Known with local UNESCO music buffs, Flash in a Pan is a string band encompassing all of the traditional musical components of a string band. However, a newcomer to the distinct musicality of Flash in a Pan, I was delighted to see how much fusion was actually going on throughout the group’s set.

In their tight amount of time, Flash in a Pan brought a fully actualized individuality. The interest of the band seems to be finding a happy balance between contemporary indie-like music and old string bands that are now considered nothing short of classics. This fusion between modern and antiquity is a fabulous aesthetic choice that, as the crowd showed, brought together an audience of all ages.

Flash in a Pan, composed of guitarist Blake Daly, bassist Lee Eckles, banjo Alex Flasher and Max Lipnick on mandolin, manages to captivate a crowd suspended in the vacuous space that is the Big Grove Tap Room. The stylish songs and unique character of this group is, to me, the crux of what Mission Creek as a festival is all about.

Art, talent, craftsmanship all lie in the places we so often look at, but never see. The gem of Iowa City that is Flash in a Pan doesn’t make me feel so grim about the future of poplar music. The band combines all of the famous Iowa Nice Charm combined with the musicianship of true study. The music, couched between bluegrass, folk and traditional acoustic indie, can only be described as enjoyable.

The post Mission Creek: Flash in a Pan @ Big Grove 4/6/2019 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Led by creative liege Kevin Parker, the album is a psychedelic exercise in symphony. This particular work makes good use of bandmate, Cam Avery: the band’s primary sound engineer, responsible for the group’s heavy use of the synthesizer.

The collaboration between Parker and Avery is evident from the album’s very first track “Let it Happen”: a meticulous 7-minute arrangement encompassing the band’s main modus operandi: rock guitar married to a heavy plethora of symphonic sound. “Let it Happen” takes Tame Impala’s flavor even a little bit further by departing from the song’s established palette and introducing an extended moment of lyric-less looper. It is complete with strings, percussion, and what sounds like a Peter Frampton era talk box.

It is no surprise that on Currents, Tame Impala has continued their track record of fun, manufactured guitar parts and a heavy bass/synth combo. But, it’s worth noting that this album also sports a few stylistic departures for the group. They’ve gone into full indie-tech territory with some of the shorter bursts of sound on this album.

Tracks like “Nangs,” “Gossip,” and “Disciples” are some of the shortest tracks on the album. They seem almost strategically placed between more terrific displays of the band’s musicality, including the single’s they released in anticipation of the album’s release: “Let it Happen,” “Cause I’m a Man,” and “Eventually.”

The whole album works as a type of symbiotic 13-tych. Many of the songs are experimenting with the idea of glitches in playback, a cog in the system of music as we experience it. Listening to just a single song on this album feels like eating one-tenth of a pack of M&M’s: senseless and incomplete.

The sounds on “Currents” are unapologetic outliers. While most could rightfully describe it as indie rock, “Currents” also veers itself into disco, techno, and even blues-y undertones. Upon the album’s release, critical reception noted these style variances.

Pitchfork reviewer Ian Cohen described a track on this album as “editing itself in real time.” That creative unstop can be said not only for “Let it Happen,” the song which Cohen awarded “Best New Track,” but for the 13-song work as a whole. Rock music is changing, and Tame Impala wants to put their handprint in that forming cement.

When “Currents” first came out, I had just graduated from high school. That summer was particularly hot and my friend group and I spent a lot of time on a Peony farm canoeing, camping, and picking fresh strawberries off of the runners. I have vivid memories of hearing the album for the first time as it echoed through my car’s speakers.

Smack dab in the middle of the album is a 3-minute psychedelic rock track that is known among fans as one of the worst on the album. It’s an auto tuned talk-track in which Parker details idealizing a time which has already happened and will never return again entitled “Past Life.”

I thought I was moving on

but I guess I was just switching off.

 It has always been my favorite song on the album.

The post Flowing Against the Current appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Their set did the job of any Farewell Tour set list, and ran the gamete of both intimate, bluesy B-Side songs and widely popular singles. Of course, songs from their most celebrated work, “Rumours”, populated the set more than any other album.

This is not the first time I have seen Fleetwood Mac in concert. After listening to them almost exclusively my senior year of high school, my parents decided (in their infinite wisdom) to gift me tickets to see Fleetwood Mac in my home city, St. Louis. I was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Lindsey Buckingham play “Second Hand News” in person; little did I know it would be the last time I ever would.

Despite the legal and emotional drama plaguing the band after Buckingham was let go from the band’s line-up, the remaining members sounded just as sharp, if not better, than when I saw them three years ago.

Buckingham has been replaced for this tour by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ guitarist, Mike Campbell and Crowded House frontman, Neil Finn. The loss of one of the band’s most central creative minds didn’t phase them as they found a new groove within tried and true melodies that put them on the map.

“Rumours” was released in February, 1977. The lyrics that encompass this entire work are heartbreaking, loss-ridden, yearning. It doesn’t take a large knowledge of the band’s history to know that during this time, almost every single one of Fleetwood Mac’s members were enduring a harsh break-up and/or crippling drug addition, and used to spend a lot of their free time at Legacy Healing.

The years of intense creativity that detailed Fleetwood Mac’s most successful album were also riddled with malice—an unraveling of the personal yarn as framework for an album pieced together.

“Rumours” is made up of 11 original tracks. The band, which existed before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were at the forefront, stays true to their folk and blues roots. However, the innovative, plucky guitar stylings of Buckingham and bohemian poetics of Nicks’ lyrics allow this album to operate on another level, reaching another audience entirely.

Though Nicks get a lot of credit for her signature smoky vocals on “Rumours”, three highly popularized tracks, including one single, are lead by Christine McVie. This kind of split is rather unheard of, especially in mainstream rock music.

The exchange of voices between two women, especially in a band otherwise comprised of men, is powerful. The dynamic between the two voices are so different, it is easy to spot the unique musicality both McVie and Nicks bring to the group. McVie’s voice is slightly tinny and soulful. Track six, “Songbird”, sung by McVie, not only showcases her voice, it describes it as well.

Though in their 70’s now, Fleetwood Mac shines. Singing “Rumours” classics like “Dreams”, “Go Your Own Way”, and “Gold Dust Woman”, no member of this band misses a beat. 1977 is still alive and well in 2018, and now, it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to spend the night looking back at the golden age of music — even just for a little while.

Stevie Nicks always talks for a bit before she sings one of her most famous songs of all time. From what I can gather, it seems the story she tells surrounding the song’s conception changes a bit every time she tells it. What does stay consistent, though, is this: “I wrote this song in Colorado. The first time I ever saw snow-covered hills. Here’s ‘Landslide’,” she says. The crowd sings every word. I’m sure they always do.

The post The Time I Saw Fleetwood Mac Play Landslide appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The band is comprised of three men: a drummer, a bass guitarist who also seems in charge of the sampler, and a trumpet player. They are spread apart on the stage’s surface, music the common denominator. Naturally, your ear gravitates toward the trumpeter.

At first, the eye is almost fooled into thinking it is going to watch some kind of new wave show. and, that’s not too far off. With the amount of digital music equipment on stage, the trumpeter is the only remnant of jazz amidst the wires. And it works.

There is absolutely no other group like Jack Lion. Mixing lo-fi samples with jazzy upbeat overtones, this band is an impressive hybrid of the digital and analog. The group makes this sound coexist so well, it’s almost easy to forget just how innovative Jack Lion really is with their discography of genre meshing.

There is no apparent singer in the band. The crowd almost seemed alarmed half way through the set when one of the featured samples on the set list had even the hint of lyric attribute.

The music remains charged with feeling though, operating without a word. Lyrics seem needless with the type of thick harmonies this group employed throughout their set.

Each band member is a musician in their own right. The drummer alternated between rock rhythms and large scale drum breaks to slow-moving jazzy soft beats. The simple scrape of the drums would signify the meshing of genres. The bass guitarist, most center stage, operated a sampler and a bass, sometimes at the same time. Finally, the trumpet player came armed with a MacBook. This band’s creative quotient was so high, it felt like they were almost creating directly in front of you. Needless to say, the energy was electric.

Bands like Jack Lion prove that in the midst of soulless chart-topping pop, innovation still exists. Even further, it exists with a unity between genres that spand decades. Sometimes, these genres would coexist in a single song— the audience always felt on the same page as the group, creating a participatory live experience that was truly one-of-a-kind.

I left the show with the unforgettable sound of a trumpet, echoing toward the audience like a brassy bell. The harmonies unified with a sample of repetitive, measured beats and topped with rock-based drumming.

If you’d like to check out Jack Lion’s music, here is their bandcamp.

The post Witching Hour: Jack Lion @ Gabe’s 10/13/18 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Anyone who is at all familiar with Iowa City knows the wonderful feelings associated with attending a Prairie Lights reading. The smell of books, the faint sound of an espresso machine echoing from beyond the closed doors of the coffee shop, the tenderness each reader seems to bring to the mic as they crack open the glossy pages of their book, brand new copies beckoning you to purchase them from the front table.

“Notes from the Underground” was humbly named as four writers from a wide range of genres shared their work. Marcus Brown, Paloma Yannakakis, Katherine Faw, and Richard Hell splayed their selections for the standing-room-only crowd. Works of poetry, fiction, and hints of creative non-fiction. Notes from the Underground might’ve been more aptly named “Raw Emotion: where poetry and fiction meet at poignant, effective language.”

First to read was recent Iowa grad, Marcus Brown. His poem, “Open Letter to My Mentor” is a piece of some length. However, it is clear each word was chosen carefully, painstakingly.

His poem set a tone for the rest of the readers to follow. A tone of intimacy with the audience that was not only effective, but necessary. Brown reminded each audience member why it matters to take a poem off the page and let it live in air.

Paloma Yannakakis is a grad student in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She followed Marcus and read a series of poems her own. Yannakakis’s voice was melodic as it painted vivid pictures spanning several millennia. There is a wise-scope to her work. Her poems, including “The Moth”, create a certain unity between the inner world—exploring the self, and the natural world—exploring details from the minute to the grandiose.

Katherine Faw is a fiction writer whose book, “Ultra-Luminous”, was named a New Yorker Must-Read. Though a first timer in Iowa City, Faw was clearly no stranger to a captivating reading. She read a generous section from “Ultra-Luminous”, explaining the book’s main premise of following a sex worker named “K”.

The selection calls no men by their name but remains heavily about them. Instead, Faw chose to give these characters their own nicknames (i.e. “Art Guy” and “Guy Who Buys Me Things”). The plot of the novel provides a certain air of tragedy to the story, but instead of just drawing upon that sympathy, Faw engages all the senses. Her work is difficult and funny. She engaged the audience at every turn.

The reading closed with Richard Hell. He has written many books of poetry as well as non-fiction. As he tapered up to the mic, he immediately took to establishing a personal connection with the audience. He flipped through pages while telling us of his “creative partner turned bitter enemy” and showcased the slightly slack binding in one of the books from which he had planned to read.

Ultimately, he chose to dazzle with his poetry. His work is brilliant. Expert at elongating a moment, and making that moment worth more, he unapologetically discusses the visceral, the sexy, the awful, and the gruesome. The six poems he read were of alternating lengths but each had their own divine humor. Perhaps most notably, Richard Hell is a writer who asks “the emotional question” of a work. Sometimes, he’ll answer it. Sometimes, he doesn’t. Either way, I was with him the whole way.

The post Witching Hour: Notes from the Underground @ Prairie Lights 10/13/2018 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Formed somewhere in sun-dripped San Diego, TV Girl is currently made up of Brad Petering, Jason Wyman, and Wyatt Harmon. Though previous collaborative member, Trung Ngo, had a huge creative hand in composing “French Exit”.

Petering’s voyeuristic lyrics and vocals play second string to the pulsating, lazed beats which envelop each track. This artistic inversion becomes a main signifier of TV Girl’s discography. Certainly, some would find Petering’s soft alto musings less inspired than other bands with more charismatic lead singers. Mostly, I appreciated the nuance.

This 12 track work combines low-fi synth beats with firm roots in indie. All of this is tightly wrapped with candid lyrics. Playful percussion dots most of these tracks. The top-ranked gem of the track list, “Louise”, pays slight homage to the stylistic moniker of fellow indie-band, The Drums, by combining ‘laxed, upbeat music paired with lyrics marking heartbreak, loss, and tragedy:

“She woke him up and she whispered

But the answer wasn’t good:

‘Whatever made you think I would ever love you

Even if I could?’”

The albums first single, “Birds Don’t Sing”, begins almost as if the main hook, complete with tambourine and brass overtones, is playing beyond a closed door. Simple guitar strumming becomes forefront here, creating a scene of someone possibly taking respite from a bass-heavy party to pick some chords alone.

This synesthesia can be invoked by a listener in a lot of tracks on this album. TV Girl is nothing short of expert in creating multi-layered imagery in which these songs exist. Further examples of that are found in tracks 5 and 9: “The Getaway” and “Lovers Rock” respectively, which feature samples from both American and French noir films.

This choice of sampling could have easily come across as contrived. However, the well-plotted musicality of this group is too sound to shake, even with the dubbed background vocals of Lauren Bacall-types. Instead, the samples add a narrative backbone to an album that otherwise could have seen the vocals swallowed by synth.

All 12 tracks easily take place in the same vernacular; TV Girl brands themselves both relentlessly and successfully. Described on the group’s Bandcamp page as “12 songs about lost lust, too much love and not enough,” the themes are arching and all-consuming. Oftentimes, all three of them converge in a single track.

More notably thematically, TV Girl provides consistently redefined descriptions of women. There is no one muse that this album chooses to “pixie” and spends all 12 tracks consumed by defining and lamenting. In other words, there is no tragic, trailing love story here.

With that said, most of these songs feature some kind of female pro- or antagonist. Lead singer Brad Petering leaves these descriptions of the women in his songs enigmatic, at times almost universal. This allows room for muse to exist as human, as opposed to desirable objects of consumption. It’s subtle, but a win nevertheless.

Overall, this album is a strong group debut. With catching melodic hooks, prosaic lyrics, and innovative sampling, TV Girl is a group largely overlooked in an ever-popularizing genre of music. Their freshman album boasts their chops and should rightfully toss their hat into the arena with the likes of other alt indie powerhouses like Vampire Weekend. 9/10 for French Exit.

Link to Bandcamp:

https://tvgirl.bandcamp.com

Link to ‘Lovers Rock’ Music Video:

https://youtu.be/ksEHfUof184

Link to ‘Birds Don’t Sing” single:

https://youtu.be/L3KHQfLBK_w

The post Innovation in an Undefinable Genre: TV Girl’s “French Exit” appeared first on KRUI Radio.