I’ll begin with a brief warning. You will probably not have fun listening to Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. This is not dancing music. This is not driving-down-the-highway music. This is not makeover montage music. Some people wouldn’t even consider the album to be music at all. The piece does what good music is supposed to do, however. It invokes an emotional response in its audience. It might not be overwhelming joy or throatcrushing rage, but Eno has created the perfect musical embodiment of peace and calm.

Music for Airports contains four tracks, titled 1/1, 2/1, 1/2 and 2/2 respectively (each song was a whole side of the original two LP set). Each track features different instruments – from pianos to wordless vocals to synthesizers – but they all have the same stylistic feel. The best way I can describe it is by asking you to imagine you are on an airplane. You’ve taken off without problem, and the plane is flying low enough that you can see the rolling hills and tiny buildings below. You are enveloped in an immense space – drawn into the landscape curving and twisting underneath you. You have no idea what’s going to appear next on the horizon of your view, but you anticipate each moment. That’s the feeling I get while listening to this CD. The songs meander through harmonies to notes just out of reach. The notes are faded enough that you have to strain to catch everything that’s going on. It tempts you, draws you inside its circular movements, and then begins to expand around you.

For a time as stressful as now, with all your big tests and projects right around the corner, Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is just what you need to sit, relax and let your mind be calm for a while. Check out part of the fantastic first track (the real one’s sixteen minutes long) and let us know what you think in the comments!

Written by Dan Raby

There’s a story that I heard growing up in North Carolina about a spot known as the “Devil’s Tramping Ground.” This is a place where no trees grow. Animals avoid going near it out of fear of something. Local legend says that this is the place where the Devil appears to spread sin throughout the world. As a kid I loved these kinds of stories. I devoured all the “TRUE GHOST TALES” books at my library when my parents weren’t looking and stayed up all night with my head under my sheets hiding from Satan and ghosts and other demonic nightmares of my imagination.

As I grew older my love of what I now know is Southern gothic never left me. It’s probably the primal nature of good vs. evil – the known vs. the unknown – that keeps me coming back to stuff like Night of the Hunter and the works of William Faulkner. They’re steeped in old-time religion but underneath the church floorboards is something horrifying writhing and waiting to attack.

In his song “The Mistress Witch of McClure (Or, The Mind That Knows Itself)” Sufjan Stevens creates his own version of Southern Gothic. In a scant three-and-a-half minutes Sufjan tells the frightening tale of a family dealing with supernatural revenge. The plot as I see it is this: Three ordinary kids decide to follow their dad into a place they’ve never been before. There they find a woman chained to a bed (their mother maybe?) and try to flee. Unfortunately their father has already shut and locked the door behind him and they are trapped with this woman. They are freed by their father but it is too late – either a curse or the realization that they’re father “left us now for dead” causes the family to splinter and descend into madness. At the end only Sufjan’s narrator character is left with his sanity, shivering from the cold and dragging his babbling brother through the snow to get away from their clearly disturbed, violent, naked father

It sounds horrible doesn’t it? Well if you hear it in the context of the song it doesn’t sound that bad. Sufjan uses minimal accompaniment – only two guitars, vocal harmonies and a trumpet – to make the song sound sweet. It’s only when you really pay attention to the lyrics you discover it’s dark, dark, dark true nature. It’s a truly fascinating and engrossing story punctuated with a beautiful score.

Of course, my interpretation could be completely wrong. Listen to it, and if you feel like I’m reading way, way too much into the lyrics let me know in the comments.

Written by Dan Raby

Here at the station we were stoked to be making campus connections with another creative body of the student media board at AU, AmWord. In their second issue of the semester, reporter for AmWord Nico Jansen spent time interviewing our DJs and General Manager Dan Raby, and wrote an article we think describes our station and DJs pretty well. Below is the front cover and piece from the November 2010 issue. Click to zoom in and read. Thanks AmWord!”

Newly Subpop’d signees Jaill released their album “That’s How We Burn” in July to moderate acclaim. Please do not be thrown off by the extra “L” and judge them for the worst like— you will be doing yourself a disservice. Among the teaming multitudes of mediocre “psych-pop” outfits, Jaill delivers incessantly catchy and delightfully murky guitar-driven songs that grab you by the hair and give you the ultimatum to dance. I have been 30 minutes late to class two (2) times because I could not stop “rocking out” to this album. I put those quotation marks to seem like I was ironically using the phrase “rocking out”, but that is honestly what happened.

Jaill’s set at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn was short, but the guitars and two (2!) basses were oh-so-tight, and my prescription was filled, for drum fills, that is. Get it? After three days of black leather jackets it was emotionally cleansing to see all the members of the band were wearing jeans and t-shirts. Lead singer Vincent Kircher had a delightful pedophile moustache and backhandedly heckled the hipsters in the crowd about their outfits, which I can always get behind.

Written by Leah Menzer

One of the greatest parts of CMJ was reading band descriptions off the official pamplet. You can just tell the interns of CMJ toiled endlessly up until the week of shows to come up with 1,300 descriptions for each of the bands. The official description of Kisses read, “Minimal dance beats propel airy tunes.”

photo by Louise Brask

Now I don’t think I can top that beautiful intern poetry. But what I can tell you is why I think Kisses are one of the up & coming indie pop bands of 2010. Not even having released an album yet, the trio of teenagers created a symphony of light indie rock with a background of ambient reverb that makes them the next Air France. Hailing from California’s LA area, you could call them ‘chillwave,’ but their west-coast influence sets them apart from the washed over bands that have been exploding in popularity over the past year.

The basement of Webster hall, The Studio, is small stage that looks it could fit no more than 100 people. Gathered around the stage that Friday night was a gaggle of about 50 onlookers, most of whom were holding notebooks, cameras, and cellphones in their hands, eager to report on the CMJ buzzband.

Kisses performed a debut set that made the crowd swoon in pure tropicalia bliss. Not only was the sound impressive, but the band’s style was also good enough to comment on. Kisses keyboardist, Zinzi Edmundson, had the cutest hairstyle: chopped, mod-style bangs. Her outfit was a full-bodied navy blue dress, sewn around the midriff and extended into skirted pleating. Her style on stage can only be paralleled to a cute french witch from the 1960s. Think Barbara Eden’s performance on the American sitcom ‘I Dream of Jeannie.’ After snooping out more about Zinzi on the internet, I found she has a blog, a gold mine, basically, of her latest fashion favorites.

Step aside Jens Lekman, boyish-faced lead singer and gutarist, Jesse Kivel, (who is also Zinzi’s boyfriend!) is the other face of the band. Onstage he held a omniscent cool that not only made him gleam rock ‘n’ roll, but also held an innocence of the kind of boy that would take you out to the malt-shop after school.

Throughout the show, Jesse had a pair of aviators that were attached on his collared shirt. Before the very last song of their 45 minute set, an audience member shouted to Jesse wondering why he wasn’t wearing them. Mr. Kivel joked around that “someone online would blog about him being an asshole if he didn’t put them on.” So, playing along, he grabbed the sunglasses and wore them for the last song. The finale in the Studio of Webster Hall had Jesse looking like a young Tom Cruise– straight out of Top Gun. At the end of their show, everyone, all 50 people, clapped in ovation. So after falling in love, it felt like the vacation was over, and I didn’t want them to go.

Their performance had a sweetness that I’ve only witnessed at a ‘The Bird and The Bee’ concert I saw at Wolf Trap freshman year. Right now they’re in their kindlings, but their songs have a catchiness and almost sunshine about them that has potential. Not to mention they are super young, and clearly ahead of other artists of their and my generation. Make them the next big indie pop band, please!

Written by Louise Brask

CMJ has lots of panels, but the one I was most excited about was called, “So You Want to be a Music Blogger: Who Cares?” Not because I want to be a music blogger, but because the panel included Matthew Perpetua, founder and sole writer of Fluxblog (www.fluxblog.org). Fluxblog is great because of Perpetua’s undying and deeply personal love for the music he writes about. What makes that website different to is that he posts not only indie flavors du-jour, but also a dazzling array of forgotten diamonds in the rough type mp3s. (I am also indebted to him forever for introducing me to the whole of DC punk god Ian Svevonious’s entire ouvre.)

Perpetua, along with the rest of the panel members (which included Strangers in Stereo/Cream Scene’s Veroinca Murtagh– and Spoon/Radiohead/Arcade Fire rep Steve Martin, and small time blog sensation Blackbird) all agreed on one thing- to blog about music, you have to love it, and you have to keep your day job. When an audience member mentioned that he had heard of people cultivating a music blog to make some quick cash on the side, without blinking, Steve Martin said, “That is the stupidest f*cking thing I have ever heard.”

The panel members also mentioned the importance of authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. Most blogs, they noted, get lost in the shuffle because they follow trends of hipness and hype when selecting which mp3s and bands to cover. They suggested developing a unique/consistent voice and taste to make your blog singular and memorable- which, I mean, duh, but very nice indeed to hear from those who truly know their stuff.

Words by Emily Lagg

On Sunday night a little bit of Montreal descended upon D.C., taking up residence at the Rock & Roll Hotel for an evening of music. First up was Little Scream, a one women show who self described herself as “Aerosmith meets Enya.” This audience member absolutely agrees, but also wants to stress that the combination somehow manifests itself in the best was possible- so don’t be afraid. While tapping her foot on a floor pedal to emit a kick drum back beat, Little Scream ripped though psychedelic guitar parts while singing in her rich voice and occasionally picking up the mini keyboard perched on the stool beside her. She ran through her set, only stopping once to tune and invite an audience member on stage to tell a joke, “Why did the hippie drown in the ocean? He was too far out!”

The great music kept going from there when Suuns took the stage. I had the chance to interview two (very awesome and super friendly) members of the band, but unfortunately the interview will only live on rehashed here, after a mishap I will blame on a trickster recorder. Suuns, who are technically pronounced ‘soons’ but definitely don’t mind if you call them ‘suns,’ (Protip – multiple pronunciations make it much harder to get sued – something they were aiming for after deciding to change their name from Zeroes) are difficult to describe on paper. The tracks on their latest album Zeroes QC aren’t necessarily confined to one genre idea, although an overall dark undulation moves along throughout. The music is brooding, surprising, noisy, part electronic, part hazy guitars, and all together different. And while live shows are always an inherently different sound than the studio album, Suuns manages to translate most every aspect of their sound live, but just in a bigger and better way. Before DC, Suuns have been on tour for about a month and a half with Land and Talk – who they also play with as the backing band – a tiring dream of getting to rock out on two sets a night, while trying to find enough time for sleep and attempting to get into Iowan casinos with Canadian IDs (the only ‘radio appropriate’ wild tour story they had so far). Zeroes QC is on rotation at WVAU, so no excuses not to check it out yourself to hear what it is really about! Check out their video for Up Past the Nursery below in the meantime.

Up last for the night was Land of Talk led by Elizabeth Powell, who started the set alone playing an acoustic version of Cloak and Cipher before being joined on stage by the Suuns boys and a back up vocalist / fierce maraca shaker. They covered plenty of territory on their latest album Cloak and Cipher while not forgetting old favorites. They even played my favorite, “The Hate I Won’t Commit,” much to my excitement, which ends in a really awesome jam-out and bass solo (but I have to be a bit negative and admit the bass wasn’t loud enough for me! Turn up the bass!).

Three wins for Montreal.

Words & Suuns Photograph by Roxanne Bublitz

I first heard Lord Huron after reviewing his music for our station and last week I got the chance to catch up with the LA-based, Michigan-born musician about a week before he headed out to New York for CMJ. Lord Huron has been making a steady amount of buzz around the indie circuit, pretty good for only having released a 3 song EP and having played only a handful of shows. His music has drawn comparisons to both Animal Collective and Fleet Foxes. Oh and his album art is too trill. Check his music (and album art) out below. -Kevin Kunitake

Lord Huron Interview by Kevin Kunitake

http://www.myspace.com/lordhuron
http://lordhuron.com/
http://twitter.com/lordhuron

The Rock & Roll Lounge
Thursdays 10am-12pm
facebook page
Show Description
The Rock & Roll Lounge is a two-hour power block chock-full of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, Heart, Chuck Berry, Lynyrd Skynrd and all the best from the 60s and 70s will take to the waves to rock your day. The show also features some of the major influences for rock, namely blues, country, Motown and R&B.

To be honest when I first heard the band’s name, the nascar-allure gave me no interest in ever listening. I’ve definitely heard too many American indie rock bands that sound too much the same, and i wasn’t into spending my night in NYC living that same story over again. Rather giving them a chance, I fortunately was dragged to their concert by other WVAU djs, particularly by the enthusiastic praises of General Manager Dan Raby prior to the show that afternoon.

Well was I ever a fool to judge a book by its cover! Their tactful performance made for a complete change of heart. A full-bodied indie backbeat of Animal Collective meets a lead singer with the thoughtfulness and clairvoyance of Ben Gibbard. The basement of the Santos Party House was p-a-c-k-e-d to the brim. CMJ passes were dangling at every other neck, roadies’ bodies ran in and out of the venue’s hallways to prepare for upcoming acts. Once Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. came onto the stage, the midwestern melodies started flowing, and the duo started playing a particularly bouncy track on their Horse Power EP, ‘Vocal Cords.’

Amidst the bustle of New York City, they turned the basement of Santos into an indie dance party. The band’s cover of “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys was definitely their golden moment of the show.

Lead singer Daniel Zott rocked the signature Dale Earnhardt Jr. Cheerios jersey that night on the Stereogun stage, and you can see him sporting the same outfit in the ‘Nothing But Our Love’ music video below.

Written by Louise Brask

Of course Screaming Females were my favorite act I saw at CMJ! The stalwart indie (four albums and not so much as a Pitchfork review) rockers played at Williamsburg Music Hall, to an appropriately packed and bouncy audience. Front woman Maria Paternoster (I hope that’s her real name– rudimentary Catholic high school Latin tells me this directly translates to Our Father) shredded and screamed with white-light ferocity through a set of both old and new songs.

Paternoster is a spine tingling awesome mixture of the the vocal athelticism of Karen O and the face-melting shredding abilities of Sleater Kinney. She wore a long loose-fitting black dress with a white Peter Pan collar that gave her a distinct Gidget/nun-like vibe that jarred deliciously with her punkish virtuoso.

Most memorable was the band’s ear ringing rendition of “Fall Asleep”, a sonically epic slow burner of a song. Give it a listen! Their last album, Castle Talk, includes this song, and is still on the rack- give it some much-deserved love!

These guys are also former Capitol Punishment performers! You cant imagine how incredibly sad it makes me to know I missed seeing them in a space as tiny as Kay Basement. Any survivors who can attest to being there, I am supremely jealous of you forever.

Written by Emily Lagg

Braids, a quartet from Montreal, are experts at the slow build up. At the small show at Arlene’s Grocery I stood entranced, a cup of poutine, in my hand, as they began to draw out their sounds. At first you could only hear the quiet bubbles and murmurs of a melody, then a bright guitar would be introduced into the mix, finally Raphaelle Standell-Preston (what a name huh?)’s voice cut through all the quiet simplicity and shook us all in the crowd out of our ambient haze. It put a powerful edge to their songs – one that worked well with the pristine melodies the other members of the band were skillfully creating. While the poutine was great (and really when is it not?) the real treat was in Braids shining mesh of instrumental beauty and blunt-yet-fitting vocals.

Here’s the song “Lemonade” with which they began their set. What do you all think?

Written by Dan Raby

Dean Wareham plays the music of Galaxie 500 (Bowery Ballroom 10/22/2010)

Galaxie 500’s career arc reads like a college rock mad lib: three Harvard students get together, record three albums beloved by critics and overlooked by everyone else, and break up within the span of five years, only to have their characteristic sound take root in modern indie music. Beach House, My Morning Jacket, The Shins, and Yo La Tengo are just a few of the bands who have been influenced by the dream pop trio’s sublime output. Those in attendance at the Bowery Ballroom last Friday got the chance to give the band the appreciation they deserved during their run from 1987 to 1991. More precisely, they had the opportunity to witness Dean Wareham – singer, songwriter, lead guitarist, and the major creative force behind Galaxie 500 – perform a entire set of Galaxie 500 songs with the help of his wife Britta Phillips on bass, and a drummer and extra guitarist to fill out the lineup and recreate the band’s distinctive indie rock-on-Quaaludes approach.

Downbeat, dreamy guitar pop may not be the sort of music that normally get fists pumping, but you wouldn’t know it from the packed Bowery Ballroom. Those in attendance were amped to see these reverb-coated gems in a live setting, and Dean Wareham was often seen with a grin, pleased, maybe, that this gorgeous music was finally getting some attention. The band kicked things off with “Flowers”, the first song off the band’s first album (and recorded with fellow Harvard classmate Conan O’Brien’s drumset), and the song was a template for much of the music to follow that night: melodic basslines and midtempo rhythms chugged along while Wareham’s vocals shifted back and forth between affectless murmurings to a yearning nasal falsetto, with the song culminating in a radiant guitar solo that seemed positively volcanic compared to the slow shuffle that preceded it. Wareham sang about his car, weather forecasts, taking acid and looking at his toes, taking acid and eating Twinkies, and staying in on the 4th of July, demonstrating his lyrical ability to mix the mundane with the bizarre. The concert also showcased Galaxie 500’s ability to take a someone else’s song and wholly incorporate it into their sound, performing covers of The Modern Lovers’ “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste”, The Rutles’ “Cheese and Onions”, and ending their set with Joy Division’s “Ceremony” – quite possibly the best Joy Division cover out there. As “Ceremony” wound down, the audience responded with thunderous applause and cheers, and Galaxie 500’s music finally received the enthusiasm that had eluded them two decades ago.

Written by Brian Waligorski

Combine the Ramones’ snot-nosed punk brattiness with MGMT’s vocal stylings and you get Dom. The quartet from Worchester, Massachusetts (this fact was constantly mentioned between songs), led by the charismatic Dom [no last name because he doesn’t want his creditors to know where he is] brashly tore through their sets with a raw intensity rarely matched at CMJ. In a world where every other act was an emotionless, noised-filled, “deep” band Dom burst in all gangly and awkward ready to blast away the audience with their sort of-stupid, sort of-clever, always-fun songs. In between sets Dom spouted out lines like “This song is called ‘Jesus’. Hail Satan!” in his nasally voice. Everything about it was so cliché and wanna-be Guns ‘n’ Roses, but somehow the enthusiasm and the crowd made it work perfectly.

I was lucky enough to see Dom twice and would jump at the chance to see them again. Here’s one of their best, “Living in America,” a tongue-in-cheek jab at flag-waving cheese rock. Check it out!

Written by Dan Raby

Over the week of October 19-23rd the WVAU Exec Board had the wonderful opportunity of going to New York City to attend the annual College Music Journal Festival (CMJ). Hundreds of industry panels and concerts were hosted by a number of venues in the city including NYU, The Bowery Ballroom, The Cake Shop, The Music Hall of Williamsburg, and Santos Party House. We got a glance into the present and future of the music industry, and we want to share our experiences via reports on the site. Over the next week expect detailed reviews and bands and industry ideas we think you should look out for in the coming year!