Wednesday, May 14, 2008

I’m from Barcelona show -- May 1st—Brooklyn Masonic Temple

Oh, yeah, today is my birthday. I just pulled this image off of my dig cam and figured it was perfect. Please do something nice today and pretend that you’re me while you’re doing it.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

“We’re From Barcelona”—I’m From Barcelona

THE GIVEAWAY IS OVER!  THANKS TO ALL WHO PARTICIPATED.

Folks, as promised last week, I have a pair of tickets to give away for the I’m From Barcelona & Thao Nguyen show this Thursday May 1st at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple (317 Clermont Ave, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY). I’ve heard and read really great things about I’m From Barcelona’s live show and I can tell you from personal experience that the Masonic Temple is an extremely cool place to catch a show.

If you’d like to enter to win a pair of tix, simply send me an email to “tips (-at-) rumproast.com” (or click on the “Tips” email link in the top right sidebar), write “Barcelona” in the subject and your full name in the body of the email before midnight tonight (4/29 ET). I’ll randomly select a winner and contact you via email if you’ve won.

This giveaway is courtesy of the fine folks at Boost Mobile.

In addition, tickets are still available at TicketWeb as well and you get a free six-month (23 issue) New York magazine subscription with purchase.

Peek below the fold for a few more Barcelona videos and one really cool claymation video from Thao Nguyen…

Friday, April 25, 2008

“Faith Healer” from Big Dipper’s Boo-Boo, quite possibly the best EP ever released

Thank god I thumbed through the latest Time Out New York this morning or I wouldn’t have known that two of my favorite indie pop bands of the 80’s, Big Dipper & Great Plains, are playing tonight at Southpaw in Park Slope. Boston’s Big Dipper released their first three exceptionally solid pop masterpieces in the late 80’s on the legendary (and long-gone) Homestead Records label and Merge Records was recently kind enough to re-release all of that out-of-print material and a slew of great bonus material on an insanely cheap 3-disc box set called Supercluster: The Big Dipper Anthology. Columbus, OH’s Great Plains were under-appreciated fractured pop masters, churning out smart n’ snarky clingers like “Letter to a Fanzine” (chorus: “Why do punk rock guys go out with new wave girls?"), “Dick Clark” and “Martin Luther King/Martin Luther Drinking”. Old 3C’s wonderful 2-CD retrospective Length of Growth 1981-89 is unfortunately out-of-print and fetches $99 or more online, but you can obtain a CD-R version of it from the label and apparently MP3 downloads are still available via eMusic and iTunes.

MP3s:

• “Faith Healer” & “Wrong in the Charts” by Big Dipper
  
• “Letter to a Fanzine” & “Dick Clark” by Great Plains
  

MORE: Here’s a review of Big Dipper’s show last night at Maxwell’s.

ATTENTION NYC MUSIC FANS: Might as well shoehorn this in here ... Rumproast will be giving away a pair of tix for the May 1st show featuring I’m From Barcelona & Thao Nguyen at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn in the very near future.  If you want to go (or know someone who does), keep an eye on this blog for details.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Sometimes it’s best to just let the photos and text speak for themselves…

From Newsday:

A bitter Sir Elton John thinks America’s sexism may be sinking his friend Hillary Rodham Clinton.

John, a knighted British subject, said that gender discrimination is behind Clinton’s problems in the polls as he addressed 5,000 Clinton supporters at Radio City Musical Hall last night in an event that raised $2.5 million for the cash-strapped campaign.

“I never cease to be amazed by the misogynistic attitudes of some people in this country,” said John, wearing a spangled black evening coat over a vermilion silk shirt. “I say to hell with them. ... I love you, Hillary, I’ll always be there for you.”

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Vote for our super swell buddy George Hakkila (aka Ham Steak) in the MySpace Band Friends contest at WFMU (aka the coolest radio station in New Jersey). He’s currently in a tight race for first place with a band from Krakow, Poland (that’s right, fucking Poland) and as a blue collar, lunch-bucket gal who loves America as much as Taylor Marsh loves make-believe radio careers, I will not stand for this outrage.  Vote now (5th song down).

*honk honk*

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

My wife Chris is a pretty huge fan of the long dormant band Firewater and I like ‘em a lot, too, so we were both surprised to find out yesterday that they’re quietly releasing an album in early May called The Golden Hour (MP3 download via the link). Three years ago the group’s front man Tod A, newly divorced and depressed ("The NYC skyline looked like bad wallpaper to me"), embarked on “a three year sabbatical through the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia” and recorded local musicians everywhere he went.  Many of these “field” recordings are going to be incorporated into the new release and on May 26th Firewater will be performing at the Bowery Ballroom here in NYC. Check out the “infomercial” for The Golden Hour embedded below.  It’s very interesting.  More bands should think about doing advance promotion like this.

MORE: You can listen to the whole new album at Firewater’s official site and check out an early review of it at the blog VS System is LEGION.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Blitzen Trapper live at Mercury Lounge, July, 2007 (full concert here)

Blitzen Trapper, whose album Wild Mountain Nation was picked as our best of 2007, will be playing at Bowery Ballroom at the end of this month (the 29th, to be precise). My wife Chris and I caught their live show unexpectedly in Seattle on a layover and they were wonderful. The performance was reminiscent of the high-energy and adorably scattered mid-years Pavement shows.  Highly recommended.  As an added bonus, they’re sharing the bill with their label mates Fleet Foxes, who our pals at FREEwilly dig (us, too) and their new EP “Sun Giant” is sure to litter best-of lists near and far at the tail end of ‘08.  That’s what we call a win-win.  Cash in on it if you’re a big applette.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

The New Pornographers—“Myriad Harbour”

• Arnaud Rodrigues—Som Do Paulinho: If you like the Brazilian psych-groove of Tropicalia, you need this hard-to-find gem.
  
• My Dog Impersonating Orson Welles: Here’s your reference point, if you need one.
  
• Michel de Broin: Truly solid snark art. (via The Daily Dish)
  
• Steve Albini explains “Fake Italian”: The former frontman of Big Black stops short of saying “spicy meatball.”
  
• La Strada: Your New Favorite Indie Band: Brookyln’s La Strada gets a shout out from HuffPo.
  
• Pardoning, parsing “black truth”—A great post from the Black Snob about a lot of stuff white people, particularly Hillshills and the MSM, don’t “get.”
  

Friday, March 14, 2008

My wonderful and talented pal Elisa Flynn has been hiding out in the studio lately working on her new album (tentatively titled “Songs about Birds and Ghosts”—Elisa, please remove “tentatively"), but she’s poking her head out to perform a free show at Union Hall in Park Slope this Tuesday at 9PM. Her new live act featuring the fabulous percussive accompaniment of Anders Griffen is a thing of absolute beauty and Tuesday she’s going to unveil some of her eagerly-awaited, freshly-minted songs, so make sure you head on down.

And to further sweeten the pot, Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna) will be reading from his new book Black Postcards and performing a short acoustic set earlier that evening (7:30PM) at the same venue. If you’re a New Yorker and you’d rather sit on your couch Tuesday watching American Idol or Big Brother than spend an intimate and sure-to-be excellent evening with Elisa and Dean, you really should consider moving to New Hampshire and harvesting honey in your underpants.

Or something like that.

Friday, February 29, 2008

The March 4th Beastie Boys benefit show for the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, which sold-out very quickly, has a few more tickets available.  I’ll be there.  Look for the white guy with slightly greying hair wearing jeans and sneakers.

UPDATE FROM READER H.S. IN COMMENTS: “Actually, the show has been sold out since the day it went on sale. The tickets available on Ticketmaster.com now are through auction only.”

FINALLY: Show “review” here.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Minutemen—“This Ain’t No Picnic”

Shortest.Selector.Ever.

Busy, busy, busy ... and no time to burrow for you, my loyal Roasters. Plus I need to rest up for Mudhoney performing the entire Superfuzz Bigmuff CD tonight. I hear they play something called grout rock.

• THE DECEMBER 2007 MOVIE PREVIEW:  Always an informative and entertaining read from Dave Thomas at FREEloader.
  
• FANTASTIC DOCUMENTARY COMING TO NYC: The wonderful and unique documentary Billy the Kid is opening this Wednesday, December 5th at the IFC Center in Manhattan for a limited engagement. Carve out some room for it if you live in NYC because it’s highly recommended. Make sure to check out the excellent trailer at the documentary’s web site (or these outtakes at YouTube).  You can read our review of it at some point tomorrow here at Rumproast.
  
• OUR YUCK! MOMENT OF THE DAY: Missing the Moon alerts us to a reason to add one more entry to the rule book in NCAA basketball. They also teach us to never, ever fuck with transvestites.
  

UPDATE: A new entry for our horribly neglected Worst.Band.Name.Ever category. One of the bands opening for Mudhoney tonight is called Pissed Jeans. No matter how good they are a little part of me will always hate them for that.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players write and perform music based on slides they collect from tag sales, thrift stores and estate sales.  In a live setting, Tina (the mother) works the slide projector while Jason (the father) and Rachel (the way-too-adorable daughter) rock out. I haven’t seen them perform for several years but they used to put on a grin-a-millisecond show.  I hope you enjoy these two videos I just stumbled upon via YouTube as much as I did.

“Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959”

Sunday, November 25, 2007

I want to get out and enjoy what remains of this crisp fall day, so I’m going to keep this Selector short n’ (except for the FReeper link) sweet…

• THE LOST SOWETO COMP: The always terrific Matsuli Music is featuring a wonderful out-of-print find of South African music released in ‘83 called Soweto. It’s a stellar comp, lovingly converted to MP3 from vinyl, and the instrumental “Here We Come” that they spotlight in their post is one of the best (and most original) African instrumentals I’ve ever heard.  Highly recommended!
  
• ELISA FLYNN’S TWO-MAN BAND: My talented pal Elisa Flynn is unveiling her new live set-up with an accompanying drummer this Tuesday at Union Hall in Park Slope. Lurid Culture recently gave her a great endorsement (scroll down) in a blurb about this show.  As they say, “Catch her on the way up.” [UPDATE: Sadly, Elisa’s performance has been cancelled due to illness.]
  
• PUBIC HUMILIATION: Nobody is better at tearing down wingnuts with just a few words than TBogg. Nobody.
  
• AND SPEAKING OF WINGNUTS: Someone at Free Republic posts a story about celebrities in California having to flee their homes due to wildfires, a few FReepers launch into predictable thick-headed rants about Hollyweirdos and environuts ("I say let the whole state burn! Get rid of the nut jobs, I do not even like to admit California is one of the states."), and all hell breaks loose ("I am beginning to wonder if ‘conservative’ is such a good thing if it means heartless."). Hilarious.  But remember, liberals are the crazy and angry ones…
  

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

My dear pal Amy has put together a benefit to support the making of Rwanda Reporting, a documentary she’s producing. I encourage all of you Big Applets to attend this worthwhile event (I certainly will). It will feature free beer, Rwandan food and the music of Francis and the Lights, who are rumored to be amazing live.  I’ll let Amy take it away from here:

In January 2008, I will travel to Rwanda to spend a month following four journalism students - two Rwandan genocide survivors and two exchange students from Carleton University. The film will document their struggle to cover post-genocide Rwanda, thirteen years after the news media fueled the horrific violence and killings.

A portion of the funds generated from the completed film will be used to create a scholarship fund for journalism students at the National University in Butare. Your support at our fundraising event will help make this project and trip a success!

Details:

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

From Pitchfork:

Gibby Haynes-- de facto leader of the exponentially unfathomable, long running psych-punk-whatever amalgamators Butthole Surfers-- will join a cadre of kiddies from the Paul Green School of Rock for a series of six dates in February (one, on the 12th, has yet to be confirmed). And together they’ll play Butthole Surfers material.

The Paul Green School-- featured in the documentary film Rock School and not the similarly titled Jack Black/Richard Linklater film School of Rock-- is a network of intensive music training programs for kids aged 8-18, and the school’s “All Stars” often pay tribute to and even gig out with famed musicians many years their senior.

Pitchfork seems a little shocked by this decision, but, c’mon, think about how righteous it would be to hear a choir of kids chiming in on “Lady Sniff”? I can’t imagine anything more beautiful.

MP3s: ”Lady Sniff” & more.

NEW YORK SHOW: 2/17/08, Highline Ballroom