Author: andrew-cedermark

Sarah White has been playing this charming new track, "I.L.Y." in concert for some time. A funny new video stars Red Rattles/Six Day Bender’s Luke Nutting as a handsome young dog owner, and ostensibly the object of White’s affection. White’s pursuit takes a dark turn—let’s just say it’s related to the dog, White’s bassist Michael Bishop and the Landmark Hotel. "ILY is a pretty simple love song, for a dog," White wrote in an e-mail. "It’s a real hit at weddings, etc."

White joins Old Calf, DBB Plays Cups and more at the Tea Bazaar on Monday, July 25.

"I.L.Y."

Guest post by Spencer Peterson

This week’s Open Studio is a chat with fiddler, banjo-player and music teacher Alex Caton, who keeps a busy, productive schedule as both a musician and singer-songwriter. She just released Fiddle Tunes, an album of Irish music recorded with Pat Egan, and recently wrapped up a round of studio sessions with Pete Winne, Stuart Gunter and Lew Burrus for the follow-up to her second solo album, The Sinners and the Saved.

Caton plays “Black Lung,” with Pete Winne on harmonica and backing vocals.

Caton started playing shows with Old Calf a few months ago, and also fronts a new country group called Sin City with piano player Betsy Wright, which you can catch at Fellini’s #9 on August 18, and every third Thursday of the month thereafter. In 2009, Caton’s productivity paid off in a nomination for a Virginia Heritage Award for her preservation and continuation of traditional Appalachian music.

When Sin City covers Cash, Lynn or Parsons, your choices are a) dance, b) nod knowingly or c) weep into your whiskey at the end of the bar.

 

For the last seven years, Caton and a few friends have been spreading the Bluegrass/Old Time/Irish music love with a little something called Mountain Road Fiddle and Music Camp, a weekend retreat of outdoor workshops and nightly jam sessions with Caton and friends. This year, camp is in session at The Brazenhead Inn and Irish Pub out in Mingo County, West Virginia starting August 19. 

And finally, check out this rough cut of “Willie Nelson, I Love You (and My Husband, He Doesn’t Really Mind).” Last we heard, the CD had been mailed to the Nelson ranch, and is undoubtedly somewhere in the old boy’s listenin’ stack.

Who would you like us to check in with?

I wrote a blog post last year about how independent musicians, including local ones, are growing increasingly comfortable taking cash from companies willing to support their music. Fair enough.

But recently I’ve been noticing what’s happening on the other side of the increasingly blurred line between art and commerce in independent music: In Charlottesville’s restaurants, shops and cafés, critically acclaimed indie rock is becoming the new muzak—that is, music to buy stuff to.

I’ve been informally jotting down indie rock tunes as I’ve heard them in businesses around town. Arcade Fire’s "Ready to Start" was blasting in Revolutionary Soup yesterday afternoon as I downed a quesadilla. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ "Home," a catchy track that quickly grew insufferable, which draws from twee indie rock traditions like Mariachi-ish horns (Beulah, Neutral Milk Hotel and so on) and whistling (Peter Bjorn and John, Andrew Bird), seems to be playing everywhere. And the once-indie-darling duo MGMT’s "Electric Feel" was playing at the Sears Sunday afternoon at Fashion Square Mall.

On one level, I like the thought that independent musicians get a couple cents  from BMI, ASCAP or SESAC when their tunes get played inside a business. But on the other, how do you square the consensus among the critical establishment that most of each of these bands is breaking down boundaries with the smiles on the shoppers’ faces? If the cream of the independent crop is so widely digestible, what purpose does that independence serve?

It may very well be the case that this music is very listenable and rewards whatever attention you give it beyond the surface level. But still—whatever happened to music that pisses off your parents?

Here are some tunes that I heard while shopping last week, and the scores the albums they appeared on received on the review aggregator site Metacritic.

Arcade Fire’s "Ready to Start."

From The Suburbs.

Metacritic score: 87.

MGMT’s "Electric Feel"

From Congratulations.

Metacritic score: 72.

The Decemberists’ "We Both Go Down Together"

From Picaresque.

Metacritic score: 81.

Band of Horses’ "The Funeral"

From Everything All the Time.

Metacritic score: 78.

The Shins‘ "New Slang"

From Chutes Too Narrow.

Metacritic score: 88.

Grizzly Bear’s "Two Weeks"

From Veckatimest.

Metacritic score: 85.

What do you like to shop to?

I was combing through some releases late last week and came across an announcement for the Blue Ridge Bloodfest, a new celebration of all things grotesque that runs August 6-7 at Random Row Books. Planned events include an independent film festival, a zombie/monster walk and make-up.

But what caught my eye was that the festival wraps up with a performance by a band called Alice Creeper—an Alice Cooper cover band based out of Waynesboro. Cooper himself is famous for a few things: his biggest hit "School’s Out," a cameo in Wayne’s World, and more recently for his love of golf. 

Alice Creeper.

 

How does Alice Creeper fit in with the cover bands that regularly play in town? Over the last year couple of years I’ve seen more cover bands than I’d care to admit. There was Abbey Road playing the Beatles at Veritas and the Pavilion, Galen Curry’s Prince cover band Shockadelica at the Jefferson, where they opened for the scarily accurate Who’s Bad: A Tribute to Michael Jackson.

Abbey Road.

 

Once upon a time there was Mass Sabbath, the yearly celebration of the music of Black Sabbath, which shared members with a one-off Misfits cover band. All this to say nothing of tribute bands like Dark Star Orchestra, which plays song-for-song recreations of vintage Grateful Dead sets, the local Dead cover group Alligator and, of course, Badfish, which competes with the recently resurrected group Sublime With Rome.

This summer alone, Pink Floyd plays the Paramount, the Dead and Jefferson Airplane play the Jefferson and The Beatles play the Pavilion. It’s like 1968 up in here.

Let’s welcome Alice Creeper to Central Virginia’s stable of cover acts by making the competition clear.

What’s the best cover act in town?

 

"Places" is a new feature where local artists show us the places around town that inspire them.

Guest post by Anna Caritj

 

Early Friday morning and the parking lot is nearly empty. Cars pass by, knotty exhaust pipes rattling against the close colored walls of McIntire Plaza. Men in business casual enter a nondescript doorway, a woman carries brown shopping bags down the sidewalk.

Here, with only parked cars and an abandoned backhoe for company, John D’earth feels at home. While there is nothing unique about this particular parking lot off Allied Lane, D’earth explains that this anonymity, this potential for anything—good or bad—is what makes the space beautiful: “I love to feel connected to the wide, anonymous world. And art is that. Art needs to be that. It’s a way to connect to the world and say something.”

But what is it exactly that D’earth connects to? The parking lot exists as a liminal space for all walks of life. It creates a universal vantage point and provides a look not only into the everyday life of mall shoppers and children going to day school. But it also joins the “typical” American life with its darker counterpart which, D’earth describes, is every bit as typical.

“The thing about parking lots is you have to watch yourself. I’m not a fighter or tough guy in any sense of the word, but I like being next to the world, seeing the world and putting myself in the way of chance and circumstance," he says. "I think we all just need to get with it a little more—with what’s happening in the world.

"[There is] a lot of craziness, lot of drunkenness, lot of violence. I make my peace with that because I see it as the human condition. People try to deny that. Entropy is normal. Health is not necessarily normal, especially mental and spiritual health. You really have to work for that. This world is fragile. All civilizations are fragile. I feel that fragility."

D’earth’s latest work, a four movement orchestral piece entitled Ephemera, which premiered in June, reflects the idea that even as entropy and illness endure, they still contribute a piece of beauty and grace to our lives. Based on poetry by his late brother, Paul Smyth, in Ephemera D’earth creates ebullient melodies that communicate with his brother’s prolific verse. While affliction inevitably persists throughout the piece, D’earth and Smyth together translate intrinsic tragedy into vibrant and teeming beauty, echoing the adage that with death also comes life.

"My brother was a very high art sort of person," says D’earth. "I never could figure out how to use his poetry in music during his own life. And then after he died, for some reason, I got it. I figured it out."

The parking lot, an anonymous unity of dark, impenetrable asphalt with neat white lines, suggests a place where dichotomies collide. It is where the enigmatic meets clarity, the dangerous meets the anodyne, and the disastrous becomes beautiful. These opposing forces either converge or clash, the tension echoing a jazz tone of dissonance as one walks the line between harmony and discord. In a world where “everybody is everybody,” as D’earth says, one must learn to embrace both chords.

Borrowed Beams of Light releases its excellent, Kickstarter-funded LP Stellar Hoax tonight at the Southern. Check out John Ruscher’s review of that album here; Hoax is loosely based on the Voynich Manuscript, a visually striking 15th century work described as the "world’s most mysterious manuscript." Use superlatives much? Eternal Summers, the duo declared Virginia’s best new group by the Boston Phoenix in its annual roundup of national bands, opens.

Stream Borrowed Beams’ Stellar Hoax here.

Tonight Ash Lawn Opera opens with The Barber of Seville. Under new direction the fest is looking to attract a new, younger audience (sometimes by including kids in the performance) while holding onto those who loved the performances at Monroe’s estate. I sat in on a rehearsal of the wit-packed Italian classic and interviewed the fest’s new director in this week’s Feedback column. Ash Lawn Opera runs through early August with The King and I and more.

Also up tonight is an exciting last minute performance by the mandolin player Jesse McReynolds, one-half of the famed Jim & Jesse bluegrass duo. McReynolds is a legend in the world of bluegrass music, and tonight’s C’ville Coffee gig is a rare chance to see a bluegrass giant—by that we mean a longtime member of the Grand Ole Opry and NEA-grant winner—in a tiny room.

Jesse McReynolds performs "Night Train to Memphis"

The Brooklyn-based Elephant 6 collective-affiliated band The Ladybug Transistor plays Sunday at the Southern with the closest thing we’ve got locally to Ladybug’s trumpet-laden indie pop, The Hilarious Posters. The Ladybug Transistor released a new album, Clutching Stems, earlier this year on Merge; sample the title track below.

Ladybug Transistor’s "Clutching Stems."

What else is going on this weekend?

Jesse Winchester, the songwriter’s songwriter who collaborated with members of The Band and Todd Rundgren as a young draft-dodger in Canada, settling down locally in recent years, announced on his website that he has cancer of the esophogus. Shows for July and August have been canceled.

"I’m sorry to announce that I’m canceling my shows for July and August," reads the note. "I have been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, and will have to undergo treatment for the next couple of months. I’m very sorry if any plans have been disrupted; I do hope to see you again soon, and we’ll pick up where we left off."

Winchester could not immediately be reached for comment, although a representative at his booking agency, Keith Case and Associates, said that the cancer had been caught early, and they are hopeful for a swift recovery: Dates are still posted on his website beyond September, including one at The Mockingbird in Staunton scheduled for late October.

For 40 years Winchester’s albums have lingered at the bottom end of the charts, if they made it at all. (He did have one top-40 hit, "Say What," in 1981.) His influence has mostly trickled down through more famous admirers like Jimmy Buffett, Joan Baez, Elvis Costello and the Everly Brothers, all of whom have covered Winchester’s songs.

Read a C-VILLE review of a recent Winchester show here.

Get well soon, Jesse! 

Mike Friend, who founded the station, is not currently in charge of day-to-day operations at WNRN. Reached by phone, the station’s assistant general manager Anne Williams confirmed that she is currently Acting General Manager.

She and other employees deferred questions to Maynard Sipe, chair of the station’s Board of Directors. "Any changes are the result of the growth and success of the station," says Sipe, who confirmed that Williams has been in charge of WNRN’s day-to-day operations since about late April. "Mike is still a valued employee."

One employee said that Friend, who had no comment on advice of counsel, was “stripped of his duties” but still at the station. The source said Friend was also considering filing a wrongful termination lawsuit, although Friend’s name was not involved in any civil suits pending in Charlottesville or Albemarle courts this week.

Sipe said he would be surprised if Friend were planning to sue. He says that Friend has been placed in charge of a large project that the station was hoping to announce by the end of the week.

Friend, a former Operations Manager at WTJU, incorporated STU-COMM, Inc., in 1993 “as a Virginia non-profit corporation with the purpose of building a non-commercial FM radio station for the Charlottesville-Albemarle area.” WNRN went on the air in 1996 and is registered as an educational nonprofit. Today the commercial-free station broadcasts in markets including Charlottesville, Harrisonburg and Staunton, and is working to expand its signal in Lynchburg.

In the press Friend has been known for a thorny public persona, banning the phrase “the corner” from WNRN when competing station WCNR “The Corner” went live in 2007. During last year’s uproar over programming at WTJU, he seems to have posted a long comment on The Hook’s website criticizing the station and its volunteers.

Updated at 1:56pm with quotes from Maynard Sipe.