scene&heard

The Go! Team’s new release, “Proof of Youth,” is not an album, but a series of sounds that try to become an album, and fail (gloriously). Listening to “Proof of Youth” you are not lifted from your mundane world and given fleeting insight into a universe of beauty. Instead, you witness a band trying to make Music, and failing. The failure is what makes The Go! Team’s music so fun, so honest, and so worth coming back to for this second release.

To understand The Go! Team’s music, you have to first understand its drumming. It is clumsy, loose, and awkward drumming. The drums are too loud and too heavy, and because of this they force themselves to the front of each song, and once there become lost and confused. They try earnestly to keep up with the sounds that swirl around them, to provide a rhythmical anchor for the group despite their own lack of rhythm, but they fail, coming off as sloppy and amateur. In short, they are pathetic imitations of Drums, incompetent, burdened by a human inadequacy that extends beyond the percussion and into the entire album.

(More after the jump)

I saw Ani DiFranco in concert once. I was a little girl, and my mother had taken me to a folk festival in upstate New York. All the ex-hippie parents were cheering wildly for Ani as their face-painted kids scampered happily in the grass. DiFranco ascended to the stage, grabbed the mic, and bellowed, “FUCK!”

For eighteen years, Ani DiFranco has channeled this unapologetic fierceness into folk songs wearing punk clothing, ardently championing her liberal, feminist ideology. “Canon,” a career retrospectivce, does a praiseworthy job of selecting songs from DiFranco’s substantial repertoire. The two-CD best-of divides her music into two vague categories. The first CD nicely sums up her earlier, more conventionally folk-y period, starting with the song “Fire Door” off her first CD and venturing into more exploratory territory towards the end with the spoken word track “Fuel.” The second CD continues to chart her experimentalism, from increasingly politically charged lyrics to instrumentation with drums, horns and unconventional harmonies.

“Canon” also contains its fair share of live recordings, including some tracks from her live CD “Living in Clip,” which are vibrant and full of energy. In the songs “Gravel” and “Untouchable Face” we can hear DiFranco playing to her adoring crowd, laughing, sighing and practically spitting her words out. The sounds of the audience’s adulation are also a nod to DiFranco’s extraordinarily devoted fan base and her status as something of a cult figure.

Unfortunately and inexplicably, “Canon” also includes a track called “Distracted,” a recording of some of DiFranco’s stage banter, including the following phrase: “And so now, like, now it’s so funny, like, all the, you know…”

Despite this single unpleasant detour from DiFranco’s otherwise sharp and thoughtful songwriting, both CDs are strong throughout, and perhaps even sufficiently varied to keep the listener engaged for the two-plus hours needed to listen to the whole thing. For devoted fans or those just discovering her, “Canon” is a commendable compilation of some of DiFranco’s best work.

Simian Mobile Disco is all about the synthesizer, to the point of naming their debut album after one of its parts, the ASDR envelope. The tracks on “Attack Sustain Decay Release” are electronic to the point of occasionally sounding like four-minute monologues by R2-D2. Condensing Simian Mobile Disco’s repertoire from hundreds of songs and mixes into forty minutes simultaneously highlights flaws in the duo’s music and leaves the listener feeling cheated.
Simian Mobile Disco, composed of James Ford and Anthony Shaw, is a production and remix team who broke from the “electronically enhanced psychedelic folk band” Simian on a US summer tour in 2005. Leaving behind the rock elements of Simian, Simian Mobile Disco is more pop and dance-oriented, and do DJ sets with other groups like Justice. Shaw and Ford dropped a number of singles and did notable remixes of bands like Air, Muse, and The Go! Team before the release of “Attack Sustain Decay Release.”

(More after the jump)

While the first thing that pops into mind when the words “Oklahoma” and “evangelicals” are uttered are television preachers from the buckle of the Bible belt, the trio of singer Josh Jones, bassist Kyle Davis and drummer Austin Stephens that makes up Evangelicals are anything but. Hailing from Norman, Oklahoma—origin of the Flaming Lips, Chainsaw Kittens and Starlight Mints—the band’s debut “So Gone” received universal critical acclaim and launched the band on a nationwide tour last fall, during which they made a stop between shows to spend a night at Yale. Davis spoke to scene&heard about Yale girls, the new ‘gelicals record, and their plans for visiting the Elm City again.

Scene&Heard: How did the tour go last year? Lessons learned?

Kyle Davis: Last year was awesome. We ended up circling the country about two and half times. Drink “Emergen-C.” Avoid Plano, Texas.

S&H: What was your favorite city to tour in?

KD: It’s hard to say best…but I love Montreal. Seattle, Portland…New York. All good. Anytime there are people there to see us we’re pretty fucking excited.

(More after the jump)