J. Roddy Walston And The Business
j roddy walston is not soft like someone born into privilege, but he does bear the hesitant scars of a man who fought his way out of a pedigree. yoked from day one to a musical lineage that included “both kinds of music – country and gospel.” he was told with regularity that it was close to sin to play either for any reason but God and Family. and that when the city comes courting with contracts and such he was expected to follow tradition…and walk away.
“a weight is kindly put upon you with a heritage, and a choice comes to you in time, at that point you can just become an extension or you can get born and grow legs of you own.”
it is a stranger south that j roddy walston lived in, a place where radio gave equal ear to classic rock, hell-fire evangelists, and the elephant six. powered and inspired by this mixture of art, spirit, and temptation he left home, in as much an attempt to bring his kin due credit as to rebel against the very things they had stood for. he followed a girl north enough, and landed in baltimore with a low budget sense of manifest destiny and a handful of high dollar songs. an undecided magnet started to draw to him a group of players. first came the challenge and compliment of billy gordon a musical mirror-image of j roddy and then steve colmus a sportly southpaw with a heavy snare hand. in them raw power met story and neither would compromise. they felt a city squeeze. they formed an intangible thumb, and they them turned into a fist. knowing good and well that you can predict a purebred, j roddy walston and the business opted to create a monster of the unknown, they threw what seed and egg they had into an american grab bag and hit the road. bending highways and rearranging maps to their fancy, making a different america for itself.
vision casting a strange view of the states to all who would listen, their agenda seems to be some sort of anti-secession, a growing over, rather than a breaking away. a ceaseless expansion of the world where the rust belt and bible belt have been grown together to form a rock and roll quilt that knows no end. i have seen their world. they perform in a place where the hedonists and believers are cut from the same cloth. well-educated blue collars from busted boom towns forced to school when the factory option was taken away. blue bloods working for a dime instead of taking the family money. renters and owners, evangelicals and recovering Catholics, nine to fivers and the service industry. they all touch there. i stumbled through a one way door. i now have a knowledge of these beatnik/honkey tonks and i can’t seem to unknow it.
in these places j roddy walston and the business is the hometown band.
Tribes
If the past couple of year’s have been rock’n’roll’s radio iceage, right now our toes are teetering on the brink of a lush new dawn. The question is; beyond the shit-storm of supposed saviour bands whose name-drops christened the New Year, which of the lauded gangs of axe-wielders are the genuine sculptors of tomorrow? Well, of the few promised Next Big Things, none have actually earned their hype more than Camden's TRIBES.
“When you’re a kid you want to be cool, so you make experimental weird music. But for us, I think there just came a point where we couldn’t be bothered messing around anymore," prophesises singer Johnny Lloyd. "I realized that there’s no point being in a band if you’re not gonna be one of those life-changing bands. Not the one’s you stroke your chin too, the one’s you beat your heart plate to.”
It's this unabashed manifesto of anthemia that've taken the rag-tag four-piece from prodigious debutant slots opening for idols The Pixies, to relentless grassroots grafting of the UK's dives, to being christened "The future of rock'n'roll" by fanboys The Mystery Jets, a sentiment chimed by everyone from NME to Radio 1's Huw Stephens and Zane Lowe, the latter of whom named their debut single Hottest Record In The World amidst an airwave airstrike that saw it tear through most of the BBC and XFM. They're a shining testament to the blood, sweat and tears so many buzz bands seem to bypass these days, at their peril. Joining the dots between Nirvana and The Libertines, their debut album, BABY (out March 2012) and WE WERE CHILDREN EP are a fittingly heart-racing call-to-arms for a generation left crying out for band name worthy of being Tip-Ex'd onto a satchel.
TRIBES once consisted of two opposed bands, or as one could say, erm, tribes. Johnny Lloyd and Dan White on one side of the naval-gasing Radiohead-obsessed track, and Miguel Demelo and Jim Cratchley on the other. Although they're quick to sniff off any lazy suggestion that the name was birthed there.
"When we arrived in Camden, we think for some reason we were expecting some vague fragments of a indie band culture or something," the frontman says, shaking his head. "But I actually remember looking around us and realizing we were in the supposedly indiest place on planet earth and there were literally no bands. Jim mentioned the name TRIBES as it part of the name of a book he was was reading, and it just seemed very apt for our setting and state of mind."
The boys set about they work with the same scurrilous drive and rambunctious soul that's defined their rise to become Britain's most talked about scene savers. After it took Frank Black but a single gig and a single demo to invite them out to support, it took only few more pub efforts for the Mystery Jets to invite them undo their wing and onto a road-testing psychedelic voyage of the nation several times over, including climactic slots at the Somerset House and resulting in literal riot scenes when the band's own tour wound up at London's XOYO.
2011 has seen their show-stopping first headline tour, winding up with a predictably sold-out headline set at Camden's legendary Dingwalls, ogled by a Sex Pistol. It's no rare sight to witness homemade t-shirt sporting Tribes fans trawling three dates, vaguely nearish to their pocket of the country; bleary-eyed, delirious, emptying from the backroom. When the band took to the rooftops near their fabled locks to shoot the finale scenes of their first promo video in characteristic rallying form, the subsequent gridlock and police shutdown was case in point to the old fashioned way the boys had emerged into the lives of indie starved kids across the country.
'We Were Children' is the kind of unflinching anthem that any generation would be proud to take as an ode: all rasping chants, and raging power chords, truly the stuff the teenage dreams are made of. Since its release the airwaves have been alive with its romantic riot, a more befitting entrance
soundtrack it'd be hard to find. The product of various trips up to Liverpool to visit producer Mike Crossey, of Arctic Monkeys notoriety, after he too couldn't help but align join their cause. The radiating, warm lo-fi glow that fills the demo, available on the flipside, is evolved to widescreen new dimensions amidst a mountainous cliff-face of amplification. 'Girlfriend' is the kind of shaggy, rogueish punk freak-out that your mother warned you about and your uncle warned you to look forward to. A tearaway of a track with the gusto to whip up a pit and punch to floor you just when you least expect it. Then 'Coming Of Age' shows a band with enough end-of-night, woozy balladeering charm to ensure the wee hours will at least be spent drunken, huddled and clinging to eachother for dear life. And sublimely inevitable conclusion spent anywhere near the rhetoric and tales of a band like Tribes, the don't come around often, but when they do they're unmistakable.
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Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros
Birthed by Mouth in the year two-thousand and five, young Edward Sharpe had to wait nearly two years before he was to grow his arms and legs and fingers and toes. Immaculately conceived, his father (a Robot who had magically become a real boy…but that’s another story) declared his undying devotion to the creature. He perched the fleshy bust upon a teetering pedestal fashioned from stacked cereal boxes and positioned the display at his window for all the town to see. Young Edward soon proved no ordinary boy.
Though his father had figured him deaf for his unresponsiveness to sounds, he in fact had the universally unique condition of being deaf from hearing too much or, more correctly put, too well. In plain words, he heard EVERYTHING AT ONCE. At first it proved rather painful like a wretched whining winding all hours, but very soon those who whisper visited young Edward and revealed to him the Tricks and Truths, the Ways and Plays, the Chords and Dischords of the Universe. He did not need to eat but the color of the sun, which was F#, and moved his bones to grow. His arms and legs and fingers and toes grew ‘til the tower of boxes collapsed and he laughed. He moved thru the door which was C over B# and ran thru the village hearing ALL of its music! The workers and children and painters of buildings and dogs barking madly and trees bristling softly and OH!!
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Gotye
Gotye - Making Mirrors
Ask Gotye about his new album Making Mirrors and he’ll speak not of songs, but of sounds. He’ll describe the various valves through which strings and choirs cycle on his Lowrey Cotillion, a vintage organ bought for 100 bucks in a second-hand shop that features on the record. Or how he constructed a bassline by sampling the Winton Musical Fence, an unlikely instrument he discovered in the outback of Queensland, Australia, comprised of five large metal strings attached to wooden fence posts and a resonant chamber. He may mention the horn break from a traditional Taiwanese folk song he discovered on a 1970s Cathay Pacific promotional record, which he sampled, sped up and dubbed out, before introducing it to some Turkish drum sounds. Or the unique, virtual versions of acoustic instruments - among them a chromaharp and an mbira - he created by painstakingly multisampling every note.
Listen to Making Mirrors and you’ll be drawn in by the details, transported to a world where every moment matters. This is pop at its most precise, but also electronic music at its most emotional. The record delves into dub, Detroit-era Motown soul, stadium-size politipop, synth-folk and world music on glorious, sprawling, huge-hearted songs.
Gotye (pronounced Gauthier) first found fame in his native Australia with his second album, 2006’s Like Drawing Blood. Radio station Triple J named it their album of the year, as did iTunes on its release in Europe in 2008. It was recently voted the 11th greatest Australian album of all time. In Britain, Like Drawing Blood became a cult hit while in the States, it made waves after Drew Barrymore fell in love with single Learnalilgivinanlovin’ and used it in several of her films.
Making Mirrors, its extraordinary follow-up, was more than two and a half years in the making. To write and record its dozen sumptuous songs, Gotye moved from Melbourne to a barn on his parents’ remote five hectare block on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. There, he had the space to permanently set up his growing array of instruments and recording equipment, and found the isolation that allowed for sonic experimentation and recording at any time of the day.
After Like Drawing Blood, which was constructed almost entirely from samples of old vinyl, Gotye set about making an album using more physical and acoustic instruments.
“I ended up sampling a lot of them note-by-note and turning them into virtual instruments,” he explains. “It’s a slow and sometimes laborious process, but it can completely change the sound of the instrument and how you approach playing it. You can buy so many virtual instruments online these days, but it’s not nearly as personal as making them yourself. I found a beautiful old chromaharp at an antique shop, and ‘virtualised’ it in this way. It ended up sounding more like an unusual hammer dulcimer when played on a midi keyboard or programmed with software”