WILD FLAG
Eleanor Friedberger, Hospitality
Tue, October 18, 2011
Doors: 7:30 pm / Show: 8:30 pm
The Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY
$15
Sold Out
This event is 18 and over
http://www.boweryballroom.com/event/59807/
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WILD FLAG
Wild Flag is a Portland, Oregon- and Washington, DC-based quartet consisting of Carrie Brownstein, Rebecca Cole, Mary Timony, and Janet Weiss. The members of Wild Flag have played in numerous and notable bands including Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Quasi, The Minders, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and others.
The four musicians who make up Wild Flag have known one another for well over a decade. Brownstein and Weiss were in Sleater-Kinney and toured with Timony’s band Helium on numerous occasions. Brownstein and Timony played in a side project called The Spells. Rebecca Cole’s Portland-based band The Minders was a frequent opener for Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and Cole play together in the 1960’s garage-rock cover band The Shadow Mortons. If someone drew a visual representation illustrating the ways in which all indie bands are interconnected, Brownstein, Cole, Timony, and Weiss would be in the same tiny sphere, so playing together felt almost inevitable. After collaborating on a score for a documentary, the ease with which they worked together proved infectious and promising. Future practices were scheduled, songs were written, Wild Flag was formed.
Yet even after the members of Wild Flag became intentional about playing together—and Mary was flying from DC to practice in Portland—the band was hesitant about naming this endeavor. Yes, they knew how to be in bands, but not in this band. Wild Flag wanted to figure out dynamics, hear how the songs breathed in a live context, build cohesion and unity, and emerge as a singular force prior to putting those sounds onto tape. Wild Flag always intended to grow organically, never wanting to take for granted that an audience existed based on previous endeavors. So, instead of recording an album and then playing shows, they went on various tours, playing tiny club shows in the US and building up a fervent audience of their own.
In April of 2011, they went to Sacramento, California, where they recorded their self-titled album with engineer Chris Woodhouse at the Hangar. All tracks were recorded live except for the vocals
The four musicians who make up Wild Flag have known one another for well over a decade. Brownstein and Weiss were in Sleater-Kinney and toured with Timony’s band Helium on numerous occasions. Brownstein and Timony played in a side project called The Spells. Rebecca Cole’s Portland-based band The Minders was a frequent opener for Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and Cole play together in the 1960’s garage-rock cover band The Shadow Mortons. If someone drew a visual representation illustrating the ways in which all indie bands are interconnected, Brownstein, Cole, Timony, and Weiss would be in the same tiny sphere, so playing together felt almost inevitable. After collaborating on a score for a documentary, the ease with which they worked together proved infectious and promising. Future practices were scheduled, songs were written, Wild Flag was formed.
Yet even after the members of Wild Flag became intentional about playing together—and Mary was flying from DC to practice in Portland—the band was hesitant about naming this endeavor. Yes, they knew how to be in bands, but not in this band. Wild Flag wanted to figure out dynamics, hear how the songs breathed in a live context, build cohesion and unity, and emerge as a singular force prior to putting those sounds onto tape. Wild Flag always intended to grow organically, never wanting to take for granted that an audience existed based on previous endeavors. So, instead of recording an album and then playing shows, they went on various tours, playing tiny club shows in the US and building up a fervent audience of their own.
In April of 2011, they went to Sacramento, California, where they recorded their self-titled album with engineer Chris Woodhouse at the Hangar. All tracks were recorded live except for the vocals
Eleanor Friedberger
You probably think you know everything there is to know about Eleanor Friedberger. “She’s that girl from The Fiery Furnaces,” you’re thinking. “She is a great singer, I think she plays guitar… .does she play guitar?” you’re asking. “She has a really great haircut,” you’re musing. And yes, you’d be right about all of these things.
But what you likely don’t know is that Eleanor Friedberger is not just the enigmatic mouthpiece of one of music’s most interesting, dynamic and constantly exciting bands. In fact, Eleanor Friedberger is an exceptional songwriter herself, playing a variety of instruments and crafting the very sorts of choruses that made you fall in love with The Fiery Furnaces in the first place. (Their song “Tropical Ice-land” supports this statement very well if you’re somewhat doubtful, which you shouldn’t be.) She’s a lover of Led Zeppelin and Jorge Ben; she’s a fearless performer, as comfortable fronting a band as she is playing alone on a stage with an acoustic guitar; she’s one of the sweetest alto voices in music. Nowhere is all of this more apparent than on her very first solo album, Last Summer, out on Merge Records on July 12th, 2011. And to give you a taste of what’s to come, the album’s first single, “My Mistakes,” can be heard HERE now.
Last Summer, which was written, well, last summer, and recorded in fall 2010, was born out of Take Me Round Again, a collection of cover songs from the previous Fiery Furnaces album. Both Eleanor and Matthew did their own inspired versions of songs they’d written together for their last LP I’m Going Away. Matt’s were otherworldly affairs, while Eleanor’s were lo-fi and lovely, all recorded in her home, the sound of an artist kicking off her shoes, settling into a big comfy chair with an acoustic guitar, a glass of scotch, and a four-track. She enjoyed the experience so much she decided to move forward with recording songs she had written in her spare time, songs that hadn’t been included on any of The Fiery Furnaces’ nine incredible albums. This, of course, begs the question: does Last Summer sound like a Fiery Furnaces record? No. It sounds like Eleanor Friedberger.
And what you don’t know about Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer is able to teach you. You learn Friedberger has an effortless ear for melody and arrangements, as evident on songs like “Scenes from Bensonhurst” with echoing piano pulses and gorgeous vocal washes that sound half-human, half-keyboard. You understand that Friedberger doesn’t shy away from that oh-so-complicated genre “pop,” wrangling Phil Spector harmonies and 60′s girl group shimmers, as seen on amazing, instantly-stuck-in-your-head first single “My Mistakes,” and the clavinet disco of “Roosevelt Island.” You know Friedberger is a surveyor of the scenes around her in her home of New York City, naming songs after Brooklyn neighborhoods and describing whirlwind New York moments within her narratives. You hear Friedberger’s more forthright emotional side, something first revealed on I’m Going Away, in the breakup rocker “I Won’t Fall Apart on You Tonight” with its plaintive chorus “I won’t fall apart on you tonight / but I don’t know what tomorrow may bring.” You get that Friedberger is a connoisseur of classic rock, peppering her songs with dashes of Donovan, Carole King, Todd Rundgren and more. You understand that she truly is a masterful wordsmith, mashing up colorful, complicated lyrical lines into beautiful refrains, one of the only people capable of singing about riding her bike through Coney Island without, well, sounding like she’s singing about riding her bike through Coney Island. It’s a testament to her passionate vocal phrasing and manipulation of melody that she can combine things like earthquakes and heart shakes without sounding trite, contrived or like she’s bitten off more than she can chew.
We’re pretty confident that when you know all this about Eleanor Friedberger, you will agree wholeheartedly that she continues to be one of the best damn songwriters we’ve got, never ceasing in her explorations of sound and constantly setting herself apart from her musical peers. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the dazzling Last Summer.
Eleanor will be touring in support of Last Summer; dates will be announced further into the spring.
But what you likely don’t know is that Eleanor Friedberger is not just the enigmatic mouthpiece of one of music’s most interesting, dynamic and constantly exciting bands. In fact, Eleanor Friedberger is an exceptional songwriter herself, playing a variety of instruments and crafting the very sorts of choruses that made you fall in love with The Fiery Furnaces in the first place. (Their song “Tropical Ice-land” supports this statement very well if you’re somewhat doubtful, which you shouldn’t be.) She’s a lover of Led Zeppelin and Jorge Ben; she’s a fearless performer, as comfortable fronting a band as she is playing alone on a stage with an acoustic guitar; she’s one of the sweetest alto voices in music. Nowhere is all of this more apparent than on her very first solo album, Last Summer, out on Merge Records on July 12th, 2011. And to give you a taste of what’s to come, the album’s first single, “My Mistakes,” can be heard HERE now.
Last Summer, which was written, well, last summer, and recorded in fall 2010, was born out of Take Me Round Again, a collection of cover songs from the previous Fiery Furnaces album. Both Eleanor and Matthew did their own inspired versions of songs they’d written together for their last LP I’m Going Away. Matt’s were otherworldly affairs, while Eleanor’s were lo-fi and lovely, all recorded in her home, the sound of an artist kicking off her shoes, settling into a big comfy chair with an acoustic guitar, a glass of scotch, and a four-track. She enjoyed the experience so much she decided to move forward with recording songs she had written in her spare time, songs that hadn’t been included on any of The Fiery Furnaces’ nine incredible albums. This, of course, begs the question: does Last Summer sound like a Fiery Furnaces record? No. It sounds like Eleanor Friedberger.
And what you don’t know about Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer is able to teach you. You learn Friedberger has an effortless ear for melody and arrangements, as evident on songs like “Scenes from Bensonhurst” with echoing piano pulses and gorgeous vocal washes that sound half-human, half-keyboard. You understand that Friedberger doesn’t shy away from that oh-so-complicated genre “pop,” wrangling Phil Spector harmonies and 60′s girl group shimmers, as seen on amazing, instantly-stuck-in-your-head first single “My Mistakes,” and the clavinet disco of “Roosevelt Island.” You know Friedberger is a surveyor of the scenes around her in her home of New York City, naming songs after Brooklyn neighborhoods and describing whirlwind New York moments within her narratives. You hear Friedberger’s more forthright emotional side, something first revealed on I’m Going Away, in the breakup rocker “I Won’t Fall Apart on You Tonight” with its plaintive chorus “I won’t fall apart on you tonight / but I don’t know what tomorrow may bring.” You get that Friedberger is a connoisseur of classic rock, peppering her songs with dashes of Donovan, Carole King, Todd Rundgren and more. You understand that she truly is a masterful wordsmith, mashing up colorful, complicated lyrical lines into beautiful refrains, one of the only people capable of singing about riding her bike through Coney Island without, well, sounding like she’s singing about riding her bike through Coney Island. It’s a testament to her passionate vocal phrasing and manipulation of melody that she can combine things like earthquakes and heart shakes without sounding trite, contrived or like she’s bitten off more than she can chew.
We’re pretty confident that when you know all this about Eleanor Friedberger, you will agree wholeheartedly that she continues to be one of the best damn songwriters we’ve got, never ceasing in her explorations of sound and constantly setting herself apart from her musical peers. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the dazzling Last Summer.
Eleanor will be touring in support of Last Summer; dates will be announced further into the spring.
Hospitality
The angular, intricate, and intelligent compositions of Hospitality signal a sophisticated new pop voice. Singer Amber Papini’s idiosyncratic songwriting and incisive lyrics coupled with the band’s rich arrangements on their self-titled debut explore youth, New York, and the bittersweet commingling of past and present in a way that feels just right, right now.
From the opening phrase of “Eighth Avenue,” guitar hooks are balanced with a cultivated melody. Papini’s singing has a wisp of an English accent via Kansas City (she learned to sing by imitating Richard Butler on The Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk) and her lyrics create a moonstruck, even cinematic vision of New York City, where the band formed in 2007. The production by Shane Stoneback (Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells) and band member Nathan Michel (guitar, drums, keyboards), who released his share of experimental “bedroom” pop, culminating in 2005’s The Beast (Skipp/Sonig), imbues the entire record with an intimate yet prodigious sound, layering period keyboards with horns, synthesizers, and treated guitars.
Hospitality the album has an overarching vision and should be listened to as a whole, though every song registers as a single. (Will Merge take a cue from Epic’s Thriller campaign and release seven singles? They should!) “Friends of Friends” could break the Hot 100 with its heavy intro, swingin’ breakdown, and horn riffs; “Betty Wang,” the lynchpin of their live set a few years back, is impossibly catchy, the story of one of Papini’s real-life colleagues at a financial day job; and “The Right Profession” is a power-pop burst of an anthem with Papini chanting the immortal line, “It’s hard to change!” (Isn’t it?) And “The Birthday,” with a sinuous, dissonant lead guitar, the lockstep rhythm of the drums, and Brian Betancourt’s nimble bass, wouldn’t be out of place on The Police’s debut record, but its epic coda makes it decidedly CinemaScope. Hospitality, while hearkening back to ‘70s/‘80s pop—both Elvis Costello and Kate Bush are influences—has an ambitious vision: its big promise is nowhere more evident than on the gorgeous anthem “Julie,” the album’s centerpiece which already sounds like a classic. The song’s lush, glorious build is coupled with lyrics inspired by Papini’s great-grandfather, a Pennsylvania coalminer.
Reprising some songs from a self-released 2008 EP recorded by Karl Blau (K Records) allows Hospitality to nod to its beginnings as a more lo-fi outfit; that early intimacy can be found in the arrangement of the cheeky and distinctly NC-17 “Liberal Arts.” And after patiently honing its craft, playing concerts (and gaining converts), Hospitality has reached what will be its first apex with many more heights to come; from their modest debut in a Red Hook row house, the band has evolved from four-track low-fidelity to a luxury five-star future.
-Gabriele Caroti
From the opening phrase of “Eighth Avenue,” guitar hooks are balanced with a cultivated melody. Papini’s singing has a wisp of an English accent via Kansas City (she learned to sing by imitating Richard Butler on The Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk) and her lyrics create a moonstruck, even cinematic vision of New York City, where the band formed in 2007. The production by Shane Stoneback (Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells) and band member Nathan Michel (guitar, drums, keyboards), who released his share of experimental “bedroom” pop, culminating in 2005’s The Beast (Skipp/Sonig), imbues the entire record with an intimate yet prodigious sound, layering period keyboards with horns, synthesizers, and treated guitars.
Hospitality the album has an overarching vision and should be listened to as a whole, though every song registers as a single. (Will Merge take a cue from Epic’s Thriller campaign and release seven singles? They should!) “Friends of Friends” could break the Hot 100 with its heavy intro, swingin’ breakdown, and horn riffs; “Betty Wang,” the lynchpin of their live set a few years back, is impossibly catchy, the story of one of Papini’s real-life colleagues at a financial day job; and “The Right Profession” is a power-pop burst of an anthem with Papini chanting the immortal line, “It’s hard to change!” (Isn’t it?) And “The Birthday,” with a sinuous, dissonant lead guitar, the lockstep rhythm of the drums, and Brian Betancourt’s nimble bass, wouldn’t be out of place on The Police’s debut record, but its epic coda makes it decidedly CinemaScope. Hospitality, while hearkening back to ‘70s/‘80s pop—both Elvis Costello and Kate Bush are influences—has an ambitious vision: its big promise is nowhere more evident than on the gorgeous anthem “Julie,” the album’s centerpiece which already sounds like a classic. The song’s lush, glorious build is coupled with lyrics inspired by Papini’s great-grandfather, a Pennsylvania coalminer.
Reprising some songs from a self-released 2008 EP recorded by Karl Blau (K Records) allows Hospitality to nod to its beginnings as a more lo-fi outfit; that early intimacy can be found in the arrangement of the cheeky and distinctly NC-17 “Liberal Arts.” And after patiently honing its craft, playing concerts (and gaining converts), Hospitality has reached what will be its first apex with many more heights to come; from their modest debut in a Red Hook row house, the band has evolved from four-track low-fidelity to a luxury five-star future.
-Gabriele Caroti
