Yesterday was Washington D.C.’s Capital Pride Parade, one of the longest-running gay pride events in the U.S. For a photographer, it was a “target-rich environment.” We’ll be posting more in the days ahead. For now, here are some images to give you a sense of the evening — the golden light, the happiness of the participants, what a scene it was. All images Leica M, 35mm Summilux Asph FLE.
Leica M, 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph
A declaration of love, spontaneously captured on camera by a flaneur sauntering by, camera in hand. It was sweet, a moment of genuine emotion on a beautiful evening.
When Parquet Courts play, we’re transported to a distant time when the best rock’n’roll in the world emanated not from Brooklyn, but Lower Manhattan. They know this — they are very self-aware — and they play their 1970s Television roots to a fare-thee-well. For a band of primitives, Parquet Courts know precisely what they’re doing. And it is glorious.
They kick off the spankin’ new Sunbathing Animal with “Bodies Made Of,” and we are immediately in the hypnotic two-guitar grip of Lloyd and Verlaine playing “See No Evil,” with the underlying riff of “96 Tears” adding a garage-band reference to the ur-punk swing. By the time we get to “Dear Ramona,” we have a magical invocation of Frank Black’s “Ramona” and Television’s “Venus,” replete with the dumb-boy glee-club and its “huh?” chorus. And it just gets better from there, songs of a minute-thirty length alternating with seven-minute opi.
Parquet Courts do what the most thrilling punk bands of the late ’70s routinely effected, a gambit to which so few bands since then have been able to pull off: they play with such utter authority within their limitations that you can’t figure out whether they are genuinely constrained or art-school geniuses slumming on a project. They manage to be raw and thrilling one moment, pretty and beguiling the next, and they understand the weight of a broader cohort of songs — a live set, an album — in which they can power through skronk and immediately return with the most melodic tune, picked out by the two guitarists (Andrew Savage and Austin Brown) who play with such consonance you would swear they are a pop band in secret. If it could be said — yeah, we said it — that Wire was a band that was always at their most interesting just when their reach exceeded their grasp, let us state here that Parquet Courts are both conceptually ambitious but also seemingly in control: they pull off that magic trick where it seems they are playing beyond their ability, but really that’s all just part of the act. Or maybe the act is to make it seem like it’s part of the act — the very asking of that question giving an indication of their conceptual intelligence. There may be no more thrilling punk band in the world today.
The spoken-voice “singing”probably seals Parquet Courts’ commercial fate, or at least it would if we were living in an era where radio mattered. In a Spotify playlist world, it is possible these guys are inches away from global domination. We just don’t know. What we do know is that when Light Up Gold, their first widely released album, came out at the end of 2012, we immediately placed it in the 2013 Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List (c). We know that when we saw them live last summer with Woods, we felt the warm wash of nostalgia flushed by the excitement of discovering something wholly new. We know that with Sunbathing Animal, Parquet Courts have released an album that will induce sophomores at Brown to drop out en masse, their move to Williamsburg inspired by just this one thing.
Even though Parquet Courts should be seen in a beery fog of a thrashing crowd, feet all sticking to the parquet floor, their new ‘un is an album all the coolest sunbathing animals will play through ear buds, while the summer sun beats down on the tar roofs of Brooklyn, the beaches of Saint Tropez. Better reach for the Coppertone, as the finest band plying the Austin-Brooklyn axis keeps you riveted to their 14-song revelation.
Leica M, 50mm APO-Summilux-Asph.
Sometimes, we love the random choreography of the street. Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Leica M, 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph. 2013.
Woo hoo! As Tulip Frenzy readers know, we have wished for a while that Tim Presley would bottle up that awesome White Fence sound in a legitimate studio, with a legitimate drummer, and not just record album after album in the comforts of his sleeping nook. And — where were we? — we found erstwhile White Fence collaborator Ty Segall has persuaded the boy to follow our instructions to a tee. Here’s how Presley put it:
Fear, anger, pain, anxiety. Guilty! I needed something new. I needed to be free and innocent. I was floating in my room. Sick of the wall Bounce-A-LuLa. I could not get high. I wanted to put some songs in someone else’s room. I wanted to see what they sounded like with a real drummer. I wanted to see what it would sound like using an Aliens ear. For a lack of a cooler/humble word, Ty Segall “produced” this album.
I had to choose the songs. We then went into Ty’s Fiat-sized garage and recorded them. He placed the microphones, hit record and played drums on some songs. Then Nick Murray was called in to finish the rest of the drums. Nick was perfect, seeing as he’d been a solid member of the live group, and I had played demo versions of most of these for him during car rides. This all was a bit different to the WF formula. I had to put dates on a calendar. It forced me to pick the best songs of the litter, and apply those to the tools I had: Ty Segall, Nick Murray, musical instruments & tape. We then dumped all that LA jive into Eric Bauer’s studio in San Francisco. Added some things, and then Ty mixed it all up. I was the farmer and this was Ty’s soup. He somehow knows exactly what I hear.
This record, I had to make a change, not drastic, but a change nonetheless. My room was tired of me, so we took a break, and I fucked some other room.
“Credence of substances, rights of any sex, and situations of finding a place in this world now next. From the drug dealer, to the honest stealer. From the homeless ex-solider to the privileged creep, to the fine Latina walking down the street. We are all guilty of anger, pain, envy & greed…..to the recently found innocent …. we all will soon be freed.”
Leica M, 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph, Novoflex LEM/VIS II adaptor.
In their separate realms, Kristin Welchez and her husband Brandon Welchez are responsible for two of the strongest albums of the past year. Under the name Dee Dee Penny, Kristin is the leader of the Dum Dum Girls, whose album Too True helped get us through a long, cold winter. Brandon Welchez’ band Crocodiles released Crimes Of Passion last summer, and it claimed the #5 spot on the 2014 Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List (c), and honestly, if we were to retrofit that list to the number of times since that we’ve played the record, it woulda/coulda/shoulda scored a higher slot.
Crimes Of Passion was a brilliant melding of garage rock and post-Bowie ’80s pop, and Welchez proved himself to be something like the ideal caddy, knowing precisely when to wield that 9 iron (horns), or the sand wedge (Farfisa.) For another band, Crimes of Passion could be a Greatest Hits album, as the entire core of the record was like one radio hit after another.
Too True was also the best Dum Dum Girls album, one of those records that — like the Iggy Pop classic from which Kristin Welchez took her band’s name — probably sounds better on a cheap stereo than an audiophile’s rig. If you take just one song, “Rimbaud Eyes,” you can immediately get a GPS reading on Welchez’ ambitions: she is somewhere in between Patti Smith (the Rimbaud reference) and Debby Harry (the early ’80s pop sound.)
So naturally it makes sense for two married artists producing such a high level of compatible work to put out an album together, and in Haunted Hearts’ Initiation we have about what you’d expect to emanate from pillow talk about fuzztones and pedals. It’s a little bit more of a Dum Dum Girls album than a Crocodiles record, for those keeping score. Which is to say that it lands in the category of mid-’80s MTV pop, catchy as a summer cold, a synth-driven studio record with some of the best features pulled out of each artist’s bag o’ tricks: the two singers’ pleasant voices, Brandon Welchez’s bass-driven pop chops, Kristen’s melodic sense.
We thought of this in the context of those early MTV bands, but there’s another pop reference point easily invoked here: a song like “Johnny Jupiter,” which is the strongest of the eight songs on this short, fun record, could easily have been featured on an iPod ad back in the day when Apple and their ad agency TBW\Chiat\Day were breaking synth-pop bands like Asteroids Galaxy Tour.
Haunted Hearts are not better than the sum of their separate bands’ parts, but Initiation is a fun record. We anxiously await Crocodiles’ follow up to Crimes of Passion, but for now we’re happy to bask in the Welchez’ musical honeymoon.
Leica M, 35mm Summilux Asph FLE.
Leica M, 35mm Summilux Asph FLE.
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