Happy Birthday, Chris Lang
My brother, Chris Lang, was born on May 25, 1971. He was fortunate enough to have been born on a day when this song was No. 1 on the charts. Enjoy the last year of your 30s, kid.
Music Review: Janelle Monae, “The ArchAndroid”
Rating: 97
In its sprawl, depth and miraculous facility with all things pop, Janelle Monae’s “The ArchAndroid” recalls Prince’s mid-career masterpiece “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” and it is only her first full-length album. Monae possesses an elastic voice and a brain to match — she can sing jump-blues and funk with as much ease as she brings to madrigals, late-‘60s pop and a stunning disco-soul song that doesn’t just evoke Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” but is its equal.
Held together by a loose story about the rise of 28th century droid Cindi Mayweather, “The ArchAndroid” never suffers from oppressive concept or overreach — its 18 songs can survive and thrive on their own. The set begins with a remarkable trio of uptempo soul-pop rave-ups, “Dance or Die,” “Faster” and the aforementioned “Locked Inside,” which is so evocative of Jackson’s classic period it could pass for a Quincy Jones-produced outtake. The first single, “Tightrope,” floats effortlessly on tight funk riffs and Monae’s ultra-sassy soul shouting before the singer downshifts for “Oh, Maker,” a superb ballad in which Monae displays Mariah Carey-style range with Marvin Gaye-style intelligence.
Kudos to Monae for ensuring that “The ArchAndroid” never inflicts sonic whiplash: her box of tricks is packed with incongruous styles — she even collaborates with Of Montreal on “Make the Bus” — but the songs transition beautifully. By the second half, she is quoting seamlessly from Claude Debussy’s “Claire De Lune” on “Say You’ll Go” and engaging in bright, irresistible electro-pop (“Wondaland”) before closing “The ArchAndroid” with “Babopbye Ya,” an 8-minute orchestral swing opus. Unless the heavens open up with something world-saving, “The ArchAndroid” is the must-have pop album of 2010.
Video of the Day: Goldfrapp, “Alive”
Alison, fully “Xana”-do’d, presides over a group of Satan baddies wearing dead Goth/King Diamond makeup, who are then attacked by Jazzercise vampires. What a feeling!
Dfest 2010 Canceled
Alexandra Lawn of Ra Ra Riot performing at Dfest in 2009. Photo by George Lang
Dfest, the popular downtown Tulsa music festival started in 2002 as a showcase for local, regional and national acts will go on hiatus this year. Co-founder Tom Green cited the economic downturn and a decrease in corporate sponsorship as key reasons why the festival, originally scheduled for late July, in now suspended.
“A tough economy, rising production costs and a decline in lower level corporate sponsorships and support have caused us to take pause,” Green said in a prepared statement. ” These factors have made us unable to produce the kind of event we are known for, so we are unable to move forward with the festival this year. At the point we knew that we had exhausted any and all options and head into July 2010 with full steam, we decided to postpone the event on our own terms. The integrity and quality of Dfest is of the utmost importance to us as the creators of the event.”
In recent years, Dfest emerged as a key summer event in Oklahoma, and the past three years saw a progression in the quality of national acts playing the event’s main stage. In 2009, bands such as The Black Crowes and Cake served as headlining bands, with critical favorites such as Gogol Bordello, Ra Ra Riot and Rooney also performing.
But Dfest, which also featured a music conference showcasing industry professionals discussing issues facing rising musicians and strategies for success, was important for Oklahoma musicians — 160 acts performed at the 2009 Dfest, most of whom live, work and perform in Oklahoma.
Kellen McGugan, lead singer of The Pretty Black Chains, performed a set on the first day of last year’s festival. He said the festival, which attracted over 70,000 people in 2009, was valuable for gaining exposure, but also for meeting and seeing bands from other areas of the state and region.
“It just wasn’t a festival. It was our festival,” McGugan said.
Last year, Dfest attracted over 70,000 festivalgoers. Unless organizers are able to revive the event in 2011, the absence of the tw0-day festival will leave a significant cultural and economic void. McGugan said he believes Norman Music Festival, a free event in downtown Norman that expanded to two days in 2010, could fill that void.
“They did so well this year, and I think it’s only going to get bigger,” he said.
McGugan, whose band will release its official debut CD this summer, said that Dfest was going to help the Pretty Black Chains promote and distribute the band to fans and members of the industry. He said that in addition to the rise of Norman Music Festival, he would welcome relocating Dfest to Oklahoma City.
“Why not move it here?” he said. “We have everything they could need.”
Video of the Day: The Black Keys, “Tighten Up”
The Black Keys have one of the best track records for videos this year: first came the two Frank the Dinosaur clips, and now this extremely witty playground brawl video for “Tighten Up.” These guys are killing it, even if they smell like ranch dressing.
The Black Keys "Tighten Up"
The Black Keys | MySpace Music Videos
Video of the Day: Janelle Monae, “Tightrope” (Live on “The Late Show with David Letterman”)
You absolutely have to respect someone who can do the James Brown, all the way down to the cape! Witness a star in the making.
Video of the Day: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, “Higher Than the Stars”
Borrowing a Cure keyboard line, the Brooklyn dream-poppers get warm and (especially) fuzzy with this great new single.
Ronnie James Dio, 1942-2010
We need to just get this out of the way, because it is the law:
Dio has rocked (echo: rocked) for a long, long time,
Now it’s time for him to pass the torch.
He has songs of wilderbeasts and angels,
He has soared on the wings of a demon.
It’s time to pass the torch,
You’re too old to rock, no more rockin’ for you.
We’re takin’ you to a home,
But we will sing a song about you.
And we will make sure that you’re very well taken care of.
You’ll tell us secrets that you’ve learned. Woah!
Your sauce will mix with ours,
And we’ll make a good goulash baby.
Dio, time to go!
You must give your cape and scepter to me.
And a smaller one for KG.
Go! Go! Dio! Dio!
– Jack Black, Tenacious D, “Dio”
It’s certainly not my earliest memory, but it’s what always comes to mind when I think of Ronnie James Dio. Sometime in the mid-’90s, my friend Tony and I were paging through the newspaper when we saw an ad for Dio playing a local mid-size venue — I think it was the Boar’s Head at the French Market Mall. The ad featured a picture of Dio and by this time he was wearing some kind of poodley hairpiece because this was pre-1998, when it officially became safe for metal singers to brandish baldness and still rock. The funny thing about it was the coyness of Dio’s signature “devil horns” hand gesture, and I say signature because Dio, who died Sunday at age 67, is thought to have invented the damn thing. It was as if he had just sighed and said to the photographer, “Yeah yeah, I know — don’t worry. I’ll break out the 7-10 split.”
“Still satanic after all these years,” Tony said.
Of course, this was at least a baker’s dozen years after Dio made his post-Black Sabbath splash with “Rainbow in the Dark” and “The Last in Line,” and so it was cool at the time to laugh out loud at this kind of goofy, faux-devilish spectacle, but let’s not discount what R.J. Dio meant to power-deprived teenagers in the early ’80s who depended on the visceral high of quasi-operatic shrieking and doom-laden guitar thunder. Of course, we didn’t know that he had been rocking practically as long as there had been rock — he started a band called Ronnie and the Redcaps in 1958 — but Dio essentially provided the template for nearly a quarter-century of metal singing when he announced in 1975, as lead singer of Rainbow, that he was “THE MAAAN ON THE SEEELVUR MOWN-TAAAAN — YEAH!!!” He belonged to the subgenre of metal screamers in which singers like Klaus Meine of the Scorpions, who might have worn Viking helmets on stage in another era (not that this was necessarily frowned upon in 1970s heavy metal), did their best to evoke air raid sirens and strangled cats.
But Dio was especially effective with the Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed segment of the metal constituency because, as his pre-Rainbow band Elf indicated, he looked quite a bit like a denizen of Middle Earth. When people describe someone as “elfin,” it’s usually to evoke someone who looks like they just drifted down a staircase in Rivendell, like Liv Tyler or Taylor Swift or Christy Turlington. At 5’4″, Ronnie James Dio did not look like that kind of elf. He was more like an imp, or “ympe,” because that looks better in Olde English fonts. He looked like what you thought might be hiding under your bed, waiting to steal your socks.
Dio replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, which in its post-Ozzy years operated as a sort of witness protection program for singers who once worked for Ritchie Blackmore. While purists often derided Dio’s Sabbath period, Dio’s involvement in the band seemed to inspire Tony Iommi — the title track to 1979′s “Heaven and Hell” featured a riff that belongs in the Sabbath pantheon. While Ozzy sounded crazy, Dio sounded like the thing you hire exorcists to eradicate from your rec room. Dirtbag teens, and I use the term affectionately, had their defender.
Yes, Tenacious D made fun of R.J. Dio, but it was not mean-spirited. It was clearly out of love — he appeared in “Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny” and the D showed up in Dio’s video for “Push.” To the very end, Dio continued to sear faces off with his wail: last year, he reunited with his “Heaven and Hell”/”Mob Rules”/”Live Evil” Sabbath lineup — Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice — to release a new album, “The Devil You Know” as Heaven and Hell. These days, with Ozzy occasionally playing with Sabbath, you have to differentiate, you know.
The unfortunate difference with Dio-era Sabbath, beyond the old Beelzebubbish content, was that you aged out of it. Ozzy’s Sabbath is eternal — you can rock “War Pigs” well into the December of your days with a certain amount of dignity. Dio was made for the skinny kid in the early ’80s who got pantsed during dodgeball and needed to feel empowered by the time he got home. So he’d throw the cassette of “Mob Rules” he recorded on KMOD’s “Ultimate Six Pack” on Sunday night into his brick-sized Walkman and rock that thing all the way home on the school bus, flash-frying every demon he could spy from the back seat.
There was nothing cool about Ronnie James Dio. That much is clear. He existed because for those kids, sometimes slaying a dragon was more immediately important than being cool. That could come later.
Video of the Day: The National, “Bloodbuzz, Ohio”
Impeccably tailored and comtemplative in black and white, Matt Berninger presents like his generation’s GQ rock poster boy, a hirsute Bryan Ferry, in this first clip from “High Violet.”
The National – “Bloodbuzz Ohio” (official video) from The National on Vimeo.
Video of the Day: Field Music, “Let’s Write a Book”
The Bewlis Brothers are the standard-bearers for XTC’s cerebral archness, and “Let’s Write a Book” takes them out of the pastoralisms and into a light-industrial white-boy funk mode. Absolutely superb — buy “Field Music (Measure)” now.
