Brooklyn | The Ardent Music Blog

The Warm Up with backwords

03/20/2012 By Rachel Hurley

The Warm Up with backwords [ 20:09 | 46.12 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We love our city and we especially love to show it off. This afternoon backwords, a psych rock outfit from Brooklyn, stopped by to hang out, take a tour of The Stax Museum of American Soul Music with John Fry and then jump in the studio and play some stripped down versions of songs off their new record By the Neck. We think they enjoyed themselves, and we really enjoyed playing tour guide for the day!

The band is fresh off a 7 show run during SXSW, including a couple of shows they put on via their very own label, Camper’s Rule Records. And we though we worked hard? Who can keep up with these guys?

So take a listen to the show! We chat about Stax, the recording process and of course, the age old question: Is it still worth going to SXSW? Then we’ll see you TONIGHT when they play 1884 Lounge in Minglewood Hall with Harlan. Show starts promptly at 10PM!

My First Record: Elliot Jacobson (drummer for Jenny Owen Youngs, Ingrid Michaelson)

02/07/2012 By

The first record I bought was Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.

It was on a cassette, of course. I remember the sweet smell of the new packaging. I listened to Dangerous from top to bottom before and after school everyday. I would stare at the elaborate cover artwork and read the lyrics over and over. My favorite song was “Black or White” and I would request it at the roller rink so much that I would annoying the DJ.

Dangerous was not only the first record that I bought, but also my first MJ record. It marked the beginning of a childhood obsession with MJ specifically as a performer. Because we didn’t have cable, I couldn’t watch any music videos at home. So I had my mom rent Moonwalker, and the dance scenes blew my mind. That’s when I learned about the Jackson 5 and became aware of the seemingly endless artistic genius of Michael Jackson. To this day, every time I hear any of his music, I am amazed in a new way.

My First Record: Jared Lindbloom of FISHDOCTOR

01/12/2012 By Rachel Hurley

My parents had a microwave-size cardboard box of their combined record collections. Not a huge bounty, but the records contained within this box were my little musical gems growing up.

Bill Wither’s Still Bill was a record that seemed to be continually rotating on my parents’ turntable and the needle resting deep within it’s grooves; especially on tracks like ‘Use Me‘ and ‘Lean on Me’.

I was around 11 or 12 years old and growing up on the mid-western plains of South Dakota, a record like Still Bill had it all for me. Funky, head-bobbing bass & drums. Simple yet profound straight-forward lyrical delivery. All of Wither’s confidence & humbleness came through on this album even if it only subconsciously registered with me at the time.

Having just finished watching the documentary Still Bill I’m reminded why this album still resonates with me today. I still get the same giddiness I experienced upon my first listen. And I have a feeling that excitement for this album will not leave me anytime soon.

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Filed Under: My First Record, Uncategorized Tagged With: Brooklyn, Lower East Side, Music, South Dakota

Nice Playlist, Brah: Hey 2011 – Thanks for the Memories by Jenny Owen Youngs

01/05/2012 By

Songs – sweet heavenly sustenance. Here are a handful of tracks that got under my skin and kept me going this year. Click to Stream.

1. Azealia Banks (feat. Lazy Jay): 212
PERFECT SONG ALERT. Not sure how a song with no identifiable hook could ever be this addictive… but here it is. The bare-bones music video is pretty raw and necessary too. This girl is going to divide and conquer 2012.

2. Young Buffalo: Full Metal Whacket
Love this band – they are headed for greatness. Here’s a song from their EP Young Von Prettylips. This is tremendous amount of music to come out of just three people. Their reverb is my favorite of all possible reverbs. See them live and you’ll get to watch each player rotate through all the instruments.

3. Drake: Headlines
I don’t know how I accidentally fell completely in love with Drake… but some things are just unavoidable. I’m in deep with the whole of Take Care, but this track is particularly satisfying.

4. The Black Keys: Lonely Boy
Get ‘em, Patrick and Dan!!

Ryan Adams’ Top 7 Albums of (not) 2011

12/22/2011 By

‎# 7 DRA- Album of the Year…The Leaving Trains – Fuck

Don’t let the title throw you (or how hard it is to get this in digital format!) this is one hell of a record. Falling James Moreland spins tales of a world gone haywire with some of the brashest and sweetest guitar chords crashing and clanging along. It’s a symphony of loners, back alley ways, lost diary pages, cats and sibling stories all woven together with a tough but loose rhythm section and Falling James’ ridiculously beautiful voice. There has never been a record that meant more to me. If you play guitar and set things on fire this is your map. Long live. (SST Records)

‎#6 DRA-ALbum of the Year….JONES VERY - Words and Days

When I listen to this album I can still see the large oil containers of the 80′s smoldering in the empty parking lots- the grayness of the tv sets in the windows- I can hear the sounds of questions.

JONES VERY was a three piece band with Vic Bondi (of Articles of Faith) on vocals and Jeff Goddard and Jamie Van Bramer on bass and drums. The sounds they made – the honesty and desperation in the vocals, the amazing arrangements made this so much more than a melodic post-punk record. I go through phases with this record and mostly it reminds me of The Police if they were dirtier and possibly more focused on the personal – if they were from hardcore.

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Filed Under: Exclusives Tagged With: Brooklyn, Celtic Frost, Lou Reed, RATT, SST Records, Texas, Vic Bondi

Pick Three with Brian Russ of backwords

12/12/2011 By

1. Revolution (1968)

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries on the current economic collapse and/or bail-out of the banking industry lately. Some of them have been widely respected in the media as factual and some are conspiracy themed – lo-fi Youtube finds.

In my searching and digging I stumbled across what might be one the most visually stunning and beautiful glimpses of an American revolution I’ve ever seen. Aptly titled Revolution, filmmaker Jack O’Oconnell puts you right smack in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury scene in the late 60s. You’re inside hippie-communes. You’re at Solstice Festivals. You go on acid trips (and really feel like you’re on them too) and you hear over and over the music of change – raw and real Rock and Roll.

Interview after interview, you’re thrown deeper into this revolution’s spirit. Swirling colors, analog projected freak-outs, bands chugging through psychedelic journeys. This films sums up the hippie movement like no other film ever has to me – including the Woodstock documentary.

At a time where I personally have taken much inspiration from Occupy movements around the country – this film really hit home and at the right time. Our current youth is no different than the youth of the 60s. We all want peace, social justice, a fair decent living, a place to do our art and a raised level of consciousness.

At one memorable point in the film, an unnamed Puppeteer and theatre director says:
“We do it. We live it, all the time. We survive and we work hard… We pay our actors about $5 a performance. You can live on $25 a week. That’s assuming you’re doing something you’re interested in and something that’s valuable. If you’re not doing something that’s interesting, then you got to get a lot of money, Mac! You got to make a fortune to keep a boring job.”

I think that’s the same spirit artists, musicians, writers and free thinkers of our current youthful generation operate in. We want meaningful lives. And we’re about to go through another major American revolution to make sure we have them.

My First Record: Alyse Lamb of EULA

11/21/2011 By

Music was a huge part of my childhood.

I was the youngest in my family, so I got away with stealing everyone’s music. I’d confiscate vinyl from my parents, cassette tapes from my sister, and CD’s from my brother (and my nephew will probably steal mp3’s from me).

Not only did I have tons of music at my fingertips, but the variety was quite nice as well: folk, deep southern blues, classical, straight up r&b, sugary dance pop, soul, gangster rap. I will never forget sitting in my room as a 7-yr-old, feeling very confused and disoriented while I heard my sister blasting Lisa Lisa’s “Head to Toe” in her room, and my brother blasting Wu Tang’s “Method Man” (yes, the sewing-the-asshole-shut bit) in his room.

I ran downstairs to seek some kind of musical solace and my Dad was playing The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Uggh! I couldn’t focus!

Pick Three with The Loom

11/14/2011 By

Psych-Folk players The Loom have a rich interesting sound, largely due to a diverse instrumentation such as trumpet, french horn, keys, guitar, drums, and bass. Their lyrics are those of urning and searching, a dissidence that many of us feel during this day and age. The New Yorker says of The Loom: “Beloved Brooklyn sextet The Loom…have lately been guiding their chamber-folk sound to decidedly louder sonic territory.” Check out their debut album Teeth (Crossbill).

1. The Wailing Wall – “The Low Hanging Fruit”

This band no longer technically exists – they actually disbanded shortly after we did a Northeast tour together last year – but Jesse Rifkin, the main songwriter behind the project, is in the midst of working up something new, and I honestly can’t wait to hear it. This whole album is incredible, but in particular the first three songs – “Speak Not Its Name,” “Bones Become Rainbows,” and “For C.M.R.” – might be the best and most stirring album opening I’ve heard in years. On that tour all of the members of The Loom would play the thundering percussion on “Speak Not Its Name” for the end of The Wailing Wall’s set, and it is without doubt one of my favorite musical memories. Check it out at allmusic.com.

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Filed Under: Pick Three Tagged With: Breaking Bad, Brooklyn, Bryan Cranston, Loom, Music, Wailing Wall, Wallace Stegner, Walter White

5 Questions with Dinosaur Feathers @hopscotchfest

09/13/2011 By Rachel Hurley

We caught up with Brooklyn’s Dinosaur Feathers at their Sound Situations taping at Marsh Windwoods in raleigh, NC while they were in town to play the Hopscotch Festival. As a matter of fact, Spin Magazine just wrote that they were one of the 8 Best Moments of the Hopscotch Music Festival. The questions featured are from the likes of Buried Beds, Jamie Randolph and the Darkhorse, Aunt Martha, Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos.

We found the band to be incredibly charming. Check out our interview (and viewer beware: their answer to the first question was kind of muddled – but you can see they say “Museum of Natural History“) and then if you are in New York City, go see them tomorrow night when they play with Oakland’s Man/Miracle at Piano’s.

Dinosaur Feathers began with a man carrying a suitcase full of beats and a girl-sized hole in his heart. Greg Sullo moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2007 to pursue his musical dreams and songwrite his way through a break-up, and found himself unwittingly living on the same block as his college singing buddy Derek Zimmerman. After Sullo debuted his beat-smithing skills at local favorite Bar 4 in Park Slope, a tipsy Zimmerman and bassist Adam Fetcher volunteered to join him in filling out the sound with backing vocals, keys, and general swirling nonsense.

Fetcher left the band before the first show could be played, lending his skills to an equally worthy cause — the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Now a 2-piece, the boys sang extra hard and played extra funky, and gained the respect of South Brooklyn’s Local Correspondents songwriters’ community. Soon after, folk-rocker Hannah Fairchild and folk-shocker Tom Curtin (of The Warbles) came on board and helped transform the group into the creamy mix of 3- and 4-part harmonies that have since defined the Dinosaur Feathers sound.

In 2009 the group played many, many shows (at least 90 in the NYC area alone), and underwent line-up changes as Fairchild and Curtin left to focus on the development of their solo work. The single “Know Your Own Strength” and the free, home-recorded EP Early Morning Risers helped the band earn the attention of local bloggers, and their general persistence earned them the title of the “hardest working band in Brooklyn” from Earfarm.com.

The group’s sound became more skewed and more rockin’ with the addition of Ryan Michael Kiley on the bass. A screaming, stomping master of the pedal-board, he worked with Sullo and Zimmerman (as well as Curtin and Fairchild) on their self-produced debut full-length titled Fantasy Memorial. The band borrowed a bunch of money from generous (if slightly skeptical) parents in March 2010 to facilitate a self-release, and Dinosaur Feathers toured extensively across the country in support of it, thereby earning the chance to play awesome sets at the SXSW, CMJ, and Sasquatch! festivals.

In late 2010, feeling a lack of looseness in their live sets, the band enlisted Sullo and Kiley’s old bandmate Nick Brooks to join on drums. Brooks’s commitment to technique helped to keep the rhythmic complexity of the drum machine, but his experience playing in rock bands allowed the bands to reach new levels of balls-to-the-wall intensity on stage.

2011 sees the band preparing their second full-length album (as yet untitled, as they continually think up unbearably goofy or filthy names for it which are immediately vetoed). Working with producer Eli Crews (Deerhoof, tUnE-yArDs, Thao and Mirah) at New, Improved Studios in Oakland, the band lived in a yurt in a generous friend’s backyard for 5 weeks, putting together what they hope is a bracing representation of their newly expansive and slightly harder-hitting sound.

They hope to release the new tunes in late 2011/early 2012 and are actively seeking a label to help get their music out. As promotion for their Summer Tour, the band released the Game of Thrones-themed single “Please, Please George” to music bloggers, fantasy enthusiasts, and the general public (check their website for links to download it). Plans are in the works to release another free, home-recorded EP later this year as well.

Filed Under: 5 Questions With Tagged With: Brooklyn, Dinosaur Feathers, Game of Thrones, Hopscotch Music Festival, Piano

Pick Three with Steve Selvidge of The Hold Steady

07/27/2011 By

Steve Selvidge grew up in the Memphis music scene, hearing the folk blues of his father, Sid Selvidge, who performed as Mud Boy and the Neutrons along with Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwait, and Jim Dickinson . That pretty much sealed the deal.

He’s been playing guitar, writing and recording music now longer than he can remember and has gone to many places with many bands and people. Highlights of this include Big Ass Truck, The Bloodthirsty Lovers, Secret Service, Amy LaVere and currently; Brooklyn, NY based band The Hold Steady. He lives in Midtown Memphis with his wife and daughter.

Visit Steve’s Myspace Page to hear his music and learn more.

1. Whispering Pines by The Band.

I’ve been obsessed with this track as of late. Great melody, lyrics, and some SERIOUS Garth Hudson action on this one. RIP Richard Manuel.

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