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  • Nadelle and Thom – Summerland

    (Note: I wrote a few reviews for what turned into the “bad at listening” series a couple of years before the Ball of Wax blog got started. Most of these were for and about me more than is appropriate for Ball of Wax, so I’m posting them here.)

    This is another one I picked up on tour in 2004. I remember running into Nedelle and Thom (by themselves, no backing band) at the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis, where I stopped because I had a day off and wanted something to do. It was by conincidence that they were there as I was going to play with them the next day in Chicago, and I recall Jeff Hanson (also on Kill Rock Stars) headlined the show.

    What I remember of Nadelle and Thom was that they were great performers. Thom’s guitar playing and singing were spot on and Nedelle sang perfectly; their harmonies were great. They were equally good the next night in Chicago, very impressive, blah, blah, &c.

    In the end though they were playing what I would describe as lounge music, and while a number of the songs were very good and catchy (“Cute Things” in particular) it just wasn’t my thing. This CD reminds me of that, and the backing band makes it even more “loungy,” very 60’s variety show music. Nothing wrong with that, no doubt, but I guess the two have since gone their separate ways.

    On a separate note, regarding the previous night at the Triple Rock in Minneapolis. That was the second time I’d seen Jeff Hanson — a friend had invited me to go see him the year before at Studio Seven in Seattle. At both shows I was shocked by his voice, which sounded very much female. To observe that voice coming from a gruff-looking man was a weird thing, and he took advantage of its effect in his songwriting, which was haunting. He had a sense of humor about it too, I recall him joking at the Triple Rock show, asking the sound guy if his mic sounded high to him. Sadly, Jeff Hanson died in 2009 in St. Paul.

  • New of montreal song

    This is nice: http://www.nme.com/news/of-montreal/60559. I don’t know where you even start to write a song like that, or any of montreal song really. Awesome!

  • Boxcar CDs

    Last week the physical CDs for An Invitation to Love’s EP Boxcar arrived. They look like this:

    aitl boxcar ep

    We didn’t order very many and they’re mostly to send to radio and press and bookers. Otherwise we wouldn’t have ordered them. It’s weird because I like how they turned out, but I don’t like having CDs. It’s also weird because I can remember the first time I ordered CDs of my music and how exciting it was to receive them. That novelty’s worn off a bit!

    Either way, we decided on a release date (1/10/2012) and will try to get everyone to listen to it and write something about it or play it on the radio or book us to play their venue. That part’s still exciting.

  • Audio Loopback Latency

    I wanted to write something technical about this issue to supplement a complaint I made a while back, and just found that someone did:
    http://editthis.info/sonar/Sonar_Workflow_-_Multisesson_Tracking_Loopback_Latency

    The date on this document is 2006, and I didn’t fully understand the problem until late 2007. I wish I’d seen it earlier!

    Unlike the author though I haven’t seen loopback (or loop-back, whatever) latency since switching to ASIO drivers. I’ll keep testing for it then.

    Here’s one for Audacity too:
    http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Latency_Test

  • Wednesday roundup

    I meant to call this the Monday roundup but I was delayed. Just a couple of things here… first, I have a music review of a band called Stray Kites up on Blog of Wax. I had some issues finding an angle on talking about Stray Kites… I settled on talking about lo-fi, but what I would rather find words for is the flighty topic of inspiration.

    Back in ’99 my friend Andrew found a website called indiepopradio.com that served a low bitrate mp3 stream of, you guessed it, indie pop. Neither of us had heard of this before. We fancied ourselves musicians; I had started making a habit of writing songs and we had made some recordings on his computer, mostly as a joke (it was also how I learned about Cakewalk). But “music” to us was still defined by what we heard on commercial radio, KCMU being too “weird,” or something… not sure why but we didn’t listen to it.

    So we started listening to indiepopradio.com and it was a revelation, because it turned out you could make recordings, release them, and find an audience, all without having to be in the “music business.” And more importantly, the kinds of music that we were now hearing and gravitating toward was cheaply produced and simple — lo fi twee bedroom pop — also something we didn’t realize you could do. Granted, there were higher-fi bands on there too, like Death Cab for Cutie, the Make Up, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Sleater Kinney, who played intricate parts and wrote complex music. But there were many others who got away with much simpler, noisier, and equally charming recordings and songwriting.

    That was hugely inspirational, and we resolved to start a label and put out our own recordings. I’ll leave off for now discussing our relative success and failure on that front, but my point: the Stray Kites record reminded me pretty strongly of that time, and that feeling of youth and creative energy and possibility that was so important.

    Speaking of that feeling, now and again I’ll read the history page on the Elsinor Records website when I want to overdose on it. Vicariously.

    In other news, my “residency” at the Benbow Room ended Friday with An Invitation to Love opening for Rosyvelt and the Chasers. That was fun. We were rehearsed just enough, and I was accustomed enough to the room, where playing the set was more or less automatic, and I could sort of sit inside the songs and play the songs rather than the notes. That doesn’t happen every show, and it’s nice when it does, though I could have done without one of my patch cables crapping out.

    Speaking of Rosyvelt and the Chasers, both bands were great that night. The Chasers in particular were something else — ultra-pro metalheads who were having a lot of fun with what they do. Kind of Spinal Tap, all very cool.