Aidin Vaziri | Interviews, Reviews and More: July 2007

31 July 2007

Pop Quiz: Hall & Oates

Aidin Vaziri | Sampled by Kanye West, covered by the Gym Class Heroes and icons to everyone from Justin Timberlake to Death Cab for Cutie, Hall & Oates are like some kind of pop-music gift from outer space. More specifically, a totally awesome planet that truly appreciates Philadelphia-bred rock 'n' soul as played by a couple of dudes with rolled-up satin jacket sleeves and at least one prominent mustache. We spoke to John Oates from his home in Colorado.

John Oates of Hall & Oates
Q: Do your fans ever riot because they miss your mustache?
A: I haven't had the mustache since 1991. It's weird, but there's this whole younger generation that has this nostalgic thing for my mustache. It's taken on a life of its own. One girl even sent me a movie she made that was like an ode to my mustache.
Q: It was a very important mustache.
A: It's become this weird '80s iconic thing. I did this Handsome Boy Modeling School record with Dan the Automator where I had a collaboration with Jamie Cullum, and when I finally saw the cover they were wearing these mustaches. It took me a while to figure it out, but it was some kind of weird reference to my old '80s look.
Q: Do you miss it?
A: No. It was the old John. I've shed my skin.
Q: Maybe you should send the mustache out on its own tour, and then everyone will shut up about it.
Read more.

Review: The Doors, Shivaree

The Doors 'Live In Boston 1970': Aidin Vaziri | The packaging is beautiful. The set list is relatively solid, considering the band's collective state of mind at the time (1970). And there's a version of "Light My Fire" on the third disc that pretty much wipes the floor with every other version of the song in terms of sheer over-the-top insanity. The only problem with the latest unearthed live set by the Doors is the sound quality, which, despite meticulous digital restoration, still feels as if you're listening to a bootleg cassette through the dashboard of a Datsun 260Z. To his credit, producer Bruce Botnick pretty much cops to this in the liner notes, meaning that if you're willing to put up with a serious case of Jim Morrison's dry mouth (not entirely his fault this time), this is just about the best way to experience the Doors at their unhinged best.

Shivaree 'Tainted Love: Mating Calls and Love Songs': Aidin Vaziri | On her latest album, helium-voiced Ambrosia Parsley takes on the music of pop's biggest misogynists and misanthropes, an unsavory crew of courtroom faces that includes Phil Spector, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, Rick James and Gary Glitter. You expect the singer who puts Air America Radio's major news events to song every week to snatch these tunes away from their composers and pulverize them PJ Harvey style. Instead, the Shivaree front woman gives each track a heavily perfumed makeover, delivering a lilting cabaret version of Mötley Crüe's "Looks That Kill" and making a sensual lullaby out of R. Kelly's "Half on a Baby." There's also an accordion-drenched version of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that's weird beyond words. It's a little bumpy overall, but oddly compelling.

Sugar & Gold Take To The High Seas

Adrift With Sugar & Gold: Aidin Vaziri | For a guy who wears a captain's hat pretty much around the clock, Philipp Minnig doesn't seem to know what he's doing once you actually get him out on the water. No sooner are we set adrift in a rented rowboat in Golden Gate Park's Stow Lake than the singer-guitarist for San Francisco disco-punk sensation Sugar & Gold navigates the vessel into a dry dock, where a gang of angry gulls stares us down. Nicolas Dobbratz, the group's keyboard player and our unofficial first mate for the day, looks on helplessly from the back of the boat. At least he has a good excuse. At 6 feet something, his legs barely fit inside the thing. "Since when does the captain row his own boat?" Minnig complains, steering against the current. We have stocked up on ice cream sandwiches in case we get stranded on the man-made island, which is overrun by weirdo flashers and pushy squirrels. The purpose of our difficult journey is to discuss Sugar & Gold's new album, "Creme," its current national tour with Gravy Train and its forthcoming show with Von Iva on Saturday at 12 Galaxies. And, more important: To get back at Minnig for the time he bolted offstage and humped me in the audience at the Purple Onion while performing with his old garage-rock band Dura-Delinquent. "Oh, so now it all comes out," he says. "I don't care. This is a good workout." Read more.

23 July 2007

Pop Quiz: Ryan Adams

Aidin Vaziri | Yes, Ryan Adams just released "Easy Tiger," a Top 10 album that features a sweet duet with Sheryl Crow and finds him regaining focus in more ways than one. And yes, we read that thing where the 32-year-old North Carolina singer-songwriter admitted he spent the past few years hooked on speedballs, a cocktail of cocaine and heroin. We know about all those self-indulgent albums he put out, too - three alone in 2005, including one unwieldy double-disc set. But, frankly, we only had time to talk about the really important things: whether we should buy a crummy old watch on eBay or not.

Ryan Adams
Q: Are you actually wearing a calculator watch on your album cover?
A: Yeah. It busted, though. I actually ended up getting a new one. I lucked out. I was looking at some antique market-type places and I found the one right after that called the Casio DBC-62 DataBank World Time, which would be like finding the iPod with the picture.
Q: Why would you need all that technology on your wrist?
A: They're handy. I like them because they're very simple and I can set two time zones on there, so if I'm in Europe or something like that, where one show could be a completely different time zone, I can at least know what time it is at home.
Q: So you don't wake up any of your loved ones?
A: Well, there aren't many, but I can at least know when to send e-mails.
Q: How do you like the calculator function?
A:I don't know how to use the calculator. I've been shown how to do it once, but I pretty much forgot right after. My alarm used to go off every day. The original watch, someone threw it onstage, so I didn't have the instruction booklet or anything.
Q: Someone just threw a valuable piece of jewelry like that onstage?
A: Well, I don't know. I just saw it onstage, and it didn't belong to any band members. It wasn't there when we started. So I had it. But the alarm was set to 4:20.
Q: Is that why it says 4:20 on the cover?
A: Yeah. But I didn't know how to shut it off, so it would go off at 4:20 in the afternoon and 4:20 at night. It didn't go off that long, but it was funny at first and then, after a long time, it got really annoying.
Q: Did you try taking a hammer to it?

Review: Silverchair & Hanson

Silverchair 'Young Modern' & Hanson 'The Walk': Aidin Vaziri | When child actors grow up, they stick up convenience-store clerks and star in poorly produced porn videos. But what becomes of their musical counterparts? This week a pair of prepubescent bands from the '90s return with albums that might have the answer. In their 2.5 million-selling prime, Australia's Silverchair was like a Playskool version of Nirvana, mining all the Seattle band's glory without any of the actual guts. A decade later, the trio is still chasing trends - in this case the sweeping, orchestral pop of Coldplay and Keane - and still making it sound oddly convincing. With Beach Boys/Joanna Newsom collaborator Van Dyke Parks on board, the group even manages a pair of transcendental moments on the independently produced "Young Modern" with "If You Keep Losing Sleep" and a dynamic three-song suite that opens with "Those Thieving Birds, Part 1." Silverchair's family-friendly American counterpart, Hanson (left), similarly recorded, produced and released its latest album unaided. On "The Walk," the band many people blame for ushering in the last teen-pop tsunami with "MMMBop" has matured beyond recognition. For evidence, look no further than "Great Divide," a power ballad that takes on the global AIDS crisis with the assistance an African children's choir. It's not all heavy going, but the brothers' overly earnest appreciation of classic rock 'n' soul, documented in the song "Been There Before" and evident throughout the disc, makes you long for just one more, "Mmm bop, ba duba dop." These guys should really take some pointers from Dustin Diamond

17 July 2007

Live Review: Smashing Pumpkins at the Fillmore, 07/17/07

Smashing Pumpkins reunite, in name only: Aidin Vaziri | If you squinted long and hard enough on Sunday, you might think you were watching an actual reunion of the Smashing Pumpkins, the unrepentant arena-rock act that sold millions of albums in the 1990s. In reality, it was just a passable crew of look-alikes frontman Billy Corgan had pulled together with the group's original drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain, for the first of an 11-night run at the Fillmore. He even made sure their hair color matched the originals'. The band compensated by trudging through a three-hour-plus set on Sunday (and well into Monday) that included many of its most rare and popular songs but few of its actual best. Several of the tunes were saddled with long-winded guitar solos that not only stretched them beyond recognition but made them feel interchangeable. Given that the Pumpkins made it through only three songs in the first half-hour, you had to wonder whether Corgan was actually being incredibly generous or just punishing all the people who'd yelled out for his old band's hits during his solo tour. Read complete review.

Fingering Through Chris Nieratko's 'Skinema'

Stranger than porn: Aidin Vaziri | Chris Nieratko never intended to publish his memoirs. The former skateboard magazine scribe and "Jackass" associate just thought he was reviewing porn videos for a monthly column in New York freebie Vice. But as each review went to print, he discovered the words didn't have so much to do with the action on the screen as his real-life escapades -- which, to his credit, were no less obscene. "If I actually watched a dozen of the movies in the book we're lucky," he said. "My goal was to just avoid the topic at all costs." Hundreds of columns later, Nieratko has a hilarious, heartbreaking and unintentionally filthy autobiography on his hands that lifts its title from the column Skinema. While short on incisive commentary on blue features, the author compensates with the kind of personal revelations that would even make Tyra blush. "Reading through it, I just got sick to my stomach," he said. "It's not the greatest gift I could give my kids."

Pop Quiz: Tegan & Sara

Aidin Vaziri | How can you go wrong with a couple of supercharged 26-year-old Canadian twins with loud guitars and spiky Joan Jett haircuts? Impossible. It's going to hurt waiting nine more days for their fifth studio album, "The Con" (the official release date, for those without a computer or a clue, is July 24), but not as much as getting shut out of their two sold-out shows July 22-23 at the Brava Theatre. Did we mention the new disc was co-produced by Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla and features Matt Sharp of the Rentals and Hunter Burgan of AFI? Or that the White Stripes loved their song "Walking With a Ghost" so much that they covered it and nearly made it a hit a few years ago? What about how Tegan and Sara's new single, "Back in Your Head," could be the most perfect pop song of the year and features the brilliant lyric, "I'm not unfaithful/ But I'll stray"? We spoke with Tegan by phone from Victoria, British Columbia.

Tegan of Tegan & Sara
Q: What did you dream about last night?
A: I had a dream that my brother that I don't have killed my baby sister in front of me. But I don't feel too bummed because I don't have a baby sister either.
Q: Are you drunk?
A: No. I don't drink.
Q: If you were drunk it would have made a lot more sense.
A: If I would have been coming down off acid it would have made a lot more sense. Actually, what happened is I like to doze in the morning, and the apartment that I'm renting for the month has a very active alleyway, so there's a lot of drug use and screaming outside. But I guess hysterical, blood-curdling cries for help don't bother me that much that I can't sleep through them.
Q: Can't you afford something better?
A: No.
Q: Maybe after this tour?
A: Well, I owned a place in Vancouver for about seven years and it was even worse. It was in the worst neighborhood in North America.
Q: Are you practicing to become homeless someday?
A: Wouldn't that be great?

Review: Editors

Editors 'An End Has A Start': Aidin Vaziri | Editors, you might remember, released one of the most amazing singles last year. It was called "Munich," and the chorus went, "People are fragile things, you should know by now." It turns out the band wasn't entirely kidding. Even though that song came with an album that was quite good, "An End Has a Start" is a surprisingly shaky follow-up. It's packed with the kind of tunes you might imagine hearing in an arena while video monitors zoom in on singer Tom Smith's furrowed brow, but listening to 10 of them in a row is an unutterably tedious experience. Add to that choruses that are every bit as heavy as their titles suggest ("The Racing Rats," "The Weight of the World") and the front man's mundane observations on life and death ("You came on your own, that's how you'll leave," he sings on the title track), and it seems as if the end can't come fast enough.

Sanjayamania Hits The Road

Idol Watch - Sanjayamania: Aidin Vaziri | Nobody really expected him to win. But for a brief spell it seemed as if Sanjaya Malakar had half the world on his side. Despite questionable singing skills and dubious choices in material, the 17- year-old native of Washington state soared through the "American Idol" elimination battles week after week, causing more drama in the nation's living rooms than an entire season of "24." Simon Cowell, not unreasonably, threatened to quit. Because the "American Idol" producers like to keep the contestants in a bubble, Malakar said he had no idea how big of an impression he was making during his run on the show, which ultimately ended for him with a seventh-place finish. Calling from Los Angeles rehearsals for the American Idols Live Tour a few weeks ago, however, Malakar said he remembers the precise moment he went from being just another hapless Season 6 contestant to the focus of full-on Sanjayamania. It was during Gwen Stefani Week, in which he performed an off-key rendition of No Doubt's "Bathwater," despite the guest coach's insistent protests. But the singing hardly mattered. It was all about the hair -- seven ponytails running down the center of his head to form a fluffy faux-hawk. A phenomenon was born. "That was the week everyone said, 'Whoa, he's insane!' " Malakar said. "I had no idea it would be so polarizing." Read the complete feature.

08 July 2007

Review: Interpol

Interpol 'Our Love To Admire': Aidin Vaziri | Any lyrics that Paul Banks thinks aren't good enough for his songs, you don't want to know about. He may be a wonderful vocalist in the mold of Ian McCulloch and Richard Butler, but the Interpol singer is one of the most confounding wordsmiths ever. "Nobody told you/ That I could just waltz through/ And shake up your style/ I'm inside/ Like a wrecking ball," he sings at one point on the New York quartet's third full-length album and major-label debut. And that's one of his better offerings. At least he's got a competent backup band, capable of channeling Joy Division's bleak melodies through U2's wind-machine riffs in epic songs such as "Mammoth" and "Pace Is the Trick." Besides, anything is an improvement after this first-album clunker: "I feel like love is in the kitchen with a culinary eye/ I think he's making something special and I'm smart enough to try."

Live Review: Feist at the Fillmore, 06/27/07

Feist keeps it fresh for a second night -- she'll fire you up, break your heart: Aidin Vaziri | Spending nearly three years on the road spreading the word about her show-stopping 2004 major label debut, "Let It Die," has turned Feist into an incredible performer -- one who probably feels more at home in front of a thousand swooning fans than she does kicking around in her undies on a Sunday morning. Miraculously, her voice remains a thing of slow-burning wonder, intact after months of wear and a brief spell in a teenage punk outfit. While a few of her chilled-over torch songs didn't always successfully cross the fine line between sleepy and dreamy, Feist made up for it with a Jack Black sense of raucous humor and the unique ability to turn an entire room of 30ish couples into her own personal makeshift glee club. Employing a swirl of jazz, folk and rock influences with some clever electronic tweaks, she burst to life with the more fitful material such as "My Moon My Man" and "I Feel It All." It was like watching a woman possessed -- her face contorting under a blunt-cut fringe, head nodding to every chord change and body flickering in one big fidget. In particularly emotional moments, her mouth would gape so wide it was easy to imagine all the objects that one could stuff inside: ping-pong balls, remote controls, houseplants, watermelons, basketballs.

Pop Quiz: Neil Sedaka

Aidin Vaziri | Neil Sedaka, 68, likes to joke that the Beatles forced him into early retirement when they arrived in America. But the singer-songwriter hit the pop charts four years ago after "American Idol" runner-up Clay Aiken recorded his single "Solitaire." Meanwhile, a greatest- hits set called "The Definitive Collection," which includes "Calendar Girl" and "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," crashed the Top 40 earlier this year. Not bad for a guy who's been kicking around long enough to have helped create the Brill Building sound and provide Captain & Tennille with their big '70s hit "Love Will Keep Us Together."

Neil Sedaka
Q: You've been jamming with Fountains of Wayne?
A: Yes. I did a place called Joe's Pub to promote the new album, and they sang the months of the year on "Calendar Girl." One evening, (the members of) Snow Patrol invited me to their Madison Square Garden concert.
Q: What, they just called you up and invited you?
A: I met them on a plane going across the country. I sat next to the lead singer, and he said he was a singer with an Irish rock band. He had his iPod, so I asked him to play me one of his songs, and he played "Chasing Cars." I cried.
Q: Did you feel kind of embarrassed crying in front of the lead singer of Snow Patrol?
A: No. It's a beautiful piece of music.
Q: Did he know who you were?
A: I told him who I was, and he said, "Oh, you're very popular in Europe.".... I was the first American singer in Australia and Japan, many places.
Q: Was this before they had planes? How long ago?
A: This is my 50th year in show business.
Q: I can barely count that high.

01 July 2007

Pop Quiz: Juliette Lewis

Aidin Vaziri | Juliette Lewis must be insane. She's just signed up her band to tour the country with Chris Cornell, the leather-voiced former front man for Soundgarden and Audioslave. We imagine his fans are going to be a bit skeptical about the whole thing, primarily because Lewis is best known as an actress who once portrayed Jennifer Lopez's best friend in a movie called "Enough," she used to date Brad Pitt and she's a big-time Scientologist. Plus, the last time we saw her she was decked out in head-to-toe neon-yellow spandex. But the biggest head-scratcher for the old-school metal fans is going to be the glam-rock blast of Juliette and the Licks' new album, "Four on the Floor." She's probably going to melt their heads.

Juliette Lewis
Q: Are you ready to face Chris Cornell's fans? From what I understand they are mostly Neanderthals.
A: We're so excited I can't even explain it to you. We've played so many different kinds of shows. Once you've opened for Turbonegro and Social Distortion, you're pretty much ready for anything. We just played to a bunch of Iron Maiden fans in Spain. We haven't been in the States, so you have no idea what we've done as a band. His audience is rockers and we're a rock band, so it's a good match. It's a nice, healthy crowd.
Q: I remember a few years ago you were pretty much the only woman on the Warped Tour.
A: There were three bands that had women in them. That's what's so great. It's where we cut our teeth. In a narrow view, I'm this crossover act because of the movie thing, but I'm sort of this underdog upon underdog, so the Warped Tour was great. It was for kids, and they don't know who I am. To them, we're just a loud, ruckus-y band. That's what festivals are about. We made a lot of friends. My Chemical Romance was checking us out show after show.
Q: How many of your moves do you think that guy from My Chemical Romance stole?
A: Shut up. He has a lot of awesome moves. I love the camaraderie between bands that you develop. It's a real community. You have a mishmash of all kinds of people. You're just joined by music and these audiences. It's more part of my nature than something else.

Review: Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys 'The Mix Up': Aidin Vaziri | Until now the Beastie Boys mainly used their instrumental chops as a way of catching their breath between ludicrous raps about living large and saving Tibet. But on their latest album it seems that Mike D, MCA and Adrock have finally run out of things to say, so they've chucked out the samples and rhymes and have devoted the whole thing to showing off their modicum of talent for re-creating the grimy jazz-funk sound of '70s porn soundtracks. While listening to the wah-wah guitars, loping grooves and slipshod sitar flourishes on tracks such as "The Gala Event" and "14th St. Break," all you can do is wonder why "The Mix-Up" doesn't come packaged with a lava lamp.