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The gossip on the Gossip is that it's currently working with local multimedia production company Wyld File on a music video for the title track off the Portland band's upcoming album, Standing in the Way of Control. We asked WF co-founder and digi-video master e*rock for some detes on the new video. "Only way to explain this one is 'gaoss' (gay + chaos), which will make sense when you see it," he says. >> TriMet recently announced its plans to occupy the parking lot on Southwest 4th Avenue and Burnside Street as a temporary bus lot during the 2007-2009 bus-mall revitalization. This will affect late-night clubgoers, music junkies and the entertainment businesses in the area. "Why were we only informed of it from a telephone call from TriMet a little over a month ago?" Dante's co-owner Frank Faillace asked TriMet in a letter last week. The pissed-off Faillace and co-owner Paul S. Park plan on circulating a petition, telling TriMet there are plenty o' empty lots for its buses to pick on. >> Word is the Minders, who promised us all a new album by, like, three months ago, are hard at work at Jackpot! Recording Studio, finally putting the finishing touches on the new platter. "The new songs are as poppy as ever," says Jackpot! owner Larry Crane, "with lush keyboard parts." They say it's coming out in March. They best not be fibbin'.
Norfolk & Western Friday, Jan. 6
Amy McCullough blows Norfolk & Western's cover.
[FUZZ FOLK] "I'm super gullible," admits Adam Selzer, Norfolk & Western's singer-songwriter and guitarist. "I would've believed it." Drinking coffee on a rainy Tuesday morning at his and drummer/collaborator/longtime girlfriend Rachel Blumberg's dining-room table, the news is broken: The band does not rehearse in an old Norfolk & Western train car located behind the couple's Northeast Portland home.
I got this idea from the band's own biography—which also claims that the group tours only by train and that Selzer's great-grandfather was the first conductor to drive a N&W train. Obviously, I'm gullible, too. Blumberg—who also played drums for the Decemberists until about a year ago—chimes in, "Some of that stuff isn't true, but the whole sense of nostalgia is very true...the general sentiment is true."
That sense of nostalgia is apparent in N&W's music. The band's latest release, If You Were Born Overseas—a collection of charming folk-pop infused with prickly banjos, swooning viola and fuzzed-out, distorted guitar lines—exemplifies both Selzer's sentimentality and inventiveness. The band—which includes a rotating cast of players, many of whom Selzer met through his recording studio, Type Foundry—also plans to release A Gilded Age EP in April (on Portland's Hush Records). The EP is uncharacteristically energetic for N&W, including rehashed versions of two of Overseas' most addictive songs, "Porch Destruction" and "A Gilded Age," in addition to the fantastically horn-rattled "Clyde & New Orleans" and the infectious "We Were All Saints."
When asked where this new sense of energy came from, Blumberg explains: "We did a bunch of touring with Matt [Ward, a longtime friend of Selzer's], and when we did that Maxwell's show [in NJ], it kind of exploded, and it felt really good."
As for the Decemberists signing to Capitol Records, Blumberg says, "I trust that they are making the best decision for them." On her electing to leave the band, she is quite content: "On a creative level, it's in some ways more satisfying. It's my thing as opposed to participating in someone else's thing. I felt like it [the Decemberists] was taking over my whole everything."
When contemplating the future, Selzer says, "You can't get too caught up in what's down the line." Blumberg agrees: "We've been having so much fun...the rest will follow." Such level-headed responses don't seem to match with the band's fabricated history, but it begins to make sense with every listen to N&W's high-spirited new material: They're just having fun.
"It wasn't meant to dupe anyone," says Selzer. "I wish we had a train car," adds Blumberg. "That would be totally cool." AMY MCCULLOUGH.
Norfolk & Western play Friday, Jan. 6, with Heroes & Villains and Sounds Like Fun at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
The Punk Group Thursday, Jan. 5
Portland pranksters talk trash about Sleater-Kinney, Toby Keith and hagatrons.
[SYNTH POP] In three years, the industrious synth-joke-pop duo the Punk Group has released four oft-topical and awesomely ridiculous albums. The pair's latest, Rock Off and Fuck On, delivers mind-numbingly catchy hooks with lyrics like "myspace is good for getting laid," and "we've got light-up hats and you don't." WW recently caught up with bandmates Brian Applegate and Tony Cameron at their "office" (Northeast's ski-lodge-esque Club 21) and asked the tough questions. CASEY JARMAN.
WW: What makes a woman a "hagatron" as opposed to a standard hag?
Tony Cameron: A hagatron is a girl who is really hot from behind or from an angle, but then you get up close and she has meth teeth.
Brian Applegate: Good from afar, but far from good.
OK, so she's not a robot. How do you guys go about writing your songs?
Brian: We just focus on one thing that sort of pisses us off. Like Toby Keith. Fuck that guy. We know we are onto something when we make each other laugh. Sometimes we just can't stop laughing, and then we know it's going to be cool.
You talk a lot of trash, like on "Sleater-Kinney Sucks"....
Tony: It's funny because it's true.
Do you get a lot of that negativity back, though?
Brian: Yeah. One thing that people got upset about early on was "Fat Girls on Bicycles." We'd have skinny girls come up and say, "You know, my friend is fat."
Tony: It's like, "Yeah, and so is one of ours."
Brian: We're not even making fun of fat girls, if you listen to the song, it's totally pro-fat. It's just like, "Get in shape." People get upset about the stupidest things.
Do you worry that people will write you off as a novelty?
Brian: No, because once you make something and it's out there, it's no longer yours. It just goes back to us doing what we think is fun.
Tony [serious]: That's why we're going to put out an ambient album.
The Punk Group plays with the Briefs and Konami Defense System at Dante's. 10 pm. $5. 21+.
Ross and the Hellpets Dec. 28 at Doug Fir
The Hellpets deliver a drag.
[POP] "This whole CD thing was a ruse to get the Binary Dolls and the Draft to come play," said Ross Beach from the Doug Fir stage Wednesday night during his band's CD release show. Beach just finished playing "Both Horses," one of the smirking political pop songs off Ross and the Hellpets' latest album, Optimism, and he was giving props to the two local bands who opened the show. But the crowd of 70 did not comply, meeting Beach's bit of complimentary comedy with absolute, uncomfortable silence. Generally the opener receives a round of applause no matter what—a courtesy either to the fact that they played well or that they finally finished. But the Binary Dolls and the Draft should not have felt slighted, for something else was dragging down this crowd.
By the time the Hellpets started playing their third song, a tongue-in-cheek ode to giving up called "It's Over," the middle of the floor hosted a circle of friends, chatting away. By the middle of the fifth song, an educational number about the internal combustion engine, the crowd had dwindled to about 40 people and the applause to little more than a smattering. The show was a celebration, but the affair felt more like a wake.
On paper, Beach's music is promising: The man writes arresting pop songs that are queerly political, addressing industrialism, privatization and corruption with a lyrical wit and a deep baritone that at times recall Jonathan Richman. But the songs are dense with constantly plucked and strummed eighth and 16th notes, leaving little room for the songs or the listeners to breathe and absorb Beach's words. When Beach reaches above his register, he often misses the notes and the heft of the words is lost, although the effect is somewhat charming. But when bassist the Countess Von Hellpet is given the mic the vocals are embarrassingly flat, rendering whatever song her voice enters a musical failure, no matter how clever Beach's lyrics.
To attribute the crowd's lethargy to a midweek, midwinter malaise would be understandable. But to excuse the Hellpets' inability to lift those present into any sort of revelry would be foolish.
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Norfolk & Western play Friday, Jan. 6, with Heroes & Villains and Sounds Like Fun at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
The Punk Group plays with the Briefs and Konami Defense System at Dante's. 10 pm. $5. 21+.
WWeek 2015