Monthly Archives: August 2007

Opposites might attract, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a clean fusion. Take Brighton’s Cat The Dog; a band borne out of natural aggression. Even their name comes inspired by violence, the logic going that if a cat and a dog were to exist in the same body, the beast would be a craven, violent thing, thrown together from opposite worlds: the feline hunter and the passive canine together, making a monster so delectable that it shouldn’t really exist.

Cat The Dog – the band that is – shouldn’t really make sense themselves. Pungent desert rock in the same body as spring-loaded new wave; urban paranoia underpinning occult psychedelics; these four young riders on the storm make new magic from old spells; and even they seem to be scared of what they seem to be about to achieve. With ingredients stretching from Television and New York Dolls to Kings of Leon and Queens of the Stone Age to Beach Boys and Beatles to The Pretty Things and The Stones to Cheap Trick and The Cars; together they light a sonic touchpaper and everyone else stands well back. The chain that led to Cat The Dog stretches throughout rock’n’roll time and space, and, in the physical realm, from Vancouver to Brighton. “We just beat the songs to death really,” says Chris Mellion, “and it rubs off on us.”

Inspired by the pounding, primal assault of Weezer’s Pinkerton , Nirvana’s In Utero , and Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape, Manchester Orchestra has created its own version of what a classic rock album should sound like, complete with fiercely beautiful melodies, shifting guitar and keyboard textures, loud/soft dynamics, and an urgency in each band member’s performance, especially Hull’s cathartic vocals.

The drama of ‘Mean Everything To Nothing’ is magnified by the fact that the album’s first six songs bleed into one another without stopping. The breakneck pace is both exhilarating and exhausting, which Hull says was intentional. “I like the fact that there isn’t a chance during the first six songs to say anything if you’re listening to it with somebody. It’s seamless. We did that to emphasize that there are two halves to the album.” The first half is a brooding tale of teenage angst and anger — the confusion and disillusionment of growing up and becoming an adult. The second half is about redemption and an overall re-evaluation of the self. It’s about Hull beginning to realize in his own words “that things are not ok, I am not ok, and there’s a beauty in that — a calming, a forgiveness,” he says.

A fully realized album, ‘Mean Everything To Nothing’ is the sound of a band coming into its own after spending 300 days on the road in support of their debut album, 2007’s ‘I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child’ — a coming-of-age chronicle that expressed the then 19-year-old Hull’s hopes and aspirations as he sought spiritual knowledge. Virgin was an attention-getting shot across the bow that Rolling Stone praised as “expansive in scope and rich in texture, even while remaining lyrically focused on small moments of revelation” and the New York Times called “music to swoon to.”

The band’s chemistry is palpable on ‘Mean Everything To Nothing’ , perhaps because, after more than a year of touring with such artists as Kings of Leon, Brand New, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Say Anything, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, as well as performing their own headlining shows, Manchester Orchestra has become a powerful and well-oiled machine. “The touring made us so incredibly tight on all levels,” Hull says, “so there was no pride involved if someone said, ‘No that doesn’t work, don’t do that.’ No one got their feelings hurt because we were all dedicated to the same thing — making the best record we could.”

Love Is All members Josephine, Nicholaus, and Markus spent a long time in indie pop band Girlfrendo. When the band split no one wanted to stop playing.  Their buddy Johan was called in to play on a 7” for a Swedish label called Dolores.  Love is All’s first single, “Lost Thrills,” was released in an ambitious pressing of 300. Fredrik Eriksson had seen the band a few times and asked if he could play saxophone.  Everyone agreed.  Love is All was officially born.

The band began to write.  They experimented with different directions for their sound, but the answer was presented to them in one whirlwind day, when they wrote and recorded “Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up,” and the Love is All sound was discovered – “It was made in one breath and recorded in one take a couple hours later.” explains Nicholaus.  Writing was followed by recording, a very logical step for most bands.  Love is All and record label What’s Your Rupture? were keen on asking Woodie Taylor to produce.  Woodie had done some work with Lee Perry and drummed with Morrissey and the Meteors.  Unfortunately, no one had the money to go over to England or bring Woddie and all his echo boxes to Sweden…. so the band recorded three songs in about three hours on a small 8 track bleeding with noise and hiss and mailed them to Woodie’s lovely Windsor estate.  Woodie added reverb and some top secret tricks…we really can’t tell.

While other new bands were dropping mp3’s all over the internet, Love is All decided to take a more traditional, more punk rock approach to getting their music heard – they made four 7”s before ever making a full-length, the covers of which were hand silk-screened in Kevin Pederson’s kitchen, and sent them to independent radio stations like WFMU who instantly championed their songs.  In fact, most of the people who first helped get the band’s name out there happened upon them by sheer coincidence.  NME made “Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up” Single of the Week after Sean Forbes, the infamous buyer at the Rough Trade Shop in London, realized he received ten copies more than he should have and thought some journalists should hear them immediately.  Two weeks after being made Single of the Week, the band received a call from John Peel to fly to London to record a legendary Peel Session.

And so they decided it was time to make a record, which they called ‘Nine Times That Same Song’.  Songs on the album combine elements of many different genres – dance punk, Riot Grrrl, No Wave, indie pop – and fuse them into one wholly unique thing, the inevitable conclusion of a band whose influences lie all over the map.  “Josephine loves old indie punk bands like Kleenex and X-Ray Spex, I’m really into Can, Brian Eno, The Kinks, Jonathan Richman, Slayer… one record I think we all like is the first Roxy Music album!” says Markus.  Nicholaus says simply, “I guess we influenced each other a lot.”

The album spread like a wildfire upon release, popping up all over the internet and into the hands of a few journalists eager to hear the band that magically had a Peel Session before an album.  Before long, they were being written about in the New York Times, Spin and landed on the cover of The Fader, solely by word-of-mouth and a true love of the band’s songs.  When it was announced that the band would be playing a few US shows, among them 2006’s SXSW festival, a frenzy broke out amongst music fans, resulting in packed, sold-out shows throughout Texas, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, where more than one fan crowd surfed and everyone sang along on the top of their lungs.  This is the reaction a good dose of love will inspire.  Especially when it’s from Love is All.

The Hold Steady was born out of some loose talk in Brooklyn in 2002. Singer Craig Flynn was thirty-one years old, and the other dudes were about the same age. Their concept was to start a straight rock band, with low aspirations. Just local shows, no touring, and most likely, no real records. They practiced for a while and then played their first show in January 2003 at North Six, in Williamsburg.

The show went well. It reminded the guys in the band, all veterans of hard luck bands, that music can be fun. They played their second show in Baltimore, and it sort of becomes a blur after that. They quickly broke their own rules about no touring and records, and released three records in three years. They lost one member and added two others. 2006’s ‘Boys & Girls in America’, was successful enough to get them in a bunch of magazines and take The Hold Steady pretty much around the world.