The view from very, very close (Morgan Lawrence for Blast Magazine)

Blast intern Morgan Lawrence is following the Foo Fighters from Washington, to New York, to Newark and back home to Boston. This is part one of her four-part series.

WASHINGTON — My journey started with a 6 a.m. flight, which meant I got to the airport sometime around 5 in the morning, rubbing sleep from my eyes. I suppose it’s some kind of karmic balance that when I checked in I had a surprise upgrade waiting for me, meaning I got to skip the somehow tremendously long security line at Boston Logan.

One of my favorite parts of travel is getting surprise upgrades. Not because of the material perks, but because it places me with the middle-aged business men oozing drier starch, aftershave and inflated self-importance. I sit among them, band t-shirt and pink-hair and iPod on, drinking my complimentary coffee and orange juice and stowing the portion-sized Sun Chips in my bag for later. I stick out like a sore thumb – a comically pampered sore thumb.

Gratefully, my paranoia about getting lost between the Metro and the venue was unfounded: the Metro stop literally let out two escalator rides below the venue. I walked out onto the street and spotted a “box office” sign immediately, scanning the sidewalk for the crowd that I was sure would be waiting- it was almost 9 a.m., after all. I kept scanning – no one. Within a moment I met two girls who looked about my age, eying me with the same kind of hope mixed with suspicion that, I’m sure, was in my own gaze as well. As we all three walked slowly toward the arena door and met in the middle, I noticed that one of them had a Foo Fighters shirt on; clearly we’re there for the same reason. And, by the looks of it, we were first.

The line time passed more quickly and pleasantly than any line I’ve been in in recent memory. Every person I met was friendly and talkative, and, most importantly, clearly as dedicated to seeing this band as I was. Only two of the first 20 or so people in line were actually from Washington, DC itself, the rest having come from as far as states away. More interesting still was that while this was my first show on the tour, I was in the minority: most saw this show as the end of their own mini-tours, or had at least been to other shows not long ago in the area. As the evening wore on, they helped us fend off people who “mistook” the front of the line for the back (read: trying to take our hard-earned spots). They were even nice enough to let me put my bag in their hotel room for the day when we found out that, despite the fact that surely I wasn’t the only one relying on a backpack to carry all of my necessary possessions, bags were not permitted into the venue.

I will say this, though — regardless of how mild the line, or how organized the lining up process (which, let’s be honest, is never really organized at all; that is purely a relative and optimistic term), the last hour to ninety minutes are the worst. Or, actually, that is not worthy of a relative term – they’re just bad, really. Anxiety heightens, as does paranoia – the free time you had before, accompanied with the appropriate I-have-all-the-time-in-the-world mentality, suddenly evaporates, and even a walk to a trashcan halfway down the block becomes dangerous because what if something happens while you’re gone? It’s totally illogical. It is essentially considered a feat if anything in the music world starts on time. Early is practically unthinkable. But the worry is there just the same.

I suppose this goes to the optimism of the concert-goer: the thought that someone with connections will realize that you’re cold and tired and near-hypothermic, soaked to the bone in a nun costume made of very thin material (uhm…never mind) and that you just want to be closer to seeing your favorite band. And, knowing that, they will wave their magic wand and let you inside.

Yeah. That never happens.

I think the truth is probably closer to one of my favorite quotes, by Mr. Oscar Wilde: The basis of optimism is sheer terror. After x amount of hours in line (where x > anything socially acceptable, often, and generally ? the length of a normal day’s work shift), a spot in line becomes less something you luck into and more something earned. As someone for whom x is always an amount that, in the end, causes passersby to confuse me with a homeless person taking refuge outside a venue, I understand this feeling all too well. Losing a spot in line through someone else’s greed or rudeness is a massive breach of etiquette on their part, and is not taken lightly, but it can sometimes be repaired with enough force. But losing it to your own folly and bad timing is unforgivable, and irreparable to boot. No one wants to risk that, even with something that isn’t a risk at all. In this case, I saw a man run to a bathroom around the corner from the line an hour before doors were set to open, come back to see that nothing at all had happened, and still take it upon himself to jog to a trash can maybe 10 yards down the street. It was as if he was convinced we would sprint through the doors as soon as he was gone, all (at least) 100 of us, leaving him behind as he threw away his paper coffee cup – sucker!

As I said before, though, very little goes earlier than according to plan in the music world, except maybe a really shitty set from an opening band that they decide to pull early. This was no exception, although I do give credit to the staff for, at least, opening the doors damn near close to right on time. It’s November, after all, which means that as the sun went down all extremities began to lose feeling and an unbreakable impatience began to settle over us all like a frost.

This is why, when doors opened, we all shot into the venue like horses out of the gate. Many of us tried to be compliant with security to speed things up but, nervous, fumbled, and only served to make things more difficult.

This is why we ran down he stairs to the wristband table an tapped our feet nervously as our tickets were checked, willing the employees to go as quickly as possible so that someone with a faster ticket scanner could somehow come up from behind and put our hours of waiting to nothing.

This is why we felt kind of stupid when they stopped us in a smaller anteroom before letting us in, as we watched in semi-terror as a larger and larger line formed behind us and up the stairs. We begged the employee guarding said door to let us in gradually, lest a stampede break out and we frontrunners be trampled, so close yet so far.

This is why we ran again when that door was opened, switching to an extremely “brisk walk” under the direction of security but then running again when the free barricade spaces were in view, just the same.

I consider my right side corner barricade spot to be one of the best vantage points in the house, if not the best. It’s positioned so that you are as close as possible while still having head-turned access to the miniature catwalk that is an outcrop of the main stage itself (which Dave Grohl tends to frequent during a number of songs). The same can be said of the corner on the left side, of course, but I’ve been partial to the right (where center isn’t possible) since my Green Day days began. Right side always meant being closer to the bassist, Mike Dirnt – who, in addition to being extremely talented, is unquestionably in the running for World’s Nicest and Most Charming Man. In the Foos’ case, this means access to one Pat Smear, who, as I knew from personal experience at Lollapalooza in August, is also in competition for that award. Or maybe they both should just win it?

First up on the band roster was The Joy Formidable, a group of guitarist/singer, bassist, and a drummer who looks scarily like Russell Brand. Guitarist Ritzy Bryant, wonderfully enthusiastic in the powerful kind of way usually dominated by testosterone-overloaded male performers, took it upon herself to catch people off-guard by making wide-eyed eye contact mid-lyric. Thankfully, I am not so easily phased – I’m of the opinion that such artist-crowd interaction is essential, and I was more than happy to nod my head and clap and grin right back. I love live music in just about all of its forms, and hell if wanting to see the Foos desperately was going to keep me from enjoying myself in the moment. I mean, come on, I’d spent the last 8 hours on a sidewalk. Live music to me sounded like the best “time kill” ever.

And, really, The Joy Formidable are good. They are. And, while I was already partial to their last song, “Whirring”(I know, I know, being partial to their only single is beyond pathetic. But what can you do?) , the end of it all left me turning to the guy behind me and exclaiming “Now that is how you send a set!” Already a track that blends instruments and pedal effects together in a fierce melody, backdrop to the Bryan’s sharp, otherwise bright vocals, this live performance took that technique and ran with it far and fast. The muted roar became a full-on cacophony. Bryan held her guitar up to the face of the amp, resulting in a healthy amount of feedback, while shredding mercilessly on the neck before giving up completely and throwing it (explaining the healthy amount of duct tape that could be seen on the instrument’s front and sides). From there she seized a mallet and smashed away at a rather large gong, the presence on stage of which was finally explained. When the storm finally passed, she and her bandmates simply walked offstage. The flowery “thank-you-we’re-so-glad-to-be-here”s had already been said, leaving them to depart with expressions fixed on their faces as harsh and unforgiving as their song had proven to be. If nothing else, their set felt overwhelmingly genuine – the spectacle didn’t feel like pandering, but more their answer to the unspoken question of “How the hell do we handle arenas this big?!”.

Next up was Social Distorion, who hold an indelible place in rock history and are cited as an influence of innumerable bands as a result. Based on those facts alone, as a hardcore music geek, I would have been excited to see them. As it stands, though, they hold an important place in the formation of my own music taste, as several of their songs were in healthy rotation on my town’s only Alternative (read: good) station during my formative years of musical exploration … which is why I was so disappointed in the way the audio dropped out during the set. On the right side, we were hit full force with the sounds of rhythm guitar, bass, drums, and some lead guitar during solos, but unless you were literally watching singer/guitarist Mike Ness’ mouth move, you would have no idea he was singing at all. No amount of panache – which Mike Ness has plenty of, by the way – can make up for that kind of oversight, which really was a shame.

Above all, ending the set with ‘Ring of Fire” was a wonderful choice, as nothing gets one’s spirits up like a good crowd sing-along. And this crowd was happy to oblige. This, and the knowledge that this set change was the only thing standing between us and the Foo Fighters, led to an unquestionable lightening of the mood between us all. Even the security/bouncers’ slightly-surly commentary of “Two down, one to go” couldn’t bring us down.

And rightfully so. I don’t know what it was about the huge cube-like light fixtures that descended over the stage right before the band walked on, but it left me with a mounting sense of excitement and anticipation of something big that had me saying, simply, “Oh shit!”. And then all too suddenly we were in the thick of it, with Dave screaming my favorite line: “These are my famous last words!”

I’ve always said “What a way to open an album!” about that line, and about that track (“Bridge Burning”, off “Wasting Light”) in general. Now I can safely say “What a way to open a show!” Dave Grohl seemed to think so, too. Going back to my previous music-nomad experience, Billie Joe Armstrong, when excited, will goad the crowd into Simon-says session of “hey oh!”. Apparently, when Dave Grohl is excited, he does the same – but without the whole “using words” thing. Instead he lets out a signature roar that demands we follow suit, filling the stadium with the kind of raw power and energy that I so love about their music, even on the record. And then….

How does one even begin to describe this show? I’ve heard every song they performed innumerable times, but each one was packed with so much life and power that it was impossible not to freak out like they’d just busted out a rarity from ’95.

More importantly, though, watching the Foo Fighters play live, even the hits they’ve played for every show since the tracks were written, one thing becomes clear: these men love playing their instruments, and they are really fucking good at it. As a drummer, and as a fan of drummers, I’m constantly rooting for the drummer to get the spotlight, to really fucking steal the show. And while Dave Grohl clearly loved to dart around the stage like a kid who’s had one too many Pixie Stix, shredding off a new mini-solo or blues digression or even some interlude that sounds oddly like free-form jazz, he couldn’t overshadow Mr. Taylor Hawkins. And he very clearly had no desire too, either. For every time you thought Dave, as the lead, was taking over a song, Taylor would fire back with something truly mind-boggling on the drums that left even Dave standing by admiringly, grinning like a fool. They would segue off after or even during one off their hits and do something completely different, showing off and just enjoying playing with each other, the 19,000 other people in the room be damned.

Their onstage rapport also deserves a mention. Usually, obviously, it’s Dave, who rotates between the effortless charm of a cool guy who just happens to be a kick-your-ass rock musician and the comportment of a teenager after chugging a few Rock Star energy drinks. Case and point: band introductions. “Don’t ever move to DC, Pat – too many people here love you,” he cautioned, after a particularly loud and prolonged round of applause went up for Mr. Smear. He called Taylor “The man who needs no introduction”, but looked mock-offended when he was cut off by the roar of the crowd. Taylor waved in various directions in response, smiling like a 12-year-old kid who just did particularly well in a piano recital but doesn’t quite know why. He proceeded to introduce Dave as “the man who really needs no introduction”, to which Dave cheekily responded “Then why are you giving me one?”

Dave and Chris Shiflett, lead guitarist, at one point got in a full-on shred-off. Dave stood below us all on a constructed runway and Chris still onstage, walking – no, strolling – to and fro, mock- put off by Dave’s show and firing a mini-solo right back at him at every turn. As much as we were celebrating the music that these men had put out and its effect on all of us, it was clear that we were just as much celebrating these men as musicians – and, even, music itself. This became all too clear when Dave stepped up to the microphone and told the kids in the audience, the next generation of musicians, that if they wanted to start a band to close their computers and go buy a guitar instead. Music, real music, was what this was all about.

It made sense, then, that Dave sauntered back out to the raised platform and played “Wheels” – a song he jokingly referred to as being only popular in Germany. In almost the same breath, though, he demanded that we all yell the chorus with him, bribing us with a promised “4-hour show” at DC’s small venue, the 9:30 Club (apparently a theme of Dave’s on this tour).

He further used his vantage point, speaking to thousands of residents of his hometown, as an opportunity to bemoan the desecration of his “beloved Springfield Mall” (comparing its current state to something out of the apocalyptic film “28 Days Later”) but reasoned that he was glad things had changed since he’d lived there – he had changed, too. He noted wryly, though, that he expected every review of the show to immediately bring up the past, to which he gave an emphatic “Fuck 20 years ago!”.

This portion of the show was a totally unique and very cool concert experience, for a number of reasons. For one, as I said before, I’m a sucker for a good group singalong, especially when the “group” is 18,999 of your closest friends. But, second, the majority of the house lights were on, and this meant that nearly every damn person in the stands was visible. And, because Dave was the center of attention (the rest of the band was off on a beer break), the entire pit was now turned to face the back of the arena. From where I stood, 10 feet from the stage, a huge portion of the stands were visible. It was a fishbowl effect, in a way, or a concert setup in reverse. It was what it must feel like (in a limited way, of course) to stand on that stage and see so very many faces singing back at you. It was awesome.

I could easily bitch about Dave’s penchant for choosing 1 of 4, at least, different locations to stand and sing, in only 1 of which I could actually see his face – but I really can’t. First, it’s like he said, addressing the people in the nosebleeds at the very back of the arena – the “shitty seats” – “They’re not so shitty now, are they?”. I really respect the fact that he spreads his presence around as much as he can, even if those people didn’t wait nearly as long as I did to see him up close .Second, I really do think that this, if unintentionally, reinforced why we were there. We weren’t there to gawk at Dave’s handsome face for 2.5 hours, as wonderful (and warranted) as that would be. No, we were there to enjoy the music and to be a community. And I think this – all of us belting out the chorus to “Best of You” and “Times Like These”, just before the rest of the band triumphantly reemerged to bring it home – accomplished that in a way that nothing else could.

Of course, this wasn’t the real encore – not yet. As I said, the rest of the band rejoined the leading man, taking the main stage. Soon after, Dave brought out who else but DC native Bob Mould to join for “Dear Rosemary”, a truly gorgeous version of the track on the record to which he contributed. We also got Story Time with Dave, where he told us about his first broken heart at age 12. To that unfortunate girl who so wounded him he dedicated the next song, Tom Petty’s “Breakdown”, which was actually fantastic – and this is coming from someone who is more than critical of covers, especially those by artists I respect (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, obviously, falling into that category, because I have ears, damn it!).

They wrapped it all up with “Everlong”, which was simply too wonderful for words. The lines “And I wonder/If anything could ever feel this real forever/if anything could ever be this good again” seemed to hit full force as I stood there, feeling nothing but purely, totally happy.

I made sure to get my tour t-shirt as I left, feeling pretty much like nothing could stop me (save the absolute impossibility of getting a cab after a concert in Washington, DC on a Saturday night…but that’s another story). 1 down, 3 to go.

For Leah Siegel, her musical act Firehorse and latest album, “And So They Ran Faster…” have been a long and hard-earned time coming.

As she told it, after years of working and performing in Boston and New York, she came to realize that she wasn’t being honest in her art – or with herself.

“I sort of took a step back and I thought ‘Something is wrong here. It doesn’t feel like me. I feel like I’m cutting corners so that I can fit in someone else’s kind of paradigm of belonging, of what I’m supposed to be, where I’m supposed to fit in,’” Siegel said.

Burnt out and broke, she decided to start from square one to remember what she loved about music and who, as an artist, she really wanted to be.

In this search for identity she stumbled upon a zodiac calendar, which placed her under the sign of the Horse. Researching further, she found the story of women born under a subset sign, the Fire Horse. Born just after the turn of the 20th century, they were thought to be “too gregarious, too independent, too fiery”, as Leah explains, to be suitable matches for anyone. As a result, in an era of arranged marriages, they were fated to live and die in destitution.

Feeling out of place, without real artistic identity, Leah was struck by how deeply this story of rejection and inability to express oneself resonated.

“I knew that I felt wild, and out of control, and destructive, and goal-oriented, and gregarious. And I felt all of those things, but certainly wasn’t channeling that in my music,” she said. “I listen to it now and I imagine someone holding a gun to my head.”

In taking the name Firehorse, Siegel hoped to remind herself to represent these facets of herself even if, like the Firehorse women of history, it doomed her. “The long and the short of it is that when I think about myself as a musician, (Firehorse) is what I want to be. That is who I want to inhabit.” In other words, she says, “I don’t want to make the music I think I’m supposed to make, I want to make the music that I want to make.”

It hasn’t been easy, though. Leah admits that part of adapting the Firehorse identity was embracing her own femininity, which, in the recording industry, often seemed to be an obstacle.

“It does seem that dude industry guys can take on like five boy bands, who sound exactly the same, but only take on 1 chick. Ever,” she said. “It’s like his penis compass gets so out of whack when there’s more than one woman in his life, you know what I mean? It’s just like whipping him around and he can’t get anything done … I like to think that that’s really what that’s about.”

It is little surprise that in writing “And So They Ran Faster…” Leah feels that she faced some of the darkest writing she’s ever done. It was “a battle” to complete, she said, “and I would just sit down and be like ‘I can’t take this anymore, it’s so dark. I’m gonna kill myself if I don’t do something else right now.’”

From these moments came songs “Our Hearts”, and “Machete Gang Holiday,” unquestionably the most lighthearted tracks to be found on the record.

“Those songs were sort of as I was starting to experience different feelings, ideas, and sensations in my life after many years of kind of feeling just quite bad,” she admitted.

While it’s clear she’s come a long way, even she hesitates to say what comes next. She’d love to do a tour, “because the live show is really fuckin’ awesome”, she said with a laugh.

But for a self-declared workhorse, the sky really is the limit.

“Now, as an artist,” she said, “you’ve never arrived. Because there’s always some other boundary, there’s always some other limitation you see in your artistry that you need to crash through. That’s how I feel about it, that’s always how I felt about it, that art is the only thing I can do with my life that, I don’t know, could send me down the rabbit hole…I just imagine that I’ll always be lugging boulders up the side of a rock cliff – an eternally rising rock cliff. Which sounds awesome to me.”

For now, Siegel hopes that her work resonates with listeners, but she’s willing to be candid about that, too.

“I think it’s one of those records where you either get it or you don’t,” she said, “and for the people who get it, I thank you, and I’m so honored. And for the people who don’t, I thank you too for giving it a shot. No hard feelings.”

It wasn’t that long ago when the infectious Hey Mama broke up, but they are back again for some boot stopping and hand clapping for two exclusive reunion shows this Friday and Saturday night in Boston and Vermont.

“We love playing together and we’ve have had a hunger to reunite with our fans. There’s a whole life that lives inside the songs and experience of Hey Mama that we wanted to revisit and share with world,” said guitarist and vocalist Avi Salloway as to why they are performing together again.

While fans are rejoicing to see the roosty rock Hey Mama back on stage together again, the group is only focusing on these two shows.

“Our energy is focused on the moment right now and that is these pair of concerts in our current and former home! This is it for now,” Salloway said.

The group members have been busy in the meantime with their own solo projects. Last winter and spring Salloweay was in Israel and Palestine working on an ethnographic music and peace project.

“I was guerrilla recruiting young Arab and Jewish artists to come across the line to collaborate on musical projects based in songwriting, recording, and performing. Building these relationships was intense, but once the artists were making music together more often than not a sense of trust was established,” Salloway said. “These artists bear the torch for peaceful progress in the region. I am continuing to work with Heartbeat Jerusalem (the organization I was working with) from stateside and we’re developing a US tour to promote their message.”

This powerful experience has inspired Salloway to form a new band called Billy Wylder.

“It’s a social bandit band which includes Paul Chase, Hey Mama’s bassists and a collection of innovative string players,” he said.

Salloway is not the only member of Hey Mama that is busy. Lead singer Celia Woodsmith has joined Della Mae, an all girl bluegrass band who recently just new record and gearing up for a tour in Germany this December.

What about drummer Jared Seabrook? “Jared’s rocking and rolling and climbing up trees!” Salloway joked.

The beginnings of the popular local band started in 2003 at University of Vermont through Salloways and Woodsmith’s mutual love of Carlos Santana.

“I was rocking out on electric guitar with Carlos Santana on ‘Live at the Fillmore’ in my forth floor dorm room. I turned around to find a sexy girl at my door, proclaiming that I had to play with her roommate (Celia), who was a great singer,” Salloway said. “The next day we met on quad and bonded over playing a collection of great American songs including a fair share of John Prine. The chemistry was palatable and we started performing and writing together, experimenting, touring, and growing together. We moved to Boston in 2007 and wanted to evolve our sonic landscape and established Hey Mama with Jared Seabrook and Ben Kogan who was later replaced with Paul Chase.”

For Hey Mama, songwriting is a collaborate process that often surprises them.

“It’s like fishing. You have the bait and throw out your line with your heart and soul and play the river. Once you’ve got a catch you reel her in, clean the fish and season it,” Salloway said. “Some of our best songs have been collaborations, where Celia and I color the song together and expand on the stories, textures and rhythms in with a ping pong approach. Then we work it out with the band and it takes on a life of its own.”

The band is looking forward to performing to their hometown crowds of Boston and Vermont again. “The synergy between the band and the audience,” Salloway said as to why he is so excited. “At our last show, the crowd was singing along as loud as we were. It was f*cking awesome!”

The band also has been inspired by the protests happening on Wall Street and around the country. “We’re enthused by America’s action to reclaim its voice and direction through the occupy rallies from Wall Street to Los Angeles. As our musical story continues together and individually we are impassioned to sing the song of justice and rock & roll. Friday’s show will be a celebration of the human spirit. Let’s roll!” Salloway said.

Hey Mama will be playing at the Middle East tonight at 8 p.m.

Marcy Playground is most recognized for their 1997 hit “Sex and Candy.” With their fourth album, “Leaving Wonderland In a Fit of Rage,” the band proves their talent by experimenting with relaxing and mellow tones. It comes as no surprise that John Wozniak’s smooth voice and dexterous acoustic guitar picking carries the album.

“Blackbird” kicks off “In a Fit of Rage” with an edgy, strong rhythm that will hook listeners. “Devil Woman;” a country song at heart, and “Gin and Money” are also notable. With “Star Baby,” Wozniak lets loose and has fun with the music. “Memphis,” easily the strongest song on the album, has Led Zeppelin-like guitar strokes coupled with the ultra-melodic pitch that Wozniak is famous for—his voice draws the listener into a dreamlike state. The album ends in a smooth finish both vocally and instrumentally with “Down the Drain.”

NEW YORK — “Flawed Logic,” the sophomore album from Philadelphia’s American Babies, is the perfect soundtrack for a cross-country summer road trip. In fact, Tom Hamilton (the frontman and driving force behind the band, also known for his work with the electro-rock outfit Brothers Past), calls the record a “collection of mental snapshots” from his time spent observing events around the country. Fans of Brothers Past might raise an eyebrow at Hamilton’s newer material, which draws heavily from folk, country and general Americana influences, but strong songwriting is still at the heart of Hamilton’s work, regardless of genre.

The singer recently took a break from rehearsals to chat with Blast about the new record, the inspiration for his songwriting, and his decision to break away from electronic music and form American Babies in 2007.

BLAST: Who are your main musical influences, both for American Babies and for Brothers Past?

TOM HAMILTON: God, it’s a fucking lengthy list. I definitely don’t separate them. I feel like you can hear my influences in either one. The obvious ones, The Beatles, The Dead, Dylan, stuff like that. Radiohead, huge influence. Stereolab, they have a record called “Dots and Loops” that redefined my entire idea of music, like the late ‘90s. Low, they put out a record, “The Great Destroyer” in like ’05, I think. (That was) another one that was just like, I heard this record and it shuffled the papers around in my head and kind of made me redefine what was possible in music. Broken Social Scene’s first record flipped me around. A few years ago, I got really into Motown, and that’s kind of where I am now, as far as this newest Babies record. Listening to a lot of Motown and Stacks records, stuff like that. That stuff just absolutely destroys me. Old Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding. You just can’t beat it.

For me, the thing with music, it’s not what you do. It’s how you do it. And I feel like the bands that I listen to, that I really like, what they’re doing, the style of music, really has nothing to do with where my pleasure comes from. It’s the fact that there is a sincerity in every note played and sung. Like Springsteen. It’s so genuine and so sincere. These people don’t do these things because it’ll make them money and because they have to. They do it because they have to, primally. Like, it’s an animalistic thing. They need to express these things. They need to get it out and connect with people. And that’s the common thread in all those bands that I named that I like. It’s all very sincere music. That’s what I try to do, no matter if it’s electronic music or folk music or blues or whatever. It’s about being sincere and genuine and urgent.

BLAST: Would you say “Flawed Logic” has a unifying theme? What events inspired the songs?

TH: I started making this thing, and everything was fucked up and everybody I knew was fucked up. The Wall Street shit, and there’s fuckin’ 80 wars going on. My friends are unemployed. My brother is on his way to getting deployed and going to Afghanistan. I had other friends that had to go to Iraq. Until that point, everything I always wrote about was, you know, chicks and love. You know, standard things you can write songs about. But when I was getting this record together, all these things, all these unavoidable things, I just couldn’t turn a blind eye to it. And I had to talk about it. I had to say something.

It was a really awkward situation because I’d never been really topical in my songwriting, you know, that much. Because personally, I hate self-righteous pricks. I hate when you turn on CNN and Jeaneane Garafolo’s on there talking about the war. It’s like, we’re entertainers. I feel like there is a line there. For me, it was a very touchy thing. I was like, wow. I have all these feelings, and there’s a feeling of urgency to talk about it, but I have no idea how to do it without being heavy-handed, without sounding like just somebody ridiculous, like Bono talking about AIDS or something. So, it was a huge challenge, and scary for me kind of. Being that far away from my comfort zone. I could have easily just written another record about my last girlfriend, you know?

So, sitting back and finding my voice was like the whole thing. Just talking to people and observing like, you know, how my brother’s family was dealing with his thing with the military, talking with my friends who lost their jobs or lost all their friggin’ money and how they’re dealing with it, and just seeing how it all goes. My friends who are married, how is it affecting them? When I was on the road I would talk to people all over the country. Just, how are all these things affecting all these people? I just basically took mental Polaroids and each one of the songs on the record, they all came from one of those mental snapshots.

BLAST: How does your approach to songwriting differ with this band?

TH: Wow, that’s a good question. I don’t know if it actually differs. (With Brothers Past) there were two songwriters. I wrote a majority of (the songs), but the keyboard player, Tom McKee, also wrote some stuff. I guess there was more collaboration in the Brothers Past thing. But as far as just like personally, the songwriting, it was never that much different. Even with the Brothers Past stuff, it was like, I would write the song on acoustic guitar or piano or something, and then I would have to dress it up in all of this other stuff. Which I feel like sometimes can get in the way of the song.

With the Babies stuff, it’s much more of a challenge. Because with Brothers Past,, there were times where, if a song kind of wasn’t totally happening, I could just, like, throw in a cool synthesizer line or something. I could throw in ear candy to kind of make up for a lack of something in the song. If a song isn’t really happening and isn’t like, really grooving, you can just throw a 404 beat under it and people just like it because it makes them move. There’s plenty of bands out there that make not that great songs and just put a dance beat under it, and people love it because there’s a visceral reaction to it. They don’t notice that you’re not saying anything in the song or that the song isn’t that great. All they know is that their ass is shaking. And that’s kind of cheating.

In American Babies, I don’t have that option. It’s kind of like, it’s just standard rock and roll. There’s no hiding behind anything. If I don’t really like this song, there’s nothing I can do to hide that. I have to just write it better or throw it out. So it kind of keeps me more honest.

BLAST: So you think it’s easier to make electronic music, even though there are more components to the songs?

TH: With the way that these programs are today, it’s exponentially easier. If you’re a producer and you are making your tracks, you’re actually recording the drums and you’re playing all the instruments and there’s original thought in there, I think it’s awesome. But more so than not, a kid gets a MacBook Pro and a copy of the program Ableton and you can buy samples. You can download samples. It’s all other people’s work that you’re just taking and, like, putting together. It’s the difference between, like, buying a puzzle that is the Mona Lisa or getting a canvas and painting the goddamn thing yourself. One of those takes an amazing amount of skill and talent and passion, and one of those things just takes the ability to fucking connect the pieces.

BLAST: What role did music play in your life growing up?

TH: It’s just always been around. My mom plays the piano and the cello. There was always music involved in my house. So, from a pretty young age, I was captivated by it. Whether (my parents) were listening to vinyl all the time, or the fact that my dad had, like, a local band, guys his age that just liked to hang out and play music.

BLAST: What was the first album that you fell in love with?

TH: My dad was a huge Deadhead, way into the Grateful Dead, which in turn made me also way into them. My dad gave me a cassette of this Grateful Dead show. It’s from Red Rocks, Colorado in 1978. Still, to this day, it’s one of my favorite things in the world. So that was the first thing that was, like, mine. And I listened to the shit out of it. I was like, this is awesome. To this day, I can listen to it. I know every note of every solo and whatever. But an actual record would be … I was really young, probably like three or four, and I loved Eric Clapton’s “Just One Night.” It’s a live record he put out, the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. I had a toy record player but it played real records. And I can vividly remember yelling at my mom, saying I wanted the cow record. Because the record label’s logo was a cow. … That was my shit, man. I loved that. That was a great, great, great album, and I listened to it nonstop when I was very, very young.

BLAST: When did you first start playing music?

TH: I started playing drums when I was about 5. My dad was a drummer and just kind of all-around rock musician guy. He played drums and bass and guitar and stuff like that. And he got my older brother playing drums when he was about 6 or so. And then, you know, me being the little guy, whatever my older brother was doing, I wanted to do, obviously. Since I was old enough to basically hold the sticks, I was like, I want to do that, because my brother was doing that. So I started playing drums when I was 6 and I took that pretty seriously until I was, I’d say, 12 or 13. And then I started playing guitar when I was about 10 or 11.

BLAST: What prompted your change in musical styles, from electronic music with Brothers Past to more roots rock with American Babies?

TH: I grew up on the roots stuff. I grew up listening to Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and obviously The Beatles and all that stuff. Rock and roll in general is like a mentality. … I mean, it’s a reaction to something. When I got into the electronic stuff, it was new and it was exciting and it was a different thing. And I was like, wow, this is great. And then I guess, around 2006, 2007, it became kind of abundantly clear that any dude with a laptop and a synthesizer can make this stuff. It became so over-saturated and easy to do. The innovation was out of it, the excitement. It didn’t seem genuine to me. It didn’t seem honest. It didn’t seem cutting edge. And for me, that was the whole allure, was trying to bring songwriting and electronic music together. It just seemed like it got very just watered down, kind of.

So I went back and focused more on the song. I got very lost in (electronic music with) dressing songs up in production, with bleeps and boops and drum machines and weird things. The main focus should be the song, and it was a reaction to where I was at the time. I was just, like, so engulfed in all this electronic stuff and I was like, you know what? I want to strip it down. I want it to be about the song. You can’t hide behind anything if you’re just recording songs. There’s no production that can make a song great. It’s like, oh no. If the tune’s not there, it’s not there, and that’s kind of it.

BLAST: How did your bandmates in Brothers Past react?

TH: Originally, the idea was for that band to be playing this stuff. We put out an electro pop record and people really liked it and it got great reviews and it was selling really well and we were doing really well for ourselves. And I was like, hey, man, I think it’d be funny if the next record we put out, we make it like “Led Zeppelin III.” … The first half of that record is, like, punishing rock and roll. The second half of the record is all acoustic. And I was like, let’s put out like a “Zeppelin III” type of record next, to kind of show the extremes of what we’re doing. Like, hey, yeah, we do electronic music and stuff like that, but we can also really just craft a song. I wanted to make a record that was like, Side A, the most intense electronic music possible, and Side B, the exact opposite of that, which is just like stripped-down acoustic songs. And the guys didn’t really think that was a great idea and I was basically told, hey, man, you want to play that kind of music, you should start another band. So I did.

BLAST: How did you come up with the band name?

TH: I started writing these tunes, these more acoustic songs, with the idea of it being a part of my other band. And when I started getting into the whole thing, I started writing this song, and it was called “American Babies.” And it took me forever to write this song. I don’t know why, but it fought me pretty hard the whole way through. I had this grandiose idea of what the song was supposed to be. And when I was planning the recording sessions and all this stuff … I wanted to get all my friends around that I knew to come in and play these songs. The idea for the song “American Babies” was, there was a middle section of it that is this big, like, cacophony of sound. And it was basically like the kitchen sink song to me. I just wanted to get everybody that played on any part of the record … which was a pretty large number of people … everybody had to play something in this section of the song. It just kind of clicked for me. I was like halfway through the record and I was like, what do I even call this band? That song, it was symbolic to me of what this project was going to be. And I was like, well, I’ll name it after the song. American Babies. That sounds good.

BLAST: Do you think you’ll ever go back to electronic stuff?

TH: Brothers Past still plays here and there, for sure. We’re mildly active. And I mean, I do enjoy that stuff, the electronic music. When I do it now, I do it less frequently than before, so it’s fun for me. I don’t get wrapped up into the whole scene and stuff and get frustrated. … My passion is songwriting, and the Babies, I feel, are the purest form of my voice that I’ve had in my career. And I’m very excited about it.

American Babies are touring throughout summer 2011. For tour dates, visit americanbabies.net.

With “American Idol” gearing up for its tenth season in the New Year, Simon Fuller’s pop-star assembly line shows no signs of slowing down. Come January, prime time TV, YouTube, and countless glossy magazines will, once again, be overrun with stories of fame-hungry contestants and the blinding white glow of Ryan Seacrest’s teeth. But before the new season starts, the teenie boppers and soccer Mom’s of Middle America have a new album to buy. The time has arrived for last year’s winner, Lee DeWyze to release his debut record, Live It Up from Fuller’s RCA label.

For those (like this critic) who missed DeWyze journey to “Idol” triumph, the Illinois native apparently wowed judges and premium-rate-phone-voters with covers of classic songs like Bill Withers’ “Ain’t no Sunshine” and R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts.” DeWyze’s vocal style is pleasant enough, but it’s not particularly impressive or interesting. Playing his songs at full blast won’t threaten any nearby glassware. DeWyze sounds more like John Mayer than Otis Redding. Like Mayer, the songs from his new album will likely fill the top 40 like ignorable pieces of furniture in a young professional’s condo.

The creation of a musical form of Ikea was surely what the RCA puppeteers had in mind for DeWyze’s debut release. “Live It Up” achieves the kind of light, generic pop/rock that it’s demographic can accept with ease. The album is packed with soft sounds and depressingly predictable key changes. DeWyze’s lyrics are also pretty unimaginative. The eleven songs on the album deal with all the issues that one would expect from the winner of a national talent contest. The fact that DeWyze sings about young love and young heartbreak for his young audience is easy enough to swallow. What does offend about the songs is their dreary lyrical content.

Throughout the record, DeWyze doesn’t just flirt with the use of tired clichés; he takes them out to dinner, picks up the bill, and drives them home at the end of the evening. The chorus of the sickeningly catchy, “Sweet Serendipity,” for example, includes the lines “I’m always landing on my feet / in the knick of time / by the skin of my teeth.” The Idol champion is also a fan of stringing together seemingly senseless similes in his songs. On “Brooklyn Bridge,” DeWyze croons over a lounge jazz piano, singing “Every time you’re near / Its like standing in Time Square /on New Years Eve and no one is around / Like looking up on a summer’s day / and seeing snowflakes coming down.” What those lines are supposed to say about the giddy excitement of a new love is anyone’s guess, but don’t be surprised when your teenage cousin uses them in her facebook status.

The soppy lyrics and recycled pop formulas aside; surely, everyone over the age of sixteen can agree that Lee DeWyze’s success is not entirely dependent on the music he produces. Whether or not “Live It Up” sells in the way RCA would like it to, hinges on the capability of those who voted for the twenty-four-year-old on “Idol” to make room for him in their overloaded psyche. With Bieber Fever at full tilt, and a new season of “American Idol” around the corner, DeWyze will, once again, have to compete to win the hearts and minds of the record-buying public.

In the run-up to Live It Up’s November 16 release, DeWyze’s managerial team are sure to do all they can to make a return on their investment. Performances on “Good Morning America” and renditions of “Star Spangled Banner” at televised sporting events doubtlessly beckon. Sadly, for DeWyze, the early signs are that his career will better resemble that of Ruben Studdard (remember him?) than Kelly Clarkson. “Live It Up” is not the egregious thing to be released from Simon Fuller’s evil empire (he’s also responsible for the Spice Girls and making Piers Morgan famous). It seems unlikely, however, that the fifteen minutes gifted to Lee DeWyze will extend much further than his first RCA release.

“White Crosses,” the latest offering from Florida punk quartet Against Me!, finds singer Tom Gabel on the cusp of turning 30, exploring the awkward and sometimes painful in-between of his youthful punk roots and more moderate (though not politically so) adulthood.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the first single, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist.” Gabel muses, “Do you remember / When you were young and wanted to set the world on fire? / I was a teenage anarchist, but the politics were too convenient.”

Like their major label debut, 2007′s “New Wave,” “White Crosses” (out June 8 ) features anthemic, power chord-driven sing-alongs delivered with a healthy dose of attitude. The tightly-wound record clocks in at just over 35 minutes, and once again at the helm is veteran producer Butch Vig, whose fingerprints are all over the densely mixed 10-song collection. The recent addition of The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay as a touring member of the band should flesh out the tunes nicely on their tour dates this summer. And George Rebelo, formerly of Hot Water Music, proves himself to be a worthy substitute for longtime drummer Warren Oakes, who left the band about a year ago under less than amicable conditions.

Gabel may have relocated with his wife and infant daughter from the Florida college town music scene of Gainesville to the sleepy beach town of St. Augustine, but it’s clear that his political punk roots haven’t been completely overshadowed by his recent domestication. The album’s title, he’s said, was inspired by the “Cemetery of the Innocents,” a memorial to aborted fetuses, which the singer passed every day while writing the album in St. Augustine, Florida. In the corresponding song, he sneers, “White crosses on the church lawn / I wanna smash them all.”

But, perhaps owing to the regime change between their previous records and this one, some of the political posturing on “White Crosses” feels anachronistic. While earlier releases deftly skewered political figures like Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, Gabel now resorts to name-checking … Robert McNamara?

The strongest songs on “White Crosses” come when Gabel adopts a more reflective, older-and-wiser tone, as on standout track “Because of the Shame,” set at the funeral of, presumably, an ex-girlfriend.

On the country-tinged (yes, you read that right) “Ache With Me,” he wonders, “Do you share the same sense of defeat? / Have you realized all the things you’ll never be? / Ideals turn to resentment / Open minds close up with cynicism.” By the song’s conclusion, he’s acquiesced to the notion that “You may not find all that you’re after / In the end, I hope it doesn’t matter.”

While some songs, like “Rapid Decompression,” feel passionate yet formulaic, others, like album closer “Bamboo Bones,” find the band branching out in new directions both lyrically and musically. The album ends with Gabel, his identity crisis seemingly resolved or at least dismissed, looking toward the future rather than the past, sounding almost hopeful as he repeats, “What God doesn’t give to you / You’ve got to go and get for yourself.”

Against Me! is on tour with Silversun Pickups. For Blast readers, they play Orlando at Hard Rock Cafe on June 15 and Brooklyn, at Williamsburg Waterfront on June 25.

It seems as if it is nearly impossible to walk down the street and not see someone wearing either camouflage or a military inspired article of clothing lately, especially around a rock venue on any given night. This type of dress is not a new concept, but military inspired clothing has become so mainstream that it is quite possible to call it a trend. It is no longer designed strictly for our soldiers in the service, but for people to wear as a way to make a fashion statement.

There may be many reasons why military inspired clothing is becoming so popular, but one reason that stands out is the music industry. One band in particular that is contributing to the influence of military attire is the Street Dogs.

Based in Boston, the Street Dogs are a true punk band. They were originally formed in 2002 by front man Mike McColgan (ex-member of the Dropkick Murphys) and Johnny Rioux. McColgan and Rioux originally started the Street Dogs as something to have fun with and stay busy. But with the 2003 release of Savin Hill, the Street Dogs realized that what was once just for fun was taken very seriously by their fans. After the release of their debut album, the Street Dogs decided it was best to add to their lineup. With a fuller band, the Street Dogs were finally ready to take to the streets, touring the United States. The band currently consists of Mike McColgan as lead vocals, Johnny Rioux as bassist, Paul Rucker as drummer, and Tobe Bean III and Marcus Hollar as guitarists.

What makes the Street Dogs so different from other bands is their ability to incorporate ska, street punk, and Irish punk into a unique, yet distinct, sound.

The Street Dogs’ third album, Fading American Dream, dropped on October 24, 2006. It was the band’s most political album to date. Not only are the lyrics on Fading American Dream war related, their merchandise is inspired by the war and military as well.

The Street Dogs aren’t one of those bands that sing about politics to try and be punk rock. Having spent five years as a firefighter, two years in Iraq (as part of an artillery crew during the first Persian Gulf War), and six years in the reserves, McColgan actually has a justified stance behind his political viewpoints.

The main logo for Street Dogs is the insignia for a private and for a brigadier general. The Street Dogs’ logo can be found on nearly all of their merchandise, including their CDs, t-shirts, and wristbands. Other military inspired designs that can be found on Street Dogs’ apparel include the American Eagle, a hand grenade, an AK47, skulls, a coat of arms and the United States Capitol.

"We actually try to steer away from using guns," said Bean, in an interview with Blast. "When we start designing new merch we throw out a bunch of ideas based on lyrics, songs, and our message as a band. From there we try to pick the boldest and strongest designs and the ones that most represent our band and what we are trying to say."

But the band clearly has a fashion sense that’s military-issue.

"We draw from that for a number of reasons,” Bean said. “Obviously our stance on soldiers is one. I personally like the military look live because it reminds me and hopefully others that there are still kids overseas fighting in an ugly war that seems to have no point. It also gives us a more unified look as a band. Also, when you’re on the road, Army-Navy stores are a great place to rummage through and pick up some cheap clothes.”

The band decided to have the majority of their merchandise designed with military themes because "simple and bold logos just look great on shirts, so we try to use those whenever possible. A lot of our other designs are tied in with song titles and content," Bean explained.

The band didn’t think they would be influencing fashion trends by putting out an album like Fading American Dream and by selling their merchandise.

"I really would never think of us as a trend-setting band when it comes to clothes,” Bean said. “But then again the Clash, who is one of our biggest influences, had a tremendous impact on the way punks dressed back in the seventies.”

The question remains: Are the Street Dogs trying to get a point across by having military themed merchandise and if so what is the point they’re trying to make?

"We are always trying to get a point across, whether it’s workers’ rights, the lost soldier overseas that is far away from his family, or just the social injustice that is heavily present in our country today," Bean said.

In a sense, the merchandise is also a way to express the band’s thoughts and feelings towards the wars. However, Bean suggested that, "One listen to Fading American Dream and you know where we stand on the war. We do support our troops, though, and would love to see them home safe and as soon as possible."

Bean explained that Fading American Dream is "a social commentary of what is going on in our country and world today. Times are bad. We are in the middle of an ugly and undefined war and losing innocent lives every day. We are sitting under the largest U.S. deficit of all time. Jobs are disappearing daily." That’s the kind of stuff that can be found on the album.

Although the rest of the band doesn’t have a military background like McColgan, they are still very passionate when it comes to their political views.

"We are a unit,” Bean said. “A machine behind a mouthpiece that we believe in and will back up any time.”

Bean believes that the heart of the Street Dogs is "five guys who believe in what we are doing and love playing music for anyone who will listen."

Last month, the Street Dogs began recording their fifth studio album. It is the band’s follow-up to their 2008 State of Grace which was their first album with Hellcat Records. The latest album will feature Rioux as producer and Rick Barton (original guitarist for the Dropkick Murphys) as co-producer. The Street Dogs will be recording at the Blasting Room, an infamous punk rock studio built by members of All, Black Flag, and Descendents, in Fort, Collins, Colo.

The Street Dogs have been headlining tours in the US and UK. They have been performing with bands like Anti-Flag, The Offspring, Reverend Horton Heat and Alkaline Trio.

On March 10, the Street Dogs released their single, “War After the War,” exclusively on iTunes. All of the proceeds for that song will be donated to Homes for Our Troops, an organization that builds specially adapted homes for severely injured veterans at no cost to them.

If you’re looking for the latest Street Dogs merchandise, look for an El Battalion t-shirt, in which the skeleton of a soldier is dressed in full uniform, holding a flag, and a rifle. Another design is the Final Transmission t-shirt, the front bears the band’s name as well as a battlefield cross. The back of the t-shirt features some of the lyrics and the title Final Transmission (one of the single’s from Fading American Dream). The band’s logo is located on the back of the t-shirt as well as the sleeve. There is also a War After the War poster (all of the proceeds will benefit Homes for Our Troops) that features a soldier in uniform carrying his rucksack.

The fierce punk rock band Drive A has been turning heads with their new album Loss of Desire. They’ve recently released a 3-disc set that features covers of The Clash’s "White Riot" and The Buzzcocks "What Do I Get" as well as a live version of their own album track "Are You Blind?" The band just wrapped a national tour where they were touring with The Used and have embarked on a six-week spring tour with the Finnish rock band, HIM.

Blast reporter Josh Couillard got a chance to chat with lead singer of the band, Bruno Mascolo, and talk about their upcoming show in Boston. Enjoy the quick preview podcast above, and be sure to check Drive A out this Sunday night at the House of Blues.

Check back here Monday for our full interview with the band.

News

We are the generation of Napster, LimeWire, and torrents. Needless to say, many of us don’t necessarily enjoy paying for our music. Some haven’t since 1999.

One of our favorite sources for music on the cheap, Rhapsody, recently announced its intention to re-tool their current app so that users can download any of their 9 million songs to their iPhone and listen to them even when they are in airplane mode. Users will not have to rely on a wireless signal to listen to their music and it is theirs as long as they are Rhapsody customers.

This is the beginning of a much-needed move away from streaming content. AT&T’s service sucks. We know that. Even apps that are great ideas in theory, like Ustream, fail in practice because of an over-reliance on an unreliable network. Content that you can download and use everywhere, even if it deletes itself off the iPhone after use, is exponentially better than not being able to access that content at all.

This is a great step towards increasing accessibility and transparency in content-rich apps. The concept of having unlimited access for a limited amount of time is not a new concept. It’s called a rental. It’s natural for developers to try to utilize all the bells and whistles of the iPhone, but it’s good to see that they are moving away from the streaming model towards a simpler, more effective one.

Apps

We all fancy ourselves rock stars. The vast majority of us aren’t, but that certainly doesn’t stop us from trying. When you need to rock out while on the go, turn to your trusty iPhone. Staying on the musical theme of our news section, here are three rocking apps for your rolling pleasure.

Noise Trio -- This app is a fun free one that uses tone rows to allow users to slide their finger along a matrix to create a song. Sliding sideways plays notes in the scale, up/down changes the tonality of the note, and pressing a certain cell in the matrix starts and stops a drum loop. Users can choose between three instruments: a flute, a blues guitar, and eastern bells. Each comes with their own scale, which seems limiting at first, but these scales are meant to be played in variations over and over. The guitar sounds very little like a blues guitar, but the main problem with the app is how buggy it is. When it works, however, it rocks.

Guitar Rock Tour 2 – This app is a brilliant free one for the Guitar Hero faithful. The app features the same rolling, tap based gaming interface as the console games, and has a soundtrack of classic tunes that includes “Born To Be Wild,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Paranoid.” The two aspects of the app that set it apart are the ability to play drums as well as guitar, and the option to compete over WiFi with others. The app even includes a career mode that allows users to travel across the globe with their band, a nice touch to a game that really didn’t need it.

Baby Scratch — This app is predicated on the notion that we would all be much cooler if we were behind a turntable in a crowded club, scratching away. The best part about this turntable app is the ability to sample whatever your iPhone’s mic can hear, and scratch over it. The app utilizes the Flare scratch engine, which is by far the most simplistic and fun scratching experience for the iPhone. Users can also overlay beat loops on samples and control the volume with a responsive fader. The app’s lack of variety doesn’t give it much replay value, but for all of the nothing it costs, it is certainly a great value.

"The Winter of Mixed Drinks" is a fitting title for latest offering from Scottish rockers Frightened Rabbit; its songs are ripe for drowning one’s discontent in a highball glass, or several.

Coming on the heels of their acclaimed sophomore album, 2008′s "The Midnight Organ Fight," "Winter" finds the band soaring to new musical and emotional heights. After nearly two years of touring behind "The Midnight Organ Fight," frontman Scott Hutchison holed himself up in the Scottish seaside town of Crail to write the new record. ("If I hadn’t come now to the coast to disappear / I may have died in the landslide / Of rocks and hopes and fear," he sings on deceptively cheery-sounding lead single "Swim Until You Can’t See Land."

The locale evidently provided ample inspiration, with oceanic themes flowing throughout "The Winter of Mixed Drinks." Like a tidal wave, contemplative opener "Things" gradually builds to a crescendo, and repeated references to drowning provide a depressingly unifying motif. "Swim" and the album’s other teaser track, bitter kiss-off "Nothing Like You," strong in their own rights, are just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the record plunges the listener into a sea of despair with hardly a reprieve to come up for air.

On "Winter," which Hutchison says comes closer to his original sonic vision of Frightened Rabbit than either of their previous releases, the singer is backed by his longstanding bandmates, brother Grant Hutchison on drums, guitarist Billy Kennedy and bassist/guitarist/keyboardist Andy Monaghan, as well as new addition and multi-instrumentalist Gordon Skene. Musically-speaking, the tracks are deeper and more layered. Orchestral string arrangements add poignant resonance to songs like "Skip the Youth" and "The Wrestle." Grant Hutchison’s drumming — always inventive but sounding more mature on this collection — once again provides the heartbeat of the record (see: the anthemic "The Loneliness and the Scream"), while his brother’s crack-riddled Scottish brogue is at its heart-wrenching best on the haunting album closer "Yes, I Would" and unconvincing "Not Miserable."

Yet all the doom and gloom is wrapped up on songs so stirring, so rousing, that it’s impossible not to detect a glimmer of hope, especially in the background oohs and ahhs, which are plentiful. Consider the track "Living in Colour" — a chant-y, borderline jovial tale of coming back from the brink that includes the title phrase as well as the line, "Am I dancing? Or am I simply spinning in my grave?"

It’s hard to tell, but whichever the case, "The Winter of Mixed Drinks" is the perfect soundtrack.

WALTHAM — "You should be able to perform any song with just a piano and your voice. You don’t need all the other shit."

Or so declared Ben Folds during his Nov. 5 show at Brandeis University’s Shapiro Gymnasium. As it turned out, Folds and his piano were all he needed to prove himself right.

For nearly two hours, the T-shirt-clad Folds belted almost all his classics, along with a couple of newer songs, to the delight of a sing-along crowd comprised mostly of college students. Folds uses every key of his instrument with the fervor and intricacy of a concert pianist, resulting in a fullness of sound that more than did justice to his many multi-instrument studio recordings. Folds once again showed why he singlehandedly made the piano cool again in rock music.

That is, when he wasn’t breaking the Steinway on which he played.

Folds’ merciless pounding ultimately proved to be too much for the Brandeis-owned baby grand. After a low D went dead mid-way through the show, Folds caused what he admitted was a first: a black key completely broke off, which the bespectacled rocker held up to the amusement of everyone in attendance. But the show went on without even the slightest hiccup, displaying the showmanship Folds has become well known for in his live performances.

The Brandeis appearance — which was his second show on the Waltham university’s basketball court — almost didn’t happen. Folds told the audience that he turned down the gig twice before receiving a letter "from a very nice young lady" begging him to come to Brandeis. An attempt at covering a song written by friend and former bandmate nicknamed Sn¼zz proved to be one of the show’s sweeter moments, with Folds teaching the crowd the song’s refrain and then asking someone with a video camera to record the tribute and post it on YouTube for his friend.

Part of Folds’ appeal — besides his boyish, silky-smooth vocals and his complete mastery of the ivories — is his ability to switch effortlessly from sentimental to silly. Anthems like "Still Fighting It" and "Landed" always empower and inspire, but the crowd favorites were those songs that showcase the wit and profanity that catapulted Folds early in his career. "Rockin’ the Suburbs" was appropriately successful, and a made-up song joking about Brandeis and underage drinking and including an entire stanza of profane filler drew big laughs.

After all, this was a college show, not the Boston Pops.

Folds’ lyrics have matured with each album, but one has to wonder how he will resolve the tension between being 43 and his decision to continue to cater to the more base tastes of college audiences. For now, he seems successful at toggling between his younger listeners (who love his 2001 album, "Rockin’ the Suburbs") and older, "Boston Pops" fans (who prefer 2005′s "Songs for Silverman" and 2008′s "Way to Normal") — but will it all catch up with him?

Folds certainly seemed at home Nov. 5 singing many of his more shallow lyrical offerings in front of a sampling of the YouTube generation, as evidenced by his encore selection: "Bitches Ain’t Shit." Folds retired the satirical Dr. Dre-written song from his live shows, but agreed to play it since he’d never played it live at Brandeis. It was undoubtedly the climax of the show — the song kids had been yelling for Folds to sing the entire night — yet I would have preferred to hear one of his classic ballads like "Brick" or "The Luckiest."

Filing out of that gymnasium, though, one thought trumped all others: this guy can flat-out entertain. I didn’t take a scientific poll, but I’d venture a guess that if I did I would have been hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t satisfied — even if he plays one thing for the adults, and another thing for the kids.

Lacey Mosley, lead singer of Texas quintet Flyleaf, shies away from the "Christian band" label that’s often imposed upon the group. Mosley, a born-again Christian, has said that her faith doesn’t define her music. But that’s a hard concept to swallow after listening to Flyleaf’s sophomore effort, "Memento Mori." Take the song "In the Dark," for instance, on which she begs Jesus to kill and then resurrect her.  (The album title itself translates to "Remember You Will Die.")

On "Memento," the follow-up to Flyleaf’s platinum 2005 debut, nothing is understated, and each song tends to bleeds into the next. Some don’t seem to have any breathing room, with Mosley’s howling, deafening guitars, pounding drums, or some combination of the three filling any and all available space. Religious or not, Mosley’s warbly vocals (am I the only one who thinks she sounds a bit like Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez?) tend to be a bit melodramatic.

That’s not to say that "Memento Mori" is devoid of catchiness. First single "Again," in particular, has deservedly made a dent in the Modern Rock chart. Even the strongest songs, however, are that kind of Paramore-esque alternative rock that angsty teenagers flock to, but that anyone past their early 20s might feel a bit embarrassed for even listening to, let alone enjoying.

On Raditude, Weezer’s seventh studio album, out tomorrow, frontman and geek icon/heartthrob Rivers Cuomo (who, on a side note, is perhaps the only lyricist who can work the phrase “ape a goombah” into a pop song and have it sound totally seamless) treads a fine line. He’s the outsider underdog who’s suddenly been invited to sit at the cool kids’ table. One minute, he’s rapping with Lil’ Wayne; on the next song, he laments, “My hairdo isn’t cool.”

Per usual, Raditude’s strong points come when Weezer sticks to the winning formula that dates back to their debut album 15 (!)  years ago — anthemic, catchy choruses and simple surf-rock song structure (see: “Put Me Back Together,” “Let It All Hang Out”). The record starts and ends on strong points, with bouncy leadoff track and first single, “(If You’re Wondering if I Want You To) I Want You To” and heartfelt album closer “I Don’t Want to Let You Go.” On the eight tracks in between, it’s clear that Weezer is trying to broaden its musical horizons, with mixed results.

On the positive side of the spectrum is the Cuomo-Jermaine Dupri-Lil’ Wayne collaboration “Can’t Stop Partying,” whose lyrics take on an ironic twist with nerd-rock pioneer Cuomo singing lines like, “Monday to Sunday I hit all the clubs / And everybody knows me when I pull up / I’ve got the real big posse with me, yeah I’m deep.” The song, which first appeared as a melancholy acoustic track on Cuomo’s solo demo record that was released a year ago, has been transformed into a synth-heavy earworm, with Dupri’s fingerprints all over it.

Less successful is the sitar-infused “Love is the Answer,” which sounds like it would fit in better over the PA of my Vietnamese-owned laundromat than on a Weezer record.

Even at 39, Cuomo isn’t afraid to let his inner awkward teenager emerge. He falls for a formerly dowdy classmate on the frankly-titled “The Girl Got Hot,” while hard-hitting “I’m Your Daddy” finds him trying to woo a girl on the dance floor. Apparently, even after hanging out with the cool kids, he’s still a nerd at heart.

With a sort of mashup of characters, an eclectic mix of sounds, and layered melodies Airborne Toxic Event headlined at the House of Blues on October 13 and sat down with Blast to answer a few questions.

On their Beginnings

Mikel Jollett formed Airborne in 2006. Spurred by personal catastrophic events in his life Jollet turned from writing about music and started to make his own.

“I realized I was composing an album instead of a novel” he told the Los Angeles Times in August of 2007.

He recruited some of his friends: Steven Chen on guitar, Noah Harmon on bass, Daren Taylor on drums, and Anna Bulbrook on viola keyboards and tambourine.

Less than a month later the band played its first show in Echo Park. Jollett had been keeping busy contacting bloggers and getting word out their about the band and their first concert. Jollett sent MP3s to blogs, and the bloggers started writing. “When it came to that first show, they were all there” Chen said. Jollett remembers about 200 showing up, which is impressive for a first show.

October 5 is the anniversary of their first show Chen remembers, “and we completely forgot about it this year” he said. Before that first show Chen had only met Harmon one or two times. “He was still on the fence (about joining the band) at that point” Chen said.

“I’m still on the fence now three years later” Harmon interrupted laughing.

On the Band

“We all bring something different, something new to the mix” Chen said. Before turning to writing Jollett was a freelancer for National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times and worked on a few novels. Bulbrook is a classically trained violinist and upon joining the band taught herself to play the viola and the keyboard. Harmon holds a jazz degree in upright bass and worked as a music teacher in LA for a few years. Chen was asked to join as a keyboardist, but petitioned to be lead guitarist.

“Anna and her viola bring something different” Harmon agreed. String instruments are rare and few between in rock bands, and when they do appear it’s nine times out of ten a violin.

“It’s a rock and roll viola” Harmon said, “The poor thing never knew what it was getting into.”

“Our goal, whether it be a slower song like “ËœMidnight’ or a more upbeat song like “ËœGasoline’ is to write a good song and strike some chord” Chen said. “That was the whole idea for the album.”

As for the name, it was all Jollett’s idea. Taken from Don DeLillo’s novel “ËœWhite Noise’ an airborne toxic event was a term coined by the military to reference a poisonous cloud emitted from a chemical spill.

“I had read the book for three classes and wrote two essays on it” Chen said, “as the title it makes a lot of sense.”

“It doesn’t matter at all what you call yourself” Chen said. “It’s what you do with it.”

On the Tour

“We’re just a new band” Jollett said to the audience, “the world’s coming by us at 100 miles a minute and I don’t think any of us can make heads or tails of it.”

Airborne has played more than 250 shows this year, and the year is far from over. The band members cannot remember the last time they were home for more than a month.

“When I go home I don’t even bother putting things away” Chen laughed. Instead he just lives easily out of a suitcase. Harmon sold his car when he realized it was doing little more than gathering dust.

“Your idea of home becomes a bit skewed” Harmon added, “now home is a tour bus.”

Chen cannot even picture home anymore: “I can’t imagine not being in a new place every night.”

Airborne will take a nice long break around the holiday time and then jet off to the UK and beyond.

It will be their sixth time in UK this year.

“I’ve landed in London as many times as I’ve landed in Los Angeles” Harmon laughed.

For Harmon, the UK is one of their favorite destinations, and they’ve been there six times this year. “But in the UK the fridges don’t work” Chen butted in, “but it’s really ok because they know their fridges don’t work. They’re not trying to convince anyone that the refrigerator works.”

On “Sometime Around Midnight”

The viola starts and the crowd screams at its loudest. Everyone knows what songs coming before one bow stroke is over. It may only be 10:58 by my clock, but for Airborne Toxic Event it’s “Sometime Around Midnight.”

An acoustic version of the song was released as a free Starbucks song of the week, and from there it grew popularity on both iTunes and the music charts.

It’s not that big of a deal when your friends know who you are, when your friends-friends know who you are Chen said. “It’s when your parents friends start to notice, it’s like whoa.”

People relate to the emotions in it, Harmon comments. The record became an instant hit. Not only a top radio and music video track, iTunes also named it the “Number 1 Alternative Song of 2008.”

On Boston and the House of Blues

Now that the Red Sox season is officially over, the gem of Landsdowne has moved across the street to House of Blues. And here the players are musicians and they wear red basketball shorts and converse instead of cleats and baseball tights. “We just played the most intense game of basketball ever” bassist Noah Harmon said, pulling his hair back. “I don’t remember the last time I was so winded.”

Two opening bands, and two hours into the night Airborne finally hits the stage. And they hit it running. For a impressive few minutes they all go a bit crazy and show off their raw talent. No vocals, no lights, just Airborne and their respective instruments. Before you know it the first song has started, and you are transfixed in a daze.

On stage they show undeniable togetherness and energy, even as the set pushes upon two hours. They bounce off each other’s backs, Bulbrook wields her viola, Harmon sporadically strokes a bow on his bass strings, Taylor hacks away with his drum sticks, Jollett spasms, and Chen stands tall and unmoving. But somehow it all works.

One of the most impressive parts of the set was an acoustic set. Jollett sat down on the stage and sang to the audience more personally, Chen went to an upright piano, and Harmon picked up a jazz bass. “I feel like we’re getting to know you now” Jollett told the crowd.

“You were the audience, Boston, and we were the band” Jollett ended after a four song encore. “One day, when your dead you’re one wish is gonna be for this hour and a half back, but thank you for it.”

But Jollett’s words were wrong, as the crowd’s one wish was that the night never ended.

Every time Muse makes an album, I feel like they’ve reinvented a new soundtrack for the apocalypse. The last time the world ended on the Muse timeline was 2006 with “Black Holes and Revelations,” a flurry of heavy, progressive rock. “The Resistance” brings us a Muse with a heightened awareness of their classical influences on their sound and they’ve incorporated this to a great degree of success. The end of days this time around will occur to a seamless weaving of rock and classical music that transcends the title of mere “rock album” and heads into masterpiece territory.

The British rock trio finally embraces their potential to create truly symphonic music after showing hints of it on previous albums. Lead singer Matt Bellamy’s falsetto vocals lend a raw emotional energy to his lyrics and his flair for the operatic is exemplified on “I Belong to You (Mon Coeur S’Ouvre A Ta Voix).” Towards the end of this track, Bellamy croons a part of the French opera “Samson and Delilah” only adding to the beauty of this song.

“United States of Eurasia (+ Collateral Damage)” is another song that borrows from a classic. A bit of Chopin’s “Nocturne in E Minor” performed on the piano by Bellamy bringing an epic song to an end. The rest of the song is very reminiscent of Queen in their heyday. Bellamy invokes Freddy Mercury here with a soft piano entrance that builds into a resounding chorus of voices and guitars that burst you into the rest of the song.

The first single off the album, “Uprising” will sound very familiar to British listeners and science fiction fans. Muse has taken the theme song from “Dr Who” and turned it into a rock anthem.

Those worried that this album is just Muse fooling around with an orchestra, tracks like “Unnatural Selection” and “Undisclosed Desires” will put you at ease. The latter is more to the style of the old Muse — slight strings, punchy percussion, melancholic lyrics and lilting vocals. Muse put a new twist on the old formula by adding some funky slap bass to the chorus which fits surprisingly well.

“Unnatural Selection” begins with a haunting organ opening that forays into some aggressive guitar work. It almost hypnotizes the listener when Bellamy’s voice and the guitar glide over the same notes together, two instruments working as one. The song comes to a halt in the middle with a heart-wrenching guitar solo to remind everyone of Bellamy’s guitar prowess.

Surprisingly, one of the best parts of the album is the final three songs that comprise the symphonic portion. When I first heard Muse was recording a heavily classical album, it made me nervous. I was afraid they would get overly ambitious and turn out some pretentious crap, but Muse has successfully dispelled that notion. “Exogenesis” is a symphony in three parts played out with a full orchestra and Bellamy’s operatic voice. This is definitely their most ambitious album yet and will leave fans eagerly wondering what creative direction Muse could possibly go in now.

The Boston Globe reported Saturday that ESPN Radio WAMG-AM 890 will go off the air on Monday after a series of problems, including awful signal strength and an utter lack of local programming.

But that’s not what makes the Globe’s story so interesting.

ESPN Radio isn’t going away in Boston. The Globe’s sources say ESPN may move programming to Boston’s mainstay sports station, WEEI-AM 850, because WEEI plans to move itself to an FM station to compete better with the new CBS station, 98.5 The Sports Hub.

The company that owns WEEI, Entercom Communications, only has two FM stations that it can use. Entercom also owns WRKO-AM 680.

The Sports Hub kicked rock station WBCN off the air, and the company that owns WEEI only owns two FM stations that it can move it to: Mike 93.7 and WAAF 97.7/107.3. WAAF and Phoenix Media station WFNX are the only rock stations left in Boston.

Mike 93.7 sounds like a much better option. The station doesn’t have nearly the following that WAAF has, but there’s at least the possibility that WAAF could get axed. Whichever station gets WEEI, the Globe says that ESPN will take over the WEEI-AM station to supplement the ESPN Boston website, which starts Monday.

Entercom had no news posted on its website Saturday.

LOWELL – Samuel L. Jackson might have had enough of those motherfucking snakes on that motherfucking plane, but three years later, Cobra Starship (which outfitted the title song for the 2006 summer reptilian thriller) hasn’t given up the party.

Although many people initially thought the group was a joke promotional tool for the film, the boys and gal of Cobra Starship are about to release their third full length album this summer and are currently playing main support for Fall Out Boy on the Believers Never Die Part Deux tour, also featuring All Time Low, Metro Station and Hey Monday.

Blast caught up with Cobra bassist Alex Suarez, drummer Nate Novarro, and Hidden in Plain View’s former drummer and Cobra comrade Spencer Peterson in their dressing room before the show on the 19th stop of the Believers tour at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell.

“We’ve just been really happy since Spencer came out here to join us,” said Novarro. “It’s like the Dow national average went up 7 points. Before that it was at an all time low.”

Everyone shares a laugh before Suarez elaborates, “there are just so many moments where we say, ‘That was awesome. Remember last night? That was awesome.’ There are like 20 of those a day.”

To no surprise, the Cobra attitude is a lighthearted one which could lead some to think that “believers never die” may work as some sort of mantra for the band considering the obstacles they have encountered over the last few months.

They ended a full summer run on last year’s Warped Tour to be confronted with a could-be-devastating diagnosis of lead singer Gabe Saporta’s voice. Because of lumps that formed on his vocal chords, Saporta was sentenced to vocal rest and surgery, but that would impede the upcoming headlining US tour for the New York-based quintet. While the Starship delayed recording of the new record and postponed UK dates, they went ahead with the Sassy Back Tour.

Saporta bumped up his surgery to December and spent the holidays recovering before going to work on the new album at the end of January, though there was some worry if he would be up for the Fall Out Boy tour.

“We just kind of hung out and waited for him to be ready to go,” said Suarez. “There wasn’t really anything else we could do.”

Now the band takes a humorous take on the situation by making skits about Saporta’s surgery for their new weekly webisodes on cobracam.tv.

“Our friend Jack the Camera Guy was available and we invited him out on tour. He just comes out with all these great ideas because he’s such a genius,” said Suarez.

A new webisode will premiere every Monday until the new album is released. The previous escapades have shown backstage footage of the tour and alleged album title meetings.

“Someone starts off, says ‘We should do this,’ and then everyone just throws in there and it all comes together,” Novarro said, explaining how the group drafts ideas for the skits.

The group’s latest episode depicts the after-effects of writing part of the new album in the mountains of Pennsylvania on Novarro’s psyche. The trip was an opportunity for the band to get away from it all and write some new material, but became another filming expedition when the band set up a web cam to film their songwriting process.

“There was lots of snow and red wine. White powder and red wine. Cobra cam. Sweet jams were written up there. We wrote a rap song,” said Suarez of the experience.

The mountain session and later recording in New York City did lead to the first song off the record being released to the Cobra Myspace, “Pete Wentz Is The Only Reason We’re Famous.” The title hints that Cobra is up to their usual celebrity trash-talking style, but not afraid to make themselves the target as well, considering Wentz is the one who signed them to his Decaydance label and they are now opening for him during the BND tour.

“I think we make fun of ourselves more, but ourselves as celebrities,” said Suarez. “So I guess you could say we’re still making fun of celebrities.”

As well as making reference to 80′s Kung Fu supervillain Bruce Leroy, the glowing Last Dragon in the new track, Saporta also gets a little dirty in the first verse when he proclaims, “you can rise to the top/but you can’t ride on my cock.”

The cavalier line took many fans by surprise on the first listen but Suarez and Novarro didn’t seem phased when asked if more of the same bluntness would be found on the record.

“Expect a lot of dick and a lot of cock,” said Suarez.

“Metaphorically, of course,” added Novarro.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of hinting about cock,” concluded Suarez before going into a traumatic story from his childhood in which he was witness to two elephants mating but confused the male elephant parts as a second trunk.

“We went to this, like, drive-in zoo , (Lion Park Safari). I’m just looking out the window, ‘Hey ma, why does that elephant have two trunks?’ and then they started doing it. Have you ever seen two elephants doing it? Not pretty,” Suarez regaled.

CAMBRIDGE — As I walked into the Plough and Stars about a month ago I felt slightly ill at ease. The cover was $7, and the space was packed. With little room to move, I worked my way to the front to meet singer Andrea Gillis.

Gillis immediately raised my confidence in the place and in the evening. She firmly shook my hand and apologized ahead of time for her cold and (therefore) “bad performance.”

I got my gin and tonic and waited for the set. There was barely any room to stand. Suddenly, the band started with the first song “Used Up” from her recent album Want Another?

So far, so good.

Gillis’s voice had a raspier sound to it because of her cold, but it seemed to work in her favor. Despite of her bad spirits and physical illness, Gillis lead a stunning performance. She rocked. The band rocked. The little house they played at was rocked. People hollered with excitement at each song.

The songs were filled with soul and her voice with power. Gillis’ sound is a mix between soul, blues and garage rock. You wouldn’t know the singer was feeling under the weather the way her voice carried through the air. I couldn’t believe how powerful she sounded.

With bassist Michelle Paulhus, guitarists Melissa Gibbs and Charles Hansen along with drummer, Bruce Caporal, Gillis’ band introduces new popularity to the co-gendered band. The throng of fans that was previously growing restless in the crowded space was now dancing and singing. One drunken guest was even shouting with the upbeat songs and swaying his lighter until realizing he was indoors.

Everyone seemed to have fun. We were really dancing our hearts out during one of her Tina Turner covers as well as her original hard-rocking songs like “Gin and Tonic.”

Andrea Gillis has been performing for 10 years and is due to release a new record soon. She opened for J. Geils and was the first band to play at the House of Blues in Boston.

If you want to hear her tunes, check out her website or MySpace.

The Camilo Project and its members, Jason “Camilo” Margaca and siblings Mark and Patrina Foley, are trying create something completely different.

With a sound that departs from your run-of-the-mill alternative, the Boston-based band features progressive hip hop beats while maintaining an alternative rock vocal style with lots of strings. Coined informally as “conscious alternative,” the fusion of unique styles from Reggae to old school Nintendo, to Rap and Rock meshes into a sound that becomes more complex with each listen.

This complexity comes from the group members’ varied backgrounds.

Margaca grew up listening to new age and ambient music. Other influences were varied, but most notably, he looked up to Dan Kenney, his childhood piano teacher who happened to be Britney Spears’ former musical director. With Kenney’s help, Margaca started his own music career 10 years ago as a rap producer with mixed results.

“I was working with kids who had a little different lifestyle than me,” Margaca said in a recent interview with Blast. “I had always loved beat reggae and rap, but some of the kids were doing things I didn’t want to be a part of.”

He ended up taking a three-year hiatus from the business only to come back to it with a passion in 2006. After refining his sound, Margaca ended up reconnecting with an old friend, Mark Foley. Mark’s background was more rock-based. Growing up, he was constantly listening to the Carpenters. Growing older, Mark has become obsessed with Gavin Rossdale and Radiohead. “I love when music has a melody mixed with a flow that you can groove to,” he said.

Together, Mark and Jason began early freestyle recordings. They recorded their first song, “Uptight,” which fused the boys’ freestyle abilities. It was at this point that Patrina Foley began to express interest in the early workings of The Camilo Project.

Patrina’s background was different still. Coming off a five-year stint with a “rootsy rock” band, Patrina brought a new dynamic to the group. Together, the trio began to record their self-titled debut album in summer 2007.

Something naturally clicked between these totally different styles. By November 2007, the group had recorded “Midnight Lover,” which proved to be the catapult for the rest of the album.

With the music video for “Midnight Lover” now completed (and another video for “Breathing” out soon), their CD on iTunes, and their music available on programs from Lastfm to Rhapsody, The Camilo Project’s hard work is starting to pay off.

The Boston-based trio features three distinct musicians with three distinct styles.

But fame and fortune isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal for Jason, Mark, and Patrina. The Camilo Project, above anything else, is striving to maintain the integrity of the music they create. Distinguishing themselves yet again, the group prides themselves on writing songs that come from personal experience, which helps them maintain a sense of soul that can seem lacking with other artists.

“Artists use the same progressions and same beats over and over again,” Margaca said. “Nobody is trying to be different anymore.”

This band really stands out. Check out their MySpace page for more info on shows and updates from this local act. You won’t be disappointed.

What’s the saying about every great man having a great woman behind him? Now that sentiment can officially be applied to ’80s alternative icon Frank Black. For his latest project, dubbed Grand Duchy, the former Pixies front man (a.k.a. Black Francis)-turned-solo artist has teamed up with his wife, Violet Clark. The duo will release their debut, a nine-song, 37-minute nugget of an album called “Petits Fours,” on April 14.

The band was borne out of a day of studio experimentation, with Clark and Black handling all the vocal and instrumental duties themselves. Their collaboration, which was fraught with “creative tension,” according to Black, sounds less like a creative process than a marriage counseling session and involved “a fair amount of shouting and throwing things.” (“She digs the ’80s. I had spent the latter part of the ’80s doing my part to destroy the ’80s,” he elaborates.) But that first day yielded the dreamy song “Fort Wayne,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

On “Petits Fours,” Clark’s ’80s affinity rears its head through keyboard and vocal effects, and Black pays homage to his musical beginnings on songs like “Break the Angels” and album opener “Come On Over to My House.” Clark’s soft, feminine vocals contrast with her husband’s gravelly growl in much the way his Pixies bandmate Kim Deal’s did. But while Deal’s voice was so wispy that it seemed disembodied at times, Clark’s has significantly more substance, as showcased on the excellent “Lovesick.”

Though it would be a stretch to describe any of the tracks as radio-friendly, Pixies fans might find the album’s overall accessibility disarming. Still, it’s hard not to be seduced by the swirling synthesizers on “Seeing Stars” or the delicate “la la la” refrain on “Fort Wayne.”

According to the album’s press release, the couple plans to use any profits they might earn from Grand Duchy to put a down payment on a house in Luxembourg. Here’s hoping they factor in room for a recording studio.

Harmonix, still glowing and high off their recent Beatles game announcement, as a last resort, ask enthusiasts to pick up the pieces, get the band together, and rock out to eight shiny new tracks featuring the work of legendary funk masters and the hardcore emo rock scene.

All silly puns aside, the “Get the Funk Out 01″ pack includes:

• Average White Band- “Pick Up the Pieces“
• Earth Wind & Fire- “Shining Star“
• James Brown- “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine – Pt 1“

The modern rock tracks, available individually will feature:

• Against Me!- “Thrash Unreal“
• The New Pornographers- “All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth“
• The New Pornographers- “Use It“
• Papa Roach- “Last Resort“
• Papa Roach- “Lifeline“

All tracks are master recordings and will be available on Xbox Live and the PlayStation network Tuesday and Thursday of next week individually for $1.99 (160 MS points), with the “Get the Funk Out 01″ pack offered at $5.50 (440 MS points).

The 01 can only be an indication of more funk to come, I say bring it on!

Blink 182 has reunited.

In statements posted on their website and MySpace, the punk rock band talks about a tour and a new album coming in the summer.

Hi. We’re blink-182. This past week there’ve been a lot of questions about the current status of the band, and we wanted you to hear it straight from us. To put it simply, We’re back. We mean, really back. Picking up where we left off and then some. In the studio writing and recording a new album. Preparing to tour the world yet again. Friendships reformed. 17 years deep in our legacy.

You dread when you hear it on the radio because you know it is going to be stuck in your head for the rest of the day. Yet when the first riffs mixed with syncopated drum beats hit your speakers and you start asking yourself, “Am I more than you bargained for yet?” rather than changing the dial, you know you’re stuck already and every few minutes until you sleep that night will be a chorus of Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down.”

Despite how you might feel about Fall Out Boy, there is no denying they have a tendency to be infectious. Now their fourth album, “Folie A Deux,” is out in stores and the first just-as-catchy single “I Don’t Care” has already hit the airwaves. Whether this latest record will go down in history as the biggest sell out of the generation or punk-emo martyrs for the masses has yet to be determined, but try and find someone who doesn’t know the words to one of their songs. Just try.

When the Chicago foursome first got together in 2001, they had no idea they’d turn out to be a tour de force of the emerging music scene. The group started when guitarist Joe Trohman and bassist Pete Wentz decided to leave their previous hardcore bands to pursue more melodic musical initiatives.

Trohman passed Wentz along to young, extreme side-burned future vocalist Patrick Stump, but the band didn’t finalize their line up with drummer Andy Hurley until they went into the studio to record their debut full length “Take This To Your Grave”.

The album was the bleeding heart soundtrack for “emo” kids everywhere, starting with a large cult-like following in small clubs in Chicago and gradually spreading outwards. The sound was rough and unpolished, but catchy. It was really the heartbreaking honesty of songwriter and band spokesperson Wentz’s lyrics that captured the attention of every teenager out there that was dissatisfied with the tragic life of suburbia and needed a more potent therapy than the Good Charlotte and Simple Plan themes blasting from the airwaves at the time.

Songs like “Grand Theft Autumn (Where Is Your Boy)” and “Dead On Arrival” with words like, “I’m willing to take my chances on the hope I forget you hate him more than you notice I wrote this for you” and “I know I’m not your favorite record but the songs you grow to like never stick at first so I’m writing you a chorus” began finding themselves on mix CDs, scribbled on notebooks, and being screamed out by kids packed like sardines into small clubs across the country.

It was only a matter of time before the Wilmette, Illinois quartet was a household (or rather chat room) name for every young person daring to call him- or herself “scene”.

Fall Out Boy spent two years touring behind “Take This To Your Grave” before returning to the studio to make its follow-up: “From Under The Cork Tree” (the title borrowed from “The Story of Ferdinand” by Munro Leaf, one of Wentz’s favorite childhood books).

Having grown up a bit from playing the local venues of downtown Chicago, “From Under the Cork Tree” came out with a much more mature sound. The guitars are tighter and overall musicianship was stepped up a notch as Stump seemed to be growing comfortably into his roll as arranger for the band.

The sophomore album was a display of growth for the boys, a snapshot of the past two years of their lives featuring appearances from hometown buddy and The Academy Is… lead singer William Beckett and a fresh out of high school Panic(!) at the Disco front man Brendon Urie. “From Under the Cork Tree” also debuted FOB’s first attempt at a slow song (“I’ve Got A Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (summer song)”) and Wentz once again delivered with lyrics that went straight to the soul of every angsty kid who had ever felt not good enough, “I took a shot and didn’t even come close at love and hope. And the poets are just the kids who didn’t make it, who never had it at all.”

Tour stories from San Francisco based indie-pop group Loquat sound a lot more like a haphazard family vacation with a tight budget than a trip to perform in cities around the U.S.

“We crash in the crappiest places and eat the crappiest food,” admits vocalist Kylee Swenson, an editor at Remix Magazine by day who scrapes together her vacation days to take to the road.

She affectionately refers to one of the digs of choice as “The Crime Scene Inn” for its seedy demeanor. The group has a roadie to help lug the gear – also known as a friend who won’t demand a high wage or complain much.

And to get from point A to point B, they class it up with a 15-seater van, where Swenson’s bandmates take turns sleeping so their equipment doesn’t get targeted by thugs.

Swenson skirts that duty, being the lone woman on board, but that’s about the extent of the kid glove treatment. “I’ve learned to thicken my skin a bit. These guys are tough on me,” she says.

Even the band’s sound has toughened up in recent years, since the release of their first full-length studio album in 2005, “It’s Yours to Keep.” That’s due in part to the two turbulent years that preceded their sophomore effort,”Secrets of the Sea,” released this fall on Talking House Records. The result is a bit of a biting undertone, without straying too far from the qualities that made their earlier music work, a mix of harmonies, electronically enhanced beats, and the tambour of Swenson’s Chrissie Hynde-esque vocals.

“My way of dealing with a lot of things is to basically write a song,” she says, which is how subject matters including the mortality of friends and loved ones snuck their way into so many of the band’s latest songs.

Swenson penned “In My Sleep” after the death of a longtime friend from a heroin overdose, when she kept encountering a presence in her kitchen. Swenson’s mother is a conduit for ghosts, she says, and it utterly unafraid of the supernatural. But Swenson didn’t feel she was up to the task. “I can’t handle it,” she says. “I can talk to you in my sleep.”

In the same way, “Sit Sideways” is a musical memorial to the father of a friend who recently passed away. “How do you console a friend when it’s, like, a parent?” The solution: rent two houseboats and party for three days straight. “My mom was not thrilled with that,” Swenson says. “Sometimes you need a distraction of some kind.”

But then she pauses. “I don’t want to lump myself in as “ËœLoquat is the band that talks about dead people’” she laughs.

Swenson grew up in Orno, Minnesota, but the harsh climate took its toll. “I’d taken one too many insane winters scraping the shit out of the windshield,” she says, and even had to serve some detention for being late on account of the weather. So after graduation she headed for Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco, to major in English and German.

Swenson spent three months post-college living in Germany and working as a maid. “While it was pretty crappy, it was insanely fun,” she says, with plenty of time to bike, play tennis, and party all night between changing dirty sheets and cleaning up after strangers.

Now she calls San Francisco home.

cause Im baaaaaaaaaack
Yes, Im baaaaaaaaaaack
Well, Im back
Yes, Im back
Well, Im back, back
(well) Im back in black
Yes, Im back in black

Hell yes. Even though it’s been relegated to Walmart and online retailers, the AC/DC Live Track Pack for Rock Band is just awesome.

You don’t need the original Rock Band disc for any of the PlayStation 2/3 or Xbox 360 versions of this standalone title, which lets you relive the 1991 live performance at Donington with Brian Johnson, Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Cliff Williams, and Chris Slade.

The pack includes 99 minutes of music and 18 songs including “Thunderstruck,” “Jailbreak,” “Dirty Deeds,” “Hells Bells,” “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Highway to Hell,” “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” and, of course, “Back in Black.”

We like that this is a standalone game that you can jump into right away.

Not much else to say. You have Rock Band. You need this.

Two impactful‚ names in music, rock legend Sting and progressive heroes from Tool will be making their video game debuts, offering both theri music and their likenesses to Guitar Hero World Tour.

The two acts add to an already huge list of artists — just about everyone will be in either Guitar Hero World Tour, Rock Band 2 or both — Sting will lend his vocie and likeness as a playable character, busting out sngs like “Demolition Man.”

As for Tool, you’ll get to play “Parabola” and Grammy-award winning “Schism” from Tool’s critically-acclaimed 2001 album Lateralus in addition to “Vicarious” from their 2006 Grammy-award winning album 10,000 Days. The game will also feature an all-new venue designed in collaboration with the band and highlighting the art style that has become a staple in their music videos, live shows and album artwork.

From Activision:

When the house lights go down this fall, a new generation of guitarists, drummers and fearless frontmen will come together and rock with Guitar Hero World Tour. The latest installment in the #1 best-selling video game franchise of 2007, Guitar Hero World Tour transforms music gaming by expanding Guitar Hero’s signature guitar gameplay into a cooperative band experience that combines the most advanced wireless controllers with new revolutionary online* and offline gameplay modes including Band Career and 8-player “Battle of the Bands,” which allows two full bands to compete head-to-head online for the first time ever. The game features a slick newly redesigned guitar controller, drum kit controller and a microphone, as well as an innovative Music Studio music creator that lets players compose, record, edit and share their own rock “Ëœn’ roll anthems. Music creators will also be able to share their recordings with their friends online through GHTunesSM where other gamers can download and play an endless supply of unique creations.

Already, 2008 is shaping up to be a banner year for Canadian indie rockers The Stills, and their third album, “Oceans Will Rise,” hasn’t even hit shelves yet. In July, the Montreal quintet was tapped to open for Paul McCartney at Quebec City’s 400th Anniversary Concert and received positive reviews for the performance (“The group rocked for its life during the high-profile gig,” proclaimed the Montreal Gazette.)

When “Oceans” is released on August 19th, there’s a good chance The Stills’ summertime good fortune will continue. It’s their strongest record to date, coming on the heels of 2003′s “Logic Will Break Your Heart” and 2006′s “Without Feathers.”

The band’s official site describes them as a “rock band with an ‘80s sound,” but traces of early ‘90s grunge influences are also scattered throughout.

The album kicks things off with “Don’t Talk Down,” which, after brazenly borrowing an opening riff from The Smiths’ “A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours,” redeems itself by segueing into a bouncy, memorable ditty.

Singers Tim Fletcher and Dave Hamelin have stated that the title “Oceans Will Rise” refers to the fragility of humans as compared to the vast strength of nature. But the album seems to at least challenge, if not defy, that very notion, with several tracks packing a fairly powerful wallop. Take the grandiose first single “Being Here,” for example, which is back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll, with Springsteen-esque guitar riffs and vocals encircling the repetitive, yet impossibly catchy chorus. Likewise, the surging “Hands on Fire” is structured like a wave, starting small before crashing down with a tsunami of a chorus.

Lyrically, however, “Oceans Will Rise” is a different story, as apocalyptic themes abound. “Dinosaurs” opens with the phrase “The clouds are thunder and lightning / The oceans level will rise / The earth will shake / Your windows will break.” The confessional “Everything I Build” takes things down a notch, with the mournful refrain, “I watched from the hill as it burned to the ground / I can still the smoke from my train out of town.”

Drummer Julian Blais provides highlights on a number of tracks, most notably on the aptly-titled “Snakecharming the Masses,” which mesmerizes the listener with a tribal beat. Rounding out the lineup are keyboardist Liam O’Neil and bassist Olivier Corbeil.

It might be hard to top the being the opening act for Sir Paul, but with “Oceans Will Rise,” The Stills will likely continue riding a wave of success.

“Donkey,” the sophomore album by Brazilian critical darlings CSS, kicks off with the line, “Oh my God, it’s so hot.”

It’s a fitting observation, since “Donkey,” which was released on July 25th,  is a quintessential summer record. Judging from their music, life for the members of CSS is a nonstop party. But what else would you expect from a group hailing from Sao Paulo, where the average winter temperature is 71 degrees? “Donkey” transports the listener into their world, even if it is for just 40 minutes.

In 11 concise tracks, with none surpassing the four-minute mark, the album provides the ideal soundtrack for a day at the beach, backyard barbecue, or any number of summer activities that involve dancing, drinking and overall indulgence. There’s nary a ballad in sight, and mononymous 24-year-old lead singer Lovefoxxx (nee Luisa Matsushita) gleefully chants lyrics like, “I’m gonna jump onto the table / And dance my ass off ‘til I die.”

Those sentiments and others come courtesy of bassist/vocalist Adrian Cintra, the band’s sole male member and chief songwriter, who also produced “Donkey.” (The other three members are keyboardists/guitarists Ana Rezende dos Anjos, Carolina Parra and Luiza Sa).

CSS has gained a steady international following thanks to its widely-hailed debut, and performances with artists including Gwen Stefani and Ladytron. Casual U.S. listeners may be familiar with the band thanks to the song “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex,” which was featured in an iPod Touch ad last year (but may be mistakenly thought of by some as being titled “Music is My Boyfriend”).

Their acronym stands for “Cansei de Ser Sexy,” which means “Tired of Being Sexy” in Portuguese. (The band borrowed their name from a phrase Beyonce once allegedly used to describe herself.)

Lovefoxxx, a pop icon in Europe and South America who is engaged to Simon Taylor-Davis of the group Klaxons, sings all the songs on “Donkey” in her non-native English. But her Portuguese accent adds a special flavor to lines like “Kiss you in the photo booth / Duct tape you in my roof.”

Opener “Jager Yoga” includes delightfully nonsensical phrases like “Desperate Living, Hairspray / Baltimore with Tanqueray / Live your life John Waters’ way.” “Let’s Reggae All Night” makes it hard to resist the urge to do just that, as Lovefoxxx suggests, “If you are my friend, we can drink in the afternoon / That’s cool.” Even on the more serious “Rat is Dead (Rage),” the band’s having much more fun than should be allowed on a song about an abusive relationship.

On the “I Love the ‘80s” sounding “Move,” complete with syncopated hand claps, Lovefoxxx repeats, “You’d better get your move on.” It’s an invitation that, throughout “Donkey,” is impossible to ignore.

On “Live at The Bass Performance Hall,” Lindsey Buckingham’s first live solo release, the guitar god who got his first taste of fame in Fleetwood Mac more than 30 years ago proves that he hasn’t lost any verve during his years on the road.

With manic energy, Buckingham jubilantly works the stage, his usual furious guitar work at the center of a searing spotlight for a career-spanning set-list that includes some FM tracks and a few from his 2006 release, Under the Skin.

But his slowed down versions of the 80s-tastic hits “Trouble” and “Go Insane” are a pleasant, and for the most part mellow, surprise.

The first, paired with “Not Too Late” from his latest release, and a few others make for a more composed beginning — just Buckingham and his dizzying plucking that at times sound as if there must be a second guitarist lurking just stage right. But by show’s end, the only indication that he may have toned it down here is the length of time it takes the dripping wet musician to shed the leather jacket and don a sweat-soaked T-shirt.

“Go Insane” gives Buckingham a moment to catch his breath, and rest his voice between grunting, growling, and, yes, sometimes even a few barks thrown in (“Holiday Road”).

A few Buckingham-penned Fleetwood Mac tunes have been thrown in for good measure.

This live cut of “Big Love” bears a striking resemblance to the rendition turned out more than ten years during a recorded reunion tour, another example of his ability to contemporize a song that originally held more hallmarks of its time.

Call me a purist, but the solo-tour rendition of “Tusk” doesn’t feel right without the rest of Fleetwood Mac, especially a bug-eyed, maniacally laughing Mick Fleetwood.

Same goes for “Go Your Own Way,” which can only muster half the emotional charge without the exchanging energy and what some fans would deduce are meaningful glances with Stevie Nicks.

That’s not to say that his backing band is unworthy. Though the other musicians don’t make an appearance until “Second Hands News,” four songs in, Taku Hirano stands out with vibrant hand percussion

The CD/DVD set are nearly identical. For the concert, “Tusk” is the sole track that differs from the audio companion. But the disc also holds the “Not Too Late” documentary, a musical montage that glimpses scenes from his studio and home, including playful scenes with his wife. Die-hard fans will gobble it up, but for most it’s a forgettable nugget.

This was our December 2007 cover story. Click here to download a copy of the original BLAST cover!

Sara Quin wouldn’t want to date herself. Or any other musician, for that matter.

The 27-year-old songstress — one twin sister half of indie pop darlings Tegan and Sara — drew inspiration from a struggling relationship for songs she contributed to the group’s latest release, The Con. Over quirky pop melodies, Sara’s lyrics candidly detail her self-described inadequate relationship skills in songs like “Relief Next to Me” (“I’m not proud that nothing will seem easy about me”) and first single “Back in Your Head” (“I’m not unfaithful, but I’ll stray”).

The latter half of the duo discussed her relationship insecurities during an interview on a break from a recent tour stop in Chicago. She touched on the band’s rabid international fan base, her love/hate relationship with their early albums and the link between their live shows and dental hygiene.

“You have to be a very patient, gentle kind person to date me,” Sara admits. “I could never date me. I could never date a musician. I just don’t feel like I could, ever. It seems so contradictory (but) I actually do feel really private and so it scares me to think that someone would have so much power to be able to create music and art from our relationship.”

“And yet, I do it all the time,” she acknowledges with a laugh. “I find that I’m not writing songs as the bad thing is happening or as the disconnect is happening, so a lot of times it’s really sort of like a retrospect thing. So I don’t feel like it’s as difficult on people as you would think just because it’s like, you’ve already gone through the rough period and then you’re writing the song. But I try to be very responsible and respectful of the things that I’m writing about. I don’t want the person that I’m writing about to feel like I’ve like exposed them.”

Even at just 27, Tegan and Sara are industry veterans. The Con is their fifth full-length album.

Since they were teenagers, the Quin twins have adopted a do-it-yourself approach that’s involved relentless touring, grassroots self-promotion and documenting their recording and touring processes for their fans through DVDs and online videos. Their persistence paid off when they were signed as teens to Neil Young’s label, Vapor Records.

Since the release of 2004′s So Jealous, which is widely viewed as the band’s breakthrough album, Tegan and Sara’s popularity has been on a steady incline. They landed a major label deal with Warner Brothers Records for The Con, which was released in July.

“Personally, I love making music, and I love the industry part of making music,” Sara says. “For me, the industry is not record labels and TV and money and MTV and whatever. It’s just the day to day of what we do and how we make this world work and how we have been able to build a career independently.”

That career started with demo tapes that evolved into 1999′s Under Feet Like Ours, the siblings’ first full-length album. That record, and the next year’s follow-up This Business of Art, are marked by gritty vocals (“We screamed a lot; we were angsty,” Sara explains) and folky guitar strumming, with influences like Bruce Springsteen and Ani DiFranco clearly discernible. Eight years later, The Con is laden with keyboards, synthesizers and polished vocal layering courtesy of producer and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla.

Unschooled listeners probably wouldn’t realize that it’s the same girls performing.

“I definitely think there’s been a huge evolution … in terms of musical sound or style,” Sara says. “Now we’re more just a traditional rock band, pop band.”

Part of that evolution is thanks to a new recording process Tegan and Sara adopted for The Con, creating demos at their respective homes in Vancouver and Montreal and e-mailing them back and forth to each other. The approach allowed them to become stronger songwriters and better self-editors through experimentation with different instrumental and vocal techniques, Sara said.

“When we were putting out our first albums … I would just write a song and then I would go into the studio and by the time you had time to listen to it, it was done,” she explained. “When I think of the band changing into what I sort of see us being now, I think that the big difference was we started recording ourselves.”

Patience seems to have paid off.

“And to be able to finally record what I was writing, and go have dinner, and then come back and put my headphones on and listen, I was really able to sort of put myself in the shoes of the people who were going to be listening to the music. And I would really start to critique myself. I think it made me a stronger songwriter.”

The latest album, which was recorded in Walla’s Portland, Ore. studio, doesn’t stray too far from those original demos that Tegan and Sara put together, both have said. To round out their lineup for recording purposes, they recruited session musicians including AFI’s Hunter Bergan, The Rentals’ Matt Sharp on bass, and Walla’s Death Cab for Cutie bandmate Jason McGerr on drums. Longtime collaborator Ted Gowans also plays guitar on the record.

Walla’s production technique involved recording each vocal and instrumental part separately and laying down individual tracks on top of one another, sometimes using household items like staplers and sunflower seeds to create sound effects.

That layering proved difficult to translate into a live performance when the band was rehearsing for their tour, Sara said.

“We definitely struggle with trying to recreate things a lot,” she said. “I think there’s a tendency to want to make it sound just like the album. When it came down to rehearsing the record live, there was this sort of like, ‘oh my God, there’s like five keyboard parts and three guitar parts, and there’s nine vocals that we have to recreate.’ I mean, it was just ridiculous.”

“There’s this moment where you’re kind of like, I love all of the parts and I want them all to be there, but you just start mixing and matching and … you just kind of start picking out the little things that you like. It was like, ‘OK, We have to let go.’”

She pauses, struggling to come up with an analogy.

“It’s like a wall of toothpaste,” she says with a laugh. “You really only have to pick one, but you just have to decide which one is the best one.”

As a result, it was helpful for her and Tegan to have their original demos in mind when they were trying to dissect the album’s tracks in preparation for touring, Sara said.

“I had a moment where I was like, these songs were all born as simple guitar or keyboard and vocal songs and ultimately at the heart of that song is just a vocal and some sort of guitar or keyboard melody,” she said. “It’s easy to recreate live once you start from a very simple place.”

For Sara, the demos also provided a new sense of pride in every aspect of the record, something she says she hadn’t experienced with their earlier albums.

“I feel so much more attached to the music we’re making now because I’m kind of responsible for making so much more of it than we used to,” she explained. “Now, if I listen back to a song and I don’t like the instrumentation, generally it’s me that did it, and so there’s still some attachment to it. There are keyboard and vocal, background or guitar parts that I like almost as much as anything else in the song because I wrote them, and I feel like they’re just almost as important as the vocals. There’s parts of me that like some of the things that we did musically even better than what we did with vocals or even melodically.”

Sara compared listening to their earlier music to looking back on a diary or journal, and says she doesn’t view the experience fondly.

“I’m mortified when I listen to it,” she said without hesitation. “I hate our vocals on our first couple records … and some of the instrumentation. It drives me insane.”

But she and Tegan were just 14 when they began recording songs, Sara’s quick to add, and were still in high school when they wrote their first album.

“I try not to go back and trash (the older music) too much, because I like to think of things that did work,” she said. “I think for 17, 18, 19 year old people, we were writing really strong songs. I don’t necessarily like the songs, and I think we’ve gotten better, but when I think about it now I’m like, you know, there’s strong melodies in almost every song we ever wrote for those albums, and I feel proud of that. I think we had a natural talent for writing music, so I try to sort of focus on the good parts and I try not to cringe at some of the (bad).”

And at the same time, she and Tegan realize that some of their earlier recordings are fan favorites.

“You really have to sort of embrace that stuff because it’s so important to other people,” she said. “I meet kids every day who tell me, oh, This Business of Art is our favorite album and they’ve loved it for like 10 years and I’m like ‘Why? Why, God, why?’”

Sara acknowledges she sometimes feels like a broken record when doing interviews that touch on “generic” fare like the girls’ divergent songwriting processes (Sara’s more idiosyncratic songs are the result of painstaking tweaking, while Tegan churns out catchy pop/rock hooks like it’s going out of style) and the pigeonholes critics can’t seem to get over. (Canadians! Twins! Lesbians!)

“I always remember feeling a bit angsty about press and interviews because there is such a focus on certain things and they just sort of get repeated over and over again,” Sara says. “If these people really wanted to know those answers, they’re out there, a thousand times over. … I would have these moments where I was like, ‘Why do they all want to know the same boring questions and answers? Who cares? Why don’t people have other interesting questions to ask us? Aren’t we interesting? Don’t they want to know about something else?’

“As I get older, I realize that I don’t care as much about that,” she added. “So I feel like I’ve reconciled something about doing press because I’ve like learned that it’s not as important what I think is interesting.”

“I don’t think that the questions are that uninteresting,” she clarified. “I just think that a lot of times the answers are presented in a way that aren’t interesting. And I think that Tegan and I are really interesting because we’re sisters and because we’re twins and we do have very different writing dynamics and those types of things. But a lot of times it’s like, you give a really generic answer because you find the question to be very generic and so then you’ll all end up looking really generic.”

After touring all over the world in support of The Con for the past several months, Sara said she and Tegan notice a “profound” difference among fans in different countries, particularly in reaction to their unique stage shows. Their live performances are characterized by off-the-cuff banter in between songs as the twins recount humorous anecdotes and stories from childhood and occasionally bicker. Their chatter between songs often lasts longer than the tunes themselves.

“Over in Europe (the crowd) changes from country to country,” she said. “The UK, it’s like people are just bananas. They just — they go crazy. They’re totally obnoxious and they’re kind of almost hysterical. And it’s super fun, but you couldn’t do it for much more than like a couple weeks before you’d get probably worn out by it. It’s pretty intense. But then you go to Germany (and Japan) and everyone’s very polite and they’re very quiet and they really absorb what you’re saying and what you’re doing.”

Audiences in their native Canada, for instance, are obviously enthusiastic during performances, but attentive in between songs.

Not true for fans in the United States, according to Sara.

“You come down to the States and, especially in the South I find, people are chatty,” she said. “They’ll just start babbling to you in front of like 1,500 people. They’re not shy at all. They’ll start asking you questions, yelling at you and stuff. That’s not as common in Canada. … (Canadian audiences) are a lot quieter in between songs. I don’t want to say they’re politer, I just think that it’s like, they’re a bit shy.”

The response of more zealous fans is often overwhelming, Sara said. When she and Tegan find themselves struggling to make themselves heard over screaming fans, she explained, it creates an uncomfortable situation for the band as well as other concert-goers.

“I sort of have an empathy for the audience member that spastically calls out for things or yells at us or whatever,” she said. “But then on the other hand, I just feel miserable because it’s impossible to have a conversation with the audience if people are screaming at you. And me and Tegan really love to be able to speak with the audience directly, and so sometimes it seems like a dictatorship to be like, ‘OK, everyone must be silent while we’re talking.’ But if they’re not silent, then it just ends up being kind of irritating, I think, for everyone, and usually that means that we won’t talk as often … Or there’s a natural tendency to want to call those people out and kind of tease them and then it seems like you’re a totally evil person. So sometimes we just avoid the whole thing and just don’t talk anymore.”

Even as a music fan herself, Sara says she finds it difficult to relate to fans who interrupt a show to shout at her and Tegan.

“The thing that bothers me is that I know it bugs the people in the audience,” she said. “Sometimes it’s like it’s less irritating for me, but I can tell it’s irritating the people in the crowd.”

“In a strange way, I almost feel protective of the people who do that, because I’m like, there’s got to be something wrong with you,” she went on. “Like, why would you do this? Especially when people (in the crowd) start to tell them to shut up and stuff, I’m like trying to imagine what it would be like to be that person. I would never be that person. I would never, ever yell at my favorite band. I don’t even like to stand close to the stage. I’m so scared that they’re going to like notice me doing something like yawning or, I don’t know, shifting, looking bored, whatever.”

During a recent concert at New York’s Webster Hall, Sara addressed a fan who was screaming from the balcony as “Attention-Seeker.”

Larger, more vocal, crowds are an indication of Tegan and Sara’s flirtation with mainstream success. The White Stripes’ famous cover of So Jealous’s “Walking With a Ghost,” and the fact that their songs are staples on television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” have caused Tegan and Sara’s fanbase to swell. The vast majority of club dates on their current tour have sold out, which still bewilders the ever humble and gracious twins.

“It does surprise me,” Sara said. “I’m always really happy and relieved when shows sell out,” she said. “I feel like that will never stop, when you just sort of walk out on stage and you go, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re all here. I’m glad you decided to come.’ I think I feel a little bit less stressed than I used to about it, but I definitely love it. I think that it’s really cool.”

Sara says she feels she and Tegan will probably never grow complacent about their fans’ adoration, which she acknowledges could be fleeting.

“I never take it for granted because people’s opinions change and their musical tastes change, and so there’s a tendency to think … maybe they’re going to be fickle like how I am,” she mused. “I lose of track of what a band that I like is doing, and then I’ll think, oh shit, I haven’t revisited that band in a long time. What are they doing? I worry sometimes that that’s going to be our fate.”

For now, the Quins are content that a decade of paying their dues is finally paying off.

“It’s a long time coming because for so many years doing a tour in the US meant opening for somebody, doing a tour in Australia meant opening for somebody, doing a tour in Europe meant spending a bazillion dollars out of our own pocket and opening for somebody,” she said. “From So Jealous on, things sort of started to shift. And for us to now be able to go out and be the headliner is still kind of a new thing for us. I’m just getting used to the idea that we can actually go out and sell 1,500 tickets or whatever. That’s exciting to me.”

Tegan and Sara wrap up the current leg of their tour Dec. 15 in Australia, and will hit the road again in Europe next February. Sara said they expect to return to the States in spring 2008.

For more information and tour dates, visit www.teganandsara.com or www.myspace.com/teganandsara.

Any serious music buff will tell you that a band’s second album is a make or break-type deal, especially if that band’s first release amassed enormous amounts of critical and commercial acclaim.

In the case of the Arcade Fire, I think it’s safe to say that their sophomore effort, Neon Bible, will make–or rather continue to make–the band’s already solid reputation within industry circles.

Rewind back to September 2004, when the Montreal-based outfit released their debut album, Funeral. The record immediately garnered extraordinary reviews from the independent local press to the New York Times. Overflowing with lush, textural sounds and endearingly sweet melodies, Funeral became a staple record for anyone who dared to call themselves fans of indie rock.

In juxtaposition, Neon Bible picks up where Funeral left off; the band perpetuates their signature sound of swooning, heartfelt melodies backed by an array of pleasantly uncommon instruments–accordions, harmoniums, harps, etc.

In terms of content, however, Neon Bible is a work far more diverse then both Funeral and other albums from bands of a similar feather. The Arcade Fire, in a sense, took a chance when recording this album, as it features a broader range of styles. Whereas Funeral was a slower-paced, more brooding album (it was inspired by the deaths of three different relatives of the band within one month), Neon Bible is more cheery than it is gloomy and introspective.

Recorded in a large church near the band’s hometown of Montreal, Neon Bible reflects this notion precisely; every track on the eleven-song album is spacious and grand, the layers of sound and instruments seemingly flowing through a tonal landscape of rich texture. Having worked around a giant pipe organ that the band found inside the church, the Arcade Fire produced, with the help of several musically-related friends (Wolf Parade, Calexico, Final Fantasy), an album of sonically epic proportions.

The standout tracks on this album—the unofficial “singles,” so to speak—are No Cars Go, The Well and the Lighthouse, Intervention and Keep The Car Running (the band performed the latter two songs on Saturday Night Live back in February). As a testament to the album’s diverse sound, all four of the aforementioned tracks differ immensely. No Cars Go showcase the band’s newfound penchant for a driving, fist-pumping melody, coupled with layers of almost heavenly violin orchestration. Intervention, on the other hand, makes full use of the discovered organ and provides the band with a soulful backing to an anthem-like song about misery and longing, harking back to the themes of Funeral.

That being said though, Neon Bible is not, for all intents and purposes, an amazing, ground-breaking album; those who are familiar with the previous work of the Arcade Fire will most likely peg it second to Funeral. For every good song on the record, there seems to be another one of mediocre quality (Rene, the female vocalist/instrumentalist, should steer clear of singing). It is, however, an album that remains true to the band’s unique sound, and even expands on it through use of several more interesting instruments, a more diverse body of songs, as well as impressively executed orchestration.

Overall, if you dug Funeral, buy this album to stay pleased with the Arcade Fire. And if you’re new to the band, buy this album to hear what serious instrumental talent and impeccable songwriting sounds like.