It’s Alive…
Before I get this next blog rant started, I’d just like to check up on something:
Have all you local fans of fine-art-folk heard this song called “Eyelashes” yet?
Frontier Ruckus, Ann Arbor quintet, stringers of a densely-poetic, Americana-rock brew of unmatched evocativeness and dizzying nostalgic song-murals…went up on Paste Magazine two weeks ago and let everyone know that, oh, by the way, they’ve got a colossal double album set to bloom in the dead of winter…on Quite Scientific Records.
More info: pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/10/frontier-ruckus-announce-new-album.html
Anyway…where was I?
Ah yes:
Now, it’s not even Halloween yet and Detroit quintet The Sights have already had one of the most prolific years but presumably, since they’re still standing…after a 50-date tour across the country through the Spring and Summer and another swath of sets throughout Europe in the fall (not to mention a Daytrotter session and an entire album produced and released)…that they’ll push themselves just a bit further, maybe…adhering to that sleep-when-you’re-dead school of songmanship. Dig: sightsarmy.com/thesights/
There’s a refreshed and admirable kind of feistiness to this group, like some kind of renegade rock force that can’t be stopped… Fitting that they’re next venture is titled Taken Alive, harkening to clichéd sound-clips of an Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney shouting out to the hater-hipster-police six-shooting any rock-gnawing blog bullets into their speeding Cadillac: “You’ll never take us alive!”
Sustained through these nigh-on-15 years by lead neo-blues-balladeer Baranek and backed reliably this past year by wild wobblers Dean Tartaglia, Jarrod Champion, Kyle Schanta and Skip Denomme, the band is preparing to slam through upwards to 30 songs selected from all five of their sweat-wrung garage-gored albums at the Park Bar in Detroit on November 3rd –
This isn’t necessarily a rock n’ roll wake for our fizzled Tigers (even though they’ll be playing a stone’s-throw from Comerica Park) and, no, it isn’t some party-like-it’s-1999 type party releasing any apocalyptic fears flumed up on the eve of this epically ominous Presidential Election, no… This is Taken Alive, the Sights’ own concert documentary to cap off their productive year and they want you to be a part of it. Each song in their set will be recorded/captured by four respective cameras and spliced together for an evocative rock n roll exposition to be released in early 2013.
Misty
There’s that… Or, if you’re hanging-in locally, then get the folk down to 1st street and see Misty Lyn and the Big Beautiful pour some False Honey for their album release party. (Read an interview with the unassuming singer/songwriter in this month’s print edition of iSPY or online here).
Info: mistylyn.bandcamp.com/
Crazier Horse
And, finally, in the time it’s taken me to write this blog post, I still haven’t made my way through one song…one song off Psychedelic Pill –the new album (and the first in decades) by Neil Young –in collaboration with his most well-known mates— Crazy Horse. http://www.neilyoung.com/crazyhorsevideo.html
For the music-geek statisticians back in the lab, I think “Driftin’ Back” is longer than Weezer’s entire Green Album. A glorious-if-unwieldy novella splashing and crashing over itself, a ruminative and rambling Americana-opera – that dazzles with gritty guitar majesty at some points but then chunks along, surreally if awkwardly, and you start wondering when the wandering-will-end… Like you went for a stroll with your Grandpa and he got you lost down a mystical backroad… and now it’s gonna take at least 27-minutes to find your way back to his farmhouse and you have no escape from his strange yammerings upon a befuddling shift of subjects…
“Gonna get me a hip-hop haircut…Hey-now…”
-Neil Young (“Driftin’ Back”)
…For what it’s worth…heh…
Anyway, I’ll sign off today by saying that we’ve got some potentially turbulent months ahead, or so the 24-hour-news-networks and b.s.-twitter-heads will tell you.
Whatever happens, let’s remember we’re all in this together. Whether it’s an epically ominous Presidential Election or the game-of-telephone-doomsayers on Facebook warning you about the Mayan Calendar running out…either way, they say the world’s gonna end…right? I just hope some of our friends remember to bring their acoustic guitars and tambourines down into their panic rooms – somebody grab a stereo, too, damnit, I don’t wanna be listening to my Apocalypse-Mix from the shitty speakers of a smartphone or iPad.
Thanks for reading.
