There are still tons of shows left this weekend as part of CMJ, so go check out some new bands and dance with somebody! Here’s some inspiration.
Shout out to my boy Burke for getting this song in my head this morning.
Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance with Somebody:
If you want to hang out with us tonight, come check out Beast and Red Wire Black Wire for the AM Only Showcase at The Studio at Webster Hall! RWBW just got back from being on tour and are celebrating the release of their great new record Robots & Roses, out now on Tough Customer Records, so it should be a fun time.
The CMJ 2009 Music Marathon & Film Festival starts today in NYC. Since we are going to be all over the city covering the best of CMJ this week, the JOTD feature will be on a brief pause, resuming next week. In lieu of the full JOTD, here is a song from one of the bands I am most excited to see this week, who we wrote about back in early September, The xx.
Saturday night Justin Vernon of Bon Iver sat down and talked with New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones at Stage 37. The event, part of this year’s New Yorker Festival, basically consisted of Sasha interviewing Justin about the singer’s home state of Wisconsin where he recorded For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007, followed by a brief four song acoustic set. It was a really tender, intimate performance, and given that Vernon confirmed at the show multiple times that Bon Iver was taking a hiatus for an undetermined amount of time, a certain cathartic overtone prevailed throughout the evening.
I can’t be sure, but at the show he said this song was called “Michican’t,” although I can’t seem to find any reference to that title online. Oh well. He boldly pronounced that he “will never play this song again,” so luckily someone in the audience was taping and has put it up on YouTube.
Apparently (according to the Times article posted today), if you give the Rev. Henry Willenborg (or many other Roman Catholic priests) one more drink… then he might make sexual advances at a spirituality retreat that lead you to break off your marriage, have his baby, and then get into a decades-long struggle with the Franciscan higher ups over child support and confidentiality agreements! What ever happened to priestly celibacy? As if the Catholic Church hasn’t had enough sex scandals. This is getting into R. Kelly-level territory. But seriously, I went to a middle school run by Franciscan nuns, and don’t find this funny one bit. Keep it in your pants, dogg.
But it’s Friday night (“and I [am] feeling alright”). So you know what is funny and also sort of relevant? This video of “One More Drink” from Ludacris and T-Pain (with an appearance by Katt Williams). If this is a “Luda Service Announcement,” I look forward to more of those and less of these.
If you were watching/reading basically any major news outlet today, then you’ll already be familiar with this “balloon boy” fiasco that has captured the nation’s attention. After local authorities and others spent hours searching for Falcon Heene and tracking the flight path of the giant helium balloon that was “accidentally” released while his brothers “thought” Falcon was inside one of its compartments, it turns out that the kid was just hiding in his garage the whole time. How do the police possibly think that this was a genuine mix-up and not a media stunt? Here are some facts that seem to give it away as a hoax to me:
1) Brian Stelter, who covers the television industry for the New York Times, reports that immediately after the Heene family’s experimental balloon lifted into the air, possibly carrying a six-year-old child, his father Richard Heene called Channel 9, KUSA, the NBC affiliate in Denver, to enlist its help in finding his son;
2) Falcon’s parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, were featured on the 100th episode of ABC’s prime-time program “Wife Swap” in March 2009 because of the popularity of their three boys from their FIRST appearance on “Wife Swap;” and
3) In an interview with CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Falcon said he heard his parents call for him from the garage. When asked by his father on-air why he didn’t respond, the boy replied, “You guys said we did this for the show.”
Come on cops. Get it together over there!
There seems to be an inverse relationship between how much this family sucks and how much this song, from Neutral Milk Hotel’s triumphant second album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998), rules (sorry, Falcon, you’re a cute kid but your dad seems “appall[ingly]” douche-y). So listen up and just remember that there are some people in this world who are famous for reasons other than being attention whores, like for making great records.
Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Aeroplane Over The Sea:
Today, in a preview of the Times Magazinearticle that will be distributed this weekend, the New York Times website posted a piece about General Stanley A. McChrystal, who has recently made national headlines rather frequently with the release of memos and other comments that detail a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. As the Times explains: “McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men. And that’s if it succeeds.”
One band that’s asking some relevant questions – like “Do You Have a Strategy?” – is Brooklyn’s Uninhabitable Mansions, which features Robbie Guertin and Tyler Sargent of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Annie Hart of Au Revoir Simone, along with Chris Diken and Doug Marvin, who just recently replaced Danny Comer as the group’s drummer (good luck in medical school!). Taking cues from all of the various main groups surrounding this “side-project supergroup” (allow me to introduce a new phrase), UM has managed to put together an impressive collection of songs here that retains some of the unpolished pop sensibility of CYHSY and layers on some nice additional instrumentation. You can preview a bunch of tracks from their upcoming full-length, Nature Is a Taker, streaming on their official website and available for digital purchase now, and also learn a lot more about the band/art collective.
Uninhabitable Mansions is playing at Cake Shop tonight as part of their Mixer series. Doors open at 7:00 PM, with UM playing around 8:00. So go check them out! But first listen to today’s jam “Do You Have a Strategy?” streaming below, from Nature Is a Taker.
East Village to Brooklyn 