Ranting About Music’s (Always Un)Official Bunbury Report: Saturday 2017 Q&A

Posted on June 4, 2017 by bgibs122

The way today’s recap is going to work is that I thought of a bunch of questions yesterday. Some were preconceived, others came up as situations arose. I’m going to ask a question, and then answer it.

1. How many artists yesterday could you have confused with H&M employees?
About 3, maybe 4. San Fermin had a few members who looked like they’d know where to find something floral print in your size, Kevin Garrett has probably tried to get someone to sign up for a rewards program, and I wouldn’t be surprised if black-t-shirt-and-jeans wearer Charlie Hirsch had to get his shelf-stocking shift covered so he could play a half an hour set yesterday. Hayley Kiyoko was a maybe, and Cobi only escaped his fate by having his shirt unbuttoned, which I think is discouraged at H&M, but not outright banned.

2. Why is Saturday always the hot day?
There isn’t an answer here, I just want it on record that Saturbury is always the hottest ‘bury, except last year where it was the hottest and rainest. Speaking of which, it was supposed to rain all weekend, and instead, there’s barely been a cloud in the sky.

3. How much has the rise of online indie music distribution (free/paid streaming, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc.) impacted live music?
This is actually one I’ve been kicking around lately. Last Sunday, my girlfriend and I saw Broods, an electropop favorite of hers, play live. Broods are a duo on record who extend to a 4 piece live; they sounded great. But they had an opener named MICHL who was essentially just a guy playing slower, keyboard and 808-based jams, like digital singer-songwriter stuff. It was the kind of thing that made me think, “I’d rather just listen to dude’s SoundCloud,” which is how Kevin Garrett and others like him landed with me, too.

We’re at the point in music culture where it’s possible–not likely, but at least possible–for an artist to gain traction based on their online presence, and not every type of artist is well-equipped to handle the transition from studio act to live one. Particularly, it’s introverty singer-songwriter/producers who have trouble making the jump; they shoot for mysterious, but end up landing in uninspiring. Like, we had that yesterday with Garrett, who was a nice guy, but probably sounds better on SoundCloud.

4. Wait, did I just see a male romper?
The answer every time was no. Usually, it was just a guy with a matching shirt and shorts, although once I saw someone in an American flag onesie.

5. What did those airbag chairs look like, exactly?
Like this. Exactly like this.
6. How do you pronounce CVBZ?
I don’t actually know because I saw D.R.A.M. instead. Speaking of…

7. Is D.R.A.M. really that happy in person?
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. He interacted with the audience a bunch of times, slow jammed, brought out “Broccoli,” “Special” from Coloring Book, and “Cha Cha,” and the crowd loved every second. His smile really is that big, too. Especially on a festival day where it felt like most acts just kind of played for the sake of playing, him and Hayley Kiyoko trying and succeeding in making that connection went a long way. Also, somewhere out there is probably video of me dancing like a Charlie Brown character to “Cha Cha.”

8. Does Hayley Kiyoko have an hour of music?
She does! Granted, it felt like a stretch (Kiyoko’s glitchy, Lorde-adjacent electro-pop works best in EP size bites), but Kiyoko broke things up by talking in between songs about what they were about and what motivated her, and it worked because she sounded sincere. The crowd fed off her enthusiasm and her sincerity, and you get the feeling she means the world to her fans–hearing an unabashedly queer women sing a song like “Girls Like Girls” has to be incredibly validating. Kiyoko still feels musically like she’s at the start of her career, and while her hour this year might have felt stretched, someday, it might not be enough.

9. Does the PA on the Sawyer Point Stage play at a softer volume than “FUCK YOU” loudness?
Apparently not. I get that late dayers like D.R.A.M. and especially EDMites Pretty Lights are going to want full volume, but even early and mid schedule acts like Cobi and San Fermin were out to destroy ear drums if you got too close.

10. What’s laundry day on a Tech N9ne tour look like?
Tour manager: “Okay, we got a load of 38-waist black Dickies, and a bunch of black long-sleeved button downs size XL.”
[all overlapping]
Tech N9ne: “Oh, that’s mine.”
Tech N9ne’s hype man: “Right here.”
Tech N9ne’s DJ: “I was looking for those.”
[silence]
Hype man: “Those are definitely my clothes, though. It’s less faded than you guys’ stuff.”
DJ: “What? Fuck you, man, my clothes aren’t faded.”
Hype man: “Your clothes get more faded than half the people at the show today. Give me my damn shirts.”
Tour manager: “There’s also a ski mask in here.”
Hype man: “Oh, my bad, that’s Tech’s stuff.”

11. This question comes from Hayley Kiyoko, but “Can I swear up here?”
Yes, Hayley. The next person on the main stage after you is going to be Tech N9ne, who is going to say a lot of swear words very quickly. You can say “bitch” once.

12. Is all EDM the same?
Not at all. In fact, the parts of Pretty Lights’ set that I saw was pretty great. Granted, the closer was a remix of “All of the Lights,” which was perfect because hearing “All of the Lights” at a loud volume is a surefire success, but PL’s stuff also seemed fairly danceable, which I can’t quite say for Bassnectar, who was just loud and spazzy and overloading. Still, though, it means Bunbury’s gone 1 and 2 on EDM, which looks better than 0 and 3.

13. Why did Kevin Garrett’s drummer have a wallet on his snare drum?
Some guesses:
-As a reminder to feed the meter after the set
-In case the ice cream truck from around outside the festival came in
-He read somewhere that Ringo Starr left his wallet on his snare while recording most of The White Album
-Have you sat on a drum throne? They don’t look wallet-friendly
-As an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records

14. People who wear tails to EDM shows: Why?
No answer again, I just needed that question out in the open.

That’s all we’ve got for day 2, come back tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!

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Ranting About Music’s (Permanently Un)Official Bunbury Report: Friday 2017

Posted on June 3, 2017 by bgibs122

Bunbury’s back in Cincinnati for it’s 5th year, and as always, I’m down to see a bunch of people play in my very own city. This year will be especially nice since I’m not doing this while moving. Anyway, let’s begin.

The Upset Victory
Due to some recent problems with the, well, Ohio River’s stage, the River Stage was moved yesterday from it’s usual place here to far opposite the main Yeatman’s stage. It seems like a move that isn’t super going to work since it bottlenecks traffic between two stages in a pretty big way, especially once either one builds up a significant crowd. And also, did you ever play that old computer game Rollercoaster Tycoon? The gist of it was that you had to build an amusement park with rides and food and janitors and stuff, and it always seemed like as your park got off the ground, you realized you didn’t build the log flume or something, and so you just chucked it in the first open area and retroactively tried to make it make sense there. That’s what being at the River Stage felt like yesterday.

The upswing to this is that you can essentially stand behind the stage and still hear everything fine, which is how I heard Cincinnati group The Upset Victory. I always like hearing local rock bands at Bunbury because they tend to play the shit out of their material, and usually on a bigger stage than they’re used to. That’s pretty much what happened with TUV, who just sounded thrilled to be there, and played their hearts out on an early Friday set.

FLOR
The first of Bunbury’s SEO-friendly acts for the weekend (a list including names like FRENSHIP, CAAMP, and probably whatever the hell CVBZ is), FLOR opened the main stage with an especially drum-y spin on radio-friendly alternative rock. They had pep, and stood out a bit based on the singer’s androgynous vocals, but otherwise they reminded me of the sort of genial, down the middle indie acts that Bunbury’s filled the lower poster ranks with for the last few years. Generally A-OK.

July Talk
Yesterday, July Talk had in their possession: a too-short timeslot, tons of bluesy riffs, two charismatic singers, and (as a friend of mine pointed out) one of the biggest voice-appearance discrepancies you’ll ever see. Singer Peter Dreimanis looks like any number of young, skinny white guys, but he has this great snarl of a voice that sounds like whiskey-soaked broken glass in the best way possible; you just look at him and try to calculate how that voice comes out of that body. The chemistry between Dreimanis and singer Leah Fay was off the charts too, and only made the band’s slash and burn rock sound better. All of their stuff is streamable, so I highly recommend checking them out, and trying to see them when they’re in your town.

NF
NF is a rapper. His website is http://www.nfrealmusic.com. His newest album is called Therapy Session. Yes, he is that serious. His style has been compared to Eminem’s, partly because Eminem is still where most people’s minds go when they see a white rapper, but also because it’s entirely possible neither of them has smiled since 2009. From the songs we saw, he also seems like a distillation of early Linkin Park’s jittery angst, but without Mike Shinoda’s stability. NF confirms last year’s All-Black Theory: that an artist wearing all black, undesigned clothing will not do anything to surprise you, so we checked out early to grab drinks out of our car instead of hearing more, which felt like its own form of therapy.

Civil Twilight
We made our way back to the River Stage for the better part of Civil Twilight’s set. CT exist in that “alternative rock/indie rock” zone, but come down firmly on the alternative rock side to me because their songs have that forward momentum and sense of drama that comes from alt. instead of indie’s bounce. The band’s been around for more than a decade, and toured pretty regularly for the last few years, which meant they had a polish that so far no one else in the day really had. You could pick out the nuances in their songs, and “Letters From the Sky” live wouldn’t have sounded out of place on In Rainbows because of it. They closed with a rollicking cover of “Immigrant Song” (that riff is somehow still underrated), probably because their most recent album is Story of an Immigrant, but also because why the fuck wouldn’t you swing the hammer of the gods?

Jared Mahone
I’ll be honest, I kind of zoned out for a bit as Civil Twilight’s set carried on. A thing to know about festivals is that if you do a full day, you’ll end up hitting kind of a lull sometime between 5:30 and 7:00 because at that point, you’ve had a bit of a day already, and the biggest acts are still a ways off. So a friend of mine and I ended up checking out the acoustic stage and the accompanying chill area. They had some kind of air/beanbag type chairs scattered about the grass (picture tomorrow? Picture tomorrow), and a raised stage for solo/small local acts. I didn’t get a beanbag chair because they were all taken, but sitting in the grass and listening to an unplugged performance made for a nice recharge.

The Shins
The Shins are a band I’ve always kind of known more about than known outright, but they ended up being a great late-day set. With a setlist that a friend relayed to me was mostly from their mid ’00s heyday, the band cranked out an enjoyable hour of music that wasn’t too intense, but was end-to-end one of the more satisfying and fun acts of the day. They were good counterprogramming to a day that had ended up kind of zigzagging on what you were hearing, and after a fairly tumultuous decade, Mercer just seems happy to have a band ready to play and an audience ready to hear him. And yes, they played “New Slang.”

G-Eazy

Death Cab For Cutie
One of the guys I go to Bunbury with has Death Cab For Cutie as one of, if not his flatout, favorite bands, so of course we were going to get a primo spot for their set. Death Cab and I are interesting in that I know and really like a lot of their songs, but I always feel like I got to them just too late in life to be a diehard fan. Like, if I had gotten to Transatlanticism a few years earlier, that would have been it. But, as it turns out, Death Cab and I (really, my entire group for the day) are a perfect match: the band is at veteran status at this point, and brought out “I Will Possess Your Heart” (the good, extended version), “Crooked Teeth,” “You Are a Tourist,” “Cath…,” “The Ghost of Beverly Drive,” “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” “The New Year,” “Title & Registration,” and closed on a beautiful version of “Transatlanticism.”

The remarkable thing about Death Cab–really with Ben Gibbard as a writer overall–is that their songs are unabashedly verbose, but they’re also easy to sing with, as evidenced by the crowd singing along with every word of like, “Title & Registration.” They also got the coveted “sunset into night” slot, so you still had that summer sun for “Crooked Teeth,” and then you get the dark for “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” It was easily the best set of the day.

Wiz Khalifa
After Death Cab’s set, I joked that going from them to Wiz Khalifa was like going from Arrival to Transformers. I didn’t mean it as a slam on Wiz (well, not entirely), but that going from one to the other demands reorienting your expectations as an audience member. One side is a fairly intricate, cerebral experience with no small measure of emotional investment, and the other side is wide-screen, high-saturation, one-size-fits-all maximalism; you’d get the same whiplash going from Noname to Kings of Leon.

And like, Wiz Khalifa just doesn’t scream “headliner material.” Snoop Dogg killed it a few years ago based on charisma and back catalog, Ice Cube excelled last year on sheer enjoyment, and Wiz really doesn’t have enough of any of those to fill 75 minutes. He could probably do a good 45 minute set, or pull from his features to work his way up to an even hour, but at 75 minutes, he’s playing snippets of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” just kind of because, and from my spot near the back of the crowd, I’m able to see a steady retreat of people who decided “Black and Yellow” isn’t worth the wait. Everything kinda bled together after a while, and eventually, I found myself sticking it out on the fascination of wanting to see what a 75 minute Wiz Khalifa setlist looked like more than just experiencing it.

But still, day 1 was an adventure, and now it’s time for day 2!

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Album Review: Paramore- After Laughter

Posted on May 22, 2017 by bgibs122

thehardtimesIf someone told you Paramore would look the best out of their scene after a decade, would you believe them?

That’s not a dig, it’s just an honest look. In 12 years and 5 albums, Paramore have never had the same recording lineup twice; not only have members left or returned or changed roles, but those who leave do so in spectacular fashion. And yet, Paramore are in better shape now than anyone else in their age and weight class from the mid/late ’00s pop-punk scene because they still feel like themselves and sound contemporary. They’ve avoided common pitfalls, like decent commercial returns on terrible music, records that have no impact outside their pre-established fanbase, fucking off into the wilderness entirely, or breaking up. The attention paid to Paramore in 2017 is grounded in their current work, and not respect/appreciation for 7-10 year old singles.

Paramore’s survival hinged on how they dealt with the Farro brothers leaving in 2010. When you’re a riffs ‘n bash pop-punk group, losing your lead guitarist/riff writer and your drummer at once forces you to think outside the box, which is what happened on 2013’s Paramore (nothing says “Everything’s fine, we swear” after losing members like self-titling your next record). On that album, the band transitioned from an exceptionally peppy Warped Tour act to a studio pop rock group with New Wave and alternative rock flourishes, a move that, for me, solved Paramore’s biggest problem: their first 3 albums were each 4-6 great songs attached to a bunch of filler. More of the songs on the self-titled have a concrete identity, and even though it runs long, it still feels like their first legitimately great album.

The dirty little secret among emo-pop’s biggest crossover stars is that the scene needed them way more than they needed it. Singers as talented as Hayley Williams, Patrick Stump, and Brendon Urie were always going to be successful so long as an audience could find them; that those connections were made through MySpace pages and sharing mix cd space with The Academy Is… and Taking Back Sunday has ultimately shown to be secondary. Fall Out Boy recognized this first, tiptoeing for the sidedoor with 2008’s Infinity On High before slipping out the next year with Folie a Deux, and Panic! At the Disco exited with their transference from a multi-writer band to an Urie solo project. Paramore likely got the message when acoustic ballad “The Only Exception” became brand new eyes‘ biggest track instead of any of the album’s slash and burn ragers, and, as previously mentioned, the loss of lead guitarist Josh Farro had to be a motivator, as well.

After Laughter runs further afield of pop-punk, and instead pushes deeper into the glossy post-punk and New Wave influence seen on the self-titled. Although it doesn’t quite match that record’s highs, After Laughter finds a happy medium between the self-titled’s adventurousness and dexterity, and the sonic consistency of their pop-punk days. It’s shocking and maybe dispiriting at first, but the new sound on the record really fits (sidenote: for how much longer are we going to use “the 80s” or “80s-inspired” as shorthand for power-pop/synth-pop/post-punk/New Wave/etc? It made sense when Hot Fuss came out, but c’mon, that was 13 years ago, and that record’s directly or indirectly shaped a lot of modern, crossover aspiring rock; we can try a little harder). For one, Paramore v.2 emphasizes texture and melody over rocking out; songs like “Pool” here and “Daydreaming” on Paramore wouldn’t fit the mold on Riot! or All We Know Is Falling. For another, Williams has always been a wordy lyricist, and giving her lines room to breath only improves their effect. “I don’t need no one else/I can sabotage me by myself” gets to register on the airy bounce of “Caught in the Middle” in a way it probably wouldn’t if it was on something like “Ignorance.” In short, the genre shift has a point, instead of being shameless 80s humping because it’s the only thing the band has going for them.

It’s entirely possible that the genre jump would have gone over smoother if “Hard Times” wasn’t the lead single. The song eventually takes off, and the hook and lyrics are strong, but it’s also the jerkiest, most straightforward “We’ve listened to a lot of Talking Heads” pastiche on the album, and lacks (in very technical terms) Paramore-y oomph. It sticks after a few listens, and it in such as shit establishes the sound and aesthetic for After Laughter, but it’s not the opening shot anyone was expecting. Second song “Rose-Colored Boy” is much stronger overall, thanks to a playful bassline, chanting hook, and a killer melody; it seems like a no-brainer as an eventual single. It’s followed up by the nimble second single “Told You So,” a dramatic, slow-builder that would probably sound like “Monster” in Paramore V.1, but sashays instead of stomps.

Purely from a music perspective, a good chunk of After Laughter–songs like “Rose-Colored Boy,” maybe “Told You So,” “Fake Happy,” “Grudges,” “Caught in the Middle,” and “No Friend”–calls to mind The Strokes’ perennially underrated 2011 record Angles. There’s New Wave influence up and down both albums’ polished if slightly dry production, along with guitars that aren’t strummed as much as they are stabbed, and drummers instructed to play like drum machines. Paramore is a little more groove-oriented, but still, they’re both records with surprisingly intricate arrangements for how hard they aim for your pleasure centers. Hell, the two even have matching “mumbled, aggro-prog outliers” in “No Friends” and “You’re So Right.”

You hear the phrase “after laughter,” and one of the first places your mind goes is “it’s over,” which is the emotional through-line for this album. If Paramore was the upbeat, “new lease on life” journey that comes from your band persisting in the face of losing two founding members (drummer Zac Farro returned for AF), After Laughter is where you realize how everything’s effected you, and you ponder if going on is worth it. The darkness on this record has less to do with negativity or pessimism outright as much as it does the loss of optimism; “Rose-Colored Boy,” “Fake Happy” and “Hard Times” (just to pick a few) are about feeling beat down when you know you weren’t always like that, and even the album’s “I married Chad Gilbert” love song “Pool” equates love with drowning. But, there are lyrics along the way like “They say that dreaming is free/But I wouldn’t care what it cost me” from acoustic ballad “26,” and “We can’t keep holding onto grudges” from “Grudges” that imply maybe things can change, and so when closer “Tell Me How” ends on “I can still believe,” it feels earned.

It’s not something you’d expect from a (I guess former) pop-punk band, but After Laughter is kind of a cerebral grower of an album. There are enough immediate thrills to satisfy, but it takes a few spins to really appreciate what’s going on, especially on side 2. It feels like a slight step back from the self-titled since not quite everything works–“Forgiveness” and “26” ultimately feel inconsequential, and the mewithoutyou cameo on “No Friend” is a noble failed experiment–but it’s still a leg up overall from the band’s early albums. They escaped the scene, they escaped the arms race, but now, they’re learning to live with themselves.

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Radio Rant: Lil Uzi Vert – “XO Tour Llif3”

Posted on May 9, 2017 by bgibs122

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rants. We’ve got an odd one today.

Imagine an artist who you swore had a “Kick Me” sign taped to their back since the first time they ever hit “Record.” Imagine an artist with a name that–even in an time where monikers like “Young Thug” and “Lil Yachty” aren’t career killers–you couldn’t say out loud without wincing before and after saying it. Imagine that this artist had a song whose name you willfully didn’t think about every time you typed it because it looks like the screen name configuration you had to settle on because all the other ones were taken. Imagine that, because the artist has tons of teen fans in spite of, or even because of the whole “Kick Me” thing, this song goes from online one-off to chart buster.

And the song, oh man, imagine if this song sounded like smashing current trends with some of the most noxious music from inside the last 10 years. Imagine if Vessel-era Twenty One Pilots were SoundCloud strivers instead of Fueled By Ramen signees. Imagine if Kid Cudi took his rock cues from the most self-pitying bands of 2007 instead of 1991. Imagine if you got brokeNCYDE to replace its irony with Young Thug. Imagine if you took scenester post-hardcore and convinced it to keep the adolescent melodrama, but to also shotgun 808s & Heartbreak and DS2.

Now, imagine if it somehow worked.

So it is with Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO TOUR Llif3,” a song that should fall flat on its face in like, 6 different ways, but is actually great because of how clunky it is. Lil Uzi Vert (a name a can’t type without sighing a little) has spent the last year or two on the peripheral of rap/Atlanta trap’s version of the youth culture with guys like Lil Yachty and 21 Savage. Honestly, my reaction to him so far has been, “Oh, so that’s what Soula Boy looked like if you weren’t in high school;” that sort of guy where half his thing is angering the Olds so much that they take time out of their daily Illmatic listens to talk about how He’s Everything Wrong With Rap Today because he looks goofy and sounds joyfully amateurish. And also probably terrible. This write off felt warranted after hearing him for the first time on “Bad and Boujee,” where his meme-ably bad verse delineates the exact point where I want the song to be over. He seemed like he had his thing, and it just wasn’t something I got into.

But then out of fucking nowhere came “XO TOUR Llif3” and its attendant “I swear, it’s good tag.” And fuck, it is. The song’s built off this yo-yoing, wiry, synth line that leads a lively but fairly standard deep bass and skittering drums “trap banger” beat. It’s not too far outside what radio adjacent rap is already doing, but whereas most radio rap emphasizes smoothness and beat-riding, “XO TOUR Llif3” is all freewheeling forward motion.

Maybe it’s just trying to look for anything else to compare the dominant trend to, but I keep coming back to how goddamn much this song sounds like pop-punk. Which I know that sounds like a leap, but it totally isn’t. Rap’s never had much to do with pop-punk, but the late ’00s/early ’10s Warped Tour scene, the era of–yikes, Punk Goes ____ comps, scenster swoops, and some of the worst music I’ve ever heard–was pretty big on rap. Not that this resulted in good music, but you listen to [checks Google again] Framing Hanley’s version of “Lollipop,” you listen to “XO TOUR Llif3,” and it’s suddenly pretty easy to imagine that little synth lead coming out of a Les Paul Epiphone and a Marshall halfstack. The verses-chorus mimic pop-punk’s soft-loud dynamic, as well, in a way that screams Warped. Uzi himself sounds more like a pop-punk guy who raps, too; listen to the way he leaps into the AutoTuned chorus around 1:28 like the least self-conscious whiner in hip-hop. It’s tempting to call his second verse Young Thug-esque because he only pronouns half the letters in each word, but it smacks of “screamed bridge” instead of post-verbal raps.

And like, come on, “XO TOUR Llif3” just is a pop-punk song. Even setting aside the musical comparisons for a second, Uzi expresses his angst and melodrama in a flat-footed way that’s far closer to pop-punk than rap. Kanye, Future, and Kid Cudi at their most nakedly emotional and wounded still adhere to rap’s stylistic flourishes and lyrical self-possession, whereas Uzi’s adolescent petulance treats a break-up as life or death in simple lines. Put it this way: none of those guys would have a chorus that rhymes “Cry” with “lied” with “eyes” with “die,” and a hook rhymes “edge” with “dead.” Speaking of, doesn’t “Push me to the edge/All my friends are dead/All my friends are dead/Push me to the edge” sound entirely like it’d fit on something like this?

I think “XO TOUR Llif3” also works because it feels like the song his career has built toward. I listened around to the rest of his stuff after getting won over here, and most of it just doesn’t have the same spark. If you take it for the slurry, neon-tinged spin on trap that it is, it’s fine, but “XO TOUR Llif3” has clarity and focus that just largely isn’t otherwise present (although, as a Scott Pilgrim lifer, I am contractually obligated to love his cover art). His other work is a little too genre-bound, and “XO TOUR Llif3” soars because he breaks the rules. Take a chance on this one, you might think it’s weird at first, but it might be a fever you can’t sweat out.

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