(Editor’s note:  None of us went to the Columbia School of Journalism, so we feel compelled to keep you in the loop on how we modified the following interview; maybe this stuff is common practice in “newspapers” and the like, we’re not sure.  We eliminated, to a large degree, vocal tics from both the interviewer and interviewee.  Things like “you know” and “like” seemed to clog the reading and didn’t really add anything to the text.  If this were a qualitative bit of research for somebody’s dissertation, we’d have left them in, but it’s not.  We also eliminated a few clarifications of questions.  Again, they didn’t add anything.  Lastly, for clarity, we moved one section of the interview to another spot.  It doesn’t affect the meaning at all and made everything much cleaner to read.  If we broke any major ethical rules here, let us know and we’ll work to amend our practice.)

We had a chance to talk with Billy Martin, drummer extraordinaire from our favorite forward thinking, improvisational jazz trio, Medeski Martin and Wood about their upcoming box set, the role of the musician in the world and the nature of music and audience.  Billy’s a sharp dude and his insight on these and other topics is a treat.  My favorite bon mot:  “We’re part of this musical subculture that is into all music.  We’re into all genres.  Really it’s folk music, you know, it’s for the folks.  For everybody.  The people’s music.”  Right on.

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Citizen Dick: The idea that a lot of bands record and then tour on that material and then repeat that whole thing, you’re trying to break out of that with Radiolarians, right?

Billy Martin: Yeah.  I mean really what it is another way for us to keep things fresh, to keep things…to keep the music fresh and to create more material.  When it starts getting played out, it’s not a good thing.  So, it also is a perfect way to write a lot more music, keep us writing, keep us fresh and also it’s untraditional in the sense that we’re not, you know, recording a record and then touring on all the music and playing it out for a year.  And it’s seasonal, too.  It originally was kind of a seasonal idea.

CD: Do you find that the product, the record that you end up with, is it fundamentally different than what you would have gotten if you’d done it another way?

BM: Yeah.  Sure it would have been different if we had done it another way.  I mean every time we get in the studio or work on music it’s different depending on the approach we take.  But it’s a subtle difference.  I think that John and Chris and I, we have a certain chemistry that is just always there, subconscious, not perfect sometimes.  At other times its just like everything is really coming out strong.  So that part, the chemistry doesn’t change as much, it’s just how we go about working with the chemistry.

CD: “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” is a really strong track from the new record.  Who’s playing that fuzzed out slide on that track?

BM: That’s Chris.  That’s Chris on the bass playing the melody with the slide.

CD: It’s such a cool sound.

BM: Yeah I love that.  I think he’s playing his Hofner, that old Paul McCartney bass.  I love the sound of that thing.  Chris has got a great slide bass sound; I love it.  I always ask him to pull that out, use that.

CD: That’s one of the bummers for us.  We get so much stuff digitally that I can never go through the liner notes.  It drives me crazy.

BM: Yeah I know.  That sucks. With the box set, you’re going to get all kinds of stuff that’s going to come on cards and you’re going to see all the credits and everything, in the old traditional way.

CD: That’s out before Christmas, right?

BM: Right around Thanksgiving actually.  That’s traditional.  I don’t think we’ve ever done anything traditional as far as release, but this one is our, “okay, this is your big Thanksgiving/Christmas present.”

CD: Will that be just on CD or will it be on vinyl as well?

BM: It’s everything.  It’s going to be five CDs, one DVD, two vinyls.  And the vinyl’s going to be 180 gram, audiophile stuff.  The DVD is the first inside the band, making the music and touring thing we’ve done.  It’s pretty cool.  It’s kind of an experimental documentary.  It’s ninety minutes and we did it ourselves, so it looks cool.  It’s called Fly on the Bottle, which is really kind of like a fly on the wall, because there was actually a fly in a bottle that we found in our studio.  It’s like you are with us, in a very intimate setting, in the studio recording Radiolarians, doing takes, rehearsing, traveling to Brazil, Argentina, Northern California.  There are quite a few tunes where we start recording them and then all of the sudden it cuts into the 16 mm footage I shot of us and it kind of takes you into a whole other world, taking you into and out of these portals back in time, forward in time.  It doesn’t make chronological sense necessarily, but it’s like you’re really experiencing the Radiolarians music as we record it, tour it and fantasize about it.  What’s great is towards the end there’s really great footage of John playing these amazing solos that ended up on the record and I just happened to give the camera to a friend while we were doing the take.  So you’ve got John playing these insane clavinet, organ solos, like the ultimate ones in some of these songs from Radiolarians III.  It’s really up-close, watching his fingers and capturing the take.  Pretty magical in that sense.

CD: It sounds like a unique thing, to be that close to the process.

BM: No one’s done it.  We haven’t allowed anybody to do it, because it’s just another extra thing that we can’t think about.  But since I had the camera it was easier.  After a while, everybody was used to it.  There’s some bonus music videos on it as well.  I’m excited about it because I’m into film and music videos a lot now.  Music video director for hire.  (Laughs)

CD: Will the DVD be just part of the box set or will that be available separately as well?

BM: Only in the box set.  Maybe someday it’ll be re-released or it ends up in the theaters in year or two as a different movie, but right now you can’t get it anywhere but in the box set.

CD: To shift a bit to the live stuff, you guys always do great covers, like the Hendrix stuff and “Buster Rides Again.”  Do those kind of choices come organically from the jazz culture or is that something that you really trouble over in terms of what you’re going to play that isn’t yours?

BM: Being somewhat part of the jazz world, it’s what you do.  You reinterpret music.  It’s kind of like part of being a musician in that world.  Which everybody does who is a real musician.  You’re reinterpreting other people’s music, you’re checking it out.  For jazz musicians it’s more common because there’s all these standards that are set up where you reinterpret those standards.  But our way of doing things is to take some standards, which like “Buster Rides” is almost like a standard, but taking something else, like “Lively Up Yourself” or even “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” is actually an old gospel sort of folk tune and, what we do naturally is say, “this is such a cool thing, let’s try to reinterpret it our way.”  We love to do that.  But we don’t like to overdo it.  But I think we should do that soon, do a record where we do all covers, but where it’s like obviously all interesting choices.  Every once in a while we do it, because it naturally comes; someone brings a tune to the table and we re-do it.

CD: One of the cool things with that, given that your audience is (at least in my mind) kind of diverse, is that doing a song from the jazz canon might expose your audience to some stuff that they might not otherwise listen to.  Do you ever see that as one of your roles, to broaden peoples’ musical perspectives?

BM: We don’t really focus on what our role is as far as that.  I think that we’re responsible only in the sense that we want to make good music.  We want to take people on a journey and maybe take a little credit for it.  But, other than that, we do what we love to do and some people like it and that’s great.  I don’t see it as our job to inspire young kids or to introduce certain things.  We just go by what we love.  But, we also like to educate people to, through things like Camp MMW and all that stuff.  We bring that in; it’s just part of our language.  But it’s not something that when we make a record, we say “Oh.  Let’s introduce this to the kids.”  It just happens that way.  That’s a natural way of music and culture.  We’re part of this musical subculture that is into all music.  We’re into all genres.  Really it’s folk music, you know, it’s for the folks.  For everybody.  The people’s music.  We want to share all that with different parts of the musical community.  I think that then people go, “Whoa, I didn’t know that song existed” or “Wow.  I’ve never checked out Duke Ellington or King Sunny Ade.”

CD: A bunch of years ago I saw you at the now Cleveland Odeon (which unfortunately no longer exists) and I remember you throwing a tambourine on your snare during an extended solo.  That’s always stuck with me as something that represents the band’s intrepid spirit.  You guys go in directions that are interesting and new.  You talked about this a little bit with the Radiolarians project, but how do you keep that up?  How do you keep things fresh?

BM: Well, you have to be in the moment and when you’re sort of fed up with the same old shit, which for us is often, I just force myself to take a left turn. We’re very sensitive to doing the same thing over again; we’re not like these performers where we use the same tricks every time; we’ don’t like things to get old.  Sometimes I fall on my face and sometimes it works.  It’s taking risks and the spirit of being in the moment and ready to just sort of improvise and jump into a whole new situation and not know what’s going to happen.  The audience picks up on that too.  If it’s new to me, and I’m making the music (laughs).  Some people will say ”Did you rehearse that?”  And you’re like, “I never did that before.”  Like throwing a tambourine down on a snare, that’s something I don’t even remember doing, but other things that I do with the tambourine I do, like it’s a little more of a pattern.  But every once in a while, I’ll do that, I’ll throw something down and I’ll start hitting it on the drums; I like the whole pots and pans effect and I like using a snare upside down or that kind of idea.

CD: There’s a song Combustication, the title of which isn’t in my notes and that, of course, escapes me now, but it was cool to see the song live because you kind of run your finger along the inside edge of the tambourine making a sound made total sense to me when I went back to the record.  It was nice to have that interplay of the live act with the recorded material.  Do you think that either of them can exist without the other?  For you, to what degree does the live stuff inform the recorded stuff and, maybe tougher, how does the audiences’ understanding shift when they see it live?

BM: Let me just backtrack to the tune.  That tune was “Coconut Boogaloo” and the tambourine is a Brazilian tambourine called a pandero and it’s traditionally played a lot of different ways.  One of the things is sort of running your finger across it and making it buzz like that.  It’s part of the language.  There are certain things about the composition, what makes it “Coconut Boogaloo” that are there, but it’s never in the same place.  It happens.  When one part comes in, you know that’s that part, when another part of the song comes in, you know that’s a different part of the song and then altogether it makes it the song, but the performance is always changing that.  We’re rearranging it all the time.  It’s like the through the performance, we breathe new life into it.  Sometimes we’ll play half of the song and then leave it and go somewhere else and maybe never come back.  Other times maybe we’ll play the song and it’ll be a really extended version.  Or maybe we’ll play one section really long or maybe we’ll go through it really quickly.  There’s so many variations of what makes it the song, how you identify it.  It could be a bass line, it could be the drumbeat, you know.  Obviously the melody everybody knows, but our melodies are very evasive sometimes.  It’s not about the melody, it’s about the melody of the drums or the combination of the bass with the piano.  Those things depend on the song.  It’s our little hooky kind of thing that makes it recognizable as “Coconut Boogaloo.”

CD: A band called Megafaun was in town recently, have you heard them?

BM: No I haven’t, but I like the name.

CD: They do a kind of experimental folk thing, but have roots in the more academic, experimental music community.  They cited you guys as an influence in that when they work in an improvisational mode, they’re reaching at some of the same things you guys are.  Do you ever do purely improvisational sets?  How does that turn out?

BM: First of all, those guys can go to hell now.  (Laughs)  I’m just kidding.  I love that we’re inspiring people, especially when it comes to experimental music.  That’s really, for me…my spirit is all about experimenting.  If I could just experiment and improvise 24 hours a day, I would be happy.  Occasionally, I lie to re-do a song and play it again, but it’s also hard work to improvise and come up with new music.  We’ve had tours where we’ve done that, like on the west coast maybe five years ago.  For the whole coast, the whole week and a half or whatever, we did every night, every set was completely improvised; there was nothing in there.  And then when we played the encore, if they called us out again, we would do one song from our repertoire.  Those sets, for me, where my favorite.  I mean because I would say a majority of our music, for sure 90 percent of our music, comes out of improvising and it just happens that way, whether it’s recording improvisation and going “That’s it, we don’t need to re-do it, that’s it.  It’s done.”  And other times improvising and going, “Oh let’s shorten this section.  I really like this part.  Let’s make that work.”  When you do it live, there’s a lot of pressure because you’re in front of an audience and you’ve always got to be on your toes and you want to be good.  You have to be kind of audacious too.  You just have to step out and be crazy enough to do something different.  That’s the best for me.  I love experimenting.  That’s the root of being an artist.

CD: Maybe a hack one to close on?  If you could play cards with any three other drummers ever, who would they be?

BM: Elvin Jones.  It’s funny, they’re just coming right into my head.  Danny Richmond who played with Mingus.  And. Nana Vasconcelos, who’s actually a Brazilian percussionist who also plays drums sometimes.

CD: Those are good ones.

BM: You got to take all the pictures and put them together and you’re gonna laugh.

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Big thanks to Billy Martin for taking the time to chat with us.  We don’t have a release date or pre-order link on the boxset (or the price for that matter), but it is going to be a doozy.  Billy alluded to the contents, but to clarify a touch, you’ll get two LPs of highlight material, all three CDs with bonus tracks, a remix CD, a live CD and that documentary on DVD.  That is a lot of stuff.  We’ll let you know more as soon as we know it.  In the meantime, we’ve got a couple of killer live cuts and a track from Radiolarians III.  (In “No Ke Ano Ahiahi,” you get the PA announcer asking everybody to leave the building quietly, which is nice.)

Medeski Martin and Wood – No Ke Ano Ahiahi, Live 1998

Medeski Martin and Wood – Crosstown Traffic, Live 1996

Medeski Martin and Wood – Undone

Minutes later, though, I learned that was not the case – Cleveland’s art school finest had turned out en masse, many carrying with them delectable-looking baked goods. My friend and I greeted one another, shared a shrug at the length of the line, and then made our way back to its end. When we finally got into the venue, after checking in with the door guy, we found The Octopus Project’s Josh Lambert near the merch table and set up a quick interview. As Josh went to find other members of the band, we headed to the debris and hipster-strewn steps outside. Soon Lambert emerged with two of his bandmates, Toto Miranda and Ryan Figg.

Ordinarily, at this point I would mention the instrumentation of each band member. With Austin-based instrumental indie-electronica band The Octopus Project, however, such description is difficult. Indeed, just about every member of the band plays just about every instrument, with switches occurring between (and often during!) every song. Generally, though, Lambert mans the lead guitar on most tracks, Miranda handles drum duties on most, and Figg holds down the bass. Unfortunately, the fourth member of the band, Yvonne Lambert, was unable to join us outside. Though it was disappointing that her voice wasn’t in our conversation, in a backwards way it made my job as scribe easier, as I wouldn’t know where to begin describing her role. Yvonne seems to play every instrument known to man, and some possibly unknown, switching comfortably from synthesizer to glockenspiel to the audience-enthralling theremin.

Even without Yvonne present in our huddle, we faced no shortage of things to discuss, and our conversation with the band moved swiftly through topics including whether their house is really haunted (it isn’t), their collaborative efforts with bands such as … And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and Black Moth Super Rainbow, their “Visual Music” project of live scoring short films, the band’s tumultuous experience filming a video for their new Golden Beds EP off the coast of hurricane-ravaged Galveston TX, and their role in the diverse and exciting Austin music scene. We also learned that this show was the fifth set the group had played in Cleveland in less than two years, with the three previous shows coming within a single 12 week stretch.

As the members of the band discussed their views toward art and music it became abundantly clear the value each individual placed on diversity and complexity, emphases just as evident in their aforementioned collaborations and multi-media experiments as it was in the sound and spectacle the band brought to the stage. The Octopus Project played among a handful of giant lit bunny rabbit ghosts, with psychedelic cartoons and strange documentary footage projected onto a screen backdrop. Unlike the t-shirts and jeans the fellas were wearing during our pre-show conversation, the men in the group took the stage in shirtsleeves and ties while Yvonne Lambert donned a vintage dress that went perfectly with her adorable short bangs/flipped up in the back haircut.

Immediately the crowd gravitated to the stage and the sound coming from it, and for the next hour the band ripped through a selection of standards from previous albums and a healthy mix of tracks from Golden Beds (which, incidentally, will be released tomorrow). If the crowd response at the Grog Shop is any indication, this new EP should receive an enthusiastic embrace, for while the energy in the room never declined from the set’s start to its conclusion, show-goers were clearly most revved up for the new tunes, particularly “Wet Gold” and “Rorol.”

All four members of the band were hitting on all cylinders, but the sonic diffusion between Yvonne Lambert and Toto Miranda struck me as the single most engaging dynamic. The audience seemed to respond in kind as well, with things reaching fever pitch as Miranda’s drumming became heavier and more frenetic, while their attention became rapt and engrossed, much like a small child being read a nursery tale, whenever Yvonne created magic with her Moog theremin.

Just when you wondered how much more excitement could be wrung out of a crowd late on a Sunday night, the band wrapped things up with an up-beat closer and an immediate encore, including new single “Wood Trumpet.” As the members each said their thank yous to the crowd, Josh Lambert announced that the band would be over “by the merch” if anyone wanted to say hi. As my friend and I headed to the exit, we noticed a new line forming in that back annex, precisely where we had earlier found Josh standing alone. Clearly, The Octopus Project was not going to get out of the Grog Shop any time soon.

The Octopus Project – Wet Gold

The Builders and the Butchers’ recently recently released sophomore long player, Salvation is a Deep Dark Well has been churning through the Citizen Dick stereo since it’s release.  We’ve been sitting on a critical comment, hoping that we had an interview up our sleeve.  We recently had the opportunity to chat with the group’s frontman, Ryan Sollee about the record, things of  influence and, briefly, the universe.  The record is packed with Gothic narratives, soaring multiple part harmonies and big emotional crescendos.  It’s worth checking out.  (Editor’s note: We went with footnotes on this one because they made sense and we just learned the code for them.  We think they’re both clever and useful, but if they’re distracting, feel free to ignore them.)

Citizen Dick: The record’s got an expansive, dramatic sound.  With that, there’s a distinct warmth.  Put simply, it’s good.  Are you happy with how it turned out?  Does it sound like it sounded in your brain?

Ryan Sollee: Overall I guess so, so much time has past since we recorded it to when it came out that I found myself stuck in a lot of second guessing traps, but overall I am proud of the record. The record is much more musically wide in scope than I had expected, that had a lot to do with working with Chris Funk, Adam Seltzer and Tucker Martine who did amazing work for us.

CD: Your website describes a youth in punk and then a left turn into Americana.  There’s an obvious connection there to, say, The Pogues who pulled the same trick with Gaelic folk.  I don’t, however, hear the sneer in your record that I do in something like Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.  How do your influences filter into a unified whole?

RS: For me influences for this band come from a lot of old American music, like Leadbelly and Son House¹, but I’ve always been into story song writers like Johnny Cash or Tom Waits.  That being said all of the musicians in the band come from a much different place musically from me, and nobody is trained or formally taught on the instruments they are playing.  So the sound comes from five different filters attempting to play old American sounding music and fucking it up, but hopefully in a good way.

CD: There’s twin lyrical trend on the record, with a lot of images that explicitly reference color (“Golden and Green,” “Barcelona”) and a lot of old-timey hellfire and brimstone, devil and damnation stuff.  Do these almost overtly literary flourishes happen organically or do you work to get them in there?

RS: I’m pretty guilty of getting stuck on a certain few topics for a while, so the images find their way into the songs pretty naturally.  Most of the songs on the first record had something to do with water.  I had to stop writing about that, so naturally I moved to hell and the devil.

CD: We’d argue that the record shares a bit of tonal, thematic and sonic quality with The Decemberists’ early work.  Is that the result of Chris Funk’s production, an already extant streak in the band or some sort of magical Portland effect?

RS: think it could be a bit of all three, it’s hard to escape your surroundings, and I think the Decemberists are a pretty amazing band, however there a many local Portland bands which I’d name as direct influences before the Decemberists.  I think the biggest effect of Portland on us the fact that there are so many acoustically based bands that are doing vastly different things with traditional folk instruments.

CD: The description of the development of your live act is fascinating. We’re looking forward to your Cleveland date.  Can you still swing as much outlandish stuff indoors?

RS: It really depends on the show, as to what will happen we really just try to feel a room and an audience to see if one thing or another will work.  That being said, growing up seeing truly outlandish bands like the Jesus Lizard² or Fugazi play, what we do seems pretty mellow.

CD: Anything else for the good of the order?  Something whimsical?  Some snippet of Oregonian slang we can pass along?

RS: You should be listening to Pancake Breakfast.³

Big thanks to Ryan for taking the time to throw some thoughts at us.  If you’ve not yet put your ears on Salvation is a Deep Dark Well, the two tracks below are going to make you sprint to the record store.  “Golden and Green” is a bit more typical of the album’s overall sound, but the Latin vibe and shouted chorus of “Barcelona” hit exactly the right note.

“Golden and Green” – The Builders and the Butchers

“Barcelona” – The Builders and the Butchers

As an added bonus, we’ve got some sweet video to get you super stoked for The Builders and the Butchers upcoming appearance at the Beachland.  (They’re all over the place if you’re not a Clevelander.)  Loyal readers will not a distinct similarity between this video and some stuff we’ve posted from Megafaun.  Suffice it to say, we’re excited.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Snag The Builders and the Butchers at insound.

Click HERE to check out the radio show in its entirety.  There are some good blogs featured and a pretty nice tracklist prepared from last week’s show.  The show airs every Wednesday, so be sure to check back often for a new weekly list of feature blogs and music.  In addition, the show can also be found via podcast if that’s your cup of tea.  Either way, it’s a great thing they’re doing for the bloggers.

For our readers, we’ve posted the several minute clip here as an audio file, as well as “I Let it Go” from The Thermals’ album. Enjoy, and keep coming back this week. We have some big time reviews on the way.  Thanks for reading- Kevin, James, and Brian

The Thermals – I Let it Go

Citizen Dick Interview – Hype Machine Radio 4/15/2009

It’s heresy to say this in Ohio, but we’re as excited for Those Darlins as we are for Dan Auerbach tonight.  (Both are playing at the Beachland this evening; if this is news to you, get yourself over there quickly, as it’s probably going to sell out.  If you’re reading this on Friday, you missed the boat.)  We know that the Black Key is going to shred, but we’re just as stoked for the country stylings of Murfreesboro’s finest semi-punk trio.  We had the opportunity to pass a few questions along to Those Darlins; their responses to those are below.  Those Darlins will continue blazing a trail across the United States with Mr. Auerbach and have a full length album coming out sometime in the summer. (We’ll keep you informed as the release date approaches.)  We’ll have a full report on their live show tomorrow (barring some sort of wildly unexcepected event, like Auerbach falling in love with us and taking us to New Zealand).

Citizen Dick: What should we expect from the upcoming full length?  Any inside dirt we could pass along to the readership?

Those Darlins: Expect it to be longer than the EP…

This is a hard question for me to answer because I’ve heard the album so many times… and its me… so when I listen to it i just think of it all in pieces and it’s hard to hear it as a whole.  I would imagine what I think you should expect of it would be something opposite of what someone else would tell you to expect of it. I think you should expect to enjoy it fully! And I think if you liked the EP, you are not going to be dissapointed but pleasantly surprised.

What’s the difference between inside dirt and outside dirt?

CD: What albums did your grow up on?  We’ve got this idealized notion of scratchy Moon Mullican 45s on a rickety turntable, but that can’t possibly be right. (editor’s note: Those Darlins responded individually to this query, which we find endearing.  Their responses follow their names, because that makes sense.)

TD:

Kelley Darlin – My sister and I choreographed our own performance to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack and my parents listened to a lot of 60s pop on the Oldies Station. They had a tape collection of hits from the 50s and 60s that I would rollerskate to in the living room. I grew up at the beach and there was a lot of beach or “shag” music around. I also distinctly remember The Chipmunks version of “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” and The Judds “Mama He’s Crazy” being played a lot around the house.

Jessi Darlin-  Bubba Dubba’s first record Midnite Rollin‘ was a constant. I also had a Dr. Suess Record, I think it was Mr. Brown something, and a Popeye record. “OLIVEOIL! YUCK YUCK YUCK!”

CCR- Chronicle

The Beatles- Rubber Soul

Later on it was mostly Ramones… Carter Family. And then I fell in love with Ernest Tubb.

Nikki Darlin- Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit was my lullaby as a child. The Beatles, The O.K.’s (my dad’s band)  Cab Calloway, Ramones, Clash, P.J. Harvey, Courtney Love and Patsy Cline were big influences on me as as a teenage gal…..god I don’t think I can start really getting into the long list but I did listen to my mom’s and grandfathers old vinyl a bit.

CD: In the wrong hands your music might sound cruelly parodic or awkwardly heartfelt.  How do you manage to walk that line, maintaining a bit of a sneer without being jerks about it?

TD: It’s au naturale.

CD: When approaching a cover, how do you make it your own?

TD: Play it. (Sounds too simple right? But we just never were able to duplicate other peoples sounds well enough, and they just turn into our song immediately. And of course it has to do with song choice as well. You have to really connect with the message of the song before you can make it yours.)

CD: The clips we’ve seen of the live act look scorching; any new wrinkles on this tour?

TD: We have a map of the United States that we put pins in after we’ve played a city. It says “The US Travels of Gordan and Edith” and is personalized by the original owners. They traveled everywhere! So we have a lot of catching up to do. On this tour we’ll get to add DC, Seattle, Portland, LA, San Francisco and Cleveland.

CD: How have the crowds been with Dan Auerbach?

TD: The crowds have been crazy psychos who wanna dance and party.

Many thanks to Those Darlins.  Good news that we fit into the crazy/psycho/dancing/partying mold – we’ll fit right in.  Enjoy the video below, extolling the virtues of drunken chicken eating.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Before the show, I was curious about how the frenetic energy of DD/MM/YYYY’s recorded material would translate live; I’ll be honest and say that I thought Black Square might be as much about studio wizardry as it is about musical chops.  Happily, I can report that the material is, if anything, better live; things were coming fast and hard, and my notes are a bit lacking on song titles, but a clear highlight (and good example of the band’s ability to raise the ante live) was “Infinity Skull Cube.”  The stuttering drum riff and evil keyboard noise were pushed to the max live and the shouted, spiraling vocals were jaw-dropping.  It was another time when the tightness of the band bubbled to the top; the changes and vocal interplay in that song were right on time.  It was a standout song in an impressive set.

The percussion was captivating all night; the band took the stage with a bouquet of drumsticks and exploded one or two on each song.  Matt King had his own snare and cymbal (lit by a beaten up home repair style floodlight clamped to the bottom), but still splashed all over the main kit.  Although the crowd didn’t seem to be picking it up, most of the tracks had a subverted dance beat buried underneath all the sound.  I was sweating by the end and the band looked like they’d just run a marathon.  Other random snippets that stand out:  the band’s easy, idle chatter between songs, notably including a rock/paper/scissors match to determine the next tune, the level of energy and emotion Tomas Del Biasio brought to the proceedings, the seamless musical chair nature of the band and, as above, the dexterity with which the band moved through the often intricate tracks.

DD/MM/YYYY are taking a week or so off, but they’re criss-crossing the nation, bringing the noise to the masses.  Check the dates here and get yourself to a gig.

Scottish quartet The Twilight Sad are currently in the studio, working on the follow-up to their excellent 2007 Fat Cat debut, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters. The explosive muscularity and emotional weight of that record have us on the edge of our seats for new material.  We had the opportunity to bounce a few questions off  vocalist and songwriter James Graham; we’d assumed he’d be a sharp dude, and he hasn’t disappointed.  It’s our distinct pleasure to present that conversation to you.  Not to spoil anything, but the most exciting new bit is that The Twilight Sad appear to be using fire extinguishers as musical intruments on the forthcoming release.  That’s something we can all get behind.

Look for the as yet untitled sophomore LP from The Twilight Sad in October.  In the meantime, to both satisfy your craving for Scottish rock and to whet your appetite for the future, check out the tremendous odd and sods collection, Killed My Parents and Hit the Road, available here.

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Citizen Dick: You wrote in The Skinny that the lyrical content of the new record will be a bit dark.  Will that also affect the music itself?  14 Autumns, 15 Winters worked, we’d argue in a primarily anthemic mode; do dark lyrics imply less soaring sonics?

James Graham: Andy [MacFarlane, guitar/accordion/noise]  and I write separately, so the lyrics won’t ever effect what direction the music goes. Andy likes making noise too much, so we won’t ever compromise the soaring sonics.

CD: How’s the recording going?  Any big stylistic left-turns to expect?

JG: I have just finished my vocals and this is the last day we are tracking.  Everything is sounding really big and noisy and we are really happy so far. The only problem we have had is that Orzel [Craig Orzel, bass] has blown up three bass amps.  We expect this record to be a lot noisier and a lot more intense.

CD: Any insider info on the new album we can share with our readers?  Album title, songs to be included, things of that nature?

JG: No album title as of yet, but there are a few ideas floating about.  The song titles aren’t going to be as long, I think.  We have used fire extinguishers on a few songs!

CD: “Half a Person” is my favorite Smiths song.  (I’m not saying that to try and impress anyone; that’s totally true, you can ask my wife, as I put it on about a million mix tapes when we were dating.)  It was thrilling to hear your cover on Killed My Parents and Hit the Road, as it shows that there’s somebody out there who loves that track as much as me.  Further, it’s a perfect cover, in that it’s recognizably both yours and theirs.  When approaching covers, how do you manage the line between faithful and blasphemous?  Is it fun to play covers, or would you rather skip them in favor of your own material?  Are there songs that you wish you’d written?

JG: First of all, I am glad you like the cover.  To be honest, I don’t really like doing covers unless its a song that we feel that we can do justice to and relates back to us. I am big fan of The Smiths and that song seemed to fit with the band lyrically.  When we do a cover, we just try to make it as much as our own as it was for the artist who wrote it.  I wish we had written a few Abba classics, “Lies” by Fleetwood Mac and a number of Leonard Cohen songs.  Lady Gaga’s new song is pretty good, but I don’t think it would translate well in a Scottish accent.

CD: Did the tour with Mogwai influence your sound?  Or vice versa?  When touring, in general, do you find that you get a bit of interplay of ideas with your tour mates?  Or is it more, they play, you play, end of story?

JG: The tour with Mogwai was great!  To be asked to go on tour with one of your favourite bands is a great feeling. We knew Stuart and Barry but we didn’t realise that they were really into the band. The shows were great, probably the best we have ever played. We all came off the tour feeling that we had made some great friends and we had really accomplished something, with some stories that can’t be repeated. We have really improved as a live band over the past six months thanks to that tour. To be able to watch Mogwai every night for a month was something I will never forget. Usually, we just play the shows and get drunk after, so that doesn’t really leave anytime for messing about with ideas. When we were on tour with Beirut, I sang three songs with them in Copenhagen, which was great cause I really like what they do. That’s the probably the closest to a collaboration.

CD: After the record’s in the can, are the any plans to tour these United States or the broader world?

JG: We will be back on the road as soon as everything is done. There is a big US tour getting planned for September, I think. It will be a support tour. Then we will be back for a headline tour, depending if we are allowed back in and if you like the record.  We will be very busy over the next year. We are already planning another EP after the album is out. We have recorded a lot of songs that we are really happy with and want to get them out into the internets, shops and illegal downloading sites.

CD: We often hear the influence of location on bands from this side of the ocean; New York bands sound like New York, southern bands sound southern and so on.  How does Scotland influence your sound?  Quick follow-up:  Do you have any cool Scottish slang we can appropriate?

JG: All the songs are about where we live, people we have known and things that have happened in our local area. It’s where we are from, so it’s going to have some kind of influence, but we don’t think about it too much. It’s not as if I go up the nearest mountain with a bottle of whiskey and my kilt on and start to write songs. I sing in my accent because it’s who I am and it would be stupid to do otherwise.

As for some Scottish slang, try these on for size…

battered a dug = kicked a dog
shat a brick and built the bennet estate = got scared
what you lookin at, am no fuckin porno = what’s your problem
delt wae = slept with
airchie = ass
guys oot = tits out
walaper, doober = dick
dobber supper = sausage and chips
am oan a pure mad whitey by the way =  when you drink too much and you go pale and spew
whitemare = nightmare

CD: We found your advice to students, also from The Skinny, to be pretty useful, notably the admonitions to “stay away from dickheads and try not to look like a complete fanny.”  Any other advice we could pass on to our readers?

JG: You booze, you lose!

CD: Where are your manners? (editor’s note: We were trying to be clever in our last question, asking the same question that we thought Graham was repeating at the end of “Cold Days From the Birdhouse.”  In his response, Graham points out that we misheard the lyric.  We could have done the snobby blogger thing and deleted the question, so as not to look like asses, but we respect you, dear reader.  Laugh at our question and Graham’s response, then enjoy the tune to see how totally off-base we were.)

JG: It’s actually mirrors!

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Big thanks to James Graham of The Twilight Sad for giving us killer answers to our queries.  Look for more Citizen Dick Interviews in the future.

“Cold Days From the Birdhouse” – The Twilight Sad