Interview: The Sunny Era

Ironically, losing half the band was what led The Sunny Era to radically expand its sound. When its original guitarist and bassist left to start families, the local trio realized that the remaining musicians shared a love of world music. The result, last year’s This Darkness Of Love, was a seismic shift from the straight-up indie rock of its debut, adding Spanish, Middle Eastern, and particularly gypsy instrumentation. The band’s new disc, Gone Missing, pushes even further in that direction, cooking up a tasty indie-pop/gypsy fusion that should pique the interest of any DeVotchKa fans. The A.V. Club sat down with guitarist/vocalist Eric Stainbrook, multi-instrumentalist Laila Stainbrook, and percussionist Rob Foehl in advance of The Sunny Era’s CD release show on Saturday, April 16, at Loring Theater with Lucy Michelle & The Velvet Lapelles and Zoo Animal.

Originally published April 13, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Review: Tapes N Tapes, Outside

The Minneapolis indie-rockers in Tapes ‘N Tapes were both the beneficiaries and victims of their own rapid ascent, riding a wave of breathless praise for their self-produced 2005 debut full-length The Loon to a deal with influential label XL and status as one of the year’s biggest buzz bands. The multitudinous Pixies and Pavement comparisons were a lot to live up to, but The Loon largely deserved them, with catchy hooks and jangly energy that kept the music constantly shifting in unexpected directions. That momentum dissipated with the disappointing 2008 follow-up Walk It Off, which gained something from Dave Fridmann’s slicker production, but squandered its promise on rambling, unfocused material.

Citing a desire to recapture the freewheeling spirit of earlier days, Tapes ‘N Tapes parted ways with XL and went back to its DIY indie roots for Outside, self-releasing the album. Musically, though, Outside mostly recapitulates Walk It Off’s sluggishness. Beyond the vivacious, offbeat jangle-rock of “Freak Out,” there’s far too much meandering and repetitive noodling, and little of the joyfulness that made songs like “Insistor” such fun. There are a few high points, including the building energy of “Outro” and the moody textures of “On And On,” the latter reminiscent of David Bowie’s Low. But overall, the slow pace only heightens the sense that there are too few exciting ideas in play; like a car trip across North Dakota, Outside takes a long time to get where it’s going, and doesn’t offer enough of interest along the way.

Originally published Jan. 11, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Recap: The Hold Steady, Meat Puppets, and Retribution Gospel Choir at First Avenue

“We are The Hold Steady, and we’re gonna have a good time tonight!”

Usually when a singer introduces his band like that on stage, it’s just a platitude, an easy way to warm up the crowd. But when Craig Finn says it in Minneapolis, and particularly at First Avenue, you can be damn sure he means it. In strict terms of residency, The Hold Steady might be a New York band, but its heart has always been here in Minnesota. That’s hardly a secret, of course—Finn has been mining his Minneapolis past for lyrical material ever since he and fellow expat Tad Kubler formed THS out of the ashes of Lifter Puller, using it as an essential backdrop for his long-running, loosely connected song cycle about being young and down-and-out. The passing of years makes the theme increasingly nostalgic and hazy with each successive album, but it doesn’t seem like Finn will drop it anytime soon—not when Heaven Is Whenever kicks off with a line about living on Hennepin Avenue.

So when The Hold Steady comes home to the bar one block away, they own that stage. And that’s because we Twin Citians own The Hold Steady. Never mind New York; these guys are ours. “I don’t think anyone understands what we’re talking about half as well as you guys do,” Finn acknowledged during “Little Hoodrat Friend.” Finn makes an unlikely rock star, dressed in a black button-down short-sleeve shirt like a guy from the IT department who’s busting out a few of Mick Jagger’s moves. He had a look of pure joy on his face the whole night, and it was mirrored in the ecstatic mood of the audience, which burst into explosive life for the headliners after an appreciative but more subdued response to openers The Meat Puppets. The crowd clearly knew all the songs by heart and sang along to every syllable.

Originally published Dec. 30, 2010 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Review: The Book Of Right On, All These Songs About Music

The Book Of Right On, All These Songs About Music (Half Door Records)

For years now, David Joe Holiday has been one of the Twin Cities music scene’s most consistently compelling creative forces. But the propulsive, controlled chaos of his songwriting has been matched by an inability to keep a band together, with both Kentucky Gag Order and Belles Of Skin City breaking up just when they were starting to show their potential. With any luck, the third time will be the charm, because the Holiday-fronted Book Of Right On has all the elements that made his old projects great: complex, intricate polyrhythmic percussion, a sly sense of humor, and plenty of head-pounding, punk-rock power.

Originally published Dec. 22, 2010 on avclub.com as part of a group-written roundup. Read the complete article.

Review: Cloud Cult, Light Chasers

Dealing with grief has been the primary driving force behind Craig Minowa’s songwriting since the 2002 death of his 2-year-old son. It’s been at the heart of each subsequent Cloud Cult album, providing a grounding element to his cosmically minded, vaguely New Age-y explorations of the big philosophical questions of life and our place in the universe. It’s significant then that Light Chasers is Minowa’s first since the 2009 birth of Nova, his second son with wife and bandmate Connie. On its eighth studio album, Cloud Cult’s musical approach remains a sweeping mix of Arcade Fire-esque indie rock, electronica, and symphonically tinged folk—but new fatherhood brings a subtle, important shift in focus. Light Chasers isn’t about living with death, but about becoming better equipped for the journey through life. Minowa, who also produced, dives in with typical gusto, building the album into a sprawling, intricately interconnected 56-minute concept that often soars into emotionally operatic, cathartic heights. At their best, as on “Blessings” and “Today We Give Ourselves To The Fire,” Minowa’s songs are like hymns for a religion that hasn’t been invented yet. In weaker moments, they come across more like a self-help book, and occasional overindulgent touches, like the processed robotic vocals on “The Exploding People,” exacerbate that. It’s fitting, perhaps, that one of the album’s sparest songs, “You Were Born,” is also one of its most powerful—a simply stated father’s declaration of love.

Originally published Sept. 21, 2010 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Buy the album. (Amazon.com link)

The Book Of Right On’s right on

David Joe Holiday knows what he wants out of a rock band: It has to be loud. It has to be percussive to its core, with rhythms bouncing off each other at crazy angles. And it has to be done for the pure love of making music. The burly, tattooed singer has been working this approach for years in the Twin Cities music scene, fronting bands like Kentucky Gag Order and Belles Of Skin City that hit like a freight train with bold, exciting noise-rock. They also exited the scene in much the same way: Belles broke up acrimoniously in 2007 after Holiday’s band-mates, he says, “staged a coup.”

“I can understand that it’s pretty hard to tolerate my erratic approach to a lot of things,” he says wryly. Feeling burned out, Holiday took his time assembling a new band, starting with longtime collaborator Jason Underwood, and the slow approach has paid dividends both in the music and the interpersonal dynamics.

His new quintet, The Book Of Right On, has all the elements that made his previous projects sizzle—pounding polyrhythms, dryly witty lyrics belted out with a crazed-sounding yelp, and the quick-footed ability to jump off in a surprising direction at a moment’s notice. It’s the culmination of a sound he’s been refining for a long time. On Saturday at the Triple Rock, the band celebrates the vinyl release of its new debut, All These Songs About Music, which is tighter, richer, and more compelling than anything he’s done before. It’s a leap forward undoubtedly helped by his new crew, which doubles up on the percussion with seasoned local drummers Mark Jorgenson (ex-Song Of Zarathustra) and Kelly Pollock (The Haves Have It).

Originally published Sept. 10, 2010 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Review: Private Dancer, Alive In High Five

Private Dancer has one simple mission: to rock out. And that hasn’t changed now that the band is on album number two. The Minneapolis quintet knocked out a charmingly ragged, boisterous mix of garage-rock and psychedelia on its 2008 debut, Trouble Eyes, and its new follow-up, Alive In High Five, follows the template so closely it may as well have been titled Trouble Eyes Part II. Party anthems, monster riffs, and belt-’em-out choruses are still the order of the day, and there’s even a literal sequel in space-rocker “2,000 Year Wave,” following Trouble’s surf-inflected instrumental “1,000 Year Wave.”

But who needs change? Private Dancer’s appeal—particularly live, where it can be electrifying—is all about angst-free, uncomplicated enthusiasm for music, and it doesn’t need fixing. All five Dancers have extensive experience in other Twin Cities bands—three members of STNNNG, ex-Hockey Night drummer Alex Achen, and Vampire Hands’ Chris Rose—and the band benefits not only from their veteran chops, but the fact that as something of a side project, there’s no pressure to do anything but have fun.

That’s not to say the musical interplay here isn’t rich and complex; Alive is bursting with catchy nuggets of sound, and stands up well to repeat listens. Sometimes the rough edges could use a little more smoothing: Love song “Diane,” which shares a title with one of Grant Hart’s HüDüclassics, could also have benefited from a more sweetly sung, Hart-like vocal than the rough yelp Achen gives it. But that’s a minor quibble. Private Dancer’s best on the straight-up anthems like “Bajama Beach,” which sounds like some forgotten gem by The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, and the raucous “Weekend,” which boils down the band’s ethic of jubilant celebration over how great it is to play in bars on a Saturday night: “My friends, we work all weekend!” It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Originally published on avclub.com July 16, 2010. Read the complete article.

Review: Peter Wolf Crier, “Inter-Be”

Slow, painstaking craftsmanship can make great music, but when inspiration strikes like a freight train out of the night, it’s best to just jump on and let the thing get where it’s going at its own breakneck speed. That approach worked well for Peter Pisano of Minneapolis’ Peter Wolf Crier, who pounded out the core of his duo’s debut, Inter-Be, in a single night after months of stagnation in the wake of the breakup of his previous band, The Wars Of 1812. The songs’ rough framework was fleshed out considerably later, especially when drummer and recording engineer Brian Moen came on board to help shape Pisano’s nascent folk-rock into something more sweepingly gorgeous and layered. To their credit, though, the embellishments respected the raw, lo-fi energy that powered the music in the first place, enhancing it instead of smoothing away its personality. The approach is superficially apparent in song titles like “Untitled 101” and “Demo 01,” but it weaves through the whole album on a more fundamental level via Moen’s rollicking percussion and Pisano’s melancholy, high-pitched vocals. There’s a touch of Bon Iver’s sad, haunted-sounding balladry in the mix here—not surprising, since Moen and Pisano have both worked with Justin Vernon—but also a refreshing exuberance, particularly on the bouncy album-opener “Crutch & Cane” and the angelic crescendo of voices that closes the terrific “Hard As Nails.”

Originally published on avclub.com May 25, 2010. Read the complete article.

Interview: Retribution Gospel Choir’s Alan Sparhawk unleashes his inner classic-rock beast

Plenty of musicians get mellower with age, but Alan Sparhawk’s been doing the exact opposite. For the past couple of albums, his main band, Low, has been progressively increasing the noise level on its minimalist (and originally very quiet) rock, and he pushes that envelope even further with side project Retribution Gospel Choir. Where Low is about doing more with less, RGC is a place where Sparhawk can cut loose. Rounded out by bassist (and Sparhawk’s Low bandmate) Steve Garrington and drummer Eric Pollard, the band has just released its sophomore disc, simply titled 2. Although it still shares a lot in common sonically with Low, the album gives free rein to a fuller, almost classic-rock sound, and it has a sense of freewheeling fun not usually associated with Sparhawk’s main band. Before playing at the Triple Rock Social Club Feb. 20, Sparhawk talked to The A.V. Club about Huey Lewis harmonies, Low’s dip into the dance world, and his toughest critic.

Originally published on avclub.com Feb. 19, 2010. Read the complete article.

Interview: Modern Radio’s 7 ways to make it as a record label

It’s not easy to keep a labor of love alive—that’s certainly true for indie record labels, and even many successful ones have been wrecked by bad luck, bad decisions, or plain old burnout. But Minneapolis label Modern Radio has been happily plugging away for a decade thanks to both a passion for documenting the Twin Cities music scene and a pragmatism focused on long-term survival. “I’ll be the first to say that I’m not surprised that we made it to 10 years,” says founder Tom Loftus, “and I won’t be surprised when we make it to 20.”

Originally posted on avclub.com Jan. 20, 2010. Read the complete article.