MUSIC REVIEWS. PODCAST. CHUCKLES. DESIGN. CATS. SEATTLE, WA USA
The Royal Basement is a blog/podcast focusing on music, art, baseball, cats, and other wonders of life, based in Seattle, Washington, USA.
The Royal Basement is a division of Kentucky Chrome Industries.
There's something incredibly magical about a one-shot music video. No edits, no cuts, just one take. Destroy something (in this case, archaic technology) in the process and give it a blistering soundtrack. There's no better way to make a music video. (See "Bastards of Young") Head Wound City knows this, and made this because it's perfect. Buy their new record here.
These two smiling men are responsible for a spike in Immodium sales in the late 1990's.
Ah, the silky mystique of "The Brown Note"; That earth-shattering, pants-splattering frequency zone where sounds manage to weave their way inside of you, stir up the most delicate parts of your inner-workings and rally the troops to abandon ship. While I never had a chance to see godheadSilo back in their heyday, I read enough zine articles and heard enough pre-internet folklore about the band to know that their live shows were widely regarded as a punishing display of sound and fury that left members of the audience walking away feeling nauseous. That two men could create a literal wall of sludge so physically affecting (minus the aid of computers/laptops, but merely aided by a wall of bass amps and a ridiculously large drum kit) was the stuff of legend. Their records required warning labels stating "we are not responsible for speaker damage", with more pre-internet rumblings of the band's records being engineered to essentially crack speakers in half. While the teens of the 70's had KISS to worship as a larger-than-life rock band shrouded in secrecy, godheadSilo had a lovely mystique of their own in the mid/late-90's.
Read MoreAustin, Texas' soul-psych-sters White Denim recently announced their new album (Stiff, out 3/25/16 via Downtown Records) and released their first single, "Holda You (I'm Psycho)". It doesn't sound like a curveball from the band's previous trajectory, but definitely finds the band's noodle-y jam band guitars soaked liberally in near fatal doses of caffeinated energy.
The band also just announced a pretty extensive US tour where they'll be joined by Royal Basement podcastee Sam Cohen on most dates. If you like guitars and miss this tour, you done goofed. Tour dates are as follows:
Read More2015 wasn't a bad year for The Royal Basement, by any means. I've had some inspiring chats with some incredible folks. I've taken a "news" hiatus over the last few months due to busy times with various holidays, other projects (working on an album, playing drums with Ghost Pains) and a pretty intense trip to Kansas City for most of the month of October to catch a Boys Life reunion and ending with a Kansas City Royals World Series victory. I was lucky enough to watch all of the ALCS and World Series back in my hometown of Kansas City, surrounded by the absolutely insane and exhausting energy of playoff baseball and mounds of fantastic Kansas City barbecue. (I was in KC for 18 days, and I believe I had various forms of BBQ for 15 meals over the course of those 18 days, cholesterol be damned.) Basically, normal life stopped for a good portion of the month of October, and baseball took over. Tears were shed, and my beloved Royals won the World Series. Writing that still doesn't even feel real.
2015 was a pretty grand year for musical output, as well. While I can't say that any records I've heard this year were life-defining records (those come fewer and farther between after your 20's), I'm thrilled with the wide range of things that fell into my ears this year. I found myself with a list of about 40 things that I had spent varying degrees of significant time with, trying to whittle them down to a nice round "top ten". Here's what I came up with.
10. The Velvet Teen - All Is Illusory (Topshelf)
9. Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Style (Matador)
8. Here We Go Magic - Be Small (Secretly Canadian)
7. Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar)
6. Major Games - Major Games (self-released)
5. Swervedriver - I Wasn't Born To Lose You (Cobraside)
4. Swami John Reis & The Blind Shake - Modern Surf Classics (Swami)
3. Sam Cohen - Cool It (Easy Sound)
2. The Dodos - Individ (Polyvinyl)
1. Dungen - Allas Sak (Mexican Summer)
It was a big weekend for the rocking and/or rolling in Seattle; Death Cab For Cutie played 3 days at the Paramount Theatre, My Morning Jacket did back to back nights at the Moore, and Stephen Malkmus came into town to play at the Experience Music Project's Sky Church. While Malkmus' generally disconnected demeanor didn't necessarily correspond with the immaculate polish of the EMP, it was a refreshing change to see a show in the Sky Church (a nice wide room with nary a bad sightline) and it was frankly great to see screensavers/stock photography loops blaring from the giant LED screen backdrop, glowering over the otherwise reserved Malkmus and Jicks. The last time I saw Malkmus/Jicks play, it was a TapeOp/Fort George beer release party down in Astoria, Oregon where the band played to 100 people and played a delightfully sloppy set, so seeing the Jicks on the big stage in a museum with all of the appropriate big-time-rock-n-roll trappings was the polar opposite experience of the Astoria show. I wormed my way to the front and caught "Freeze The Saints" on my phone, which is a beautiful song on its own but really sparkles in this live, stripped down setting (public school piano goof-ups and all). Hope you enjoy.
The new Kurt Vile album (b'lieve i'm goin' down) is out today via Matador, and first spins showcase an album full of Vile's penchant for finger-picked crystalline lazy Sunday jams mixed with moments of spine-tingling anthemic bliss. He stopped by Conan O'Brien's show to play the first single ("Pretty Pimpin'") and do a stripped down version of "Wild Imagination". This iteration of Vile's band appears to be loaded for bear, featuring (amongst others) Farmer Dave Scher (Beachwood Sparks) on keys and backing vocals.
Kurt Vile plays the Showbox in Seattle with Cass McCombs on October 18, 2015.
I'll fully admit to taking The Helio Sequence's presence as a Pacific NW regional band for granted. They play Seattle pretty frequently, and I never go see them. Their consistency as a band is incredible, but somehow, their newest album (self-titled, on Sub Pop) pushes at their atmospheric edges, experimenting with electronic elements but still retaining an organic/human foundation. At times, the record finds The Helio Sequence sounding more relaxed yet more confident than ever. "Battle Lines" marches along stridently while still retaining a breezy, shimmery atmosphere, pining for the promise of a better day (and remaining optimistically hopeful in the process). The entire record is a great summer soundtrack, urgent in all the right places but still wistfully relaxed.
The Helio Sequence play The Neptune Theatre in Seattle on Saturday, July 11th, 2015. Tickets are available here.
In life, we are often dealing with conflicts. For this particular man, some of the worst kinds of conflicts are those of interest. For all of our technological advancements of the past few decades, we still haven't figured out how to be in two places at the same time. So, tonight, when the legendary Television play this song and a grip of other guitar redefining classics at the Moore Theatre in Seattle, I'll be siding with my loyalty to my hometown and my beloved Kansas City Royals as they take on the Mariners at Safeco Field. My inner jock and inner artist are currently not on speaking terms with each other, but I'll be blasting the intertwined guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd all day long in an attempt to make peace between these warring factions. If you live in Seattle and hate sports/my hometown, you have no excuse for missing one of the most musically revolutionary and innovative bands to come out of the late 70's, live and in the flesh. Gimme friction, indeed.
Television plays with Jessica Dobson (Deep Sea Diver) at The Moore Theatre on Tuesday, June 23, 2015. Ticket information is available here.
Recent Royal Basement podcastees The Dodos have announced a nearly month long tour with Danish prog-poppers Mew that's got me all excited. They come through Seattle on September 30th and hit a select smattering of the midwest and east coast after a pretty solid west coast run.
Mew released a new video yesterday for their single "The Night Believer", featuring 1000 Mew fans from across the world. It's a little slick and a little weird, just like we've come to expect from anything Mew-related. Give it a look.
As a kid growing up in Kansas City, I cut my teeth on the dissonant noise of a lot of our local bands; Season To Risk, Molly McGuire, Boys Life and Shiner (amongst others) were all in constant rotation around the house during my high school years. Shiner, in particular, seemed the most malleable of all of those bands, able to stretch their legs comfortably over the chasm of brutal noise and sparse, ethereal beauty. After Shiner's breakup in the early 2000's, singer Allen Epley's newest project (The Life and Times) carried on the torch into a bit more stripped down/spaced out territory alongside bassist Eric Abert (formerly of St. Louis' Ring, Cicada) and drummer Chris Metcalf (Stella Link). The result isn't terribly dissimilar to Shiner (who are back together again), but a bit more atmospheric and anthemic, bubbling over with melancholia laid atop deliciously dark hooks and some absolutely crushing drumming by Metcalf propelling it all.
I'm always thrilled to have some folks from my hometown brightening our Northwestern doorstep, but I'm particularly thrilled this time to be playing in a band (Ghost Pains) opening up for some good Kansas City folk up here in Seattle. Come out and let's talk Royals baseball.
The Life and Times & Ghost Pains play at Barboza on Saturday, June 13th. Early 21+ show (7pm). Tickets are $10.
Logan Kroeber and Meric Long of The Dodos.
I just published a new podcast with The Dodos over on the podcast page. Go give it a listen at your earliest convenience.
More podcasts coming up soon with Ryan Allen (Thunderbirds Are Now/Destroy This Place/Ryan Allen & His Extra Arms), Zach Norton (Party Dungeon/The Fruiting Bodies/ex-Child Bite), Sam Cohen (Apollo Sunshine/Yellowbirds) and more! Keep your ears peeled.
Toronto's METZ is back with their second record (the subtly titled "II", out today on Sub Pop Records), and it's got the band doing exactly what I hoped they would do; taking their already jittery, agitated sound and somehow winding it up into an even more aggressive, anxious mess of noise that somehow still retains it's hookiness. They're touring basically from early May until October of this year, and if they don't come to a town near you? You might want to move.
Guitarist Jim Elkington and Jeff Tweedy at the Tweedy concert at the Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington on March 12, 2015. Photography by Marie Langhout-Franklin.
A full review of the Tweedy live show (and some great photos by my wife Marie!) are over on the concert review page. Head over there for the rundown.
As a person who doesn't necessarily enjoy giant sweeping changes in the cultural landscape of a city or paying higher rent because of said changes, I can't honestly say I've been excited about the changes I've seen in Seattle in the past 6 years since I've moved here. While I'm sure there are multiple people who have enjoyed some fantastic career prosperity because of these changes, it's been hard to watch some of the grimier, more colorful bits of Seattle evaporate into immeasurably deep holes that magically sprout gigantic condos overnight.
One of the casualties of the gigantic South Lake Union/Queen Anne wipeout of the past few years has been stalwart punk venue The Funhouse. When The Funhouse's building was purchased in late 2012, it left a gaping hole in the city's scene for growing bands. Many venues exist for a good portion of the established local and touring bands playing in Seattle, but where were the fledgling bands supposed to play? While venues like Barboza, The Black Lodge, and The Rendezvous have stepped up their game, it's still left a void in the venues for a city of this size.
Thankfully, it appears that El Corazon and The Funhouse have teamed up for a joint venture. Former Funhouse booker Brian Foss will now be in charge of the front room of El Corazon, as well as a co-manager of El Corazon. “About a year and a half ago, I made a drunken pledge to my friends and my wife that I was going to grow this beard out until I found a new place for The Funhouse,” Foss says in an article from Seattle Weekly.
Kudos to El Corazon for embracing change and uniting with one of the better clubs this city has seen, and kudos to Brian Foss for never giving up hope. The Funhouse rides again (no joke) on April 1, 2015.
Episode #10 of The Royal Basement podcast is up! This go-round, we chat with Tony Ruland and Kyle Holland about their new project SOFT SLEEP, featuring former members of The Lonely Forest, Cumulus, The Globes, and Death Cab For Cutie. Tony tries on my Guy Fieri costume and the band debuts its new single "Unravel" from their forthcoming 7". It's worth a listen. Head over to the podcast page and get soft.
I also just recorded a new podcast/basement session with Trapper Schoepp when he was through Seattle. That should be up in the next week or so. Keep your eyes and ears peeled!
I've been playing catch up down here in the basement, and finally getting around to editing and posting this podcast and Basement Session that I recorded in December with Alex Robert of the Seattle-area band Black Whales. Run over to the podcast page and give it a listen and download some exclusive Basement Session songs that Alex recorded with me. Black Whales are playing this Friday, February 20th at the Columbia City Theater in Seattle along with The Mama Rags and Prom Queen.
I just recorded a couple new podcasts this past week, so be on the lookout in the next few days for episode #9 (Eric Slick of Dr. Dog) and #10 (Tony Ruland and Kyle Holland of the new band Soft Sleep, featuring former members of The Lonely Forest/The Globes/Cumulus/Death Cab For Cutie). Good sounds a-comin'. Keep hitting refresh.
In the magical pre-internet days of 1992, discovering new music wasn't as ridiculously easy as it is in 2015. For a kid growing up in the suburbs of Kansas City, my musical expansions were generally found in pilgrimages to record stores, stocking up on fanzines and whatever used CD's my grubby 16 year old mitts could afford (which, in all fairness, was basically the same as downloading a record these days, but whatever). The gaps therein were filled by having Monday evening watch parties with friends, poring over VHS recordings of last night's 120 Minutes (MTV's version of Pitchfork), occasional lapses in judgment that lead to joining BMG/Columbia House for the 10th time, and picking up copies of SPIN at the grocery store.
The back pages of SPIN were a veritable Etsy shop of alternative culture, and an ad for "Rock Video Monthly" sucked me in. It was a subscription service that delivered a VHS tape chock full of alt-rock videos to your door every month. As a voracious devourer of the alt-rock culture at that time, it didn't take a lot to sell me. Long story short, a tape came one month, full of forgettable cutout bin also-rans, but one video captured the entirety of my brainspace. Rocket From The Crypt's "Sturdy Wrists" was a firecracker in my television set, exploding with air-raid horns and a relentless staccato riff that went supernova during the chorus.
That video set me off on a Rocket From The Crypt binge that I'll write a doctoral thesis about some other time, but it also served as a wormhole into the world of the San Diego music scene. Singer John Reis is arguably one of the figureheads of the scene, and his involvement in Drive Like Jehu and Pitchfork spiderwebbed into the discovery of a network of new bands that I wasn't seeing covered by the zines that I was reading. Before I knew it, my stereo was stacked with records by No Knife, Heavy Vegetable, Three Mile Pilot, Tanner, Inch, Creedle, and enough Cargo Records samplers to fortify a small jungle hut.
I've always been amazed at the quality and diversity of sounds that came out of San Diego during this time, and thankfully, director Bill Perrine felt the same way. In his new documentary (It's Gonna Blow!), Perrine does his best to fit the tangled web of San Diego bands from the mid-80's to the mid-90's into a tidy 90 minute time period, and does a fantastic job at balancing live footage with stories from the music makers themselves, never focusing too much on one success or failure. While so much has happened in the nearly 20 years since the film's cutoff, it's crucial to go back and revisit this particular time period. From an industry standpoint, it's about appreciating the wheels that were in motion that brought punk and alternative rock into suburban households. All of this music was happening so close to Los Angeles, the music epicenter of America, and most of these things barely registered so much as a blip on that radar. Something about that was truly magical to my 16 year old brain, and is still befuddling to my 38 year old brain. From an artistic standpoint, this was a musical golden era for a lot of cities, but the growth and body of work that came out of San Diego during this period is fascinating (and a bit overwhelming). It's Gonna Blow does a great job touching on the significant players in this period, explaining why these bands were important while giving live snippets that inspire further inspection of the bands and their respective works. Bring a notebook and be prepared for a few hours of YouTube wormholes soon after viewing.
It's Gonna Blow! San Diego's Music Underground 1986-1996 is showing at the Grand Illusion in Seattle on January 24th and 25th. Saturday night's showing includes a live performance from San Diego band Physics. Tickets are available here.
Pitchfork has an interesting article up now about the classic iPod experience and Apple's phasing out of the iPod. It's a pretty great read, in that it's calling Apple out on regressive thinking and essentially pulling the plug on the development of the iPod. I personally believed the iPod would continue to be developed over time, and would gain more storage (which is only getting smaller and cheaper as time goes by) to the point where we were carrying 1 TB drives in our pockets, stocked to the brim with music. When Apple stopped making the 160 GB iPod, we probably should've seen the writing on the wall, but I foolishly hoped they would make a move over to SSD storage and continue to build bigger devices.
The death of the iPod only makes us miss out on a truly uninterrupted music experience. There are no notifications, no flashing/blinking/buzzing lights to call us away from the enjoyment. The distraction of moving on to a new album that's streaming somewhere isn't there. It's not a perfect music listening experience, by any means, but it's a lot closer to perfect than streaming something on a phone, both in terms of sound quality and in the beauty of that disconnected solitude.
Enjoy your iPods while they're still spinning, folks.
If you're deep into the world of classic power-pop, dropping Paul Collins' name into a conversation about as common as blinking. For the more casual fan who can't name everything Bomp! Records has ever put out, discovering the world of Paul Collins is the sort of rare treat that you don't find every day. Collins started out his career with Peter Case (The Plimsouls) and Jack Lee ("Hangin' On The Telephone") in The Nerves, honing his chops as a songwriter and a drummer before forming The Beat in the late 70's.
Without falling into the hyperbole-filled world of "what ifs", The Beat should have been a massive band. A pass through the band's 1979 self-titled debut release reveals a band firing on every cylinder, blowing through some absolutely perfect power-pop songs that don't have an inch of fat on them with crisp drums and guitar solos that cut through the mix surprisingly well for a 35 year old recording. Collins' voice leaps through the speakers, simultaneously charmingly clear-headed and chain-smokingly anxious, pining away for the planets to align and that perfect girl to find her way to him atop a bed of major chords. Alas, the band found modest success in the days before MTV (appearing on the Merv Griffin show and American Bandstand, when those were cultural barometers), but ultimately, never took flight to the extent that those songs deserved. True to the loyal underdog he plays in his songs, Paul Collins has continued to soldier on, having released 15 records as The Beat/Paul Collins Beat/Paul Collins over his career. In another universe, Paul Collins Beat is selling out amphitheaters on a reunion tour. In this universe, we get to see him up close and sweaty, blaring through a duct-tape-infused PA system. The Beat goes on, indeed.
The Paul Collins Beat play The Garageland Fest at Lo-Fi Gallery/Victory Lounge tonight alongside Rich Hands, Acapulco Lips, The Gods Themselves, The Knast, Loud Eyes, Bread & Butter, The Crush, Killer Ghost and others. Alongside the bands, there will be record vendors who are stocked up on all sorts of power pop and garage rock. Show starts at 5pm. More information available here.
If you're a fan of Seattle's Campfire OK, you've probably been curious about the band's whereabouts for the past few months. After quite a few years under that moniker, changes in membership and artistic direction seem to have instigated a name change. If their first single ("1983") is any indication, the band now known as The Weather seem to have kept a lot of the same melodic sense as Campfire OK, but with the gloss knob turned up to 11. Trust me, that isn't meant to come across as snarky; singer Mychal Cohen's musical world has always had a beautiful and dark atmospheric side, but hearing that vision fleshed out into more explorations with electronic elements (and not so rooted in organic instrumentation) literally makes the songs shimmer like fever dreams.
The Weather's forthcoming album "Waters Electric" will be released in early 2015. They play Neumos on Saturday, January 17, 2015.
