items tagged with RIBCO

The Digable Planets that perform at RIBCO on November 6 will be different from the casually low-key, jazzy hip-hop group that from 1992 to 1995 made a major splash, with the single "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)," the well-regarded albums Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and Blowout Comb, one Grammy, and another nomination.

But Doodlebug (also known as Craig Irving and Cee Knowledge) insisted that even without Ladybug (Mary Ann Vieira), he and Buttefly (Ishmael Butler) are authentic Digable Planets.

"We're the ones who created the name Digable Planets and produced all the music and wrote all the music," Doodlebug said in a phone interview last week. "We decided to continue the tradition of Digable Planets. If she doesn't want to do it, that doesn't mean the group has to die. ...

"Ninety percent of everything that came out of her mouth was written by one of us. Why wouldn't it still be Digable Planets?"

The most obvious touchstone for the local power trio Forty Minute Detour is Alice in Chains, which is odd when you consider some of the other things that get thrown into the stew.

Alice in Chains, after all, seemed like the most authentic grunge-metal group -- dark and dirty and, in the person of lead singer Layne Staley, living the nightmare of its songs.

Forty Minute Detour's In the Edges often invokes that dank blackness. Chad Clark's vocal performance and his big, flat, fuzzy guitar hook make "Nervous Breakdown" the Alice-iest cut on the album.

But it's rare on the record in not breaking from the formula. And you only need to look at the band photo from In the Edges to know that this is a little different: Bassist Josh Elmer, guitarist/vocalist Clark, and drummer Josh Morrissey are all smiling.

The origin of the folk and rock (but not folk-rock) group Old Canes is a promoter who didn't accept "no."

Christopher Crisci was touring Europe with his band, Applessed Cast, in 2001. "The promoter for this tour that we were doing asked us if we wanted to do some in-store acoustic shows, and we told him 'no,'" Crisci said this week. The experimental band uses lots of effects and delay, and "it just doesn't translate that well acoustic."

That should have been the end, but the man was undaunted. "After one of the shows, he's like, 'Okay, now we're going to the store; we're going to do the acoustic show.' I was like, 'We don't do that, but I have some folk songs.'"

That show spurred singer/guitarist Crisci to record his folk songs, and Old Canes' Early Morning Hymns was released in 2004. The band's second album, Feral Harmonic, will be out three days after the group's October 17 Daytrotter.com performance at RIBCO, which also happens to be the Reader's 16th-birthday party.

When we talked two weeks ago, Garnet Keim of The Blakes was preparing to move from the Seattle home he'd rented for four years.

To where was he moving? "Into the van," he said.

So he was going to be homeless, in a manner of speaking? Keim sounded incredulous that I suggested such a thing. "You could say that," he said. "I have a nice van. I can just sleep in that van anytime."

The Blakes will be performing a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO on Saturday, October 17, for this publication's 16th-birthday party, and the band's transient nature has been somewhat typical.

Listening to the debut album from Pronto, the quartet fronted by Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, the inescapable reference point is the singer/songwriter genre from the 1970s -- warm, organic, a little hazy, and mostly ready for AM radio. One can't avoid, for instance, Randy Newman's influence on "What Do You Know About You?"

Jorgensen, in a recent phone interview promoting his band's September 18 show at RIBCO, sounded tired of the comparison -- "We didn't set out ... [to] make a record that everybody's going to say sounds like the '70s," he said -- but he didn't deny its accuracy.

All Is Golden is not all soft-focus AM-radio fare. "Monster" has the muscle of power pop, while "I Think So" belies Jorgensen's love of experimental music as it devolves into a coda of sax and electronics and noise. But even when the songs themselves don't fit the decade, there's still a pervasive vibe.

The surprise is that Jorgensen is a relatively recent convert, for a long time not being a fan of the era's musical giants -- Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, for example -- or even the premise that lyrics are a meaningful vehicle for musical expression. He and his collaborators on previous experimental, instrumental music projects dismissed lyrics as merely "a vehicle for the melody."