items tagged with RIBCO

On the day he's playing a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO, singer/songwriter Dale Watson will release Carryin' on, and the album seems a natural fit for a guy who's been a country-music relic from the beginning. That's a compliment, by the way.

Since his 1995 debut Cheatin' Heart Attack, Watson has been writing and performing country songs in a style out of fashion for decades. But it wasn't until this new album that he was able to combine his own songs with musicians from the era he emulates.

His band for Carryin' on was assembled by steel guitarist Lloyd Green and included Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano and Pete Wade on guitar -- all noted session players active in the 1960s and beyond.

While Watson's regular band -- with which he'll be performing in Rock Island -- is adept at old-school country, the 47-year-old said in a recent phone interview that people his age and younger simply can't beat the old-timers: "It's just something you have to have lived to play."

Chevelle's Sci-Fi Crimes raises one major question: Does the band believe in the paranormal subject matter it tackles with such earnestness on its 2009 record?

"Pete and Dean and I have this ongoing discussion about whether it can happen, whether aliens can even reach us," said drummer Sam Loeffler in a phone interview last week. "It's all in fun."

Which is to say that the members of Chevelle -- brothers Sam and Pete (guitars and vocals) Loeffler and brother-in-law Dean Bernardini (bass) -- aren't believers. Yet.

So when Chevelle headlines Saturday's Rock the District event in Rock Island, feel free to share your beliefs, theories, and evidence with the band. Sam, at least, claims to have an open mind.

Roughly 100 seconds into "Down Down Down," the third track on Peter Wolf Crier's debut Inter-Be, the drums kick in. That's the duo in microcosm, as Peter Pisano's fully formed guitar-and-vocal songs are amplified by the drums and other accents Brian Moen added relatively late in the process.

The band will perform a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO on Tuesday, June 22, and the moral of the Peter Wolf Crier story is to follow things where they lead.

Dan Snaith sounds tired of answering questions about math.

He comes from a family of mathematicians; he earned a Ph.D. in the field in 2005. And because he records and performs (under the name Caribou) electronic music, journalists (this one included) ask him a lot of questions about the relationship between his primary academic and musical pursuits. They both involve computers, don't they?

Snaith -- who will be playing with his band at a Daytrotter show at RIBCO on Saturday, June 5 -- said there are some similarities. But not many. "Being able to do what you want ... is kind of an intuitive process," he said in a phone interview last week. "In both mathematics and in music, you kind of have to use some gut-level intuition to piece things together. [But] I think they're very different in many ways."

What's evident listening to the music of Caribou is that Snaith's electronic instruments are largely tools, not ends. There are certainly electronic sounds, but the songs sound organic and feel handmade, and his singing voice is ethereal, warm, and emotive -- a perfect offset to any digital coolness. Put differently, there's nothing mathematical about Caribou's songs.

Against Me! has been selling out for the better part of a decade, so complaints about the polish of the band's forthcoming record are already tired to songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Tom Gabel.

Because Gabel is a punk icon and an anarchist, it was little surprise that there were negative reactions when the band jumped to a major label. But as it prepares to release White Crosses in June -- the group will play a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO on May 4 -- Gabel talked about the challenge of being an ever-changing person in a world of rigid expectations.

When Caroline's Spine plays RIBCO on April 30, the guy behind the drum kit will likely be more familiar to the audience than the band itself. Greg Hipskind, the longtime drummer for the Quad Cities quartet Wicked Liz & the Bellyswirls, has been the touring drummer for Caroline's Spine since last fall.

The Phoenix, Arizona-based alt-rock group, led by singer/songwriter Jimmy Newquist, had a pair of albums on Hollywood Records in the late 1990s. "Sullivan," based on the true story of the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo who died in World War II, was a modest hit. The band also had songs on the soundtracks to An American Werewolf in Paris and Varsity Blues in the company of Bush, Skinny Puppy, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Collective Soul, and Van Halen, among others.

The self-titled album by Head for the Hills opens with "One Foot in the Grave," and its instrumentation and twangy harmonies are classic bluegrass. The next track is "Solar Bowling Shoes," and the title alone is a clue that the Colorado-based band has interests beyond tradition.

But the band really establishes its newgrass credentials on the instrumental "Nooks & Crannies," which -- aside from its eloquent melodies and nimble digressions -- brings in an electric mandolin at the four-minute mark. Its introduction offers a hint of rock-and-roll distortion, and it later adds some feedback, and finally it breaks away from any sense of tradition with a soaring solo. The instrument's use is transcendent, creating a bridge between bluegrass and rock.

The blending of those two genres is of course a hallmark of newgrass, and Head for the Hills -- performing March 19 at RIBCO -- is particularly adept at farming that expansive middle ground. There's nothing else on the album as quintessentially bluegrass as "One Foot in the Grave," and there's nothing as nontraditional as "Nooks & Crannies," but the remainder of the album is a testament to the band's alchemic skills.

To understand some of what makes Dr. Dog sound like it was preserved in amber in the mid-1960s, listen to singer/guitarist/songwriter Scott McMicken talk about drums.

The quintet -- performing a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO on February 9 -- has a new record (Shame, Shame) due out April 6, and for its sixth studio album it finally enlisted a producer, holing up in a New York studio for nearly a month.

"The real crux of the problem in New York was the drums," McMicken said last month. On previous Dr. Dog albums, which regularly sound 40-plus years old, "the drums aren't really dominant ... very muted."

But on the New York recordings, the drums had a modern microphone configuration -- overkill, in McMicken's view. "The real problem was that you were hearing all 16 microphones at once. I knew if I could put my hands on that console and turn off 75 percent of the mics, we'd probably be getting to hear a really cool drum sound."

If you followed the career of Freedy Johnston, you might wonder what happened to him after 2001, when Elektra released his Right Between the Promises album.

Until Rain on the City (out today), Johnston released a live record and a CD of covers, but the man behind the 1994 single "Bad Reputation" -- who was Rolling Stone's songwriter of year that year, and whose major-label discography included albums produced by Butch Vig and T-Bone Burnett -- doesn't want to talk about the more than eight years between albums of original material.

"That's why we put it in the bio," he said last week. "I didn't want it to be talking about it every time, rehashing the same story."

In that official record-label bio, Johnston -- who will perform a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO on January 23 -- is vague: "It takes a while to re-adjust one's priorities and get back on track after working with the big budget that the majors give you. I went through issues with the IRS, had a relationship go south and a touring vehicle grind to a halt, but through it all I never gave up writing and gigging whenever possible."

In our interview, Johnston didn't elaborate much on the specifics of his personal life. (In addition to living in Austin, Texas, in Nashville, and in New York, he did live in downtown Rock Island in 2002 and 2003 and married a woman from the Quad Cities.) But he did discuss his difficulty completing songs.

"I used to have no problem writing songs before I had a major-label deal," he said. "All of a sudden it was really hard to finish the damn things. ... Now I'm on the other side of it. ... Maybe I just needed to reset my clock. I'm working better now than I ever was."

Shilpa Ray has a voice with the unpolished force of PJ Harvey and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O on their early recordings, and she sometimes unleashes an uninhibited bluesy growl. Yet she's also capable of reining in her vocals to suit the song, as when she sounds (intentionally) a little sloppy/slurry/drunk on "Beating St. Louis" but also manages to nail a passage of higher notes.

She has a testimonial from the king of dramatic singing, Nick Cave: "She has a great voice; she writes great songs, great lyrics."

And Shilpa Ray - who will be playing with her backing band the Happy Hookers on January 16 at RIBCO - also plays a portable harmonium, a reed organ she picked up while studying northern-Indian classical singing from ages six through 17. (The instrument sounds a lot like an accordion.)