DOWNLOAD: Cinema Red & Blue - "Same Mistakes" (MP3)

Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo (more by Abby Braden)

Wooden Shjips will be at ATP NY this weekend (hand-picked by Jim Jarmusch). That's followed by a show at MHOW on 9/6 (tickets) and then more dates north and west as far as Chicago, but then Ripley Johnson of the psychedelic left coast crew will start heading back east for a different string of dates with his other project, Moon Duo. The band will team up with Crystal Stilts and Messages (mems of Psychic Ills) for a show on 9/17 at Knitting Factory. Tickets are on sale.

Crystal Stilts recently played Bowery with Dean Wareham but have otherwise laid relatively low. Members of the band recently completed a new collaborative LP with David Feck of the UK's Comet Gain under the moniker Cinema Red & Blue. You may remember they played here back in September...

"Cinema Red and Blue is a Comet Gain side project featuring frontman David Feck, as well as that band's Anne Laure and Hoffner Burns. They're actually in town to record their album at Gary Olson's Marlborough Studios in Brooklyn and decided to play a show while here. I ran into Feck at a show on Monday and he told me that the album is about half covers and to expect the same from the live show. He rattled off a bunch of the songs they're covering but the only one I remember now is a Julian Cope song from his 1989 album Skellington. The band will be augmented live by former Comet Gain / current Soft City member Phil Sutton, plus JB, Andy and Kyle from Crystal Stilts. I have to imagine Gary Olson will contribute trumpet to at least one song. This should be fun." [Bill]

That self-titled LP is due 9/28 via What's Your Rupture, and features the Vic Godard cover "Same Mistakes" which can download above. Finest Kiss adds that, "the makeshift band also employs the services of Amy Linton, Hamish Kilgour and [as Bill predicted] Gary Olson."

Wooden Shjips released Vol 2 earlier this year, a compilation of rare singles available via Holy Mountain. Moon Duo was recently featured on the Woodist comp Welcome Home / Diggin' The Universe.

Messages (the band featuring members of Psychic Ills) also have another show in the near future, supporting Excepter and Up Died Sound on 10/27 at Coco66.

All tour dates and some video is below....

Continue reading "indie supergroup Cinema Red & Blue LP coming soon (MP3), Crystal Stilts, Moon Duo (a NYC show) & Wooden Shjips too"

by Bill Pearis

DOWNLOAD: The Smith Westerns - Be My Girl (MP3)
DOWNLOAD: Sondre Lerche - Good Luck (MP3)

After what seems like an entire summer's worth of epic weekends, this one is looking pretty quiet, music-wise. No surprise, as it's Memorial Labor Day which is usually a dead time for shows. But that's not to say there's nothing going on. Chicago's glam-rocking teenagers The Smith Westerns are back in town after touring with Los Campesinos and Girls. While a good chunk of their self-titled debut is so Marc Bolan it seems like an exercise in style appropriation, they do it really well. It's not new, but it's new to them and that makes it work I think. They play tonight (9/2) at Monster Island Basement with Titus Andronicus and the So So Glos; Vassar College tomorrow (9/3); and a late show at Bruar Falls on Friday (9/4) (tentative replacement for the show they had scheduled at Swat Bar). They also list a show on Saturday (9/5) as "under the High Line" but what that means, exactly, well your guess is as good as mine.

Comet Gain @ MHOW in April (more by Tim Griffin)

The most exciting show of the weekend, in my opinion, is happening at Cake Shop on Saturday (9/5). Cinema Red and Blue is a Comet Gain side project featuring frontman David Feck, as well as that band's Anne Laure and Hoffner Burns. They're actually in town to record their album at Gary Olson's Marlborough Studios in Brooklyn and decided to play a show while here. I ran into Feck at a show on Monday and he told me that the album is about half covers and to expect the same from the live show. He rattled off a bunch of the songs they're covering but the only one I remember now is a Julian Cope song from his 1989 album Skellington. The band will be augmented live by former Comet Gain / current Soft City member Phil Sutton, plus JB, Andy and Kyle from Crystal Stilts. I have to imagine Gary Olson will contribute trumpet to at least one song. This should be fun.

The whole Cake Shop bill is pretty good, with Kyle Forrester pulling triple duty: keyboards in Ladybug Transistor, and saxophone in German Measles. Ladybug Transistor are one of the NYC indie world's elder statesmen and their lush sound is cool and easy like a late summer breeze. On the other end of the scale, German Measles are usually a jokey mess onstage, I saw them on Monday at Bruar Falls and they actually approached something you could might call competence. Maybe they're getting serious? Opening the night at Cake Shop are the budget baroque sounds of Jacques Detergent.

Sondre Lerche @ Bowery Ballroom in 2008 (more by Faith Ann-Young)

And looking forward to the early part of next week, Sondre Lerche is playing Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday (9/8), which is the same day as the release of his sixth album, Heartbeat Radio. (He plays Music Hall of Williamsburg the next night.) The 27-year-old Norwegian, now Williamsburg resident, has the charms to hold the attention of a Bowery or MHoW-sized crowd by himself, which is how he usually plays in NYC, but I do wish he'd bring his ace band, The Faces Down, to America at some point, as we deserve to hear his songs get the full-on treatment live. Heartbeat Radio is another winner, I think, maybe his best yet -- with Sondre displaying more confidence in his songwriting and ease in his arrangements. (He's also been listening to a lot of Prefab Sprout, I think, with the album's "I Cannot Let You Go" clearly being a tip-of-the-hat to Paddy McAloon.) You can sample album-opener "Good Luck" at the top of this post. And whether he's with band or solo, he is always entertaining.

And finally, as this is a light week, I thought I'd point out that the essential 1980 concert film URGH! A Music War has finally made its way to DVD. For those of a certain generation, this seminal document of the punk/post-punk/new wave scene was seen every other weekend on USA Network's weekend Night Flight and blew minds with footage of Gang of Four, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cramps, Wall of Voodoo and more. Since then it's shown up on cable and film festivals in about 17 different versions, with some performances being cut for music rights reasons and other legal whatnot. These reasons have also kept it from DVD, much like the first to Decline of Western Civilization films, to the point where I thought they'd never get a legit release. I'm still not sure how legit this is either (read URGH! performer Jim Skafish's blog post about it), but you can buy it via the Warner Archive which has made available hundreds of films that the studio has deemed otherwise unworthy of proper releases. They actually burn you a DVD-R of the movie. You don't get proper menus or any extras beyond the trailer or even proper chapter breaks (they divide it up into 10 minute sections), but the picture quality is good (anamorphic widescreen), and it's almost the whole film. (Sorry, Splodgenessabounds, your footage isn't here.) And it sounds good too -- they did a great job recording the bands. And just to have the footage of Klaus Nomi, The Cramps and Gary Numan, it's worth the $19.99.

There's a few choice clips from URGH below, as well as tour dates fliers and general etc...

Continue reading "Smith Westerns, Sondre Lerche, Cinema Red & Blue (Comet Gain), URGH! A Music War & more in This Week in Indie "