photos by Amanda Hatfield

Wild Flag @ Bowery Ballroom

Wild Flag recently hit the NYC-area during CMJ, selling out three shows while they were here with Eleanor Friedberger and Hospitality. The run ended at Manhattan's Bowery Ballroom. A second set of pictures from their Bowery Ballroom set are in this post. Pictures of Eleanor's set are HERE and Hospitality's are HERE.

Wild Flag will return to NYC during a 2012 tour for a much larger show at Webster Hall on April 1. Tickets for the NYC show go on sale Friday (11/11) at noon with an AmEx presale starting Wednesday (11/9) at noon.

All spring tour dates and more CMJ pics below...

Continue reading "Wild Flag -- 2012 tour dates, a Webster Hall show & more pics from Bowery"

photos by Amanda Hatfield

"On March 5, all-girl supergroup Wild Flag made their New York City debut with two shows at the tiny Rock Shop in Brooklyn. Featuring some of indie rock's most experienced and flat-out rocking women, the fledgling band sounded exactly like the sum of its parts. Now, for most other bands, that might seem like faint praise. However, when your "parts" are made up of two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney (guitarist/singer Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss), ex-Helium frontwoman Mary Timony, and Rebecca Cole of the Minders, that's a sum that most bands can only dream of." [TheMST]

We were at both shows, but for now, a set of pictures (including the setlist) from the early show, which Yellow Fever also played, are in this post.

And don't forget Wild Flag are also play Radio City Music Hall with Bright Eyes on Tuesday and Wednesday - tickets to the Tuesday show are still on sale.

More Rock Shop pictures below...

Continue reading "Wild Flag played the the Rock Shop (early show pics)"

"People on the subway are staring at my scabs"

Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig, and Jim Carrey performed as "A Taste of New York" on Saturday Night Live this past weekend (on 1/8). A Taste of New York is an "authentic" band from "an area between Avenue B & Avenue C" in New York City. And though Holy Sons are from the West Coast, we have learned that the sketch/song was inspired by new Holy Sons song "A Chapter Must Be Closed" from the recent Survivalist Tales. Fred Armisen watched the video for the song and the rest is history. Compare/contrast the videos below.

Musical duo The Black Keys also played Saturday Night Live on 1/8, a few days before they appeared on the Colbert Report with Ezra. Video of both songs they played are below too.

Musical duo Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (ex Sleater-Kinney, current Wild Flag) go way back. Their Thunderant series of videos have been making the rounds online for years, and so it's pretty awesome that they've landed a "6-part IFC Original short-based comedy series" called Portlandia which premieres on Friday, January 21, 2011 at 10:30 PM ET/PT on IFC. "Each episode's character-based shorts draw viewers into "Portlandia," the creators' dreamy and absurd rendering of Portland, Oregon."

An assortment of guest stars inhabit PORTLANDIA, including Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks, Sex & The City), Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), Selma Blair (Legally Blonde, Hellboy), Heather Graham (The Hangover), Edie McClurg (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), Kumail Nanjiani (Michael & Michael Have Issues), Jason Sudeikis (SNL, The Cleveland Show), and Gus Van Sant (Milk). Singer/songwriter Aimee Mann also guest stars, alongside James Mercer (The Shins), and local Portland musicians Jenny Conlee and Colin Meloy (The Decemberists) and Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney).

Wild Flag is touring in March. Some very funny "Portlandia" videos, and everything else mentioned above, below...

Continue reading "Fred Armisen inpired by Holys Sons for SNL sketch, pairs w/ Carrie Brownstein for new IFC show 'Portlandia'"

photos by Taylor Keahey

Those heading to Texas this March have SXSW 2011 to look forward to, but is Wild Flag making their way to NYC? The band made up of 2/3 of Sleater-Kinney (Brownstein & Weiss), Rebecca Cole (the Minders) and Mary Timony (Helium, Autoclave, Soft Power) will play the East Coast for a string of dates that (so far) include Philadelphia at Johnny Brenda's on 3/6, but nothing closer. The full (small) list of currently announced dates is below.

Wild Flag completed a West Coast run earlier this month with Grass Widow, San Francisco at Bottom of The Hill on 11/18 included....

"The members of Wild Flag prepared their own gear, but when it came time to play, Brownstein decided her bottle of Bud Light just wouldn't do. "I would love a Jameson on the rocks," she said -- but there was no traveling anywhere inside the club at this point. So after a few reminders and moments of sincerety-implying silence, a full amber glass came surfing along the top of the crowd. "I'm watching that thing, no roofies," she said -- as the anticipation crested -- then the band kicked out a false, note-length start, and then, on the second try, Wild Flag detonated its sonic bomb, a hybrid of shrill, Sleater-Kinney-flavored punk and fortified grunge riffage, led by two face-shredding guitars." [SF Weekly]

More pictures from that show, with the dates, below...

Continue reading "Wild Flag (the band with 2/3 of Sleater-Kinney in it) played shows, announced some East Coast dates"

by BBG

I have it on good authority that...
Corin Tucker had more than one leg at Bowery Ballroom... (photo by killerfemme)

The Corin Tucker Band played Maxwell's on 10/23 (with Screaming Females) and Bowery Ballroom on 10/26 as part of a short leg of East Coast dates in support of the new LP 1,000 Years. The shows were part of Tucker's first tour in the East since selling out Webster Hall with Sleater-Kinney in 2006 as part of the band's final leg of dates before going on hiatus. Flanked by a supporting cast of Sara Lund of Unwound and Seth Lorinczi of Golden Bears, Tucker's new project won over the crowd at Bowery with a combination of bombast and tranquility:

At Tuesday night's show, the turned-to-11 jams (like "Riley" and "Doubt," the latter of which sounds the most like Sleater-Kinney) got the biggest reactions, but Tucker's quieter moments were the most stunning. The band paused for a brief acoustic interlude (including strings) for runs through gorgeously-arranged new epics like "It's Always Summer" and "Dragon," both of which began small and swelled to surprising crescendos. "Miles Away," which opened Tucker's encore and features little more than her gentle, dynamic voice and a rolling piano riff, is lovely on the album but became a full-blooded torch song on stage. Sleater-Kinney's songs mostly all swirl and no release, but Tucker's new approach seems to be about resolution. -[MTV]

Meanwhile Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney have a promising new band of their own called Wild Flag also featuring Rebecca Cole (the Minders) and Mary Timony (Helium, Autoclave, Soft Power). The band will record their debut LP for Merge Records and tour on a larger scale in 2011, but so far have only scheduled a handful of West Coast dates (below).

And in case Wild Flag and The Corin Tucker Band just don't do it for you, take comfort in the fact that Tucker also recently told the Seattle Weekly the following in response to questions about a Sleater-Kinney reunion: "We're all still friends and we have talked about doing Sleater-Kinney in the future again... I'm hopeful that that will happen."

The Corin Tucker Band's 1,000 Years is out now via Kill Rock Stars. Video from Tucker's Maxwell's and Bowery Ballroom sets are below, along with all Wild Flag dates...

Continue reading "Corin Tucker's band played NYC, Wild Flag hopefully will soon"

Corin Tucker on "Jesus Etc.": On the One Beat tour, I remember driving, and that's all Carrie [Brownstein] and Janet [Weiss] would listen to [laughs]. My god, that record played over and over and over again. We would just drive to the next show and listen to that record. We all loved it, and we didn't always agree on what to listen to in the van.

Pitchfork: Was there anything else that all three of you would agree on?

Corin: We all liked to listen to Led Zeppelin. We would just go through the whole catalog [laughs]. We all liked that. We all liked Belle & Sebastian. [5-10-15-20]

Sleater Kinney's Corin Tucker will be touring with Sara Lund of Unwound and Seth Lorinczi of Golden Bears (aka The Corin Tucker Band) in support of Corin's debut, 1,000 Years, due October 5th on Kill Rock Stars. A picture of the band is below.

They hit the road this October. The trip includes a Tuesday, October 26th show at Bowery Ballroom with Portland's Hungry Ghost. Tickets are on sale. All dates below.

Corin talked to the Portland Mercury about the sound of the new record...

How would you describe the sound of the record, particularly in comparison to Sleater-Kinney?

I think some of the songs are in the ballpark. It's definitely my voice and my songwriting style. But like I said, it's different instrumentation on some of the songs and a different collaboration. Seth's producing and arranging things, so that's different, too. It may be more traditional with some of the arrangements. [via Sleater-Kinney.net]

That's the cover above. All tour dates, tracklist and some Corin solo videos are below...

Continue reading "Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker releasing an LP, touring (dates)"

People like Fred Armisen, Carrie from Sleater-Kinney (and NPR) (man, she was rough on Tallest Man on Earth), Joe Mande and Nick Kroll will be watching comedy shorts (with piano accompaniment) tonight...

Continue reading "ThunderAnt, Max Silvestri, others & film @ MoMA Tuesday"

...if she (Carrie Brownstein) wants permission to stream their track on her blog.....

An interesting tidbit: This mix was supposed to have the Grateful Dead on it, whose music I really love, but they refused unless we promised to do a piece on them on All Things Considered. In addition, we would need to run a feature on The Dead on the site. Here's a sentence I've never written: Someone needs to take a bong hit and chill out. Just a simple "no thanks" would have sufficed. Are The Dead really in need of publicity? Because I swear there's a dancing bear sticker on every third car I see in Portland. And now I've written a paragraph on them anyway, for free, not even in exchange for a song. Doesn't that count?!
[Carrie Brownstein/NPR]

photos by Ryan Muir

Mr. Malkmus's old band, Pavement, is one of the few remaining first-tier holdouts not to reconvene for Coachella. The quieter reunions this year were those of Swervedriver and Love and Rockets; the more significant one was Portishead, reunited after 10 years, which played a mesmerizing set on Saturday. (The main stage at Coachella in the evening is one of the glories of concertgoing in America: enormous sound, ample space, desert air.) [NY Times]

More pictures below....

Continue reading "Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks @ Coachella 2008 (day 2) - pics "

the tenth in a series where we asked comedians to tell us what was good this year....

I first experienced Jon Glaser a really long time ago when he was hosting some show at UCB that had David Cross on the bill. At that point in my life, I'm pretty sure Cross was really the only reason I was there. Glaser came out as Dave Gordon, a man who has tiny hands. It was (and still is) one of the funniest things I had ever seen and I became an immediate fan and follower of Glaser. To me, he is by far the funniest, most unique character actor around, and I rarely see him play the same character twice. Favorites include Johnny Ding-Dong, Silent Fury, one of the Fuggedabuddies (w/ Jon Benjamin), bassist for A Matter of Trust, member of Gloucester-based band The Perfect Storm, and many, many others. A former member of The Second City and writer for Conan O'Brien, he can be heard as voice of DJ Jesus in the Adult Swim cartoon Lucy: The Daughter of the Devil. He also played Dr. Rawstein in Horse Apples on Wonder Showzen. He was in a pilot called Gay Robot that Nick Swardson wrote. Oh, and he's also 50% of Midnight Pajama Jam w/ Jon Benjamin. The list of credits could go on for miles. Here's Jon's take on what was good in 2007 - Klaus

- - -

I have a 21 month old son. As a dad just tryin' to be cool by playing 'non-kid, cool' songs for his child, here are the "Top 10 Songs I Played For My Son In 2007 That I Am Glad He Seemed To Like", aka a pretentious list of my own musical taste that I forced on him. These are all old songs (except one), but were new to my son in 2007.

"Mr. Tough", Yo La Tengo - An early and continuous favorite. He was dancing to it in his bungee swing before he could walk, let alone dance, on his own.

"Blitzkrieg Bop", The Ramones - I didn't want to include this one because the image of kids dancing to The Ramones feels like a lame Huggies commercial (as opposed to a well done Huggies commercial, of which I think there are several). But I kept it in because the way he danced to it one of the first times he heard it was insane. He snapped his neck to the side so hard a couple times I thought he was going to break it.

"You're No Rock N' Roll Fun", Sleater-Kinney - He enjoyed watching himself in the mirror as he danced to this, and at one point yelled "Go!"

continued below.....

Continue reading "Best of 2007 by Jon Glaser"

The new NPR Music website is pretty cool. KEXP, The Current, WNYC and more. Streaming concerts. Studio Sessions. Even blogs - one of which is by Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney...

Song stuck in my head: Theme from "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
Maybe because it's the only aspect of the current season that isn't brutal. And it's the only part of the show I can repeat out loud without offending anyone.
Most recent album I learned to love only by listening to it as background music: The National's Boxer [Carrie]

Sleater-Kinney played their last-ever NYC show at Webster Hall in August 2006.