The News Review:
- Brit-punk icons the Mekons take a quieter tack with acoustic tour
- Exhibit merges rock and art
- Allah Amps and Anarchy
- Music Preview: Pittsburgh’s Cynics find the perfect garage in…
- From Warehouse to Rough House: The Clinic Nurses OC’s Punk Scene Back…
- The art of noise
Brit-punk icons the Mekons take a quieter tack with acoustic tour
Seattle Post Intelligencer – Oct 4, 2007
“There were these just big stupid corporate bands. It was really kind of depressing. We were kids and we were latching onto music that your older brother would like stuff that wasn’t really our music. But people would have an older brother who was into Yes. So I’d go see Yes and I’d be standing around bored out of my mind. But Langford fondly recalled such bands as Cabaret Voltaire the Slits and British pub-rock group Dr… “They played really fast three-minute songs. That was the real precursor of punk. In the north of England people took the idea of punk as permission to do anything. “You could do whatever you wanted — whereas in London it became a uniform and a fashion and a very narrow definition of how things should sound” Langford said. In spite of its noisy beginnings the group’s first U. tour in three years is billed as “A Quiet Night In With the Mekons.
Exhibit merges rock and art
Daily Northwestern – Oct 4, 2007
substring(0 thispageresult. Robert Longo’s untitled life-size charcoal drawings – which show people wearing business attire in very intense poses – were necessary to display in a set of three to reflect the chords played in punk music. As expected with art there is much commentary evident in the displayed pieces. One room has a huge stack of posters in the middle of the floor that read “What Would Neil Young Do?” which visitors are free to take. “It shows how we internalize rock figures and they become a part of our ethics” Molon says… substring(0 thispageresult. Robert Longo’s untitled life-size charcoal drawings – which show people wearing business attire in very intense poses – were necessary to display in a set of three to reflect the chords played in punk music. As expected with art there is much commentary evident in the displayed pieces. One room has a huge stack of posters in the middle of the floor that read “What Would Neil Young Do?” which visitors are free to take. “It shows how we internalize rock figures and they become a part of our ethics” Molon says. To bring the connection closer to home there are number of activities for visitors to participate in including creating their own screen-printed T-shirts and bags as well as a studio where visitors can record their own demos.
Allah Amps and Anarchy
Rolling Stone – Oct 4, 2007
Twenty-four hours after leaving the Toledo mosque Boston’sKominas — Punjabi for “the Bastards” — are playing in a packedbasement in a rundown corner of Chicago’s Logan Square. Local punksmix with curious young Muslims — including a few girls wearinghead scarves — as Kominas frontman Shahjehan Khan launches intothe opening lines of “Sharia Law in the U. “This has been the best time of my life” says Khan 23 whogrew up in Boston the son of Pakistani immigrants… “The best way for me to deal with it was music. ” TheKominas are one of the more established groups having toured andreleased records. Their songs mix punk speed and attitude withMiddle Eastern sounds. Their lyrics often confrontational arealso deeply personal. Everyone on tour has stories about being harassed for beingMuslim. “There’s that stigma ‘Oh he’s from Pakistan he’s afuckin’ terrorist’ ” says Omar Waqar of D.
Music Preview: Pittsburgh’s Cynics find the perfect garage in…
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Oct 4, 2007
The good thing of the Cynics in the studio is precisely this potential they have potential to create music and to put feelings into that music. “Here We Are” begins unlike any other Cynics record with a delicate acoustic title track but it doesn’t linger. The second track “Coming ‘Round My Way” opens with a stabbing punk guitar and a wave of ’60s reverb and “Here We Are” is on its way to being a pure rock ‘n’ roll record now the most diverse in the Cynics catalog. Along with soon-to-be garage classics such as the harmonica-powered “The Warning” and the metallic “Slide Over” the Cynics recall the folk-rock of the Byrds (”Me Wanting Her”) the frenzy of early Who (”The Ring”) Beatles psychedelia (”She Fell”) and an unlikely take on Booker T and the MGs (”All About You). “We’ve never had this much range on a record” Kostelich says “but it’s always been there in practice. Jorge gave the whole thing a timeless sound by recording it in mono the way the tracks on the Nuggets box and all the Cynics’ favorite records were made. “Jorge said mono is like a punch in the face and stereo is like [a camera] panning like sideways… You take this formula and what you can do with it is unlimited. People as old as me and Gregg are still finding new things to do with same formula. It’s always been the best music to me. First published on October 4 2007 at 12:00 amScott Mervis can be reached at. com or 412-263-2576.
From Warehouse to Rough House: The Clinic Nurses OC’s Punk Scene Back…
OC Weekly – Oct 4, 2007
Thankfully true punks—with their cockroach-like tenacity—can’t be killed off so easily. The Clinic in Santa Ana offers a home to these die-hards hoping to nourish the beleaguered punk crowd and get the genre to mean something again… “The place was opened so we kids could have a place to play and enjoy going to shows since these days you gotta drive hours to do that” chirps Atomic Youth’s Thaddeus Hudzinski. Once just a warehouse in industrial Santa Ana the Clinic has been turned into a punk sanctuary with apropos accoutrements: a stained carpet a homemade stage (really more of a big wooden box) and artistic graffiti in bright colors painted from floor to ceiling. “It’s definitely a true punk-rock venue run by punks for punks” says Joe V. Gorjis says the Clinic’s atmosphere “is ?different because it’s literally a warehouse: ?a stage a PA a light no tables no chairs ?no booze. But since this is an all-ages venue it’s pretty safe to send your kids to to see ?punk rock the way it was intended to be ?seen: simple.
The art of noise
New Statesman – Oct 4, 2007
Far from the laid-back musical proposition of later hits and Bryan Ferry’s solo oeuvre their first album was a thing by turns of raging propulsive energy and addled neurasthenic sentiment. TV footage from that period (on the cusp as Michael Bracewell puts it of their “imperial” phase) reveals a band whose sheer manic blare – not to mention a certain extraterrestrial coquetry – left shuffling denim-wearing audiences open-mouthed at their audacity. Most strikingly in a period when laborious dues- pay ing was a mark of musical authenticity Roxy seemed entirely sui generis. Despite the singer’s apparently having taken himself for the offspring of Marlene Dietrich and Johnnie Ray they looked and sounded like nothing on earth… The band itself was an idea a movement a design for life. It’s easy at this remove and in light of the group’s later falling away from this exacting ideal to paint the Roxyist aesthetic as merely aspirational or naively even laughably faux-sophisticate. But their mid-1970s audience – haughty lasses in Waaf uniforms and stilettos etiolated boys with a taste for electronics and eye-shadow – went on to invent punk and post-punk to imagine new ways of being between art music fashion and literature. In the mid-1980s a decade and more after its release Roxy Music was still being passed around classrooms like an invitation to join some secret aesthetic society. Eno especially still remains an inspirational figure. Perhaps because both futurism and nostalgia were always built into their sonic and visual fantasies because they were so studiedly not of their time Roxy Music seem immune to the kind of easy periodisation and crude revivalism that plagues rock bands today. (Of their contemporaries only Kraftwerk have this peculiar quality.