Good evening Mr. Putin

To my feverish delight the Cold War Kids are back with the rebutle to their fantastic 2006 LP Robbers and Cowards. The Cold War Kids new single "Something Is Not Right With Me" has made it's way across airwaves and is an exciting, energetic romp of their own recipe of indie rock fused with blues. Lead singer Nathan Willett energeticly dances through the track while circumfranced by the crashing of symbols and drums. The bass line bares to the line of almost a new electronic sound but the guitar and piano remain true to class CWK form. "Something is Not Right With Me" is their first release off of their upcoming LP "Loyalty to Loyalty" set to be released on Downtown Records September 30 . The Cold War Kids have a slew of tour dates this summer across the US including a stop at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco this month. You can download "Something is Not Right with Me" for free on the band's website, coldwarkids.com

The Stranded Local Q&A: The Watchmakers

They were the greatest rock band I ever saw in my life. I saw them play maybe half a dozen times and they utterly devastated me each time, floor to ceiling, bone marrow to brain stem. Their break up was tragic and sudden, and something I had even darkly predicted in print. Allow me to quote myself.“One day this whole twisted wreck will fly apart and they’ll be forced to kill each other in the street after a late show, and sadly you people will have missed out on the whole depraved affair.”

At the beginning of the year 2001, shortly after their tour with J. Mascis and Mike Watt the Teenbeaters went their separate ways. David Milone re-joined Ours, then went on to play guitar for Radio 4. Jimmy Ascuitto and Kevin McAdams joined Elefant. Dave did a couple solo gigs that were pretty good. Zam Jimmy and Kevin did a project in 2002 called Killaholics, it was wildly more hostile than Teenbeaters and significantly more short-lived. Then there was nothing.

Zambia Greene went down deep, moved to Philly and eventually after six years, found music again and the Watchmakers were born. Zam got together with Kevin and a new compadre Jim Manigrassi and there was some of that old black magic.

Is it Watchmakers or The Watchmakers?

Zam: You gotta ask Kevin, I don't care too much. I simply prefer the plurality of it all
Kevin: It's always been a struggle to embrace the "the."

What's the band's official line up?
Jim:  When we are playing in the same room together, Zam plays guitar, rhythm, and lead, whatever he wants. Kevin plays the drums & sings back-up, I play the bass. This august will be a year recording these songs.  Kevin and Zam have contributed piano, organ, banjo, horns, harmonica, & glockenspiel to the record.    

Does Watchmakers sound have any connection to the Killaholics material?

Zam: I’d love to think not, but there are three of the same guys involved. The only clear differences I can think of that might be of any interest is that I wanted most of the watchmakers’ songs to be in keys that put my vocals, at some point in most songs, just at the top of my vocal register (as far as I’m aware). So that way I’d still be able to sing them, but hopefully it would be too hard for me to affect my voice, which is a thing I tend to do naturally. I figured that way I’d be forced to spit it all out in whatever is my honest singing voice. And I decided to write that way ‘cause I’ve been writing for other people since I was about 19 or so and had never really tried to find whatever might be my honest singing voice. I think in the Killaholics songs, I was just singing all over the place, and whatever I thought might sound good.

When did you start doing music together again?

Kevin: You know, Zam has been trying desperately to live like an adult and quit doing this music crap, but I keep bugging him to write.  I guess this whole fiasco began two years ago.
Zam:  Kev comes out to Philly on the Chinatown bus to rehearse and write and whatnot.

How did you recruit members?

Zam: Me and Kev just had been talking about doing something together and we needed a bass, so I asked Jim, who I worked with at the mural arts program, and he was playing in some bands in Philly at the time but didn’t mind playing with us.
Jim: Zam gave me a tape of original songs from a 4-track he recorded. i got to know the songs and love them as much as all of my favorite records in my personal collection.

Is it hard having the band so spread out?

Zam: I live in Charleston, SC, Kev lives in New York and Jim’s in Philly. That’s like 800 miles or so. Kev’s busy doing advertising music and session stuff, Jim doesn’t care about anything and I’m busy as all stinking hell.
Kevin: Who knows? Hopefully within the next few months.
Jim: We are talking vinyl!

Do you even wear a watch?

Jim: No, but I believe in a higher power, "God" if you will.
Zam: I do currently; it's a very nice Elgin jawn that was my father's - found it lying around his house. I also believe god exists.

How does that relate to the watch?

Jim: Zam told me a story about this guy wandering around the desert who comes across a watch in the sand. "This proves God exist" he said. Perhaps it was pre-watch era which makes it a miracle? I’ve never had much say or interest in band names including my own, but 'watchmakers' match the music as if it already existed. We’re picking up where the desert man left off and drifted into oasis.

Download "Hudson River Car Crash" [MP3]
[MySpace] http://www.myspace.com/watchmakers

Guess What: Zappa Plays Zappa

Writer/contributor Annie reports to us this week from a reputable and wholesome festival. Joseéééé approves and endorses outdoor concert attendance.

Gathering of the Vibes (Bridgeport CT) August 2008 - I find myself in the midst of thousands of hippies commemorating the life of Jerry Garcia by doing every drug they can manage--and drugs are in no short supply. Unregistered vendors walk around, casually calling drugs by their first names like intimate old friends: "Molly, Yayo, Chronic, Ganja Cookies, Doses, Rolls, Pharmies." Those distributing hippie crack need not say anything at all; instead they just walk through your site with huge green balloons pinched between each pair of fingers. This begins early on. These guys have been there awhile, are paying attention, and will come through as soon as your party has had a half hour to set up a tent.Day Two was Friday. The horrid sun had finally set. Dweezil Zappa was getting ready to pay tribute to his father. I decided to do the same with half our crew and a couple of tabs. We walked the mile to the stage with flouncy head-dresses made of plastic tubing and tie-on clothing. As everything began shimmering, I bowed to let small children pull on the stretchy tubes and smiled at fucked up hippies admiring the "nice hair." We stood near the edges where the crowd was thinner and listened.

Let me back up a bit: we'd spent our first day of treacherous heat waiting for the other 60% of our party to arrive, sitting on a $100 pile of pills that turned out to be a special blend of caffeine and aspirin. Herein lies a lesson to anyone who finds E for a mere $15. One of our crew made the right decision and bought doses early on. While the rest of us were busy being let down, he had been tripping his balls off, assuring me that his little baggy was full of authentic LS-Delight. This was the same bag from which I'd happily sampled.

Dweezil began singing on all matter of subjects in a voice obviously the gift of his late father. At one point he imitated Eric Cartman asking for a bag of dildos. Later he sang (predictably) about yellow snow. The jams were intense, sprinkled with analog synth, weird-ass phrases, and noises that belong better to chill electronica than jam bands. As I've never been one for the twenty-minute guitar solo, this really caught my fancy. The sun set. The shop lights at the horizon made it look like it was suddenly dawn again. I was confused. The strobe lights seemed to have a rather long exposure time. I began to dance.

I danced the entire set, weaving my head from shoulder to shoulder, pulling my huge unnatural dreadlocks out to the side. I waved my arms and boogied down. My tribe began dancing too, probably more out of joy at the heat going away than anything. Eventually, Zappa got on the mic to say they had time for one last song; fortunately it was one last song with more solos than one might expect. Would the song never end? We hoped not. Then the guitar which had been soloing just as usual started talking, proclaiming, "We are gathering the vibes! Gathering the vibes." We were incredulous, tickled, tripping like Mad Hatters.

When it was over, we walked back to the camp and recalled the moment to the people we found there, but of course those not present couldn't have understood. Of course, by that point we'd also morphed into extremely unreliable narrators. I saw a lot of incredible things that night in memory of a man so truly amazing that his son still channels him 15 years after his death. And even that remotely I was able to say "Guess what: I experienced Frank Zappa."

The Stranded Local Q&A: West Philadelphia Orchestra

The West Philadelphia Orchestra uses the much-less-cumbersome acronym WPO on their album cover, shirts, and flyers. I shall use it herein. I was in Boston, and I heard a parade. It was a parade of psychedelic proportions. Fire-breathing midgets, men on stilts juggling children, and marching bands dressed as beasts in tattered uniforms. I would come to know their names: The What Cheer? Brigade, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, The Hungry march band and many others. it was the Honk! festival and my introduction to an inexplicable genre, the klezmer-military-gypsy-punk-marching-orchestra-band. That many hyphens means that I'm without a deterministic genrefication. It was only recently I discovered I had one of these many-headed-beasts right here in Philly. Please welcome Gregg Mervine of the WPO.

Can you tell me who's in the current line up of the West Philly Orchestra?

Our line-up is flexible - we're more a collective than a band. Usually these folks are in the band: Jack Ohly (tapan, vocals, bass), Janos Perge (violin, vocals), Katt Hernandez (violin), Jacob Mitas (viola), Larry Toft (trombone/baritone), Brendan Cooney (banjo, trombone), Elliot Levin (soprano sax), Steve Duffy (sousaphone), Dawn Webster, Kimbal Brown, Patrick Hughes, Adam Hershberger (trumpets). But we sometimes have people join us on clarinet, violin, melodica, percussion, and so forth. When we play traditional music, anyone who knows the style and the tunes is welcome to jump in.

In a world lousy with guitarists, how does one find an accordionist?

There are two accordionists who sometimes play with us. One is a great pianist who plays tango accordion, and the other is a Bulgarian guy who studies at Drexel. These people just live in Philly, they hear us play, they ask if they can play with us, and if they know the style somewhat, can handle the melodies, improvise, and are nice people, we usually say yes.

What's the smallest venue you tried to cram all 15 members into?

We haven't crammed too much actually. We play at Tritone every month, which holds maybe 150, maybe 200, and that gets totally packed and too hot and sweaty, and we don't want to fit everyone in a smaller place. If we do play a small venue, we just bring less people. We play a tiny West Philly bar sometimes, Fiume, but we just play with string players plus maybe a trumpet and percussion. This band can be a quartet or 20 people, depending on the situation.

Which is the better forum for the band, the club, the theatre or the marching parade?

We sometimes do outside, parade kind of things, but we're not a marching band. In Philly we have the Mummers, so leave that sort of thing to them. We wander around when we play sometimes, like towards the bar for another citywide special, or jumping into a circle for dancing, or getting dragged into a conga line. For musical reasons, we like playing on proper stages where we can all hear each other, and the audience can hear all the parts and appreciate the subtleties in the orchestration and solos, even if they're dancing and moshing or whatever. However, playing amidst a packed, sweaty, and dancing crowd in a small club or West Philly basement is an equally joyous experience. Playing weddings is also a blast, and since many of our songs are traditional wedding songs, it's very natural.

What's the right terminology for your sound, is it Balkan brass? Klezmer? Gypsy big band

Describing us is tough. The brass guys do the traditional Balkan brass music, the string players play the string traditional music, we arrange the strings and brass together for a lot of the tunes, and we do original music that uses all the voices in the group. Basically, in the Balkans, there's the brass band tradition and the older string/cimbalom/accordion traditions, and we dabble in both We also play some klezmer tunes, and we play a Monk tune and other random covers. It's really a hybrid, a blending of traditions, like what many Eastern European bands are also doing. We play the traditional with a weird style too, which isn't intentional but rather what happens when we come together, with many different backgrounds, and attempt to play this music. Our new record contains plenty of original music, which use the scales, harmonies, and song forms, but other influences, like modern harmony, jazz dialogue, or Brazilian rhythms are also woven into the mix. It's not intentional. You put Cecil Taylor sideman Elliott Levin in there, experimental improviser Katt Hernandez, the trumpet section from Bobby Zankel's big band, songwriter Jack Ohly, who also lived in Brazil and plays a rural folk style from Bahia, and it's not going to sound like Boban Markovic, Taraf de Haidouks, or Frank London; it's gonna be eclectic, unruly, and potentially too diverse to hold together, and this balancing act is my job as bandleader.

You have your first album coming out next month, what was that process like?

It was chaos. I decided on my own that we were going to record a record. Sometimes I lie awake at nights and hear entire records, and that's what happened. After a few nights of not sleeping, I had some ideas. So I wrote and arranged a bunch of tunes, collected tunes from other band members, we rehearsed them once, and then we recorded it. We weren't totally ready, but I like to hear the players struggling to get it right - it adds a tension there, the risk and uncertainty. Somehow, out of the chaos of the sessions, we got some nice performances down. We tried getting everyone in the same place at the same time, and that didn't work. We took some risks and threw things together ala Mingus. Then some magical things happened, like a duet I did with Katt in one take when the rest of the guys were breaking.

How did you get that grant from the Subito, of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Composers Forum?

We were scratching our heads, trying to record all this stuff without going into debt. I met up with my friend Eugene Lou, who organizes crazy performances, drummers and dancers simulating particle generators and things like that, and he told me about the Subito program. The next day I checked it out, noticed that the deadline was the following day, so I quickly wrote up a proposal. I also included some scores of my compositions, and then I rushed off to the post office. The Subito program has helped many Philadelphia groups, like Normal Love and Odean Pope, I believe, and we are so fortunate that they helped us. It allowed us to work in a better studio, with better engineers, and experiment a bit more.

You share an acronym with the World Presidents Association, the World Packaging association, the World Powerlifing Organization, The Worcester Park Observatory in the UK, The Washington Post stock ticker, World Public Opinion and Writers Project Organizer software. Have you had any marketplace confusion yet?

No. Maybe someone will hire the powerlifters to play the Chicken Dance at wedding.

Buy // CDbaby

Energy crisis? I have too much!

For some odd reason today I am totally wired. Perhaps its from a lack of sleep or because I have been stressing for the last 4 days moving into a new apartment. Either way today is my first real day of breathing and I am way too jittery. Here are my top 5 songs to burn through energy to:

5. Boys in the Attic by The Mae Shi off of HLLLY: The Mae Shi thrash this 1:15 minute song, starting off with bass play alone then smashing right into a fully arrangement of crashing drums and loud guitar. Vocalist Ezra Buchla conducts this song with his distinct and original voice. This whole album could be my list but that wouldn't be fair.

4. Irregular Heartbeats by Tempo No Tempo off of Repetition E.P: I absolutely love the drums in this song, the make you want to move and pull strings that make your head bob and sway. The construction of the vocals are fantastic and the solos are so energetic that it is contagious

3. Set Fire to the Face of Fire by The Blood Brothers off of Young Machetes: Nothing calls for you to freak the hell out quite like Jordan Blilie's vocals on this song. From the start, this song is an eruption! Blilie shrieks, shrills, and screams to your heart's and pulse's content. "Set Fire to the stars on fire!"

2. Down by Boys Noize off of Oi Oi Oi: Down is a 100% assault of noise through your speakers. The mixing gives you few seconds to breathe within the song when it is not slamming at you. It is beautiful and brash. Down is adrenaline in audio form. Listening to it tires you out. Makes you not be able to write...

1. Dog by Sebastian off of Ed. Rec. Vol. III: Sebastian is the hardest DJ ever and his work on Dog is no exception. It is a filthy mix of metal and electronica that makes you grit your teeth with pain. The first time I heard this song I it gave me a flashback to when I witnessed Justice cover Master of Puppets by Metallica. Ugh so loud, so good.

My Formative Years: For Nearby Stars by VPN

I always hated pop music. The syrupy, sweet saccharine encrusted candy-pop moved me to nausea. VPN was the first pop band I ever truly loved. I saw them only once. For me, musically it meant a radical change in perspective. As it is with humans, my devotion always signals the end of something.

I forget where I was. After a few years the churn of new trendy Manhattan venues into gelato stands distorts your memory. It might have been Mercury Lounge but my memory of the night is well-lit, though that seems impossible now. A balding blonde man sat behind the drum set and turned on an electric drill which begat the spinning of a set of colored bells. The colors swirled together and he then struck the bells individually. The effect was warbling and quivering like the playing of a saw or playing wineglasses. It was eerily melodic. I was there at the insistence of a dirty record guy. Paul Seff wherever you are, thank you.

Download "Flypaper" [MP3]

By the time I encountered VPN they’d walked backwards into a Bob Pollard influenced pop melancholia. The album For Nearby Stars was their great finale. I worked my way backwards accumulating their catalog. I picked up Small Wire which was if anything more melodic and more delicate. My obsession grew. Years later I was able to find their Boy with Only One Head EP on Big Ten Rex records.

Download "Turn Off" [MP3]

The Line up was ever-changing in their 10-year run. The line up around 2001 included both of singer Austin Hughes twin sisters Pat Hughes, Jean Rodd and Drummer Eddie Gormley performed with Vatican III and on some Babe the Blue Ox albums. The night I saw them Harrison Cannon from the band Geezer Lake was playing bass. But the music always remains emotionally complicated giving a heady almost poetic weight to every song.As I dug deeper my awe grew ungainly.

Download "High-Heeled Gloves" [MP3]

As you move backwards in their catalog they seem more and more like strange punk mutants equally related to Elvis Costello and Devo. What they had become by the time I encountered them was an entirely different animal. The name they’d used for a decade was ill-fitting. They embraced the acronym VPN and discarded the communist allusions. They were at least to the ear, an entirely different band.

But after that the trail drops off. The two LPs on Evil Teen records end their catalog. There is no definitive discography. They put out some 7-inches on D-tox records and Fang records in the early 1990s. I have accumulated all of these, even a mysterious one-sided translucent blue 7-inch labeled only LMNOP. Today Cannon and Hughes are in the dark bluegrass act the M. Shanghai String Band. The other member’s whereabouts are unknown.

What's In The Airwaves

My Swedish fantasies came into a more tangeble realm this past Tuesday when my obsession The Tough Alliance re-released their first LP "The New School" for radio play. For those of you who don't know, TTA are a duo from Gothenburg who hail as one of the most creative and energetic acts coming out of Sweden. Their fun and dance filled albums are supported by few shows a year and in a style that The Tough Alliance could only pull off. At concerts TTA try to instill riots pretty much at their shows, they don't particullarly focus on playing instruments but rather just sing over their recordings and dance on stage. At one show in Sweden they used the microphones as bats to fight off the crowd.
The release of "The New School" comes out right before they are re-releasing 2007's "A New Chance" in America. Keep antennas perched up high for track's off of "The New School" coming through your radio, "My Hood" and "Koka-Kola Veins" are my personal favorites.