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…
Sorry for the lack of blogging. I took a huge and tragic spill on a hill I had no business skateboarding down back when I was in college and, as a result, I occasionally throw my back out, so I’ve been laid out flat for the past two days. Here’s a quickee post for you to enjoy and then I’m going to crawl back on the couch.
Guitarist extraordinaire Gary Lucas hosted a “Beefheart Night” back on April 9th at the Knitting Factory here in NYC. Gary played with his fantastic all-instrumental Captain Beefheart cover band Fast ‘N’ Bulbous (their CD Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind is highly recommended) and several fans and friends of Don Van Vliet spoke in between the band’s two sets. David Lynch sent in a cool little video of himself reading ”Pena," too. The highlight was a surprise appearance by the legendary Robyn Hitchcock at the tail end of the evening, who performed three songs with Lucas accompanying him on the steel guitar. A few weeks ago I uploaded my video of them doing “Sure ‘Nuff ‘N’ Yes I Do” to YouTube and yesterday Lucas contacted me to let me know that both he and Hitchock really enjoyed seeing it, so I uploaded their version of “China Pig” today (unfortunately, I didn’t record their last song “Click Clack"). Enjoy.
“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.
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.
I know I’m easy, but the fact that this video by the Carolina Chocolate Drops already has 37,000 views on YouTube gives me new faith in humanity. These guys are playing Celebrate Brooklyn on June 26th with the Dixie Hummingbirds. I’ll be there.
UPDATE: It gets better (worse?), she cornered poor Chelsea in Baltimore a few months back and sang it for her sans autoharp. I think that had to be an even worse experience for Chelsea than when she found out about you-know-what…
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds—“Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” (hi-res version here)
Nigerian Gangster—Matsuli Music brings you Chicago DJ Mike Love mix-mashing Fela Kuti and Jay Z. If you haven’t already started clicking on the link, you’re dead to me.
A Significant Part Of Obama’s Message—Kyle E. Moore of PA’s Comments from Left Field spells out what should be the obvious. (John Cole from Balloon Juice has been quite literally on fire on this subject, too. Just scroll down to “Hillary Clinton, disgrace” and read up from there.)
US electoral system explained—A hilarious rapid-fire flowcharted look at how people with funny accents view our electoral process.
Spider John Koerner & Willie Murphy’s Running, Jumping, Standing Still—The Heat Warps implies this underrated ‘67 eclectic ragtime-rock-romp album is better than Dylan & the Band’s The Basement Tapes (it’s not ... very few things are), but it’s definitely worthy of your attention. I’ll be listening to this a lot.
A few weeks ago I might’ve felt silly posting this rollicking music video about Obama winning Pennsylvania, but not today. Obama is tied with Clinton in the state in the latest ARG poll. This poll may be an outlier (along with the PPP poll that had Obama up by 2%), but there’s no denying that he’s been trending upwards in PA polling for a little over a week now and could actually pull off a stunning victory. In a addition, the daily national Gallup that was released today has him up by 9% over Clinton.
Does any of that mean that Hillary can’t win the nomination? Absolutely not. Here’s Hillary’s path to victory:
After the post below focusing on the ugly side of YouTube, even I can use a palette cleanser, so here you go:
New York Dolls—“Trash”
I’m posting this because I think dipsetmuthafucka, who posts a video of himself dancing in public every day, is a hoot and because I’ve never seen a woman look more adorable and/or sexy eating a hamburger.* Check out all of dipsetmuthafucka’s videos here. I’ve embedded a few more selections below the fold since he’s got 377 of them to choose from (no, I haven’t watched them all). Enjoy.
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.
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.
LATTE-SIPPING CROWD: I’ve got your latte right here. God, I hate these people.
WORLD OF POOH—LAND OF THIRST: One of the last great indie albums of the 80s featured Barbara Manning and will probably never, ever be released on CD. You need this. Trust me. Grab it before it’s gone.
IT’S 3AM: Good selection of parodies of Hillary’s loathsome 3AM red phone ad over at YesButNoButYes. And while you’re there ... jeebus, this is fucking disturbing.
Mick Jagger—“Memo from Turner” (from the film Performance)
BOBBY CHARLES: I got turned on to Bobby Charles while listening to Devendra Banhart guest DJing on WNYC’s “Spinning on Air.” It was a warm spring night, I had the radio on out in the garden, and Charles’ song “I Must Be in a Good Place Now” wrapped snuggly around my head like the most comforting cloth ever created. An absolutely gorgeous moment. Charles’ phenomenal debut album, recorded with most of the members of The Band and Dr. John, inexplicably swings in and out of print and The Heat Warps was kind enough to upload it recently for your listening pleasure. Believe me, you need this.
BOOT CAMP—THE END OF THE LINE: Robin completed her initial six-weeks of hell in boot camp and the whole series has been an entertaining, ahem, “reed.” Click and scroll around her blog (pretty much the closest thing I get to exercise these days) to see what she went through.
I never much cared for Van Halen, even during the David Lee Roth years. After listening to this isolated vocal track from “Runnin’ With the Devil”, I’m confident that I made a great choice rejecting and denouncing this band from the get-go.
