From the same tipsters that told Tulip Frenzy that Sacha of the Morning After Girls was in New York mastering the band’s new album comes word that Aimee and Scott, having left the MAG, are now in a band called the black ryder. See links below. Some good songs on their MySpace page. They sound a lot like the Warlocks, and lo and behold, see who their friends are: the Warlocks, the Dandys, BJM, Spaceman 3, etc. No album or downloadable songs yet in the States, but watch this space.
So last night the Broad Street Bullies downed our Caps in game 7 of the Stanley Cup preliminaries. And let’s not talk about the Pennsylvania primary. It’s the morning after, but where, oh where are The Morning After Girls?
Their website’s last entry is from June of last year. There’s a reference to a new album, but where is it? Where are they?
Based on the only music released stateside, the spectacular “Prelude EPs 1&2,” here’s what we know. They’re not girls, they’re (mostly) boys, they live in Sidney, and sonic data reveals that for them, it’s always New Years Morning 1990 — or maybe 1996. We hear references to the Pixies, the Stone Roses, the Charlatans U.K., the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and the Dandys. Pretty good company to keep.
It’s time they resurfaced. Please don’t post a note telling me they’ve broken up. Or plunged off that bridge into Sydney Harbor. Or were eaten by wallabies. I couldn’t take it. Not on this morning after.
UPDATE: See comment below. The Morning After Girls are sufficiently alive and well to be finishing up a new album. Tulip Frenzy asks, and get answers… Yippee.
See statement from band: Hello friends,
We have some very unfortunate news to report. Neko had a really bad fall in Washington DC, which resulted in a fractured ankle, and will be leaving our tour today. She was really trying to be a trooper and stayed on as long as was possible through Richmond and Athens, but it has gotten to the point where she must return home and have her ankle taken care of and to recuperate. She’s very upset about having to leave, it’s been super fun having her on stage and around the bus.
We hope that you understand Nashville, St. Louis, Chicago, Madison, and Cleveland. The rest of us will just have to play that much harder to put on the best show possible.
Aside from Neko’s fall, this has been a SUPER great tour for us, and thank you thank you thank you for everyone who has come out so far and bought tickets for the remaining shows.
best
TNP
TOUR DATES:
Apr 18: Nashville, TN @ The Cannery *
Apr 19: St. Louis, MO @ The Pageant SOLD OUT
Apr 20: Chicago, IL @ Riviera SOLD OUT
Apr 21: Madison, WI @ Orpheum *
Apr 22: Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom * SOLD OUT
May 24: Gorge, WA @ Sasquatch Music Festival
May 25: Chillicothe, IL @ Summer Camp Festival
June 21: Minneapolis, MN @ Walker Arts Center w/ Andrew Bird
June 22: Calgary, AB @ V Fest
July 18: Bennicassim Spain @ Festival Internacional de Benicàssim
Aug 07: Northampton, MA @ Calvin Theater w/Grizzly Bear
Aug 08: Jersey City, NJ @ Liberty State Park
There’s not going to be a Luna reunion anytime soon — not now that Dean Wareham has written a funny, candid, rock’n’roll memoir about life in two of indy rock’s greatest bands: Galaxie 500 and Luna. Luna’s other guitarist Sean Eden will likely not forgive him for the portrait Wareham paints, and in fact future collaborators would be well advised to watch their step when working with Dean; he’s not just a gloriously tasteful guitar god, he’s also a really amusing reporter whose now written one of the great chronicles on life in a band that, while providing pleasure to its fans for a decade or more, never quite got to the verge.
When Luna’s final album, “Rendezvous,” came out in 2004, it seemed like Wareham had nothing much left to say. At least nothing much left to sing: the songs were sonically gorgeous, and his guitar playing was casually perfect; he’s such a naturally gifted musician, he barely had to strain to showcase his chops. But the lyrics at the end consisted of couplets like, “She’s got a rosy future/in her Juicy Couture.” Thankfully, “Black Postcards” shows the Dalton School and Harvard-educated Wareham still capable of writing funny, snarky prose. In fact, it’s written in exactly the voice we’d expect of Wareham, only with more bite.
This should be required reading for aspiring rockers. For the one or two bands each year who become big enough to travel in style, there are dozens who bump around the countryside in the backs of cramped vans, hungover and with a crick in their neck, trying to find the next venue. Luna, who recorded some great albums but never had a hit, were one of the ones touring for life support while the music industry crashed and burned around them.
Here’s Wareham on the dichotomy between being a critical success with Galaxie 500 and having to take a day job to pay the rent: “Sure, I had my photo on the front of the Arts and Leisure section, but I was also broke. I found a temp job at Italian Vogue magazine, just for the holiday season. I was one of two administrative assistants in a small office in the Conde Nast building. The other secretary, a Puerto Rican lady, laughed at me. ‘You’re in a band? Your band must not be so popular, or you wouldn’t be working here.”
He’s got wonderful insights, harbored and husbanded over years in which he kept good notes. From why bands break up — mostly because the enforced camaraderie of life on the road makes them so get on each others’ nerves– to why the best drummers tend to come from the suburbs — houses in the suburbs have basements in which you can make a racket. It’s a wise and entertaining read even if you weren’t a Luna fan (though it helps.)
I was a Luna fan. A major one. I saw them a dozen or more times over the years. For years, “Penthouse” was my favorite album and their live shows were the way we punctuated the calendar. I once went to a party in my Washington neighborhood where a woman who was identified by her husband as the best friend of Dean Wareham’s wife, told the story about her getting a phone call from her friend. Wareham’s wife had confided that Dean was having an affair with Britta Phillips, the strikingly attractive bass player who had recently joined the band. “She said she’d given him an ultimatum: break up the band, or end the marriage.”
“Omigod,” I blurted out. “I hope he ends the marriage.”
My wife hit me. Really hard.
By the end — and I saw Luna’s last D.C. show, a few weeks before they packed it in — the song “Black Postcard”, written at least three years previously, had acquired an elegiac finality. “I’m tired of having no future, and I’m tired of pushing my luck, and I’m tired of waiting for the endgame, watching the stars go black/Throw it all away, throw it all away/I want a holiday.”
It was time. Thankfully Wareham kept writing down contemporaneous observations, and proved himself as skillful with a keyboard as he is with a fretboard.
Dateline 930 Club, April 15th, 2008. Secret Member Dan Bejar did not float onto the stage in a bubble comprised of burped-up Beck’s beer. Neko was hobbling from being checked into the boards at a Canucks playoff game, and advance word had it that she had a cold. The set-list seemed the inverse of the usual dynamic: slow songs first, escalating to all the old showstoppers (not to mention “All The Old Showstoppers.”) We had the sense that what some fear most – the New Pornographers turning down the volume, going cold turkey on the Mountain Dew — had come true, and yet when it worked, which was most of the time, it was glorious. The set we saw Tuesday night does not seem to be remotely the same one folks saw the night before. (See:http://rockist.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-pornographers-setlist-930-club.html) I actually missed, if not Bejar, at least hearing songs like “Jackie, Dressed in Cobras.” Some things were clear: they were having fun, Neko’s bad ankle notwithstanding. They finally could hear themselves, once the monitors were working. And we could hear them, could hear not just the beauteous roar of the four voices in harmony, not just the bison-stampede thunder of Kurt Dahle’s drums, but even the occasional guitar line played by Todd Fancey (normally buried like an artifact underneath remnants of later civilizations.) When they finished the “The Bleeding Heart Show,” it was like the whole chorus from “Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy” was up there on the stage singing. Or maybe it was us.
I like to think about rock’n’roll in terms of families, clans, circles. Six degrees of sonic separation. If Tulip Frenzy were a Harvard B School class, someone would blurt out “Ecosystems.” Yeah, well, connected systems. There is that.
You know that old story that only 100 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but they all formed bands? I like those bands. For years, it was nearly enough for someone to put the words “Velvet Underground” in a review of a band, and I’d go buy the record. Why? Because if they were trying to sound like the Velvet Underground, that was a good start. From Galaxie 500 to Luna, Dream Syndicate to the Darkside, you really can’t go wrong looking for music made by bands who worship at the altar of his Lou-ness.
There are some obvious clans, systems, circles. Think of all the bands that want to sound like the Stones, or the Faces. For all I know, Whitesnake might have an ecosystem richer than the Amazon. Then there are more formal systems like the Elephant 6 Collective. Bands that sound like or have been produced by Brian Eno. You know the game.
For me, some of the bands that sound like the Dandy Warhols are more entertaining the Dandys have been since 13 Tales. You know who I’m talking about: the Morning After Girls, the Out Crowd. Bands that have that cool Dandys guitar sound, but maybe aren’t so cynical, so self-consciously ironic.
Now, I had long since listened to the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and yes, my angle in was from “Dig,” that documentary that came out a few years ago showcasing the Dandy Warhols as careerists and The Brian Jonestown Massacre as junkie geniuses that could never quite get it together. Oh man oh man oh man, to have been alive in the 1990s when the BJM were around. Wait! I was alive in the ’90s! How did I miss them?
Are they the great unknown American band? The band that most jacked into the raw power of the VU? Putting out double albums, three albums in one year, playing 9-hour sets for 10 people. This is the stuff of myth, and having spent the last month — note the absence of posts here — playing them over and over and over again, yeah, the reality is pretty amazing.
If you’re not an aficionado already, start with Take It From The Man. Play it for like a week. Then move on to Their Satanic Majesty’s Second Request. After that, go straight to And This Is Our Music.
Oh yeah, you’ll want more.
Did I mention that they’re still alive and kicking and are going to play festivals in Europe this summer and then play a gig at Terminal 5 in New York this summer? July 25th. See you there.
Because they’re friends, the reference point for San Francisco-based pop genius Kelley Stoltz has tended to be Brendan Benson. And I can see that: they’re both incredibly clever pop classicists who can craft bespoke masterpieces out of threads pulled from old Beatles and Kinks records. On “Circular Sounds,” Stoltz’s brand new album, (his fourth) you could easily see him fitting into the Elephant Six Collective, with “Everything Begins” bearing resemblance to something by Beulah, and more than a few other songs invoking the late great Olivia Tremor Control. But I mean this as the highest compliment: Stoltz is the pop Wes Anderson. No, not for anything having to do with preciousness, but because of the way he conjures the greatest small moments from the exceedingly weird 1970s. There’s a Spirit/Randy California-ish ring to the guitar, but Ray Davies and the Kinks — heroes of Wes Anderson — would seem to be the songwriting model invoked most often. Here is a completely realized vision: power pop (lower case ‘p’s) based on beautiful songwriting so removed from current trends and sensibilities that if you told me this was some great lost record from 1973, I’d fall for it completely. Just as I fell for “Circular Sounds.” Doubt me? Go to the iTunes store and listen to “When You Forget.” If you can resist, you’re probably the type that can eat one potato chip.
Tulip Frenzy 