Haw River Ballroom

From the Desk of Craig Finn

 

Hey,

 

I just got off the phone with Jake Ewald. He says hello.

 

I called him to tell him I’ve been digging the new Slaughter Beach Dog album he’d sent me. I’d been playing it around the house a lot, and had a question about it. He picked up on the first ring and told me that it’s called Crying Laughing Waving Smiling and that it’s going to come out on September 22nd on Lame-O Records. That wasn’t really my question, but I guess it’s good to know.

 

I actually called to ask him if his van really got stolen. He mentions it in one of my favorite songs on the record, called “Engine”. I’ve been a fan of Slaughter Beach Dog for a little while now, and I know that Jake can tell a fantastic story, though I also know a great storyteller can stretch the truth. But Jake said his van really did get stolen in 2020, right at the top of the pandemic.

 

It’s also true that just a little while later he moved from Philadelphia, where he’d been living for a decade, to a house in the Poconos. Once there, he found he had less distraction and a calmer mind. He started going for walks and listening to music. He found some new appreciation for the “old guys”, as he said on the phone- Neil Young, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, those types. Personally, I’d call them the “classic guys”, but I’m a bit older so I’m probably somewhat defensive about age.

 

Anyways, to me it seems like some of this might have led to an old school approach to making a record. In July 2022, the whole Slaughter Beach, Dog band (Jake, Zach, Ian, Adam, Logan) gathered at their long time studio The Metal Shop back in Philly with a bunch of songs Jake had written over the past two years. Jake would show them a new song, singing and playing an acoustic guitar, and then the band would all play what they were hearing for the song. Classic, human, and not overthought.

 

They’d talked before entering the studio about this approach: emphasising the instinctual, not being afraid, listening to each other. The band caught fire. They captured fifteen songs in the first five days. The priority throughout was serving the song. I’ve been listening for days now. I can tell you these songs got served.
There’s beautiful space in everything. It’s patient and aware.

 

I’ve always admired Jake’s eye for detail, and it’s on full display here. It’s an album filled with gorgeous imagery and vivid worlds are built within each song. I see it all. He careens around the country (New Jersey, Baton Rouge, San Antonio, Florida, Georgia) and engages his tastebuds (spinach, cheddar, caviar, buttercream, margaritas). He’s tender in bars and funny in cars. And vice versa. Most impressively to me, he consistently finds the divine and sacred in the everyday: church pews in a diner, toast bearing the image of Christ.

 

It’s my opinion that every record is about growing up- we all have to get a little older before we make the next one. But Crying Laughing Waving Smiling examines a particular weightlessness that is part of spreading wings, putting down roots, trying to grab a hold of something. This is how it feels when you’re making the moves that you make while becoming the person that you’re going to be.

 

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It was the silence as much as the disease that proved so unsettling. The world had gone inside, underground, taking with it some of its more destructive aspects. The clean and clear air in major cities was a jarring reminder of the airborne rot we had grown used to. Stuck indoors, we went stir crazy, imagined new worlds, dystopian worlds, apocalypses of the small and large variety. There were viral social media stories, most of them fake, about animals reoccupying cities, dolphins taking back the canals of Venice, elephants getting drunk in abandoned Chinese corn wine distilleries and passing out in tea gardens . In those first fearful days of the pandemic, we wrote ourselves out of existence and imagined what the world would be like without us. We missed the noise; we carried it inside us. We tried to find melody in the madness.

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Gareth Liddiard, frontman for the Aussie band with a name perfectly suited to the times, was like the rest of us in feeling the malaise. On not writing any new songs for the first six months of the global shutdown, he says, “Why would I? Everything seemed pointless.” Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air, what the band calls “give-a-fuck fatigue.” A Laughing Death in Meatspace and Braindrops, Tropical Fuck Storm’s 2018 and 2019 records, probed the destructive force of consumerist culture, the imperialistic reaches of the United States, the threat posed by a warming planet. The band wedded a brave new worldview to an ever lively acid punk sound. Which made you sometimes despair. While still wanting to dance.

Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic. Over the last five years, you didn’t have to be conspiratorial to see the conspiracies everywhere you turned; and Liddiard, Fiona Kitschin, Erica Dunn, and Lauren Hammel, the Tropical Fuck Storm collective, know how to make friends with the strange. They invite our paranoia and fatigue. “It’s a permanent state,” Liddiard sings, “war made the State, the State made war, what’s the point of worrying ’bout it anymore?” The band chronicles weird adventures in statecraft and surveillance, ponders the global infatuation with resurgent fascisms. Tropical Fuck Storm shines an incandescent light on a world in which corporate media, bad-faith leaders, and charismatics of all stripes lose the ability to recognize their own deceptiveness.

At times we’re tempted to call Deep States a protest album, though it’s not, quite. The band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the didactic mode. “We make pop records,” Liddiard says, “that don’t deny we’re all in a bit of trouble here.” But Tropical Fuck Storm does their preaching on the sly, always cognizant of the fact they are making pop music, after all, no matter how avant-garde or “out there” it gets. Deep States comes complete with Q drops, nods to the January 6 th Capitol Riot, a riff on pizzagate, MAGAs squaring off with Antifas, waterboarded Martians, dangerous cults from Heaven’s Gate to The Shining Path and, not to be outdone, Romeo agents who bed us at night only to betray us by morning.

 

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For Beginners: The Best of M. Ward is a collection for M. Ward fans of any vintage. Gathering together 14 tracks from across his Merge Records discography, including the newly recorded song “Cry,” For Beginners is both a primer and a mixtape of favorites sequenced in a way that gives them new life.

 

Beginning with “Chinese Translation” and “Poison Cup” from 2006’s Post-War, For Beginners drops in on Ward as he expands his prowess in the studio. His singular cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” from 2003’s Transfiguration of Vincent, breaks out into the exuberant “Never Had Nobody Like You” from 2009’s Hold Time. Rather than the neat evolutionary line suggested by a chronological arrangement, what holds For Beginners together is Ward’s impeccable skill as a songwriter, which remains in focus as his sound expands from low-fi home recordings to electric, radio-ready stompers.

Serendipitously timed for release during Merge Records’ 35- year anniversary, this celebration of one of the label’s most beloved artists includes “Cry”—his first new recording on Merge since 2018—a stripped-down cover of the Godley & Creme pop classic featuring Melbourne, Australia’s Folk Bitch Trio.

 

M. Ward on “Cry”:

“Cry” was recorded in a Tasmanian modern art museum called MONA. I sat at the end of a long hallway a few feet away from Anselm Kiefer’s sculpture of a 20-foot-high stack of lead books, and standing to my left and right around a single microphone were Melbourne’s Folk Bitch Trio; we rehearsed and recorded “Cry” in about 30 minutes. A pleasure to add this song to a collection of some of my favorite memories of music-making during the first decade of record-creating with my friends at Merge.

 

The song is the perfect capstone for a collection of this nature, summing up much of Ward’s power as a musician: the richness he’s capable of achieving in sparse recordings, his knack for collaboration, and his ability to see through to the soul of a meticulously crafted pop song—as much a means of looking forward to what’s to come of his own work as it is a callback to his past.

 

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For over two decades, Atmosphere has maintained a course of rigorous output, releasing over two dozen studio albums, EP's and collaborative side projects in as many years. In that time, the venerated duo have built a legacy out of bringing honesty, humility and vulnerability to the forefront of their music, continually challenging themselves to evolve without straying too far from their roots. Slug has proven masterful at storytelling and writing compelling narratives, leaving a trail of his own influence while paying homage to the rappers and songwriters that helped shape him. Ant has skillfully molded the soundtracks with inspiration from soul, funk, rock, reggae, and the wizardry of hip-hop's pioneering DJ's and producers, creating his own trademark sounds while providing the pulse for songs about life, love, stress and setbacks. At its essence, Atmosphere has been a musical shepherd, and with each new album comes a new journey as they guide generations of listeners through this thing called life.

 

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a string of albums from 1997-2002 widely recognized as redefining what protest music can be, where longform instrumental chamber rock compositions of immense feeling and power serve as soundtracks to late capitalist alienation and resistance. The band’s first four releases—especially F#A#∞ (1997) and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000)—are variously regarded as classics of the era and genre. Godspeed's legendary live performances, featuring multiple 16mm projectors beaming a collage of overlapping analog film loops and reels—along with the distinctive iconography, imagery and tactility of the band's album artwork and physical LP packages— further defines the sui generis aesthetic substance, ethos and mythos of this group. GY!BE has issued two official band photos in its 25-year existence (the second, below, a 2010 recreation of the first from 1997) and has done a half-dozen collectively-answered written interviews over that same span. The band has never had a website or social media accounts. It has never made a video. Few rock bands in our 21st century have been as steadfast in trying to let the work speak for itself and maintaining simple rules about minimising participation in cultures of personality, exposure, access, commodification or co-optation.

Following a seven-year hiatus that began in 2003, Godspeed returned to the stage in December 2010 (curating the UK festival All Tomorrow’s Parties) and the band’s post-reunion period has now lasted over a decade, marked by hundreds of sold-out live shows and three additional albums, all of which have been met with high acclaim.

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! – the band’s fourth post-reunion album (and eighth overall) – is out 02 April 2021.

“What's political music? All music is political, right? You either make music that pleases the king and his court, or you make music for the serfs outside the walls. It's what music (and culture) is for, right? To distract or confront, or both at the same time? A thing a lot of people got wrong about us – when we did it the first time, a whole lot of what we were about was joy. We tried to make heavy music, joyously. Times were heavy but the party line was everything was OK. There were a lot of bands that reacted to that by making moaning ‘heavy’ music that rang false. We hated that music, we hated that privileging of individual angst, we wanted to make music like Ornette's Friends and Neighbours, a joyous, difficult noise that acknowledged the current predicament but dismissed it at the same time. A music about all of us together or not at all. We hated that we got characterised as a bummer thing. But we knew that was other people's baggage. For us every tune started with the blues but pointed to heaven near the end, because how could you find heaven without acknowledging the current blues, right?” The Guardian, October 2012

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This is a seated show.

 

 

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