rock Archives - Page 11 of 11

Unearthing the Legacy of Mike and the Ravens, the Northeast’s Greatest Lost ’60s Rock Band

Feb 242017

The only surviving photo of early Mike and the Ravens. L-R: Peter Young, Mike Brassard,
Steve Blodgett, Northfield town chairman Earl Rinker, Bo Blodgett, Eddie Jones

Late one Saturday night in 1962, the window of the Community Church in Stowe, Vermont creaked open. Three teenagers clamored through, dragging a box behind them. They climbed up to the church steeple, which contained the building’s sound system. Every day at noon it blanketed the town with a recording of tolling bells (despite a bell tower, the church did not have any real bells).

The teenagers opened their box and slipped a different recording out of its sleeve, a vinyl set of covers of the latest frat-rock hits: “Get a Job” by The Silhouettes, “The Stroll” by the Diamonds, and a handful more. They removed the tolling-bells record, put in their rock album, and pressed play.

They say the rock and roll woke up people as far as six miles away. The boys scurried home in the darkness as Bill Justis’s twangy “Raunchy” filled the streets.

Stowe being a small town, this prank did not prove to be the unsolved crime of the century. When the ringleader’s mother heard about it the next morning, she immediately pegged her son as the culprit. He was promptly arrested and forced to go back to school, breaking up his band. Continue reading »

This Music Video Hauntingly Depicts Depression Taking Over

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Feb 222017

Tyler Daniel Bean describes his first music video’s concept succinctly: “When you try to make a video about what happens when depression takes over the house and you decide the best way to show it is by dancing around in your underwear for 9 hours and then cutting it down to the length of a song.”

Like certain David Lynch films, the video for “Willow II” gives a series of everyday scenes – a man making coffee, eating breakfast, aforementioned underwear dancing – an ominous tone once you notice the protagonist’s empty stare. He appears to be living in a picturesque forest-cabin setting without noticing or engaging. As the images progressively get less mundane – his bandmates begin rocking out around him, most notably – his blank gaze remains the same.

Like the record it comes from, On Days Soon To Pass (one of our favorite albums of 2016), the “Willow II” video explores Bean’s struggles with depression. In this case, the video concept came from a metaphor he learned in therapy: Continue reading »

Who Should Win the NPR Tiny Desk Contest

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Feb 152017

Last weekend, Fantastic Negrito won his first Grammy Award for “Best Contemporary Blues Album.” It’s a safe bet that few Grammy voters would have ever heard of him had he not won another award two years prior: the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. And if the future is just, last year’s winner, the wonderful violinist Gaelynn Lea, will soon be collecting Grammy statues of her own.

Fantastic Negrito hails from California, and Lea from Minnesota. So as this year’s contest continues, we think it’s time for the Northeast to – to quote Lea’s winning song – linger in the sun. To aid in that effort, out of dozens of locally-made videos, we’ve picked our favorite Vermont entries in the 2017 contest.

The only real rules for a Tiny Desk Contest video are that the song has to be an original and a desk should somehow figure in (it doesn’t even need to be tiny). But many of the state’s finest musicians went beyond the bare minimum, one dragging a not-so-tiny desk to a mountain summit, another finding a tiny church to match the desk. The songs span from folk to prog, soul to punk to classical piano. There’s also a song about dinosaurs, and a special celebrity entrant: Officer Clemmons from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood!

So read on to discover our dozen-plus favorite Vermont entries. Then head to the Tiny Desk Contest website to browse other entries from Vermont and beyond. Our favorite non-Vermont find: this bizarre David Lynch fever-dream masked performer. Continue reading »

America’s Best High School Band Grows Up (And Wishes You’d Stop Focusing on Their Age)

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Feb 082017

The Snaz are sick of backhanded compliments. Whenever someone has written about them the past few years, the first thing mentioned is inevitably the band members’ young age (mid-teens when their first EP came out in 2014, if you must know). Though well-meaning, the constant youth focus could carry the unspoken implication, “They’ve very good…for people so young.” But they’re very good, period. Also, they’re not even that young these days.

“The band isn’t just a bunch of kids anymore,” singer Dharma Ramirez says. “We’re all like 18 and half living on our own. There’s a sense of independence and all the confusion that comes along with that.”

The Snaz just released their third album, Sensitive Man and their maturity shows. Ramirez says this album found her for the first time addressing topics outside of her own world. She sings about police brutality on “Gary” and small-town peers settling down and starting families before they’ve seen anything of the world on “Holly Mae.” Continue reading »

Trump Inspires Reagan-Era Punk Band to Finally Release Its First Album

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Feb 022017

Punk duo Blowtorch has been around for thirty years, but never released an album. They’ve just been too busy. First they ended the Cold War, then they took down Bush and his cronies, and most recently they got Obama elected. That’s if you believe them at least. They tell the band’s story in a fantastic poem:

While sipping tea in ancient Thebes Blowtorch was conceived.
Blowtorch came to be during Reagan’s revolution-of-the-rich presidency.
From Nectar’s and Burlington’s 242 MAIN to Gotham’s CBGB’S Blowtorch blazed.
Blowtorch brought an end to the Cold War, called it a day. Continue reading »

Ghost Weapons Takes on Tragedy with Post-Punk Passion

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Jan 272017

Post-punk music has a long history of addressing sorrow – after all, two of the most iconic songs of the genre are titled “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Boys Don’t Cry.” On his new two-song EP Two Tragedies In The Key of F, Vermont songwriter Gary Peters aka. Ghost Weapons continues the tradition. But rather than addressing the malaise of the human condition broadly, he uses the loud, anthemic music to help deal with personal tragedies far closer to home.

The first song, “Auroras,” addresses his father’s recent death after a battle with multiple sclerosis. He calls it “a song to help the healing, and a remembrance of a good man whom I had a difficult relationship with.” In an email, he elaborates on the song’s most provocative line: “What if science has it wrong?”

“This is sort of my constant struggle with the scientific and the spiritual,” Peters says, “wanting to believe in something, yet not subscribing to any religion and having a strong background in science (I studied geology in college). The line is really me asking, what if there is some sort of afterlife/energy where we all end up? After having regrets about missing out on so many good years with my Dad…just sort of holding onto a flickering hope that our paths will cross again in some way.” Continue reading »

Exploring the Lo-Fi Sprawl of Mysterious Bandcamp Artist mouselion

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Jan 172017

The other day, I stumbled upon a new two-song EP by an artist I’d never heard of: mouselion. The name turns out to be an apt moniker, as his lo-fi rock songs creep in like a mouse but tend to build to lion’s roars. Quiet dirges explode into a storm of feedback, while loud rockers can abruptly collapse into barely-there whispers. Like Kurt Vile or even Bonnie “Prince” Billy, mouselion contains multitudes.

mouselion is also outrageously prolific, releasing four albums and three EPs in 2016 alone. And judging by how long it took him to drop 2017’s first EP (ten days), this year could be equally productive. It’s lot of music for someone who appears to have no online presence beyond an anonymous Bandcamp page. Continue reading »

The Whitesnake of the Green Mountains: 8084’s Lost Hair-Metal Classic

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Jan 132017

Classic Vermont Albums digs up great and sometimes forgotten albums from Vermont’s musical past.

In addition to looking at the best new music coming out of the state of Vermont, we will periodically dive into the archives to look at the best from the Green Mountain State’s musical history. To kick off a series simply titled Classic Vermont Albums, we’re going to look at an album that isn’t just dated chronologically, it’s dated period. But we don’t mean that as a bad thing.

In the mid-1980s, bands like Van Halen and Bon Jovi were massive, so it figures that many towns with their own music scene would produce imitators. And that’s just what 8084 started out as, a band covering all the hair-metal hits of the day. They performed hair-metal and arena-rock covers for parties and bars around Vermont. They dressed the part too, all leopard-skin shirts and huge teased manes, looking like Twisted Sister with a smaller makeup budget. Continue reading »

The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive in Apartment 3, Your New Favorite Lo-Fi Slacker Band

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Jan 102017

Apartment 3’s stated influences are a mix of beloved ’90s indie-rock bands (Pavement, Pixies) and current artists that also model themselves after said beloved ’90s indie-rock bands (Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall). So you know where these guys are coming from. But though their lineage is straightforward, this Vermont quartet beautifully executes the lo-fi crunch of their forefathers. The ten tracks on their self-titled debut album, just released on indie label Section Sign Records (which also released one of 2016’s best albums, Violet Ultraviolet’s Pop City), are blissfully fuzzed-out garage rock perfect for headbanging through clouds of weed smoke.

“Slacker” was the semi-derogatory label given this music in the ’90s – and the band itself embraces the term – but the washed-out vibes can’t hide serious songwriting. Beneath the haze, the catchy gems bring in beachy “woo-ooo” backing vocals and wonderfully whacked-out guitar solos, showing that slacker needn’t mean half-assed. Recorded in a bedroom recording studio (in, we assume, some building’s apartment #3), Apartment 3 is a great new addition to a laid-back-punk genre that never quite hit the mainstream but never went out of style either. Listen to the album below. Continue reading »

The Best Vermont Songs of 2016

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Jan 062017

When I launched this blog last month, I kicked things off with The Best Vermont Albums of 2016. I said after that I’d move on to what’s next, not just what already happened. Which I will, I swear (and I have a bit, highlighting great new material from Vultures of Cult (R.I.P.), The New Line, and 1881). But first, one final retrospective.

When putting together the Best Albums list, I realized many of my favorite 2016 songs were not on proper albums. They were from EPs, singles, preview tracks from 2017 albums, covers, or other one-offs. So, for one last look back, we’re counting down our favorite Vermont-made songs of the past year. Then onto 2017. Promise. Continue reading »