her music. That is, if your idea of the afterlife is sitting alone at the end of the bar in a dimly lit, smoky roadhouse at last call. The smokiness is essential to the mental picture here, because that’s what Sykes’ voice sounds like – a mouthful of smoke. It’s certainly a bit of an acquired taste being several degrees beyond husky, but if you’re attuned to its emotional frequency it hits like a choir of angels.
Sad, solemn and weary beyond words – yet somehow not a total downer – Sykes’ third record Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul does well to cement Sykes’ candidacy as the reigning queen of alt.country noir. It sustains a mood of regret and longing for pretty much its whole running length and while that can certainly get a bit heavy, Sykes has the perfect foil in the guitar of Phil Wandscher. The former Whiskeytown axeman is the perfect complement and counterpoint to Sykes’ forlorn meditations providing delicate atmosphere or muscularly twangy riffing as necessary. The two really do have a musical chemistry that’s rare and impressive to behold.
Sykes talks to New City Chicago about the writing process of behind the new record,
Harp about what she calls “emotional McCarthyism” and The Stranger about pop and guitar solos. She’s currently on tour with Sparklehorse and will be stopping in Toronto this Friday night at the Mod Club (congrats to Elva, Vicky and Bob on winning passes to the show).
MP3: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter – “LLL”
Stream: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter / Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls of the Soul
MySpace: Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter
Another country artist who knows a thing or two about heartbreak, Lucinda Williams, talks to Paste, The Baltimore Sun and The Phoenix about her new album West.
The Hold Steady talks about boys and girls in America with The Irish Times.
Philadelphia jam-happies Dr Dog will be at Lee’s Palace on May 2, their new album We All Belong is out next Tuesday and they’re the featured act on Daytrotter this week. Meanwhile, strange, eclectic and… strange sister duo Cocorosie will be in town on May 14 for a show at Lee’s in support of their new record The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, due out April 10. Billboard has details.
Drowned In Sound talks to Maximo Park about their sophomore album Our Earthly Pleasures, available April 3.
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
If you haven’t gotten tickets for this Friday’s Sparklehorse show at the Mod Club, I can only assume it’s because you’ve overdosed on alcohol and valium, collapsed unconscious, had your heart stop for several minutes and have been confined to a wheelchair for the past six months because really, there’s no other excuse. Goodness knows I’ve been waiting for Mark Linkous (who suffered through the above scenario in 1996) to come back to town on a headlining tour for many a year and finally, in support of last year’s Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain, he is.
But if for whatever reason you’re not ticketed up for the show, I’m here to help. Courtesy of Against The Grain, I have three pairs of passes to give away for this show, which also features Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter on the bill. To enter, send me an email at contests AT chromewaves DOT net with “I want to see Sparklehorse” in the subject line and your full name in the body. And I expect an entry from every one of you because everyone should want to see Sparklehorse.
Contest closes at midnight, February 20.
MP3: Sparklehorse – “Shade And Honey”
Stream: Sparklehorse – “Don’t Take My Sunshine Away” (ASX)
EPK: Sparklehorse and the North Carolina Bureau Of Tourism (YouTube)
MySpace: Sparklehorse
![[Valid RSS]](http://www.chromewaves.net/images/interface/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}