Interview: Color Me Obsessed director Gorman Bechard

There’s something missing from Color Me Obsessed, director Gorman Bechard’s new documentary about Minneapolis music legends The Replacements: the band itself. Bechard purposefully avoided putting Paul Westerberg or his bandmates in the film directly—no interviews, no music, no concert footage, no album covers. But what seems at first to be a self-defeating approach is perhaps uniquely suited to The Replacements, a band so infamously disinterested in its own fame that its members once tried to steal their master tapes and throw them in a river, and flipped the bird to the whole idea of MTV by making a music video consisting entirely of a speaker playing “Bastards Of Young” for three and a half minutes. As its title implies, Color Me Obsessed is about the band’s fans as much as it is about the band itself. By not directly including The Replacements in the film, its subject broadens beyond simple biography into an exploration of what it means to be a fan, and to have your life changed by a song. Obsessed tells The Replacements’ story, from formation to early ’90s flameout, through the words of fans, critics, and contemporaries from the Minnesota music scene, including HüDüant Hart and Greg Norton, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, Kids In The Hall’s Dave Foley, and Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. The A.V. Club talked with Bechard in advance of Color Me Obsessed’s Minneapolis debut, 7 p.m. May 4 at the Woman’s Club, as part of Sound Unseen.

Originally published May 2, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

In Tune With Nature: Cloud Cult mixes music and environmentalism

Since he was a child, Craig Minowa’s two driving passions have been music and environmentalism. As the leader of critically acclaimed indie-rock band Cloud Cult, he’s built a career that puts both at the center of his life.

Cloud Cult began as a solo project in 1995, while Minowa was an environmental sciences student at the University of Minnesota. It has grown into a group that’s earned a devoted cult following for its philosophical and expansive indie-rock on albums such as “Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes)”, “The Meaning Of 8” and its latest disc, “Light Chasers.”

During that time, Minowa and his wife and bandmate Connie Minowa have been trailblazers in greening the music industry through Earthology, a nonprofit organization that functions as Cloud Cult’s record label as well as, more recently, the umbrella for their environmental projects outside of music, including Connie’s green outreach work with local Indian tribes.

Originally published May 1, 2011 in Momentum, the magazine of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. Read the complete article.

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.

Recap: Wire at First Avenue

Neither Wire or its audience are getting any younger, and the preponderance of greying and bald heads onstage was equalled at First Avenue on Sunday by the grizzled and gleaming domes in the crowd, most of which appeared to be atop bodies in their 40s or 50s. But age has hardly mellowed the English art-punks, who bookended their set with a pair of roaring rockers spanning their long career, kicking off with the poundingly aggressive “Comet” from 2003’s Send, and winding up with a volcanic version of the title track from their 1977 debut, Pink Flag, which built up into a storm of noise and feedback.

Originally published April 11, 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: Einstüe Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture IV

Born out of the Berlin performance-art scene in the early 1980s, Einstüe Neubauten (along with Throbbing Gristle) staked out the most confrontational, challenging territory of the then-new industrial genre. The group’s deliberately cacophonic approach reverberated in more dance-floor-ready groups like Ministry and Front 242, as well as art-punks like Wire, but Neubauten pushed sonic deconstruction to the limits of tolerance. The results were often harsh and frightening, and less recognizable as music than as recordings of some deadly forklift accident in a sheet-metal factory. The band’s output slowed after leader Blixa Bargeld joined Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, but always kept clawing at the edge of the experimental frontier. That uncompromising aesthetic (not to mention lyrics that were mainly in German) ensured a limited cult audience, but Neubauten’s influence can be heard in later bands from Mr. Bungle to TV On The Radio.

Neubauten celebrates its 30th anniversary with the double-disc Strategies Against Architecture IV, its fourth retrospective compilation. Picking up studio recordings and rarities from 2002 to 2010, it showcases a band that may be older and mellower than the explosive early sturm und drang, but still remains far ahead of most others of its kind. Bargeld and company explore textured, even minimalist territory on the chilling drone of “Insomnia,” while the more propulsive “Dead Friends (Around The Corner)” and “GS1 & GS2” put them in company with Wire’s recent Read & Burn series. Ironically, for a band whose very name expressed its anarchist tendencies—it means “Collapsing New Buildings”—Neubauten has long since proved that its music has staying power.

Originally published Dec. 7, 2010 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Review: Various artists, Tradi-Mods Vs. Rockers

When the electrifying, trancelike street music spearheaded by veteran Congolese band Konono No. 1 reached Western ears in the early 2000s, it sounded like something beamed in from Mars. Konono’s music was based around traditional instruments like the likembe thumb piano, but the need to use hand-built, jury-rigged amplifiers to be heard on busy Kinshasa streets brought in heavy, loud distortion that gave Konono a rough, propulsive, hypnotic edge. It sounded weirdly and radically modern—the same kind of thing that forward-thinking punk and electronic musicians like Sonic Youth had been playing around with for years, but approached from an entirely unexpected angle.

The Konono aesthetic has had some time now to filter through Western indie-rock and electronica, and it’s expanded intriguingly on the double-disc compilation Tradi-Mods Vs. Rockers, which opens up the floor to 26 American, British, and German indie bands who rework material from Konono and other Congolese bands, including Kasai Allstars. The results are largely enthralling, and sometimes nearly as revelatory as Konono itself sounded in 2004. Heard in context on Tradi-Mods, for instance, the seamlessly incorporated influence of Konono on Andrew Bird’s electronically processed, looped violin is obvious. The disc is a triumph, and a great example of what a remix album should be: reverent to what made the original material fascinating, but not so much that it can’t fly away in its own unexpected directions.

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

Recap: Grinderman at First Avenue

From his earliest days in the 1970s with Boys Next Door, and later The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, Australia’s Nick Cave has always trafficked in a swampy, machismo-laden stew of sex and sleaze-ridden spirituality. Even at his most gothically elegant, that electric charge of sinfulness is at the core of his art, whether in his songwriting or novels like The Death Of Bunny Munro. You’re never sure whether he’s going to buy you a shot of bourbon, rob you at knifepoint, or lecture you sternly on how God is coming soon to destroy the world. That’s also a big part of the magnetically dangerous stage presence that makes Cave one of the quintessential rock ’n’ roll frontmen, which he proved with a powerful show at First Avenue last night, performing with his latest project, Grinderman.

Originally published Nov. 24, 2010 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.