Iceland Airwaves Part 1: Find Great Icelandic Bands, Find Good Music Writing

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Bart Cameron

Photo via Prins Póló's web site

October is Iceland Airwaves month. You’ve heard about it in Seattle, in part because KEXP is promoting it and broadcasting from Reykjavik, my old home. Airwaves used to have an enormous impact on my life: as the editor of the Reykjavik Grapevine, I started the policy of reviewing the Iceland Airwaves festival completely– every band. I also started importing foreign journalists to help me. With the help of a lenient publisher and an amazing staff of designers and photographers, we even put out daily issues of a magazine dedicated to the event.I’ll comment on the music in a second post, but, quickly, I’d like to point out that every year Airwaves offers the casual music fan a chance to hear Icelandic music that you can’t otherwise access unless you’re on the island. Yes, you should go to the festival. But until then, you can go to IcelandAirwaves.is and see and hear about 200 great local musicians.

Continue reading →

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For All the Girls: “Phylicia”

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Damien Fairchild (For All the Girls) seems to be possessed of a fickle (or perhaps incredibly generous?) heart and a talent for writing and producing bite-sized, breezy pop songs. He is recording an album of songs “for the girls I am in love with or have loved at one point in time.” The album will be released next Valentine’s Day, which is also his birthday.

His 14th birthday.

So while I try not to be overcome with envy at the idea of this young man who has apparently had leagues more experience in both love and music than I had at his age (13? I had my share of crushes, but the word “love” evaded me until well into high school. I had pretty well mastered a squeaky saxophone rendition of “Eleanor Rigby,” though.), I hope you will enjoy this sweet, summery video for the sweet, summery song “Phylicia.” (Phylicia, I hope you’re not too jealous of Amrit, or any of the others coming down the pike.)

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Northwest Folklife Festival Site Offers a Bounty of Streaming Audio

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Levi Fuller

It feels like it just happened, but the 2011 NW Folklife Festival was more than four months ago, with a whole summer (such as it was) between then and now. With the days getting shorter and wetter, it seems like a perfect time to remember those sunny warm days by pulling up a computer and listening to the huge amount of archived audio our friends at Folklife have made available for listening.

There’s a lot to choose from, so a good starting place might be our own Ball of Wax showcase, which happened on Sunday, May 29th (scroll about halfway down the page until you see Pickwick‘s Galen Disston rocking the mic). You can check out sets from me, Joshua Morrison, Shenandoah Davis, Sunday Evening Whiskey Club, and Pickwick.

Continue reading →

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[glocal scene] Jil Is Lucky

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Phil Heron

Jil Is LuckyI had somehow come into contact with Roy Music, the label of the Paris band Jil Is Lucky, through booking gigs around Europe. The label manager put on a few gig nights in the City of Lights, and often prescribed peculiar English names (with a feline slant) to attract a fashionable crowd (e.g. Cute as a Cat and We Are the Lions). A while after a brief email exchange with the mysteriously omnipresent club promoter and label manager, I received a blank postcard to my home address with an image of a man in a pair of sunglasses flanked by four religious leaders dressed in colourful spandex (which would be the album cover shown here, but without the band title). A few weeks later, the début album from Jil Is Lucky appeared in my postbox. Continue reading →

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[glocal scene] Dappled Cities to Release 4th Album

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Phil Heron

IDappled Cities’ve often compared Dappled Cities to an Australian version of The Shins. I think it is about time a lot more people had a listen.

For those not familiar with Australian ‘art rock’ band Dappled Cities, I will give you a quick history of the band and their home town of Sydney. In 2001, four Sydney high-schoolers formed Dappled Cities (originally called Dappled Cities Fly) with the idea of playing music together and to other people. Sadly, in Australia in 2001 dance music dominated the Sydney music scene. Certain cities around the world are cyclical in the sense that one ‘style’ of music becomes popular, and venues are adapted around that (Vancouver in Canada is a perfect example of this in North America). Throughout the ’90s and into the noughties, clubs in Sydney were full of the beautiful people dancing until the early hours in an all-or-nothing statement of Australian identity. Continue reading →

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Album Review: Stray Kites

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Louis O'Callaghan

Stray Kites – Mieux
(2011, self-released)

I’ve found this to be true: lo-fi twee bedroom pop can be polarizing. I love the stuff, much of the time . . . for sure, the genre is littered with a lot of bad music, bad lyrics, bad recording, preciousness, etc (what genre isn’t?). That’s part of the bargain of democratized recording technology. But it’s also full of understated brilliance of a sort too quickly dismissed on the first sour note, misplaced beat, strange singer, etc. And as the overall volume of music being made increases, it becomes easier to miss out on some good stuff. Good stuff like Mieux! Continue reading →

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We are all Absolutely Kosher

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Jon Rooney

Last week, venerable Bay Area label Absolutely Kosher announced that they would cease releasing new music this fall due to financial hardship and the inability to find a model that makes running an independent label viable. While not a mega-indie like Merge, Matador or Seattle’s own Sub Pop, Absolutely Kosher is no anonymous bedroom outfit – they caught the Mountain Goats on the start of their climb to indie royalty with the release of The Coroner’s Gambit in 2000 and delivered the musical coup of 2003 by giving to the world the Wren’s indisputable classic The Meadowlands. While reintroducing the Wrens to a Pitchfork-approved world may have marked the peak of their visibility, Absolutely Kosher has charged ahead releasing interesting, often challenging, and occasionally brilliant work by emerging artists, apparently in the face of their fiscal best interests. The roster is deep and eclectic, from Sunset Rubdown’s breakthrough LP to Rob Crow’s robed Goblin Cock project to early Xiu Xiu to a host of lesser known Bay Area acts like the Court and Spark and Virginia Dare. The label’s body of work speaks for itself.

Continue reading →

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Vanish Valley Gets Good

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Ball of Wax’s relationship with Vanish Valley‘s Andrew McAllister goes back to our earliest days. Before his band Conrad Ford went by that name, they appeared on Volume 2 as Toy Tractor. Conrad Ford then showed up on Volume 4, covering one of my own songs. (Both of those volumes can be downloaded for free at their respective links.)

Now he’s gone and moved to sunny L.A. and started a new band, called Vanish Valley (whom you might have heard on Volume 21), and Vanish Valley has released its first album, called Get Good. I’m on my first listen now, and I’m digging it (big surprise). VV retains the sleepy pulse of McAllister’s earlier projects, and of course his careworn, flannel voice, but there are some new elements here to perk up one’s ears: a few more upbeat songs and some noisy guitars and keys cut through the banjos and lap steel and clear the air nicely.

[wp_bandcamp_player type=”track” id=”984651873″ size=”grande” bg_color=”#FFFFFF” link_color=”#4285BB”]

Check it out yourself and get your own copy at Vanish Valley’s Bandcamp page.

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Album Review: The Foghorns – To the Stars on the Wings of a Pig

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Jon Rooney

The Foghorns – To the Stars on the Wings of a Pig
(2011, Knick Knack Records)

Count this review as another in a long line of conflicts of interest here at the Blog ‘o Wax. The Foghorns are a Seattle by-way-of-Wisconsin outfit led by one Bart Cameron, who happens to write for this fair site and be an all-around good egg. Cameron’s Foghorns, from a distance, play traditional American music – touching upon country, folk, and even gospel with notable skill, taste and restraint. Get a little closer and the songs on To the Stars on the Wings of a Pig, the band’s latest LP, reveal themselves to be funny, bitter little laments about the hell that is other people and, quite frankly, ourselves. Despite the context clues of traditional instrumentation and standard folk song structures, the Foghorns craft savvy, biting reproaches more in line with Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” or Lou Reed’s Sally Can’t Dance than a knee-slapping hootenanny. “Je Deteste” combines a smattering of French lyrics with a dusting of honest creepiness via lines like “little girls, oh how they do confess/and when they do they whisper/ so they keep you guessing.” “More Than Jesus” is a jaded homage to carnal delights while “Wedding Bells” teeters between a lovelorn lament and a callow kiss-off. “We Could Never Be Friends” expresses a delicate, refined sense of resignation.  It’s a mature, satisfying bummer of a song containing the best line on an album full of good ones: “Well I been to your parties/the only truth at your parties/comes when the party ends.” Continue reading →

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Tango Alpha Tango at Comet Tavern Tonight–Slow Skate Should Assist in the Forceful Adoption of Portland’s Bluesy Up-and-comers

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Bart Cameron

The rivalry between Portland and Seattle is unmentioned on this blog. I won’t give it voice here. I’ll just say, we locals get a bit tired of bands from the city with the NBA team. I won’t explain it, because it gets nasty quick– something about all their bands acting like a rock concert is music theater with jazz hands, and all our bands looking at our own feet all through the gigs. But it’s much more.

I won’t go on with that. I will say that I got over my, as Philip Roth would say, Portland complaint, the day I shared a bill with the fabulous band Tango Alpha Tango.

Check this video from their kickstarter:

Okay, now about Tango Alpha Tango. They’re polite. They sound fantastic. They rock. And they have no freaking complaints. They seem to have made a policy of circling back to the Comet Tavern every month, and building an audience the honest, old-fashioned way. With a good show.

I’ve wanted to write about them for a while, but, in my opinion, their live show so surpasses their recordings I just didn’t want to give the wrong impression. That said, their kickstarter video actually has a sound that is closer to where they are now.

I know that Seattle, strangely enough home to one of the greatest blues guitarists in the history of music, is not so much a blues town– though I hope GravelRoad and Lonesome Shack can help change that. But I think we should officially immediately adopt Tango Alpha Tango. A band with chops, not too derivative, that understands hard work, and a band that, you know, looks pretty cool but not posery. Eh?

I’m particularly happy about the gig tonight at the Comet Tavern, because this looks to be the best of Portland and Seattle. Seattle’s Slow Skate, who started out great years ago when they were featured on NPR, then got better working with Ball of Wax, are opening the night. I would also suggest that perhaps Jason Goessl of Slow Skate and Nathan Trueb of Tango Alpha Tango somehow trade licks at some point of the night.

One more thing. This concert is taking place at the Comet Tavern. If you haven’t been there recently, you need to revisit it. The place has been redone. Severely. There’s now a stage. And proper sound.

Thursday, September 22nd
The Comet Tavern
Slow Skate, The Soft Hills, Exohxo and Tango Alpha Tango
$7, 8:45pm, 21+

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