I don't take much time to be a real blogger on this blog of mine, but I thought a new track out by Icky Blossoms was a good enough excuse. It's called "Babes" and I think it rules.
The band put on an awesome show this past Friday at the Slowdown. You can check out a shitty video I took on my phone. Just tilt your head to left, and you're good to go.
Icky Blossoms has pretty much been a well-kept secret, with Derek Pressnall (Tilly and the Wall, Flowers Forever) and Nik Fackler (Flowers Forever, InDreama) working in the studio and collab-ing with the likes of Jacob Thiele and Clark Blaechle (The Faint) and Teal Gardner (UUVVWWZ). They only have three tracks up on the web as of now, but have many on standby, as their set proved at the Slowdown.
Nik Fackler was probably shaking the sand out of his shoes when I got ahold of him to discuss his outfit InDreama. The musician/filmmaker just finished escaping the Los Angeles asphalt for an evening of ocean gazing, only to be met by a prolonged traffic jam on the returning commute. He needed some nature, he says, after spending the day putting his projects in line before his two-week leave to Omaha the next day.
With eight current projects — since first trekking to LA last summer with two — Fackler clearly hasn't become a beach bum. Over the past year, he’s finished InDreama's debut record and then some, collaborating with Flowers Forever pal Derek Pressnall (Tilly and the Wall) through their dance music project Icky Blossoms — swapping ideas and stepping in the studio whenever he’s back in Omaha. This time, Fackler’s back to celebrate the release of a four-way, double 7-inch split featuring Indreama, Icky Blossoms, Conduits and Darren Keen persona Touch People 9 p.m. tonight (April 15) at the Slowdown.
InDreama’s lineup is quite the array. Capgun Coup/No I’m The Pilot’s Sam Martin isn’t quite the beholder of the band’s art-rock style, Fackler says, “but I think he likes the challenge.” He accompanies Fackler with vocals and guitar.
A New Year music video by Nik Fackler, starring Capgun's Sam Martin
Film industry friend Aaron Gum is the poet on synth, he says. Percussion will be on the double with Craig D. (Tilly, David Dondero) and add-on Kevin Donahue.
And then there’s Dereck Higgins. The local bass virtuoso has been deeply connected to Fackler, he says, since Fackler's puppy days as a 21-year-old picking up the guitar with The Family Radio. So it’s not surprising that Higgins influences Fackler’s first legitimate LP. Fackler definitely did some growing first, though.
“Family Radio, I look back and sort of feel like that was learning to play music,” he says, “cause as soon as I learned guitar I kinda started a band, and was sort of putting it all together. But then once we recorded the music, I didn’t like how it sounded.”
InDreama picks up from where his first band left off. Initially just a recording project, Fackler found his bearings with recording and production through experimentation. He also took the time to feel out the sound, with the goal of harnessing something interesting, not normal.
“InDreama is sort of my way of learning how to make an atmosphere for a song to exist in,” Fackler says, “which I think I learned a lot from working on Lovely, Still, and growing as an artist over those two years,” he says of his 2008 first feature film, shot in Omaha.
The album is set for release by this summer on Slumber Party Records. It’s untitled, and may never have a name to put to its 12 tracks, he says.
“The world that I was living in when I was writing, mixing and making the record isn’t the world that I live in now, internally and mentally,” Fackler says. “So it’s sort of weird to name something when I’m not connected to it anymore.”
Fackler began writing the music as he traveled from film festival to film festival promoting Lovely, Still. The creative free time was a nice change from being 100 percent busy with the film, he says. Entirely new experiences and feelings, as well as falling in and out of love with a girl, shaped the album’s lyrics and variant of tones. He made sure to leave behind genre limitations and any doubts about what he was creating, he says. All musical expression had to be captured.
If there’s one word to describe the album, Fackler says, it would be eccentric. Interests in prog rock and classical music, thanks to Higgins, are mustered in with the experimental — the quality that really glares golden with an incredible range of sound elements, percussive and synthesized. Fackler touches totally different spectrums of vocals, something he says represents different characters within a story, on a journey depicted in a world called Dreama. In no way is he necessarily trying to sing like himself.
And possibly the most interesting detail: The album’s dynamic nods to a classical music listening experience (see the nine-minute electro-cadence epic “Exodus from Reunion, A + Storm ^ Great = End”).
Cameron McGill’s new LP, Is a Beast, began when he picked up an old acoustic guitar at his girlfriend’s apartment. It was her late grandfather’s and hadn’t been played for 20 or 30 years, he says. With the original strings intact, he began writing songs as his girlfriend shared stories of the man to whom the guitar had once belonged.
“It had an eerie quality,” McGill says. “In some ways it seemed to cast a shadow, maybe, over the light in which those songs were written.”
Cameron McGill & What Army is on tour supporiting the album and will stop at the Bourbon Theatre at 9 p.m. Thursday, April 7 in Lincoln as a part of a KRNU benefit show with The Betties, Life of a Scarecrow, Masses and Show is the Rainbow. You can catch them a week later at the Barley St. Tavern at 9 p.m. Thursday, April 14 in Omaha with openers Bryan Rogers and Manny Coon.
I caught up with McGill while he took a break in a tour bus stopped in St. Louis.
Bus engine off, he’s able to catch some time to hear himself think so he can work for a few hours, he says, while out on tour with Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. With a forthcoming album under his main project, Cameron McGill & What Army, he has some pre-release work to hash out.
“This release has definitely had the most kind of set-up and promotion than any of my past records,” he says of the LP, due out physically April 12.
Since joining up with Margot in 2009 as the band’s keyboardist, a break from one band means time for the other, especially when you’re touring about seven months out of the year between the Chicago groups.
Or at least, that’s how it’s shaped up for McGill as he prepares to self-release his fifth studio album. Is A Beast is currently available for purchase on iTunes as well as for online streaming. The album holds McGill’s singer-songwriter sound while expanding upon the band’s music, lending to a nice mix of folk and rock.
It's not often that one sees more cops than showers over a week's course. After Noah's Ark Was A Spaceship's Midwest/Southern tour with Yuppies, vocalist/guitarist Andrew Gustafson can say he's done it.
Fresh off his spring break, unparalleled to any other college kid's, he tells me that with four run-ins with the cops at house shows and on the road, "I don't think anyone in both bands showered more than twice." Yikes.
Official tour group pic
The band introduced its debut LP, Hanga-Fang, to show-goers across the south and Midwest, even meeting a few song requests and synched lips in Denton, Texas, a city less than half the size of Lincoln.
"The kids we met were totally supportive and genuine," he says. "It's not something that you necessarily find everywhere."
"Opener" and "Warm Eyes" from Hanga-Fang. Free downloads here at Slumber Party Records.
Now back in Omaha, Noah's Ark is looking forward to a break before hitting the interstate west for a 10 (or so) day June tour. A break from playing, anyway.
"We’re looking forward to knowing that we’re coming back out again in June, but also knowing the time between now and then we can write and lay low," he says.
Along with the West coast tour, there's also talk of a weekend stint with The Answer Team, he tells me.
In part two, Noah's Ark goes Ninja Turtles for pizza...
Wednesday, March 23: house show in New Orleans We left Memphis after a long night of hard partying to New Orleans. The drive was a long, Southern-filled experience. The South is much different from Omaha. In a gas station we saw dudes with gun racks inside their trucks. There were Confederate flags everywhere and single-serving beer cans to-go on every corner. Wow!
We entered Louisiana (Gator Land). Apparently, Rob cornered one and tried to feed it some leftover bananas but it was not into them. The gator turned around and whipped Rob in the genitals. I guess he learned his lesson.
New Orleans is an incredible city still ravaged by Katrina. We played in a sweet house with Yuppies. Our sets were filled with sweat and beer. The show was so packed that things became unruly. Women threw their panties at the stage and the floor became so full of underwear that it needed to be swept before Yuppies went on. Yuppies were great and singer Boogs threw the crowd into a trance with his piercing eyes. He's a huge hit with the tranny crowd.
After the show, we hit the town with our friends Steevo, Liz and Eric from Omaha. We ate poboy sandwiches with a homeless guy before consuming gallons of Louisiana gator beer. We sang near perfect renditions of our favorite pop and R&B tunes at a karaoke bar. We stumbled home and immediately disrobed and danced the night away. We awoke the next morning nude and sweating. Off to Austin, Texas! — John (guitar/ bass/ vox)
Catching up on the phone with Yuppies’ singer/guitarist Jack Begley (they call him Boogs) yesterday evening, he tells me the guys are basking in some pre-show downtime, outside in 80 degree weather. The Omaha act is at a little club called Cheer Up Charlie’s in Austin. It’s a vegetarian cuisine restaurant and bar — only the band’s second bar stop on their nine-day Midwest/southern tour with Noah’s Ark Was A Spaceship.
The two bands also toured together in 2008 when they put out a 7-inch split. The old split is still sold at the merch table, as are a few new tracks on CD-Rs (also hosted on MySpace and downloadable at their Bandcamp page). The garage pop-rockers have an album lined up for May/June, afterall.
"Getting Out" and "Sunglasses" by Yuppies
Mid-tour, they’ve played two house shows, two bars and one “DIY-art-gallery-sort-of-place” in St. Louis — their nights in between spent in sleeping bags on the floors of nice people. Nine guys (eight musicians and one roadie), two bands and two vans. This is their day-by-day documentation of their tour, as told by a different person each day. Comic book exaggeration included.
Today, Yuppies and roadie sidekick Crass whiz from state to hotdog-eating state in their trusty tour van, battling snack-stealers and sassy gas station girls. Tune in next week for part two to see if Noah’s Ark and the 5-0 meet again.
Friday, March 18: The Birdcage in Iowa City, Iowa We grab gear and food, put it in the van and hit I-80 east to our first tour stop in Iowa City, “THE BIG EASY.” The sun is shining and the grass is brown — I’m homesick.
The concert is at a house named The Birdcage, because it is the home to more birds than humans, which really does a number on their utility bills. The residents of the house play in fantastic rock groups — Solid Attitude, and Wet Hair — who performed after our band. Our band performed to a sedated audience, between 3 and 500 people — the memory has become hazy. Then Wet Hair played — spacey keyboardy, chill, good stuff. Followed by Sic Alps, on tour from San Francisco. They were fantastic — fuzz guitars, banging drums, catchy jamming.
By then it was 4 a.m., and the band we are on tour with played. The guys in that band are rather unfriendly, I do not know any of their names, but their band is called Noah's Ark was a Spacearc, or something. Anyway, earlier that day they stole some of my snacks, so after they set up I detuned all their guitars. Boy did they look foolish when they tried to go into their first number “Sandman” and it sounded like “Kashmir”. Pretty pathetic for a cover band, but the babes seemed to enjoy it. The next morning we got coffee and left for Chicago, “Sin City.” I think Crass fell in love. — BOOG$, aka Jack (vox/guitar)
The Vingins came to the HN benefit show at the Zoo Bar March 11 equipped with freshly burned CDs for all. They must have left empty handed that night, especially after playing a great opening set to a pretty packed house.
My copy has a Sharpie-scribbled lonely cow (that has to be a cow, right?). Nice personal touch.
It's not a full album, but these tracks are perfect, vocalist/guitarist Derek Ouston told me.
He's not far off. The tracks prove to be cleaner than their 2010 self-titled EP. There's more melodic vocals and some play with digital effects. They preserve their lo-fi and garage-y qualities while adding some shoegaze. Overall, there's more variation, even within each track itself. They compromise fuzzy-levels for polished blends. Limited free downloads are available at their Bandcamp page.
Tracklist 1. Assassin of Youth 2. Captain Gideon 3. Pool Treats
The Vingins play the Bourbon Theatre at midnight Thursday, March 24 as a part of Lincoln Exposed, also underway at Duffy's and Zoo Bar Friday and Saturday March 25-26. Get more bang for your buck with a $15 three-day pass (versus $7 for one day). Check out the full schedule.
This is a story of a St. Paul, Neb., native who played in some bands and studied film at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the ’90s. Sure.
But it’s also a story of an American and a Frenchman who met in Paris and decided to try and play music together. Right away, they came up with great material, so the American extended his and his wife’s yearlong stay in Paris another, oh, six years. They recorded two albums and toured extensively, playing high-profile international festivals like the Primavera Sound Festival.
At home in Omaha with his wife and daughters (ages 7 and 4), Aspegren has settled down 4,500 miles away from his BSN bandmate Lori Sean Berg in Paris. Separated, this is how the percussion/electronics twosome developed much of their latest LP, Build With Erosion, out on Team Love today, March 15.
The trans-Atlantic band situation caused frustrations — material would sit for months sometimes before the two would meet in Paris for week-long recording sessions, Aspegren says.
“The pay-off was actually getting together, having not created anything together for so long,” he says. “It’s almost kind of magical, getting together and then all of a sudden remembering the way that you can have an interaction with somebody like that.”
A long time in the making, Build With Erosion is the band’s third LP and latest record since 2007’s Along the Quai.
Beginning as an instrumental band (Aspegren on percussion, Berg on electronics), BSN has evolved to include vocals beyond the ambient/instrumental type with Build With Erosion. Much of the album’s lyrics are written and sung by Aspegren. Berg’s vocals are evident in loops and background.
The album is created out of rhythm foundations, namely tribal, he says — aspects upon which BSN sound has always been constructed. For the most part, their writing process remained the same.
When your first gig outside of a 50-mile radius is the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, I guess you could say that’s a big deal. Because, well, SXSW is a big deal.
When you’re the only other Nebraska band playing outside of Bright Eyes, that is also a big deal. (Lincoln band Vibenhai will also be in Austin for a show Saturday, March 19 as a part of the ATX Wildfire Reggae & Arts Festival.)
The guys of Satchel Grande are just taking it as it comes. The nine musicians that make up this funk rock band haven’t strayed out of their usual Monday night practices to prepare for their festival set.
“We’re very familiar with the material,” Satchel head Chris Klemmensen says, “so it’s just a matter of maintaining our standard practice schedule and tightening the screws on things.”
There are also other Satchel standards, like tie-attire and aviator shades — all authenticated with the 70s ‘stache and institutionalized at the big-band performances. They're supplemented with trumpet, sax and many embodiments of percussion — guitars, bass, keys, of course, also included.
For Klemmensen — the lead vocalist, keyboardist, songwriter and all-around maestro — the band and any sort of festival-magnitude opportunity have been a long time coming.
“We played Ribfest once, I don’t know where that compares,” jokes keyboard/percussion/vocalist Andy Kammerer of a gig in Council Bluffs.
Before Satchel Grande formed in 2006, Klemmensen put together the album Plus One to convince his friends to turn his vision into a live band and the white-boy funk that it is today.
Other than accommodating the trip itself, the hardest part has been cutting down their normal two-hour groove set to 40 minutes, Klemmensen says.
After three weeks, 12 drafts of setlists and countless worried text messages at weird hours to bandmates, he’s got it figured out.
The situation is very comparable to putting together a follow-up to last year’s Dial ‘M’ For Moustache LP.
“Cutting down 25 songs to 10 is also a pain in the ass,” Klemmensen says.
But the guys are less consumed by their next release, and more with the 14-hour drive in a 15-passenger van. They plan to leave 8 a.m. Tuesday, March 15 and drive straight through to make their 8 p.m. show in Austin the following day. So maybe there won't be so many drinks for the guys the night before at their Waiting Room send-off show.
The Reader picked Satchel Grande for an all-proceeds-inclusive show Monday, March 14 at 8 p.m. The guys will be playing their SXSW set, followed by prize give-aways and more songs. For just $5 at the door, you can help the band make it to Austin, so they can really show ‘em how Nebraskans get down.
“I’ve been a bit of a hermit,” he says. “I don’t really go out, or do much, or see anybody or anything like that.”
His new-found life as a recluse has led to new experiences — like with the undead.Kind of like how the death of his band, Eagle Seagull, opened doors for a solo project. It was a not-so-horrific experience for Mardock, even considering the circumstances of the band's breakup.
“I've heard, with some amusement, about my reputation as some sort of amoral, womanizing monster,” Mardock says. “I know, in some people's minds, that I'm the villain. People that know me well — I think it is amusing for them, too, because they know what I'm really like. They know my life.”
For the most part, he says, he keeps his mouth shut about it all, as to avoid any sort of public spectacle.
It was well after business hours atMake Believe Studio when I met up with Omaha rapperConchance. Owner Rick Carson was already pushing a 12-hour workday as I settled down on the couch in the dimly-lit, incense-infused control room.
Offsetting the serene atmosphere at this artist-friendly studio is a certain memo jotted at the top of Carson’s to-do list. He pulls out his planner and points out to task No. 1: “finish the Conchance record.”
The project keeps the 20-somethings weighed down at the studio for late nights like these. But however work-fatigued these nights may be, they help give Conchance (Brent Walstrom Gomez; ‘Conny’) a particular piece of mind.
“I’m not trying to fucking sit around and watch days go by,” he says.
Walstrom Gomez (who won an OEAA award this year for best rapper) will tell you that he’s already spent too much time “sleeping” on this project — months spent bumming around on friends’ couches and tour vans, from here to the West Coast. Not to mention the countless days residing at Hotel Frank with members of Capgun Coup; faded and left dormant by the previous night’s party and pot smoke. Whatever the pretense, living in the music-mecca-microcommunity with Capgun’s Sam Martin and Greg Elsasser unmistakeably shaped Walstrom Gomez as an artist, as it had on others before him.
As Omaha’s once-premiere home and hang out spot to scene musicians, Hotel Frank’s 7,000-plus square feet (divided among three wings) helped cultivate artists from Son Ambulance to Cursive and The Good Life, along with individuals like Todd Fink and Conor Oberst. The house saw its final days of grandeur with Martin and Elsasser (also ofNo I’m The Pilot).
So it’s fitting that Walstrom Gomez’s first LP, Calm Kids, features work from his former Frank roommates. The Capgun pair helped with production and handed over beats for the album, which is due to drop in early May on Slumber Party Records.
Hear more of what Conchance has to say about living at Hotel Frank.
The album was almost named “Mr. Waites,” in memoriam of legendary Omaha jazz musician Luigi Waites, who past away last spring, Walstrom Gomez says. His uncle played with Waites for 25 years as a part of The Luigi Inc, a jazz band that remains one of his biggest musical influences.
