Concert Review: The Vaccines, Horseshoe Tavern, January 18

Posted on by Ricky in Concerts | Leave a comment

Toronto – Clocking in at a rough 25 minutes, London’s The Vaccines played a short but blistering set of nostalgic Ramones meets wall of sound style rock tracks that mostly justified all the hype that surrounded the four piece band. Front man Justin Young often plays the guitar with a pseudo psychotic look that gazes past all the crowd into a space thats only reserve for young rock stars. I am sure once he gets a little more shows under his belt that the show will become more manic, more memorable and more visceral, something I think the band is going for. Watching this band, I was reminded of The Subways and the Pigeon Detectives, previously hyped retro styled rock bands from the UK with a penchant for sub 2 minute songs. The styles between the three bands are different though, but the buzz around them seemed the same.

All in all it was a good show for those who have learned that NME hands out “best band ____” declarations like free candy and was just there for a good rock show. Those who were expecting a life changing moment might have left disappointed, but they’ll just purchase the next issue of the magazine and forget about the band anyway.

Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra) by The Vaccines

Should I Stay or Should I go: Coachella Edition

Posted on by Ricky in Concerts, Music | 1 Comment

The Coachella lineup was released Tuesday night, and as you would expect, the knee jerk reactions from hardcore music fans (including myself) ranged from “OMG I have to go!”* to “what a lineup!”* to “I would DIE if I can’t make it!”* Given the usual rush of emotions that comes when a music festival lineup is announced, I’ve decided to write a little article about whether or not you should go to Coachella. For the record, Panic Manual members have been to Coachella in 2004, 2006 and 2010.

Let’s start with the obvious – Can You Afford Coachella?

Let’s say you have 3 other friends interested in going. You are on the East coast in a major city with an international airport, then here are some costs. I am assuming you are going to take Thursday off, and Monday off. Here are some rough estimates:

YYZ – LAX: 400$ if you book early
Car Rental: 30$ a person if you are over 25, and someone has a credit card with collision insurance
Gas: 20$ a person
Accomodation: 125$ a person for four nights stay at a reasonable hotel
Coachella ticket: 280$ (absurd)
Food, Merch, Drinks: 150$ (assuming you don’t go nuts)

This ranges out to about $1000 a person for a five day trip. Not insane prices, but definitely will make you want to assess your plans. Some people might suggest you go camping. I don’t know about you, I don’t really want to camp in a desert. Maybe I’m old, but the weather at Palm Springs varies wildly (as would any place in a desert climate) from day to night. The other thing you have to realize is that music festivals are draining exercises, and the last thing you want to do after a night of music festival going is to wander into your campground, finding your tent, realizing your sleeping bag is in a weird angle and then having to fend off any potential drunk/high neighbors. If you are going to Coachella or anywhere far, might as well drop a few more dimes and get yourself a cozy hotel room with a hot tub, so you can get fully recharge for the next days adventure.

Still, music festivals are a great adventure, and as someone who does go to these things, it comes down to the music. So here is my general assessment:

Reasons to Go#1: OMG bands

Anytime I assess a music festival lineup, you pretty much have to find a few bands there that are in the “oh my god, this is something I won’t ever be able to see” zone. These are either bands that are reuniting after a long period (not DFA 1979, who broke up not even 3 Harry Potter movies ago) or bands who rarely tour. Looking at the list, these are the only bands that come to mind:

Duran Duran
Suede (reunited in 2010)
Chemical Brothers
Lauryn Hill (released from mental institution)
Big Audio Dynamite (reuniting)
Leftfield (reunited in 2010)
Empire of the Sun (apparently put on mind blowing shows, but excessive drug use means they sometimes schedule two concerts on the same date in different cities)

Now if you are a hardcore fan of any of these bands, then by all means you should go, assuming they also don’t schedule a North America tour at the same time, or recently just flew to England to see them.

Reason to Go #2 – Haven’t seen many of these bands

Sometimes I forget that I go to a ridiculous amount of shows, and so basically, I’ve probably seen a majority of the bands playing at any festival so if you have never seen bands like Interpol, Animal Collective, Mumford & Sons, The National, PJ Harvey before and you want to somehow wrap up all those experiences in one weekend, then by all means, go. However, you must realize that festival time slots means that each act other then the major headliners will only play about 40 minutes. Do you really want your first time seeing the National to be a 45 minute affair? What if it conflicts with another band you want to see? (That will happen). Still it’s a great way to see a lot of your favorite new bands for a reasonable price. I am guessing you will see about 10 bands a day, 30 bands in total if you go there day and night.

Reason to go #3 – Never been to Music Festival

If you haven’t been to a music festival, Coachella is a pretty sweet first time festival, it’s warm, there are a lot of pretty people everywhere, they all speak English, you get to go to LA, you might run into drunk celebrities and it’s also a pretty good lineup.

Reason to Not Go #1 – You live in Toronto or New York

Let’s face it, most of these bands are going to roll through here at one point or another. You have your own music festivals in which all the bands in size 12 point font will play two or more shows and really, you’ve probably seen these bands before. The Arcade Fire played Toronto 3 times last year and aside from the OMG bands, every band on the list will be here at one point or another if they are touring/and are smart. There are better ways to spend $1000

Reason to Not Go #2 – Most bands only play ~30-40 minutes/ Crowds / Overlap

The two massive drawbacks of overpopulated music festivals is that most bands play a short set and also some major act will be stuffed in a tiny tent that will be too crowded and you’ll get pissed that you didn’t see them (ie Beck in 2004). There will also be at least one instance where you wish you could be at two places at once, although none will be as bad as having Lady Gaga play opposite the Strokes at Lollapalooza. Either way, these are probably the major setbacks of any festival, if you are one to get frustrated easily, then music festivals might not be for you at all.

Reason to Not Go #3 – Propensity for Heatstroke

It gets hot in Palm Springs. There are also thousands of thousands of people. This will raise the heat further. If you are the type who can’t handle heat or a crowd, then this is probably not a great festival for you, unless you are only interested in seeing the bands in size 10 font.

Conclusion

Going somewhere is always fun. Coachella is always fun. It also has the benefit of being the first North American festival, keep in mind there’s also Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Osheaga, Sasquatch, some thing in San Fran and pretty much every major city that happens every summer, so while you are frantically messaging your friends trying to convince yourself you need to be in Indio, remember that there are other options and it’s not the end of the world if you don’t go. Which you should..probably. I don’t know, I’m not your father.

* I just made those up, didn’t bother looking for references, assumed it to be true. Real Journalism, yo.

Interview: Ringo Deathstarr, January 18, 2011

Posted on by Allison in Albums, Everything, interviews, Music | 3 Comments

Ringo Deathstarr

Austin-based Ringo Deathstarr is one of the best things to come out of Austin since Ricky decided SXSW is the greatest event in the universe.

While touring the U.K. with David Gedge’s the Wedding Present, two of my friends on the tour could not stop raving about how fantastically legendary Ringo Deathstarr were, live. Given the number of opening acts they have seen, I took this to heart and checked out their debut EP, then moved onto Sparkler to find amazing collections of toe-tapping ambiance.

Frontman Elliott Frazier recently sat down with us to answer a few questions.

PM: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. I want to start things off by fully admitting that we didn’t know a whole lot about you prior to 2010. But after hearing so much buzz from the Wedding Present’s 2010 tour, we checked out your excellently noisy self-title debut, that I was surprised to learn was released back in 2007.

Why are we just hearing about you now?

RD: Who knows…we never really had proper labels or distribution in the United States of America*.
*(The band is on the U.K.’s SVC label now)

PM: Tell us a bit about your first full-length LP, Colour Trip,  that has already been generating a fair bit of talk. Maybe you can also let us know why you went with the British (which we in Canada are so fond of) spelling, the recording process and you know, if you ate anything particularly memorable during recording (I just had a nectarine).

RD: The British spelling is because the record label behind this whole thing is British and you know, that’s just how the Queen would spell it.

We recorded it a year ago, and we had never really been in the studio for a month straight before, so we took advantage of all the nice toys they have.  Some songs were written in the studio, some we had been working on off and on since the previous summer…A studio date here, a studio date there. But once Club AC30 got behind us they put us up for a month and we got busy.  The most memorable thing for me was just working with Jason “Computer Boy” Buntz, ‘cuz he was not too afraid to try crazy ideas, and let me tell you, we both had plenty.

PM: How do you feel about all of the Pitchfork publicity? Yay, nay, indifference because publicity is publicity?

RD: Pitchfork gave us a good review once a long time ago, and it did help. but one can’t be too concerned with Pitchfork….we do our thing, they do theirs.

PM: A lot of listeners have decided you channel  a lot of JAMC, MBV, and the other usual shoegaze suspects. But I’ve often found that when listeners peg all sorts of influences on a band, the band doesn’t even have them on the
mental list. Do you have a mental list, and if so who are they?

RD: Every time I hear a really shitty band, it inspires me to make something better. So there’s all that…plus you know, there’s plenty of music that influences us besides “shoegaze”: Black Flag, Fugazi, Ramones, Devo, Dance House Children, Descendents, Nirvana, Nirvana, Nirvana, Beat Happening, Guitar Wolf…

PM: For our SXSW attendees, where is the best place to get the best burger in Austin?

RD: P. Terry’s, ‘cuz they have vegetarian burgers, as well as a great meat burger (so I’m told). Hut’s is consistently kick ass.

PM: A lot of your recent tour dates have been in Europe, one of them with the legendary Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (what a bill..G500 fans must be peeing their pants, as I think those that don’t already like you will after the show). It must be weird to play with folks who have been doing this for decades, like David Gedge and Dean, in an intimidating way. Have you noticed a difference between the veterans and the newbies?

RD: Not really, just age I guess.  Some people are party animals, and some are not, no matter how long theyve been playing…So we just like meeting the living legends. So far they’ve all been cool to us.

PM: Finally, when are you coming to Toronto!?

RD: In the springtime, when the flowers are in bloom.

You can pick up Ringo Deathstarr’s Colour Trip that is set for release on March 8th.

Ringo Deathstarr – So High by johnout

Concert Review: Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, January 15, Lee’s Palace

Posted on by Allison in Concerts | Leave a comment

Saturday night’s show with David Lowery, and the more-or-less original line-ups of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker illuminated a few things for me. First, some people age better than others (frontman David Lowery still looks pretty much exactly the same as he did in 1993, except that he may now need bifocals as evidenced through his indecisive “should I keep them on or take them off” fiddling with his glasses); second, that the late 80’s/early 90’s remain to be an overlooked era of new music; third that I should go to more reunion shows to feel young.

Let’s talk for a bit about reunion shows. Some of you (by this I mean 5 people) might already be aware of my conflicted feelings about this matter. It’s not that I dislike reunion shows, it’s more that I think their very nature (being a cash grab) makes for rather lifeless shows. But it’s a double-edged sword…on the one hand those of us who would’ve been too young to go to these concerts in the first place want to relive a missed past. On the other, shouldn’t we be letting these people get on with their lives instead of driving barrel-fulls of money up to their homes begging them to perform said almost-chart-topper? Shouldn’t we be letting these people get on with their lives? It’s all very gray and hazy for nostalgic folks such as myself, but I at least acknowledge that recapturing what was then will never be for now.

The same contradictions that I feel about reunion shows can apply to the way they are being carried out. More than a few acts have taken CVB’s/Cracker’s same approach of touring one definitive album, often considered by fans and critics alike to be the band’s best release, and giving the fans what they want. The Wedding Present did the same thing with Bizarro this past year, and judging from t-shirt sales, this is what people are looking for. I suppose it’s better than getting a barrage of requests by a pathetic drunk superfan’s barrage of “best of” requests being flung every few minutes (more on that, as well as Lowery’s response to this,  later).

First off, I note that Lowery is really well-preserved and his gravelly voice is on par with how I remembered it, hearkening back to my observation that some genres of music are simply more forgiving than others when decades pass. He first appeared with a 6-man line-up for the Camper Van Beethoven blitzkrieg-paced performance of Key Lime Pie. Some renditions went over better than others, with the country-infused (like with Borderline ), augmented  “baby getting hit with a cat” violin bits of who I can only assume to be Don Lax not flying over so smoothly. Interlude and Flowers were a bit more dodgy, probably based more on my lack of appreciation of the songs more than anything else. Of the slower tracks, June probably came off best. Their cover of Pictures of Matchstick Men, the biggest  managed to revitalize the lulling crowd (which looked almost sold out to me at this point).

The most amusing interaction Lowery had with us was when he was setting up a recorded sample on his iMac, where he admitted we could probably hear the interruptions from his Gchat account pinging him. Which begs to question, how seriously are these shows anyway?

Not very, and rightfully so. Lowery even sent so far as to belittle an annoying drunk fan who wouldn’t stop yelling out requests, in spite of the explanation that this would be a track-by-track performance of the Cracker album Kerosene Hat. “Dude, you are so not funny anymore”.  During another jabbing round when the guy continued to yell out songs he wanted to hear, guitarist Johnny Hickman attempted to break it up with some light stories about how the drunk guy would eventually succumb to embarrassing stories of the first time he was laid, to which Lowery responded “What are you kidding me? This guy’s never been laid in his life!”

Let this be a lesson to you loud request yellers.

As for the Kerosene Hat set, it made me remember how good this album was in 1993 and still is today. The energy was a lot higher because of the singalong qualities of most of the songs that would’ve come back to casual observers like even me. Songs like Low, Get Off This,  Let’s Go For A Ride, and Euro-Trash Girl all made me realize how heavily rotated it was and how “alternative rock” even seems like a bit of a dinosaur concept nowadays. These guys did it pretty well, and seemed pleased to be up there, which is always better than someone killing your memories.

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN – good guys and bad guys by celsofloyd