Aidin Vaziri | Interviews, Reviews and More: March 2009

22 March 2009

Alice Russell: The Real Thing

Alice Russell is boring, in a good way: Aidin Vaziri | Alice Russell knows she's boring. Unlike the other British soul sirens who have made their way over here in the past few years, the 33-year-old singer has never gone to rehab, won any television singing competitions or even been photographed by paparazzi stumbling half naked out of some dodgy bar. "My life is so boring I'm falling asleep right now talking about it!" Russell exclaims, calling last week from a tour stop in Pittsburgh. "I know things like that are good for PR, but I'm getting old now and my hips are giving out." Press hard enough, however, and she will come clean about a little recreational pill popping. "I keep limber with fish oil tablets," says Russell, who headlines two nights at Yoshi's San Francisco this week. "I don't think you can OD on them but maybe people will come see me for the fish breath. I think that's going to break me through." Continue reading.

20 March 2009

Review: Peter Doherty, 'Grace/Wastelands'

Peter Doherty, 'Grace/Wastelands': Aidin Vaziri | Most people know Britain's second most popular drug addict by name, but few have heard his music. Despite the outsize tabloid fascination with his death-defying chemical intake, romance with Kate Moss and occasional prison stays, Pete Doherty has actually done very little of note. Sure, his first band, the Libertines, seemed poised to update the Smiths' romantic imagery and shambolic melodies but it all fell apart too soon, after the doe-eyed singer clashed with his creative partner Carl Barat - and then robbed his flat while the rest of the group was on tour. Doherty's next outfit, Babyshambles, scored an unexpected Top 10 hit in Britain with the song "Killamangiro," but quickly took a backseat to the front man's reported $2,000-a-day crack habit. Having managed to stay out of the headlines for the past few months, his first solo album could finally make the case for Doherty, the musician. But like all his other output, it's a record that casually veers from brilliance to indolence. When he's fully present, the results are fantastic - vulnerable, poetic and gently swaggering tunes such as "Broken Love Song" and "The Last of the English Roses." It's the stuff that makes his fans tolerate everything else. Doherty, however, too often sounds like he's merely drifting along, filling out the record with too many rambling ballads to make it his defining statement. Producer Stephen Street and Blur guitarist Graham Coxon do their best to keep him focused, but old habits die hard.

Pop Quiz: Rhett Miller

Aidin Vaziri | Rhett Miller, a vastly underrated singer-songwriter and occasional front man for the Old 97's, is playing a brief solo acoustic tour. Calling from his home in New York's Hudson Valley, Miller said fans can expect to hear plenty of favorites from the past 15 years as well as songs from his forthcoming self-titled solo album, a work he calls intensely personal. "I think it's fantastic," he said. "Of course, I'm still in the middle of it, so I have no perspective."

Rhett Miller
Q: Are your relationships as messed up as the ones in your songs?
A: You haven't heard the new record yet. The really tough times from my late 20s and early 30s are still very fresh in my memory, and I have no trouble drawing on that well of anguish and heartbreak. But the murders are all fiction - I have alibis.
Q: Lots of critics have said that you're too good-looking to have any relationship problems.
A: That's nice. I'll take it. It is what it is. It's like if you live in a nice house, you always want a nicer house. I got my heart broken, too. Maybe it was by a girl slightly better looking than most of the critics out there are used to, present company excepted.
Q: You're married to supermodel Erica Iahn. Is that as tough as it sounds?
A: She's in the room, so I can't say. Continue reading.

Review: Razorlight, 'Slipway Fires'

Razorlight, 'Slipway Fires': Aidin Vaziri | Multiplatinum stars back home, Razorlight got notice here only briefly, when lanky front man Johnny Borrell and starlet Kirsten Dunst, left, were spotted riding around Austin, Texas, on the back of his rented Harley. Don't look for a breakthrough now. The British group's third album trades accessibility for ambition. No expense has been spared in the making of "Slipway Fires" - the video for the single "Wire to Wire" was directed by two-time Oscar nominee Stephen Frears. Yet for all the strings, lush pianos and blinding ambition, the band sounds strangely soulless. The scruffy charm exhibited on stunning early singles such as "Stumble and Fall" and "In the Morning" is gone. The new material hardly measures up to its ornate surroundings. The power ballads sound more preposterous than inspired, and the rock tunes are stuffed with '80s-scented cliches. It's all you can do to keep your lunch down when, on "North London Trash," Borrell sings with exacting sincerity, "I've got a hot-bodied girlfriend, who makes the cameras flash!"

Janaka Comes Up For Air

Janaka's 'Pushing Air' pulses to a global beat: Aidin Vaziri | Janaka Selekta racked up plenty of travel miles working on his first solo album, "Pushing Air." It was more than a year in the making, the basic tracks recorded at Selekta's Lower Haight studio in San Francisco before he took them to India, where some of the country's top classical musicians sat in on the sessions. Then it was off to Chicago for a month in the studio with producer Radiohiro for the mix. On Sunday, the 37-year-old multi-instrumentalist and DJ brings the independently released album back home when he joins up with his fellow musicians in Dubfi Soundsystem - vocalist JC Stokes, guitarist Ali Tariq and tabla player Shabi Farooq - for a release party at the Elbo Room. Business as usual, he says: "My father is a diplomat. We were carried around like luggage." Continue reading.

Pop Quiz: Petula Clark

Aidin Vaziri | Petula Clark, 76, set swinging London into motion with hits such as "Downtown" and "Don't Sleep in the Subway." With more than five decades of musical experience on her resume and 70 million albums sold worldwide, she's still going strong, having divided recent years between solo performances and Broadway and West End productions such as "Blood Brothers," "The Sound of Music" and "Someone Like You." Most recently she appeared as Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's adaptation of "Sunset Boulevard."

Petula Clark
Q: What's on your iPod that would surprise most people?
A: On my iPod? I don't possess an iPod. I've got music going on in my head all the time; I don't need something stuck in my ear. I like silence, too. A lot of people these days are afraid of silence, but I live in Geneva and we have a chalet up in the French Alps and I spent three days up there before leaving for this tour. I hardly spoke to anyone. Real silence. It does your soul good.
Q: John Lennon used to say that you were his favorite singer.
A: Yes, he did. I met him in Montreal when he was doing the bed-in. I just happened to pop in because I wanted to talk to him about something, and there they were in bed. He was adorable. There were all these people in there, and of course they were filming and recording. So I'm actually on that record, "Give Peace a Chance." We met a few times after that, and he always told me how much he enjoyed my singing. Continue reading.

On The Town: Jamie Alexander and Derek Song

Aidin Vaziri | Jamie Alexander and Derek Song are the founders of Park Life, the combination gallery and store space that has brought everything from high-design housewares to lo-fi local artists to the city's Inner Richmond neighborhood. They tell us about the places they like to frequent.

On The Town: Jamie Alexander and Derek Song
Triple Base, 3041 24th St. "This gallery is a real asset to the Bay Area arts scene. More than just a showroom, they are really building a community around the art and artists they show. A great spot if you are looking for affordable art by young artists with a lot of potential."
Super Tokio, 251 Clement St. "This mixed bag store is literally across the street from Park Life. I shop here daily. They have the same Asian-inspired snacks and refreshments as the places in Japantown but at half the cost. The only thing this place doesn't have is produce and meat but seriously, they have everything else." Continue reading.

For St. Patrick's: 17 Irish Albums That Rock

Aidin Vaziri | In honor of St. Patrick's Day, we catalog Ireland's 17 most important contributions to rock 'n' roll since step dancers stopped moving their arms. Incredibly, there's not a leprechaun in the bunch (unless you count Bono):

For St. Patrick's: 17 Irish Albums That Rock:
My Bloody Valentine, "Loveless" (1991): Like staring at the sun, the melodies are so brilliant they can only be delivered through an ear-splitting psychedelic haze.
U2, "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984): That voice, those guitars, the sudden urge to grow out a mullet. This is where it all catches light.
Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks" (1968): He wanted to make a jazz album, but what came out isn't even music - it's better.
Damien Rice, "O" (2003): So intimate and unassuming it's only after repeated listens that you discover your heart in a puddle on the ground.
The Pogues, "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash" (1985): Really, any album by the Pogues will do; this one that Elvis Costello produced just happens to be the best. Continue reading.

Catching up with ... Laura Albert

Aidin Vaziri | Laura Albert has a picture of Borat pinned to her office wall. It's perfect. Like comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the 43-year-old San Francisco novelist invented an outrageous character to grab the world's attention - in this case, the underage West Virginia transvestite prostitute JT LeRoy, who was named as the author of "Sarah" and "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" (both published by Bloomsbury). It worked a little too well.

Catching up with ... Laura Albert:
Q: Are you still writing?
A: Always. I've been writing a lot for French magazines. They didn't even blink for a second. It's me, Josephine Baker and Jerry Lewis - although he just won an Oscar. There's another JT book; I just need to add a few more voices.
Q: Do you have a favorite reality show?
A: I was really into "The Real World" when I was a kid. But I lived it. They can't compete. I was in a mental institution.
Q: What are you most likely to get arrested for?
A: Telling the truth. Continue reading.

10 March 2009

Pop Quiz: Tina Dico

Aidin Vaziri | Tina Dico is a pop star in her native Denmark, where teenagers pack festival fields to sing along with her clear-eyed rock songs. Here, she's still a cult phenomenon, best known as an occasional vocalist with Zero 7. If a recent move to New York doesn't help the singer-songwriter make a bigger impression on America, then her beautifully packaged new triple EP set, "A Beginning, a Detour, an Open Ending," should do the trick.

Tina Dico
Q: Have you ever partied with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, since you are the only two Danish musicians I know?
A: I have not. The keyboard player in my Danish band is related to him, so he always sees him at family functions.
Q: That's funny. I always see him at Oasis shows.
A: Really? Now I have something to talk to him about. I can tell him Oasis stories.
Q: Why, do you have some good ones?
A: No, but I can make some up. Continue reading.

Review: Kelly Clarkson, 'All I Ever Wanted'

Kelly Clarkson, 'All I Ever Wanted': Aidin Vaziri | Kelly Clarkson must feel totally defeated. After trying to dislodge herself from the "American Idol" franchise and grab the reins of her career from record company boss Clive Davis with 2007's downbeat "My December," she was rewarded with a round slap on the cheek from her fans. It's not that the self-composed songs on her previous album were terrible; it's just that no one wanted to hear the woman who sang "Since U Been Gone" with such conviction come back moaning like Alanis Morissette after a bad cup of soy latte. As you can tell from that cover art, all creative decisions for Clarkson's latest, "All I Ever Wanted," have been safely returned to the hands of music industry masterminds. The result? An album unabashedly stuffed with second-generation "Since U Been Gone" rewrites - each one more brilliant than the next. Dr. Luke and Max Martin, the guys who wrote the original, even return for the first single, "My Life Would Suck Without You." Glen Ballard, meanwhile, delivers "Long Shot," a rabid tune he rightfully took to Katy Perry first. New "American Idol" judge Kara DioGuardi co-writes the insanely catchy "I Do Not Hook Up." And OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder brings a hint of introspection to the proceedings with "Save You," but only briefly. This album is driven by the high-octane melodies and manic hand claps that hit fever pitch with the album's heavy metal centerpiece, "Whyyawannabringmedown." As Clarkson giddily wades through the sunshine and retro sheen of the disc's penultimate song, "I Want You," it's easy to think surrender has never sounded so sweet.

Bay Area band update: Whatever happened to ...

Aidin Vaziri | Last month, we got word that Faith No More is reuniting for a European tour this summer. But what about the other major Bay Area rock acts from the '90s that somehow slipped off the radar? We tracked them down at the arenas and county fairs to get status updates.

Counting Crows
Led by faux-dreadlocked crooner Adam Duritz, this Berkeley roots rock group went multiplatinum with its 1993 debut, "August and Everything After," which featured the wistful single "Mr. Jones." Even though album sales dipped, the hits kept coming, up to 2004's Oscar-nominated "Accidentally in Love" from the film "Shrek 2." The band is on a world tour playing stadiums and arenas.

Third Eye Blind
Stephan Jenkins' group was opening for the likes of U2 and the Rolling Stones just months after releasing "Semi-Charmed Life," the doot-doot-dooing hit from its self-titled 1997 debut. But band defections, unplanned time off and a collapsed record company quickly changed Third Eye Blind's fortunes. Missing in action since 2003's "Out of the Vein," Jenkins recently reported on the band's Web site that a new lineup was working on a much-delayed fourth album, "Ursa Major," with plans to reignite industry interest at South by Southwest. Continue reading.

Five Questions for MC Lars

Aidin Vaziri | MC Lars, the Stanford-educated rapper best known for the hit "Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock," is back with a new album, "This Gigantic Robot Kills." Mixing hip-hop beats and punk guitars with free-association rhymes about computers and comic books, the 26-year-old Pacifica resident has become one of the most prominent figures of a musical sub-genre called nerdcore. On Thursday, Lars (real name Andrew Robert Nielsen) performs at Amoeba Music in San Francisco. We asked him for a syllabus.

MC Lars: Nerdcore rapper:
Q: What's nerdcore all about?
A: It's hip-hop that's not afraid to be smart. It's the same music but with a lyrical predisposition about computers and science fiction and technology. Some of the references are really obscure, like you need to know computer coding to get it.
Q: You're probably the only rapper that has dropped Noam Chomsky's name in a song.
A: Growing up, hip-hop was educational and entertaining. For me it's a success if a punk kid comes to my show and then wants to check out KRS-One, or if a hip-hop kid comes and then wants to check out Minor Threat. If either of them wants to read "Hamlet" afterward, then that's a bonus. Continue reading.

Live Review: Estelle at the Mezzanine

Estelle Swaray shares her breakup: Aidin Vaziri | Estelle Swaray treated her concert at the Mezzanine on Thursday like the most fun break-up party ever. Strutting onstage in a little black dress and shiny red stilettos, she breathlessly filled in the capacity crowd on the state of her love life: Things, it appears, are not going so well. Since her breakthrough second album, "Shine," landed in America early last year, the British singer has been hard at work touring and making countless promotional appearances, leaving plenty of time for the men back home to start wandering, one even going so far as to get intimate with her former best friend. "Can I swear a little bit?" Estelle asked early on in the evening. "Thank you, because I'm about to." Continue reading.

01 March 2009

Review: U2, 'No Line on the Horizon'

U2, 'No Line on the Horizon': Aidin Vaziri | Watching U2 rehash the stage set and pounding disco beats of the "Zooropa" era at the Grammys was a bad sign: Could one of the world's best rock bands be so devoid of ideas that it has to return to its second- or third-worst album for inspiration? You probably don't want to know the answer. The backward-looking "Get on Your Boots," a single that is as clunky as its title, isn't the biggest slip to be found on "No Line on the Horizon." In fact, it's one of the few songs that actually has a pulse on a record bogged down by long, droning ballads and groaning electro-rockers that would have sounded dated even when the Prodigy ruled the charts. "Moment of Surrender," "Stand Up Comedy," "Breathe" - at best, these songs should have been "Pop" B-sides. Bono's lyrics, meanwhile - usually driven by life's big, existential questions - suffer a major lapse as well. At one point on "Unknown Caller," the band members sing in unison, "Force quit and move to trash!" If that doesn't indicate that they made this album while the Edge was tooling around on Facebook, what does? Later, on "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," Bono lends one of his traffic-stopping wails to the line, "There's a part of me in the chaos that's quiet/ And there's a part of you that wants me to riot." Even Lenny Kravitz would have thought that couplet too lazy for public consumption. "No Line on the Horizon" is rife with so many embarrassing moments that not even Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois - the same production team behind U2 classics "The Unforgettable Fire," "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby" - can save it from circling the drain before it's over.

Sara Bareilles: Little Voice, Big Time

Aidin Vaziri | Sara Bareilles just had a moment with Bono. At least she thinks she did. It's the week after the Grammy Awards and the 29-year-old singer-songwriter is fairly certain she caught the U2 front man's eye as his band took the stage to open the ceremony. "I jumped to my feet because that's what I would normally do when I'm at a concert and nobody else stood up," she says. "I felt stupid for a second, but why wouldn't you stand up for U2?" Bareilles would have been hard to miss anyway, even among a sea of famous faces. Seated in the seventh row at Los Angeles' Staples Center, where her ubiquitous hit "Love Song" was up for song of the year and best female pop vocal performance, she was wearing a fluffy Luisa Beccaria bubble gum dress with bright red belt and matching lipstick. She thinks Bono tried to throw his sunglasses her way but missed. "Of course," she says, "I could be totally making this up." Continue reading.

Pop Quiz: M. Ward

Aidin Vaziri | After releasing a handful of criminally underappreciated indie-rock albums, M. Ward was lifted into the spotlight last year via his collaboration with Hollywood starlet Zooey Deschanel on the album "She & Him." Now the groggy-voiced Portland, Ore., songwriter returns with his sixth solo release, "Hold Time," which sounds like an AM radio broadcast from another time and features guest spots by Lucinda Williams, Rachel Blumberg and Deschanel. This year, he also hopes to release an album with Monsters of Folk, his side project with Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Jim James of My Morning Jacket.

M. Ward
Q: When you were touring with "She & Him," were you OK with all the people walking past you to get their pictures taken with Zooey Deschanel?
A: Absolutely. I love having the focus on the guitar and arrangements and leaving the vocals to a pro.
Q: You've also worked with Norah Jones, Jenny Lewis, Chan Marshall, Neko Case and Lucinda Williams. Do you have a policy of collaborating only with hot chicks?
A: You know, I'm very happy to let the songs dictate where they want to go and how they want to be produced and what kind of voice they need. I have just as many male collaborators as female collaborators. Continue reading.

Review: 'War Child Presents Heroes'

'War Child Presents Heroes': Aidin Vaziri | The basic concept here is to have a bunch of old people pick young people to do their old songs, but in a young way - or something like that. The only problem is that it's for charity, so we can't say anything bad about it. Not even when Rufus Wainwright whines the whole way through a medley of songs from Brian Wilson's "Smile." Or when Hot Chip turns Joy Division's "Transmission" into a future jingle for Radio Shack. And absolutely, positively not when Duffy makes like a strangled barn owl on her remake of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die." That would be totally wrong. So let's talk about the good stuff instead, like Beck's spectacularly noisy garage-rock rewrite of Bob Dylan's "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," which dispenses with the original's melody to make room for maximum racket. The Hold Steady, meanwhile, restores all the vulnerability and drama into Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City" - a much-needed reminder of realness after that Super Bowl display. Even Lily Allen manages to convert the Clash's "Straight to Hell" into a surprisingly decent - if totally inappropriate - children's lullaby, but she kind of cheats because Mick Jones is involved. Elsewhere, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are perfect interpreters of the Ramones' "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker"; TV on the Radio was placed on this earth for its woozy remake of David Bowie's "Heroes"; and Elbow shows masterful restraint on U2's "Running to Stand Still." Buy it for the children.

Pop Quiz: Antony and the Johnsons

Aidin Vaziri | To listen to "The Crying Light," the aching and desolate new album by Antony and the Johnsons, you would never guess that the group's otherworldly 37-year-old singer and namesake Antony Hegarty grew up in thrall of pop peacocks such as Boy George and Marc Almond. He still has a soft spot for the Top 40, though, as evidenced by his recent jaunt through Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love." Hegarty, whose band plays Tuesday at Nob Hill Masonic Center as part of Noise Pop 2009, also tells us about singing onstage with Björk, calling out Sean Penn, and his yen to serenade the president.

Antony Hegarty
Q: Are you bringing the wedding dress you wore at the Apollo concert last year on tour?
A: It wasn't really a wedding dress. It was a cloak my friend made for me that was festive and over the top. I was just trying it out.
Q: It looked great when you sang "Crazy in Love." Would you ever do a Beyoncé tribute album?
A: That would be fun to do. She kills me. Her lyrics are genius, and she's such an amazing singer. I listened to that song 10 trillion times the summer it came out. She sings the s- out of her songs. That's the trouble. What are you going to bring to it that's not already there? The only reason "Crazy in Love" worked for me was because it wasn't a ballad and that transformation made it something else.Continue reading.