The Sly Oyster | culture & entertainment on the sly

Troy, N.Y.’s power rock trio Super 400 have released their first proper video for their tune, “Emergency.”  Sound vaguely similar to Soundgarden and that’s okay in my book.  Few bands attempt to properly melt your face these days.   It’s not subtle music, but they bring the loud abrasive  sound of like early nineties alternative rock.

Mp3: Super 400 - “Emergency”

3 and the Beast is available now.

Purveyors of that sweet sweet black gold, Guinness is putting the full court press to make St. Patty’s Day an official holiday of sorts on these shores. The Irish brewery, synonymous with the holiday and your drunk uncle Seamus, has launched Proposition 3-17.

Growing up in Boston, we always got St. Patty’s Day off anyway, though the holiday was actually Evacuation Day, so this makes sense in our eyes. Guinness needs 1 million signatures to bring this to Congress, though you wonder if that is actually their plan or if this is just a clever way to drum up free publicity for their beer.

“Guinness and Proposition 3-17 believe that regulated, official holiday would not only reduce the amount of employees missing work in order to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but allow people to officially express their Irishness,” the company says.

And I say why not? It’s already just south of 885,000 signatures.

So what does this have to do with the new Flogging Molly album Float? Absolutely nothing, except they are the best Irish punk rock band going. Their fourth studio album was recorded entirely in Ireland and came out in stores last Tuesday, March 4. It’s a tight set of 11 songs, but mostly what you’d expect from a band that combines the fury and brashness of The Clash with the sounds of traditional Irish folk music.

Still, the album is a strong one. I wish Bridget Regan’s fiddle work was toned down a bit more in favor of the banjo, accordian and tin whistle but that is a minor complaint. Frontman Dave King channels the fierce independence of his homeland, as this is certainly the most politically minded album in their ouevre. But it’s a politics of rugged individualism, the kind that won Ireland its independence. He begs of us “hey now stay proud” and the album is imbued with the sense of not floating in an ethereal sense, but off keeping our heads above the water and surviving long enough.

The album doesn’t tread new territory for the band, in fact compared to their third album A Mile From Home, this one seems like a sonic regression, however, it’s emotionally more direct and punches harder to the gut than their previous efforts. Highly recommended for fans or Irish music or those looking for something vastly different than the cornucopia or indie rock that is out there.

Myspace: Flogging Molly
Mp3: “Us or Lesser Gods”
Mp3: “You Won’t Make a Fool Out of Me”
Video: “Paddy’s Lament”
Video: “Requiem for a Dying Song”
Also: King talks about his move back to Ireland in this interview.

Float is out now via Side One Dummy Records. (Which means you should buy it cuz St. Patty’s Day is approaching fast)

Slate has an interesting piece, that’s old news to music lovers, but is nonetheless about Neutral Milk Hotel mastermind Jeff Mangum. Mangum and his band recorded the now legendary album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea a proper decade ago. The album is revered by many (so much so that The ‘Gum refused to do a tribute album for it) and it’s noteriety stems as much from its genius as from Mangum walking away and never being heard from again.

It’s almost as if Jeff Mangum accomplished everything he wanted to with his musical homage to Anne Frank, or simply that he couldn’t figure out how to top himself and he’s suffered from writers block ever since. Anyway, the comparisons to author J.D. Salinger are apt, only that no one really understands why either walked away.

In one sense we all feel blessed to have glimpsed their genius and on the other we all feel a bit robbed. It’s a strange paradox.

Because he suffered from night terrors, Mangum often stayed up until dawn working on his songs, sometimes addressing them to the ghosts in a haunted closet. At first, this method produced modest results: His first album, On Avery Island (1996), showed flashes of promise but had its sludgy and spotty patches. One day, Mangum wandered into a bookstore and happened upon a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The book consumed him. After finishing it, he spent a few days crying over Frank’s story. As he told a Puncture magazine interviewer before Aeroplane’s release, “I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that’s embarrassing?” The songs and lyrics he started writing about Frank could be so nightmarish in vision that Mangum grew afraid of what was issuing from his brain: verses about “pianos filled with flames” and eating “tomatoes and radio wires.” At times, he seems possessed, singing on Aeroplane’s title track, “Anna’s ghost all around/ Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me.”

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is so expansive in its weirdness that one of its 11 songs is a rollicking bagpipe jam—yet it would be wrong to call it a “cult” record, since that would imply it’s some sort of flawed art-school project. Sure, Aeroplane occasionally sounds like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier, but it all weaves together as Mangum guides the proceedings with percussive guitar strumming, singalong melodies, and his booming, emotive voice. The album plays like a document from a parallel-universe version of the 1940s, inlaid with Mangum’s haunting lyrics: “And here’s where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/ Indentions in the sheets/ Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore.” Aeroplane isn’t about airtight instrumentation or tricky songwriting—most of the songs have just three or four chords—but about a remarkable range of feeling put into melody. (Mangum recorded his part of the song “Oh Comely” in one scratch take, at the end of which you can hear a stunned band member yell “Holy shit!” in the background.)

The praise and hype and kisses (though Dodge’s article was back in 06 still has some great Mp3s) it received this past month were certainly worth it. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a monumental work. [Buy]

Mp3: “King of Carrot Flowers: Part 1″
Mp3: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”

Damn. Just because we love this album. Here’s another clip of Jeff playing several songs off the record solo.

Craig Finn and the boys of The Hold Steady have finished recording their fourth studio album, the follow up to 2006’s Boys and Girls in America. Considering that their last album is still in heavy rotation around here, you can imagine how exciting this makes us. The record still needs mixing, mastering, sequencing, album artwork, etc. but it is expected to be released in late 2008.

Though both Finn and Kubler are quick to point out that it “still sounds like a Hold Steady record”, there’s talk of opening up the sonic palette a bit on Stay Positive. Finn adds “there’s certainly horns and strings, which I guess we had before, but there’s also a mandolin, a harpsichord.” Kubler notes the band’s growing comfort with the studio setting, particularly with Agnello at the helm. “In terms of fidelity or stereo range, I think John took a little different approach in the way we mixed it in terms of just using some hard pans and doing some things different, rather than just a compressed guitar rock record.”

One can’t talk to Craig Finn without asking him about words themselves; specifically the ones he’ll spit all over Stay Positive. When asked if there was any kind of overarching theme to the tunes on the new disc, he hesitated a bit. “I think the songs relate to each other in a way,” adding “I’m not sure I want to talk about that quite yet.” I figured maybe Kubler would give up the goods. “Well, he’s sitting right next to me, so you’re not going to get anything out of me!”

However, it probably involves teenagers getting drunk and looking for a fix or figuring out their religion. You know? The usual Hold Steady type of stuff.  For those wondering who the hell The Hold Steady are, well think of them as like The Replacements meets Bruce Springsteen.

Mp3: The Holdy Steady - “Stay Positive (Live @ Toad’s Place 11/19/07)”

Myspace: The Hold Steady

Kate Nash, whom we sorta love for all her charms and whimsy, put out a pretty good debut album, Made of Bricks. Nash writes songs that recall the kind of childlike moments when you spin and spin and spin in one place and it’s all very fun and makes you fall apart on the ground.

It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe. Here, however, covering The White Stripes’s “Seven Nation Army” she’s playing it absolutely straight. Just banging on the piano and accompanied with the drums. She manages to strip the song of it’s furor and anger, exemplified by Jack White’s ripping it up. Instead of a song that fills you with fury and vengeance at society, Kate makes you feel like she’s singing about a jilted lover.

Mp3: Kate Nash - “Seven Nation Army”
Myspace: Kate Nash
Video: Foundations

The Unicorns were something special. Even though they put out two albums, a little heard and produced (500 copies) debut Unicorns Are People Too, and then a proper studio effort in 2003, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?, the indie-pop band from Montreal, led by singer Nick Diamond has a gusto about them. There was something childlike and sophisticated about their songs. The lyrics and the melodies worked to just give you that warm happy feeling.

When the band broke up in 2004, Nick Diamond went on to start Islands. Islands were the grown up version of The Unicorns. Their debut album, Return to Sea, was a sprawling work of ambition. The soundscapes were more polished, however, they lost none of the playfulness. They are, hyperbole aside, one of the most sublime pop bands working in music, in part because they are not beholden to any sort of pop standards. They maintain tight song structures, even when they are being adventurous with how they achieve that.

Their new album, Arm’s Way, is scheduled to drop in April. Until then, this is one of the new tracks from it. “The Arm” has a sort of Sergio Leone western feel to it, which I guess would give it a Ennio Morricone feel to it, since Leone was the director and not the composer of the film. But whatevs. The song is pretty great and shows even further development of the band’s soundscapes.

The line that kills me in this song, again and again, is “your anxiety is a tapestry.” It stops me cold every time, even more so then the mentions of “a lifeless carcass in a badass car crash, hopefully you’ll wake up soon. I want you too.” Which is just a weird way of saying I love you.

Mp3: Islands - “The Arm”

Tour dates after the jump. MORE »

It’s not. Recently, an old song titled “Ain’t I” surfaced and led to much speculation over whether or not this was going to lead to a Blueprint 3. It’s a great song and considering the timing of the leak, with Jigga’s American Gangster album still doing pretty well (though we cop to not having gotten a copy yet), releasing a new song not from the album makes little business sense.

Still, with lyrics on “Ain’t I” that relate to Jay-Z’s current state of affairs (”I took a pay cut to become a exec/ So the next mother—-er can earn his paycheck/ And even though these n—as talk greasy ’bout me/ Ask these n—as how they gonna eat without me!”), people think that there’s some validity to rumors about the impending release of Blueprint 3.

“I’m a hustler’s hustler/ a gangster’s gangster/ I’m a rapper’s rapper/ Your favorite, ain’t I?” Jay-Z spits. And the beat reminds you of the vibe from his back-in-day Timbaland collaboration “Lobster and Scrimp.”

Well, MTV News contacted Jay-Z’s rep Wednesday night. Jay’s spokesperson said that, while the song may be new to the general public, it is an old recording that was previously unreleased. Jigga’s rep also said he has made no announcement about a new LP, Blueprint 3 or otherwise.

So there ya go. Great tune, but it’s just that. Not connected in any way to any upcoming albums, etc. Though don’t be surprised if this track winds up on a future album because it’s that good.

Mp3: “Ain’t I”