TGIF Labor Day Hodge Podge – Rain Machine + Jason Allen Phelps

Today marks the beginning of a much-anticipated long weekend for me.  I am headed to the airport this morning to pick up a certain reader for a four day visit, the Buckeyes kick off the college football season tomorrow, and there will be a lot of heavy drinking taking place.  As such, things are going to be brief today.  Please do not take my brevity as a lack of caring though; I hope everyone has a drunken but safe Labor Day weekend.  Go Bucks and enjoy the tunes!

Many of you who keep up with the music scene via various blogs have probably heard the regrettable news about one of my favorite bands, TV on the Radio.  As posted yesterday by XXXX, the band has announced that they will be taking a one-year hiatus from each other.  As a fan, I took the news pretty hard.  It has already been a year since the release of 2008’s Dear Science, and given the break it seems that we will be waiting at least another two years before we could plausibly get our hands on another new LP from the Brooklyn group.  Luckily, two key members from TVOTR have been active in a handful of side projects to help us get out fix in the meantime.  I addition to his work in Tahiti Boy & The Palmtree Family earlier this year, vocalist Tunde Adebimpe has recently been collaborating with Massive Attack, while multi-instrumentalist Kyp Malone has lent his guitar stylings to Iran and will also be releasing a solo album under the name Rain Machine later this year.  I have written about Rain Machine in a previous TGIF entry, and off all the projects mentioned it bears the closest resemblance to TVOTR’s material.  A new track from the upcoming self-titled album hit the Internet this week, and gives me something to look forward to this fall in my newly TVOTR-less existence.  “Smiling Black Faces” is a politically charged anthem that addresses the 2006 slaying of Sean Bell by a group of NYPD officers.  The track is expectedly dark, but Malone’s warbling vocals and trademark guitar fuzz remind me of a happier time when TVOTR were still together making records.

Rain Machine – Smiling Black Faces

Buy Rain Machine @ Insound!

In accordance with the brevity that I mentioned in the opening, I am foregoing a second new track today and skipping straight to something from the vault.  I highly doubt that any of our readers will have ever heard of this before, and it is admittedly average at best, but it is a track that takes me way back to my college years and I happened to stumble upon it in my library earlier this week.  Back in my days at Ohio University, there was a bar on Court Street called Night Court, which is unfortunately now closed.  It was your typical college bar, nothing really special, but it was one of the few places in town that regularly hosted free live music throughout the week.  My first few years in Athens I spent nearly every Thursday night there listening to a local musician by the name of Jason Allen Phelps.  The setup was simple: a man, an acoustic guitar, and a stool.  Phelps clearly had more talent than the tiny room could hold, but after the bar closed and I eventually graduated I never heard anything about him again.  The truth is, I probably wouldn’t really dig his brand of music if I came upon it now, but for a few years it was a part of my weekly routine.  This track, “Simple Man,” is the one that always stuck in my head.  To this day it still reminds me of a simpler time in my life, when beers were $2 and my biggest concern was which party to attend on Friday night.  When it comes down to it that is what is truly great about music; that ability to take you away to another time or place.  This particular track probably won’t do it for you, but this would be a great weekend to revisit one that does.  And if anyone happens to know what Jason Allen Phelps is up to these days, please drop a note in the comments.

Jason Allen Phelps – Simple Man