Comin' On Home
Mofro's Swampy Funk Rock Finds A Solid Place
originally published September 19, 2007
Eric Sutton
Mofro
If Country Ghetto, the new album by JJ Grey and Mofro, sounds like it has a certain effortless feel, it's no coincidence.
"The song 'Country Ghetto'? I didn't spend 10 minutes thinking about that song," says Grey. "It was the same way with 'Circles.' We were riding down the road on the bus and I just ran and grabbed a keyboard and just started playing it into the computer, this tiny little keyboard thing you can play into the computer. The same thing with 'Turpentine'… I don't know of any song that I thought more than a few minutes about or ever really thought about. They just sort of happened."
Songwriting hasn't always been so effortless for him. Grey's first brush with recording came in 1994, after a demo he had made with guitarist Daryl Hance got the attention of a British record label and earned the duo a trip to London to record. That deal collapsed, and it wasn't until 2001 that Grey got a second chance for a first album.
By that time, Grey had returned to his home base of Jacksonville, FL, and adopted the band name Mofro. Signed to the indy label Fog City Records, Grey recruited Hance and several other musicians to make the album Blackwater.
Looking back, Grey remembers the struggles that came with the recording, which was produced by Fog City owner Dan Prothero. "I had a drummer over there in England," Grey says. "I saw him one time at a rehearsal, and I brought him over. He's a great drummer, playing drum'n'bass. But I only got to see him play drum'n'bass, like 150 beats per minute. When we tried to slow down and start playing some soul, oh man, he was struggling."
Eventually, Prothero convinced Grey to let him bring in another drummer, George Sluppick, and the songs began to take shape - at least to Prothero's ears. But Grey says he remembers not being sure about Blackwater when it was finished. "When we left out of the studio with Blackwater, I was like, 'I don't know what the hell we've got,'" Grey says.
"Then the second record, I knew a little bit more what to listen for and I felt better about it. And then this record I felt really good about it," he says. "This is one time when I left the studio that I felt like, 'Wow, we've really got something here.'"
Fortunately for Grey and what has been a shifting cast of backing musicians in Mofro, Blackwater made musical sense, and the group gradually began building a following with heavy-duty touring.
The band's popularity only grew after the release of the second album, Lochloosa, in 2004. Now with the arrival of Country Ghetto, Grey could be poised for another major step up in his career with Mofro.
After releasing Lochloosa on Swampland Records (through a licensing agreement with Fog City), Country Ghetto arrives on the much larger Alligator Records. Country Ghetto, which like the previous two CDs was produced by Prothero, has been in stores for about six months. But even before its release, Grey was liking what he was seeing from Alligator's promotional efforts, including a new influx of interview opportunities.
"That's one thing that they brought to the table," Grey says. "And they do a lot of things that we've never been able to [do] before. It's no knock on any of the labels we've been on before… But I'm learning it's a whole different kettle of fish when there are 16 full-time employees who've been doing this for years, rather than two people max working on it in conjunction with me and my manager to try to do it."
With Country Ghetto, Alligator has signed the group - now officially billed as JJ Grey & Mofro - as it hits a new musical peak. Songs like "By Your Side," "War" and "Country Ghetto," with their gritty funk edge, rock harder and offer a bigger sound than much of Mofro's earlier music. They are also some of the tightest and most smartly crafted songs Grey has written. The strong songcraft also carries through on the more relaxed songs on Country Ghetto, such as the deeply soulful, heavily emotional ballad "Circles," and the tangy horn-accented "Tragic."
Along with the musical growth, Mofro has settled into something of a stable lineup since Lochloosa. Joining Grey and Hance are drummer Sluppick (who came on board full-time after his other band, the Willard Grant Conspiracy, split up) and bassist Adam Scone. The group has begun a typically extensive tour to support Country Ghetto, bringing along an additional musical treat for fans - a pair of horn players for the current dates.
This will allow JJ Grey & Mofro not only to faithfully render songs from the album but bring new dimensions to older songs. "A lot of the stuff that was on the other records will have the horn lines that I always wanted to put on those, but couldn't afford to get a horn section together in the studio, that kind of thing," Grey says. "So we'll have horns on some of those songs, too."
WHO: JJ Grey & Mofro, The Lee Boys
WHERE: Georgia Theatre
WHEN: Friday, September 21
HOW MUCH: $12 (advance), $15 (day of)
Thinking Outside
The Sojourner Box Set Doesn't Mean Jason Molina And His Magnolia Electric Company Are All Out Of Ideas - Just The Opposite
originally published September 19, 2007
Dan Peterson
Magnolia Electric Co.
Jason Molina, both solo and through his groups Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., could be one of independent music's most prolific songwriters. In the span of 11 years, he has released nine full-length Songs: Ohia albums, one live album and two full studio albums since Songs: Ohia evolved into Magnolia Electric Co. in 2000, two solo albums and roughly 20 EPs, singles and other assorted in-between-album releases.
Molina himself says he's used to finishing entire albums in three days - sometimes with some in-the-studio songwriting included in that short span of time. So maybe his fans should have seen a project like Sojourner, his new release on Secretly Canadian, coming all along. But it's still an impressive achievement, even by Molina's prolific standards.
Sojourner is a box set of entirely new material. It features one CD, Nashville Moon, recorded with the Magnolia Electric Co.'s touring band. A second CD, Black Ram, finds Molina collaborating with a variety of musicians - including producer and sometime Athenian David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame - whom he had never even met before the sessions. A third CD, Shohola, captures Molina performing in a solo acoustic session, while an EP called The Sun Sessions comes from a single post-midnight recording session at the legendary Sun Studio in Memphis. Then to top things off, the Sojourner package includes The Road Becomes What You Leave, a DVD that documents a tour through Canada by the group.
All in all, the box set represents a mother lode of musical output from a period of only about 18 months - a time span that also saw Molina release a solo album in 2006, called Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go.
Even Molina seems impressed by what he has accomplished, openly wondering how he'll be able to follow up something so substantial as a box set. "I really sort of set myself up an interesting trap by putting out a project like this," he says. The Sojourner project started out with the Nashville Moon session at the Chicago studio of respected alternative rock producer Steve Albini. And while Molina initially thought the session might produce the next Magnolia Electric Co. CD, he soon realized it would be part of something far bigger, as he continued to turn out songs that seemed to belong together.
Eventually, a framework for Sojourner began to take shape with each of the three full-length CDs showcasing Molina's music in a different way. "It's really the first time, I think, that I'm getting close to the way that I want to present the music, where it shows all of the different ways that I'm happy doing this kind of music," Molina says. "I like to perform with just guitar and voice or just piano and voice. I like the more traditional country elements sometimes, and then I also like the more abstract and psychedelic and sort of gray areas that I explore on Black Ram."
The Nashville Moon CD was an attempt to capture the live sound of Magnolia Electric Co. by recording the songs immediately following a summer 2005 tour. "More than 90 percent of that material was music we took on the road," Molina says of the songs, which were recorded live in the studio, complete with his vocals. "We toured extensively for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I really had grown to appreciate the arrangements as they stood. To me, it was really important to get into the studio as soon as that tour ended, so we could have the closest interpretations to the live performances as we could get."
This live-in-the-studio recording approach on Nashville Moon captures a good bit of the live Magnolia Electric Co. experience, while unveiling such first-rate tracks such as "Montgomery," "Lonesome Valley" and "Hammer Down" that showcase the group's sweetly burnished country rock sound (think Harvest-styled Neil Young or Son Volt as reference points).
Where Albini served essentially as a recording engineer, simply documenting the performances by Magnolia Electric Co. in his studio, Lowery was involved on a deeper level in the recordings that emerge on Black Ram - including being one of the musicians who plays on the songs.
"I would call him more of a 'producer' because he took my idea to come to a studio to work with musicians I had never played with before, that I'd never met before, and basically write in the studio a record," Molina says. "So David was instrumental in getting me musicians who were very open to working on the fly, musicians who were open to changing things even if they felt like what they played was really successful, just try it again from a totally different angle."
Black Ram offers some of the most intriguing music on Sojourner, as the disc moves from the atmospheric touches of "Will-O-The Wisp" to the stark and bold rock of "What's Broken Becomes Better," and then from "In The Human World" to desolate piano tune "The Old Horizon."
When recording the Shohola CD, Molina followed an approach he likes to use to inject an element of risk into recording solo. Essentially, he takes an already completed song and forces himself to try a totally untested approach when he records it. "Like, I'll maybe have written the song on dulcimer, but then I'll just force myself to record it on a guitar, even though I haven't totally changed the arrangement and I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it," he says. "So when I do these recordings, every sort of second is truly dangerous because I'm not exactly sure how the vocal melody is going to land… I put all of these challenges up for myself when I'm doing the solo recording.
"I think lyrically that session is very strong," Molina says. "I think it's a lot of challenging material, personally challenging material."
For the most part, the sparse setting of Shohola works just fine, as songs like "The Spell," "Steady Now" and "Night Country" boast vocal melodies that stand strong in the austere and intimate solo setting.
The Sun Sessions EP contains only four songs, but it represents a special moment for Magnolia Electric Co. On a tour stop in Memphis, Molina arranged for Magnolia Electric Co. to play a gig in exchange for several hours of studio time at the storied Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, among others, recorded some of their early hits. Because Sun Studio operates as a museum during the daytime, it's available for recording only late at night, which for Magnolia Electric Co. meant a midnight studio booking.
"We came up with an EP worth of tunes that I think are very strong, and I think that we got more than what we would have ever anticipated," Molina says. "I think we all left there feeling like we had really done something special."
With Sojourner having arrived in stores in early August, it's no surprise to hear Molina say that the current Magnolia Electric Co. live set leans heavily on songs from the box set. But, he noted, there are fresh twists.
"The way some of the songs are presented on the box set we've tinkered with and changed around, changed the arrangements and instrumentation," Molina says. "That makes [the shows] really exciting from a musical perspective."
WHO: Magnolia Electric Co., The Watson Twins, Drakkar Sauna
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, September 22
HOW MUCH: $8 (advance), $10 (door)
Punk Rock From Another Planet
Peelander-Z's "Comic Action Punk" Returns
originally published September 19, 2007
Peelander-Z
The disciples of punk rock have always worked to capture its attitude, while some bands seemed to capture punk's antiauthoritarian stance. Few bands seem interested in capturing the sheer fun of punk. But if it's fun audiences are looking for, Peelander-Z might have something for them.
"We are from Planet Peelander… we just were flying through space and our space ship didn't work, so we landed here. Now we don't know how to get back to our planet." These are the first words heard as Flagpole interviews Peelander-Yellow, otherwise known as Kengo, the vocalist-guitarist for the New York City-based group. The bandmembers insisted on being interviewed in-character, and so it goes.
At first listen, Peelander-Z sounds like by-the-numbers punk rock, but upon closer listening, the music is smartly written, and, while still keeping with the time-honored traditions of punk, contains anthems that line up perfectly with the manic intensity of the band's live shows, which are more theatrical than those of most groups.
While other punk bands are screaming with righteous indignation about heady concepts like capitalism and societal marginalization, the men of Peelander-Z are busy worrying about their other love - professional wrestling. This creates a challenge for Peelander-Z; much like the members of The Clash, who often worried about balancing their pop songs with socially relevant themes, Peelander-Z is busy trying to reconcile love for that very earthly pursuit of play fighting with punk rock. It's a struggle that comes through in the act's music and live performances. "I love punk rock music, like MC5, The Stooges and Johnny Thunders, but we are more influenced by wrestling; people like Andre the Giant, Mil Mascaras and more Japanese wrestling," says Peelander-Yellow. "That's why we do wrestling moves on the stage. We wanted to be wrestlers, but we don't have good bodies. So we play punk rock like wrestling."
Peelander-Z's live show is not only an ideological battle of arm-bars and barre chords; it's also a chance for the band to move a bit further down the road from your standard punk rock shows. Audiences are treated to something closer to GWAR than The Buzzcocks. As a practitioner of what the band calls "Japanese comic action-punk," Peelander-Z is known more for its stage show, which usually features a Jack Kirby-style Space Opera as well as music. While that may be a burden for some bands, Peelander-Yellow thinks it's a good thing. In fact, it could mean his band's survival. "We never eat food, we eat everybody's smile," he says. "That's why we do comic punk. We need everybody to come to our shows and to have a good time so that we can eat. Humans eat food, our band is not human. We have to get energy from everybody. That's why we do the human bowling [onstage]. We don't understand it because we aren't human."
But it's not just the stage show that keeps the fans coming back. According to Peelander-Yellow, the band has built in teen-idol-like quality. "Peelander-Red has long hair that is like tentacles, and he is super kinky. He is an 8th-level sexy hunter."
Nonsensical qualities aside, it's the rampant pop culture and lost-in-translation asides that endear Peelander-Z to its audiences. Veterans of more than 150 live shows a year, the bandmembers have taken their refraction of Japanese and American culture and turned it into an art-form. It's the New York Dolls fighting Mothra at Wrestlemania, and it's a winningly versatile formula. "Because we play punk rock, and because we get energy from our audiences, we are able to play with any style of band," says Peelander-Yellow.
This fall, the band's U.S. tour will culminate with an appearance with Kaiju Big Battel, a Boston-based performance art group that combines Peelander-Z's love for professional wrestling with a Godzilla film aesthetic. "We are so excited to play the Big Battel. Hopefully, they will let us try our moves, and help us find our way home," says Peelander-Yellow.
Finding the way home is Peelander-Z's latest cause. According to Peelander-Yellow, finding a way back to their home planet is the entire reason for their tour: "That's why we tour; we are always looking for how we can get back to our planet."
So while returning home may be in the cards for Peelander-Z in the future, right now audiences can help feed the band (smiles, remember?) by catching its live shows. "We want everyone to come see us, because their smiles and their energy make Peelander-Z stronger, and help make this planet happier," says Peelander-Yellow.
So while some call Peelander-Z's career thus far brilliant marketing, and others call it a stage show in place of any actual discernible talent, the Peelanders prefer to call what they are doing a vehicle for making people happy, and that's a good thing, right?
And what is with those manga-style costumes? "These are not costumes," says Peelander Yellow. "This is our skin, because we are not human beings." Right.
WHO: Peelander-Z, The Captains, The Emeralds
WHERE: Tasty World
WHEN: Friday, September 21
HOW MUCH: $6
Do Come Hear Cheer
Toronto Post-Rock Act Do Make Say Think Brings The Volume
originally published September 19, 2007
Do Make Say Think
The age of post-rock, that epic swirl of guitars and noise, in some ways has passed into the annals of history. But still it soldiers on. Though no longer the darling of the music media, it still pops the mainstream bubble from time to time, and its veterans continue to draw large numbers of faithful fans. Explosions in the Sky scores a weekly prime-time TV show. Mogwai is churning out soundtracks to fairly large-scale films. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is still on hiatus, and collaborating with Vic Chesnutt.
A genre that took the tried-and-true mechanisms of indie rock and molded them into big graceful slabs of cinematic drama, post-rock exploded into the public consciousness in the late '90s. Do Make Say Think was there in the salad days and continues to gradually hone its sound into tighter and sharper pieces of widescreen shrapnel, condensing the genre's tendency to sprawl a single track across an entire LP side without losing an ounce of emotional heft. The band has always strayed to the rockier side of the hyphen, with loose jazz underpinnings, but it's been the balance between the rock and the post that's most consistently impressive. The album Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn was the culmination of everything mesmerizing about the sound, and when it dropped in 2003, the genre was just beginning to need a boost. Sort of a meeting of Tortoise's TNT and Mogwai's Young Team - except better than both - the record firmly squeezed in beside Godspeed's second album in the hearts of fans.
In February of this year, You, You're a History in Rust practically tiptoed into record stores. Perhaps this was simply due to the nearly four years since Winter Hymn; or maybe it's that Canadian post-rock just doesn't sell magazines anymore. Aren't you a little sick of our northern neighbors trumping us? But the album is brilliant all the same, sounding a bit like a compendium of DMST's discography while subtly paring down the grandeur - and not so subtly featuring guest vocalists. It was inevitable, what with several members moonlighting in Broken Social Scene.
It's a fairly common assessment that Winter Hymn was the album that saw the potential of a truly great band reach fruition, and it's always interesting to hear the following release. The judgment is thus unfair much of the time, and the band's multi-instrumentalist Ohad Benchetrit agrees.
"I really do feel that Winter Hymn was the point where we fully realized our sound," says Benchetrit, "and then after that we said, 'Well, what do we do now?' We made an effort with this album to do what we love but to explore things we've done in projects outside of the band. An effort not to repeat ourselves, but we are what we are. Some things were easy, others not so much. We'd never experimented with vocals before, and we enjoyed that immensely. We just wanted History in Rust to be a continuation of our sound without sacrificing what we want to do and without making the same record again."
Of the Canadian sensations that stormed our nation a few years back, Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade are three huge examples of fresh young bands that sprang fully formed from the loins of what seemed, in a Yankee's eyes, a secret scene. Being Canadian, Do Make Say Think has been in a somewhat unique position of being doubly "trendy." Now that both the Canadian and post-rock surges of newsworthy global awareness have tapered off, Benchetrit says the quieter life is no problem.
"I think the same thing I've always thought about that," he says. "Music comes from everywhere; it's so rare that anyone anywhere does anything truly unique. We went through this twice, with the rise and fall of post-rock, the influence of Constellation [Records, in Montreal], the hugeness of Godspeed.
"Then there was a second wave, a bigger one, mostly centering on Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene. The latter was more of a firsthand experience for us, of course. I think it's a coincidence that these bands were Canadian. Perhaps the scene was perceived to exist partly because focus had shifted there due to these bands. It was a timing thing."
The quiet/ loud dynamics of post-rock have become cliché over the past several years to the point where it's often more admirable if a band avoids it. Do Make Say Think certainly employs this drama, but in a way where it's not so overbearing and obvious. This is yet another of the band's strengths. The quietly building passages of development leading to big epic surges of release and climax are inherent in the genre - but you could say the same thing about most media. Films and books require tension-building and release just as much.
"We feel the same, that's it's become very cliché to keep doing the loud/ soft, loud /soft," says Benchetrit. "So we made an effort not to be so typical on the new record, but that goes back to not wanting to repeat our own selves. But there's nothing like that feeling when everyone's hitting the crescendo together - that's powerful and I'll always enjoy that. The idea really is to figure out a way to achieve that epic sense without resorting to the same tricks. We wanted the big surge without simply making the guitar get louder."
The band has come a long way since its early days. As Do Make Say Think's vision has clarified, so has the live show. One could debate the merits of seeing a one-time-only performance, a personal experience versus reproductions of album tracks. But when a band's albums are this explosively beautiful, with such a inimitable grasp of composition, it's really no question after all.
WHO: Do Make Say Think, Ham1
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Friday, September 21
HOW MUCH: $10 (advance), $12 (door)
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