Aidin Vaziri: April 2011

28 April 2011

Tune-Yards: A Little Friction

Merrill Garbus finds her audience: Aidin Vaziri | Merrill Garbus, the one-woman dervish of homemade folk and R&B who records music under the alias Tune-Yards, moved to Oakland just over a year ago. The New England native says she came mainly for love - her boyfriend lives here - but admits she was also looking for a little friction. "Despite my efforts otherwise, I've always lived in places that are sheltered," says Garbus, who kicks off a two-month North American tour Tuesday at the Great American Music Hall. "Oakland is not a sheltered environment. You are confronted with poverty and violence and social tension on a daily basis. There is plenty of energy. There's also action and activism and people building things out of a crumbling infrastructure." The city played a big if slightly oblique role in shaping the songs on Tune-Yards' second album, "Whokill." The songs deal with street-level anger and injustice. Despite the fundamental folk bent of tracks like "Bizness" and "Doorstep," the songs are a patchwork of reggae production techniques and avant-jazz horns and Afro-Beat rhythms - all with the singer wailing on top like a laptop Nina Simone. Read more.

Review: Gorillaz, 'The Fall'

Review: Gorillaz, 'The Fall': Aidin Vaziri | OK, now Damon Albarn is just showing off. While touring America's arenas last year with the flesh-and-blood version of his cartoon supergroup Gorillaz, the Blur front man recorded "The Fall" entirely on his iPad - the first-generation model, no less. For an album crafted in soulless hotel rooms, it's surprisingly deep, particularly low-key synthesizer jams such as "Little Pink Plastic Bags" and "California and the Slipping of the Sun," which was composed during a stop in Oakland. Crooner Bobby Womack even drops in to offer some rhapsodic room service on the country-tinged "Bobby in Phoenix." A few of the tracks do sound like mere digital sketches but, on the whole, it's another set that confirms Albarn is never short on ideas. Available as a download-only release last Christmas, the funky tour diary is now on sale in physical form.

Live Review: Janet Jackson at the Bill Graham Civic

Janet Jackson review: Pop queen affirms her legacy: Aidin Vaziri | Janet Jackson looked as if she meant business. With her hair shorn and slicked back on Tuesday night, at the first of two sold-out shows at the Bill Graham Civic, she took the stage wearing a simple black tank top, utilitarian jeans, a diamond-studded collar, bright red lipstick and a matching bandanna on her left wrist. Her arms were almost as taut as her smile. Over her very long career, the 44-year-old singer and actor has taken on many different personalities - from Michael's doe-eyed, perpetually sweet-natured little sister to the scorned dominatrix on her most recent album, 2008's "Discipline." But at the Civic, on tour in support of her 3-year-old greatest-hits set, "Number Ones," she seemed mostly intent on demonstrating her sturdiness.Read more.

Pop Quiz: Mike Watt

Aidin Vaziri | Bassist Mike Watt, 53, who made his name with Southern California punk band the Minutemen, has released a new rock opera about growing up and growing old, "Hyphenated Man." The album contains 30 songs, and Watt, who recently has spent much of his time on the road as an auxiliary member of the reunited Stooges, is celebrating by playing 51 concerts in 52 days with the trio Missingmen. He also appears on new releases by several artists on his label, Clenched Wrench, including Nels Cline and Richard Meltzer. We spoke to him by phone from Cleveland.

Mike Watt
Q: You're doing 51 gigs in 52 days. Are your knees holding up?
A: My knees hurt. It gets you a little hoarse. You can't build calluses on the vocal cords. But I'm holding up pretty well for a 53-year-old punker. I'm not going to complain. I'm grateful people want to see this opera.
Q: Why did you make a concept album about your midlife crisis?
A: It's called a crisis sometimes, but I don't think it is. The whole thing about midlife is it's supposed to be a total nightmare, but you get to have experiences you didn't get to have earlier.
Q: Sure, if you get to watch Iggy Pop wiggle his butt every night.
A: I never thought about that. My work is a little different. It's scary because you know death is coming closer. Now I want to record more and more. In the Minutemen days, the album was just a flier to get people to the gig. Now I think of it as something that's going to be around forever.
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Live Review: Duran Duran at the Fillmore

Duran Duran at the Fillmore: Tears Falling, Panties Flying: Aidin Vaziri | Nobody tell the building inspector but the Fillmore might be missing its roof. Duran Duran held a very public rehearsal for its big Coachella gig at the famed San Francisco venue on Saturday and from where we were standing it definitely felt like they tore the sucker off. The band regaled the sold out crowd who had waited in line for up to seven hours with ecstatic renditions of songs from its early '80s imperial phase -- "Girls On Film," "Hungry Like The Wolf," "Wild Boys" -- and a handful of surprisingly decent tracks from its latest Mark Ronson-produced album, "All You Need Is Now." Having properly reunited six years ago after various lineup changes, the members of Duran Duran effectively skipped over the decades of filler that came in between (with the exception of "Ordinary World"), delivering a lean, hit-heavy set that was greeted with nonstop wails, falling tears and flying panties. Read more.

Pop Quiz: Linda Perry

Aidin Vaziri | After writing some of the most gargantuan pop hits of the past decade, including Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" and Pink's "Get the Party Started," Linda Perry is ready to resume her role as a proper rock 'n' roll belter. Last month, the former 4 Non Blondes singer dropped the first album by her new band, Deep Dark Robot, "8 Songs About a Girl," and now she and bandmate Tony Tornay are back in the clubs playing it live.

Linda Perry
Q: You have a pretty good gig writing for people like Christina Aguilera and Pink. What made you want to get back in a crummy van and hit the road to play in front of 30 people?
A: It wasn't really a choice. I did this interview when James Blunt's last album came out, and the guy asked me, "So when are we going to expect another album from you?" And I said. "Never!" But then I stopped. I realized anything is possible in my life. When Tony and I met and decided we were going to be in a band, it just turned into an album.
Q: Do you think maybe after working with James Blunt you just needed to rock out?
A: It just happened organically. It was fun recording like that and not thinking. Everybody I work with overthinks everything. Everybody is so caught up with tempos and what's on the radio and what VH1 will play. Nobody lets a creative process flow. It was fun.
Q: So how do you go from writing a song like "Beautiful" to "F- You, Stupid Bitch!"?
A: It's just all the wonderful gift I was given. I realized how special my life was when, in one week, I worked with Alicia Keys, Dixie Chicks and I think it was Cheap Trick. How many people can do that? It's just because I love music in every way. Good or bad. I believe all music is needed.
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Two Gallants Arise From The Wreckage

Adam Stephens back with Two Gallants after wreck: Aidin Vaziri | Think you had a rough year? Try being Adam Haworth Stephens. Just a few days before the San Francisco musician, the singer and guitarist for the beloved folk-punk duo Two Gallants, released his first solo album in August, he was hit by a car while riding his bike to a rehearsal space in the Mission. "I had convulsions," he recalls. "My body was flailing around. Then these kids who were riding by stopped to check in on me and they turned out to be Two Gallants fans. So while I was drifting in and out of consciousness they were telling me, 'Your band is rad!' " With his regular outfit on a break, Stephens managed to recover from the accident in time to take the album, "We Live on Cliffs," which was produced by the Grammy-winning Joe Chiccarelli, on the road with keyboard player Matt Montgomery and drummer Omar Cuellar. On a cold November morning on Interstate 80 in Wyoming, their white Chevy van hit a patch of ice on the road and rolled several times. Stephens, 30, suffered a dislocated shoulder, broken rib and severe nerve damage. He also walked away with the kind of psychological fallout that sent Bob Dylan into seclusion after his motorcycle crash. "At least for the first few months after the accident I cut myself off from the world," Stephens says. "I'm feeling a lot better now." Read more.

Review: Tune-Yards, 'Whokill'

Review: Tune-Yards, 'Whokill': Aidin Vaziri | Merrill Garbus is kind of like those musicians who occasionally appear at Fisherman's Wharf with every fathomable instrument strapped to their bodies. But rather than making an unholy racket, when the woman who performs under the name Tune-Yards starts plucking her ukulele, banging her drums and stomping on her effects pedals, what comes out is pretty close to transcendent. On her outfit's second album, "Whokill," her paint-peeling wail tears through the cacophony of primal rhythms, jagged chords and layered harmonies on supernaturally soulful tunes such as "Powa" and "Bizness." Better still, while her 2009 breakthrough, "Bird Brains," was recorded onto a used cassette tape using nothing but a handheld tape recorder, this one was recorded in a proper studio. That hasn't stripped it of its DIY charm - it still feels like Björk minus a million dollars.

12 April 2011

Coachella By The Bay

Phish, Arcade Fire, Muse top Outside Lands lineup: Aidin Vaziri | Dry your eyes. Just because tickets for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio are sold out doesn't mean you're out of luck. Thanks to the Bay Area's relative proximity to the Southern California destination, most of the artists on the bill for the three-day concert, which runs Friday through next Sunday, have scheduled stops here either on their way in or out. Plus you don't have to compete for the portable toilets with 70,000 other people. Here is a quick and dirty guide on how to have the Coachella experience without having to slather on the sunscreen. Best bets for each date are marked with an arrow.
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Phish, Arcade Fire, Muse Set For Outside Lands

Phish, Arcade Fire, Muse top Outside Lands lineup: Aidin Vaziri | Muse, Phish and the Arcade Fire will headline the fourth annual Outside Lands Music and Art Festival, which returns to its original three-day run in Golden Gate Park on Aug. 12-14, producers announced on Monday. More than 50 bands and performers are set to appear at the colossal event, including major names such as the Black Keys, MGMT, Girl Talk, the Decemberists and the Roots. Tickets go on sale Thursday at noon. "We are really ecstatic," said Gregg Perloff, founder of Another Planet Entertainment, the Berkeley concert-promotion firm that co-presents the festival with Superfly Productions of New Orleans, the people behind the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee. "We really feel this is the best lineup in the world."
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Pop Quiz: Wire

Aidin Vaziri | The members of Wire - well, most of them - have reunited again after one of their frequent breakups, and they are on the road supporting a new album, "Red Barked Tree." The British post-punk band's 12th full-length studio recording is drawing near-universal praise, with some critics even suggesting that its minimalist, acerbic songs could sit easily next to those on the three highly influential albums the group delivered during its imperial phase between 1977 and 1979: "Pink Flag," "Chairs Missing" and "154." Wire follows its appearance at this week's Coachella Festival in Indio (Riverside County) with a concert next Sunday at Slim's. We spoke with guitarist Colin Newman.

Colin Newman of Wire
Q: Do you think you're a good musician?
A: I'm a crap guitarist. It's very simple, but it works. I don't spend my life playing acoustic guitar.
Q: Could you play "Stairway to Heaven"?
A: You must be joking. I can't play anything. I could probably do a Neil Young song.
Q: So what you're saying is Wire's success depends largely on a series of fortunate mistakes?
A: It's not mistakes. All very organic. You can characterize it as sheer stupidity or brilliance. It's mindless. I'm not thinking when I'm writing. Once my brain catches up to it, it's over. If you were to have a young artist just starting out and trying to figure out what I do, they couldn't do it. You discover it over time.
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Review: Foo Fighters, 'Wasting Light'

Review: Foo Fighters, 'Wasting Light': Aidin Vaziri | For their first album in five years, Foo Fighters went back to their roots. All the way back. "Wasting Light" was recorded in Dave Grohl's garage at his San Fernando Valley home, entirely on analog tape. After a 15-year run of platinum sales and stadium tours (more if you count the Nirvana days), the hirsute front man certainly could have afforded a more lavish comeback effort. But the low-key approach suits the Fighters perfectly - the record sounds like the product of a band hurtling out of the gate on a blast of velocity and volume. Grohl even brought back "Nevermind" producer Butch Vig and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic on the track "I Should Have Known." The full-throttle "A Matter of Time" stands with Foo Fighters' most truculent rockers; "Dear Rosemary," which features Hüsker Dü singer Bob Mould, carries a whiff of the Posies and a dash of Swervedriver, sounding like the entire '90s preserved in resin; and "These Days" offers a respectable flashback to the classic quiet-loud-quiet dynamics of "Everlong." But it's the scream-fest "White Limo" on which Grohl fully reverts to his 18-year-old self. You can almost smell the bong-water-soaked Persian rug as he yelps his way through the onslaught of guitars and drums.

02 April 2011

Breakfast With Britney

Britney Spears set packs 6,000 into SF auditorium: Aidin Vaziri | Britney Spears made good on her pledge to put on a free concert in San Francisco - even if it wasn't the one fans were originally promised. Six thousand people jammed the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on Sunday afternoon to watch the 29-year-old pop diva perform just three songs from her new album, "Femme Fatale," for a set to be broadcast Tuesday on ABC TV's "Good Morning America."
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Pop Quiz: The Dodos

Aidin Vaziri | Even the members of the Dodos admit that their previous album, "Time to Die," felt a bit like a last gasp. But the San Francisco folk-rock duo sounds totally revitalized on its fourth studio recording, "No Color," which boasts a fresh selection of percussion-heavy songs, backing vocals by country-rock firebrand Neko Case and some old-school determination. The group even survived vibraphone-related strife. We caught up with multi-instrumentalist Meric Long (the band also includes Logan Kroeber) somewhere in the middle of North Dakota, shortly after the Dodos played the South by Southwest music festival in Texas.

Meric Long of the Dodos
Q: You listened to nothing but Neil Young and the Ramones when you wrote these songs. How come none of them sound like a goat singing over two chords?
A: There's not a direct influence, but there's a sort of ethos you can take from both those artists. They're both kind of stubborn. I feel like that feeling of sticking to one's guts - or guns, or knives, or whatever. I feel like we tried to do that on this record. I started listening to Neil Young really intensely around the time I started reading his biography, "Shakey." A lot of that book is about his determination to stick to whatever idea he had regardless of anything happening around him. I found that very inspiring.
Q: There was a pretty major vibraphone controversy surrounding the making of this album.
A: Yes. We went into the studio as a trio. We had the vibraphone parts recorded. But when it came time for mixing, we started taking things off and moving things around. We ended up with a record that didn't have any vibraphone on it. We just wanted to make the songs as good as we could, and the vibraphone disappearing was part of that.
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Review: Ray Davies, 'See My Friends'

Review: Ray Davies, 'See My Friends': Aidin Vaziri | Ray Davies, the former leader of the Kinks, deserves all the praise he can get. His crackling, widescreen songs of British life paved his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, yet in the grand scheme of things, where contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney regularly fill stadiums, he remains an underdog. So it makes sense that some of Davies' more high-profile friends and admirers would get together to throw a little recognition his way. As a tribute, though, "See My Friends" is an oddity. For one thing, it's billed as a Davies album with his face on the cover and name on the marquee. But once the music kicks up, the songwriter is pushed off to the side, like a meek host at a party with a procession of increasingly unruly guests. Metallica and Bruce Springsteen can't help but stomp through their contributions ("You Really Got Me" and "Better Things," respectively) as Davies merely attempts to be heard above the ruckus. Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora's heavy gloss makes heavy bombast out of "Celluloid Heroes." It's the lesser-known collaborators who approach the project with just the right mix of reverence and imagination, particularly Mumford and Sons with their folkie medley of "Days/This Time Tomorrow," which neatly falls in line with Davies' recent solo work; and Scottish singer-songwriter Amy MacDonald, who provides the man of the hour with a crunchy duet on "Dead End Street."

01 April 2011

Pop Quiz: Travie McCoy

Aidin Vaziri | Travie McCoy is inching closer to living the fantasy laid out on "Billionaire," his huge hit with Bruno Mars. The frontman for Gym Class Heroes is about to release a new single, "Superbad," the fourth from his solo debut, "Lazarus." The surprisingly upbeat record was made after McCoy's high-profile breakup with pop star Katy Perry and his move to Miami to break a debilitating addiction to prescription painkillers. The singer - a frequent collaborator on songs by artists such as Fall Out Boy, Pink and Kelly Rowland - is on his first headlining tour with support from Pete Wentz's new band, Black Cards.

Travie McCoy
Q: Has that song made you any closer to being a billionaire?
A: I'm coming around the bend. I'm making my way out of the thousand-aire range. I have a dog and a roof over my head, so I'm happy.
Q: A lot of the CD's lyrics were inspired by your breakup with Katy Perry. Have you gotten over it yet?
A: Oh yeah, that was three years ago. Sometimes when you're in a long relationship, it takes a while to get over somebody. For me to be bitter and sour over this thing at this point would be a little psychotic. But I still get asked questions about that. I guess people need a scoop, and they want me to spill the beans. The beans have already been spilled. It's old news.
Q: Well, most people don't have to see their ex-girlfriend staring back at them from the magazine shelf every time they're buying a gallon of milk.
A: She's in my face every day, all day. But after a while, it's just another face.
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Clothing Optional: Hunx and His Punx

Clothing Optional: Hunx and His Punx: Aidin Vaziri | Poor Seth Bogart. We caught up with him at the worst possible moment last week: He was packing for South by Southwest. His bed was strewn with possible options in every fabric and pattern - animal prints, polka dots, denim and sequins - and his mind was obviously troubled. His band Hunx and His Punx was getting ready to play seven shows in the next three days. "So I need seven outfits," he reasoned, sounding remarkably solemn for a man who typically slithers around the stage in edible underwear while wailing into the microphone like one of the Ronettes' foster children. Bogart said he turned his attention to Hunx and His Punx three years ago after it felt like his band Gravy Train!!!!, the exclamation point-loving electro-pop troupe, had run its course. "It was just time for something different," he said. "I wanted to perform and go crazy and do my own thing."
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Review: Britney Spears, 'Femme Fatale'

Review: Britney Spears, 'Femme Fatale' : Aidin Vaziri | There's a good reason Britney Spears is launching her new album in the heart of the Castro. Her seventh studio recording, "Femme Fatale," dispenses completely with the clunky suburban pop confections of her early years and pushes full blast into gay clubland, finding its pulse in the Hi-NRG rhythms and the hands-in-the-air melodies of classic Chicago house. The songs are streamlined, uncomplicated affairs designed purely for making butts bounce. It has no aspirations of regaining the hulking sales of the schoolgirl phase - no attempts to outweird Lady Gaga or outsleaze Ke. The young moms who grew up singing "Oops! ... I Did It Again" into a hairbrush? Goodbye. The doe-eyed Spears, who sounds virtually unrecognizable throughout, adapts easily to her new role as a heavily Auto-Tuned cheerleader for the electropop surge, breathing lustily through bangers such as "Hold It Against Me" and the minimal robo-stomp of "How I Roll." Even the will.i.am track, "Big Fat Bass," is almost bearable. It's all a bit of a thrill, really. By letting the mirror ball take the spotlight, Britney has never sounded more bearable.

Jim Greer: 'Ginger Vision' Clouded By Reality

Jim Greer: 'Ginger Vision' clouded by reality: Aidin Vaziri | Jim Greer put out a new solo album last week - his first in five years, in fact. But "Ginger Vision," a collection of deeply personal songs by the Oakland songwriter, arrived with remarkably little fanfare. Greer didn't even take the day off from work to celebrate its release. These days it's hard for him to find much reason to celebrate. In August, Greer's 20-month-old son, Teddy, was diagnosed with a rare, high-risk pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma. His family's world instantly turned upside down. "I went all the way to the dark side for a while," Greer said, during a recent afternoon interview at the San Francisco studio where he works.
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