Previous Shows
of Montreal, w/ Noot d’Noot
Thursday, May 27, 2010
By: SprinklesDoors at 8, Show starts at 9, 18+, $25
Billiards Open Only To Ticketholders
Of Montreal
Frontman Kevin Barnes has written a note about the band’s newest album, Skeletal Lamping. And well, who better to tell you about the record than the man himself. So without further adieu….
Photo by Patrick Heagney
i’ve finished the new album. i’ve been working on it for over a year. it’s mastered and ready to
go. i am very happy with it. i worry that some people aregoing to misunderstand it. there’s nothing i can do about that though, now, it is done. anyways, i didn’t create it to give people something to like. i created it because i was compelled to. it is possible to view this album as one long composition, with lots of different movements, or just as a collection of pop songs. i wanted to make an album that was unpredictable and, at times, startling, yet always hummable and catchy. some of the transitions are intentionally awkward. i did this to keep the listener off guard and to dismantle people’s perception of how an album is supposed to be constructed. i am so bored with art that makes sense and “works”. i wanted to do something that didn’t “work”. very few things pique our interest while they are working as we expect them to, things are far more interesting when they are not working. shocking people though, just for the sake of it, is so mundane. nothing on Skeletal Lamping was intended to shock. i just feel that, in most contemporary songs, you can basically finish the artist’s sentences, musically and lyrically. i wanted to make an album where that was not possible. i wanted to make a record that could truly surprise a listener. to create something that was, in turns, enraging, joyous, discomforting, playful, lovely, unpleasant, freaky, mesmeric… something that came close to capturing the labyrinthine complexity of this human consciousness. i spend most of my time in a state of mild confusion and pensiveness. i imagine most people do too. this record is my attempt to bring all of my puzzling, contradicting, disturbing, humorous…fantasies, ruminations and observations to the surface, so that i can better dissect and understand their reason for being in my head. hence the title, Skeletal Lamping. Lamping is the name of a rather dreadful hunting technique where, hunters go into the forest at night, flood an area in light, then shoot, or capture, the animals as they panic and run from their hiding places. this album is my attempt at doing this to my proverbial skeletons. i haven’t yet decided if i should shoot or just capture them though.
http://www.polyvinylrecords.com
Noot d’Noot
The amazing psychedelicized Nuevo-Atlanta 10-piece Go-Go troupe NOOT d’ NOOT has managed to cram their hypnotic surrealistic soul-party vibe onto improbably-sized-for-their-task 12-inch vinyl
discs. The new LP, CASH FOR GOLD, will be available June 16th, 2009 through the band’s own Shakedown Records imprint.
CASH FOR GOLD is a skilled outgrowth of the band’s open-ended oddball psych-R&B dance collision: a pure 30 minute expression of tailshaking, mind-expansive joy-and-groove. Tellingly, the project began as a 12-inch single – preferred medium of role models like ESG, Arthur Russell and Kilo Ali – but grew, through the band’s proclivity to improv its way to gleaming new spaces with an open Kosmiche-Krautrockists’ attitude, song-for-song, to its current 30-minute mini-lp size.
Openminded vets of the formidable Atlanta hip-hop and underground rock scenes, Noot evinces the best attributes of either steeze: their sonic instincts and studio savvy are redolent of their hip-hop collaborations with Dungeon Family/Outkast, Prefuse 73 and Grip Plyaz. Their vision, though, is propelled by a resilient DIY aesthetic and approach engendered by years spent in the independent shoestring-budget echelons of Punk Rock; what other impulse, besides a restless urge toward creation, could compel them, in economic times dire as these, to self-release records and tour in full 10-piece glory? Members have performed with Metalloid heavy-hitters like Mastodon and Zoroaster, grassroots spacerockers Good Friday Experiment, and pop-funk experimentalists the Selmanaires; these variegated musical encounters have produced a vigorous percolating eccentricity. Experiencing CASH FOR GOLD for the first time is a gently-schizoid and enlightening endeavor.
Charged opening tracks like “Fingers Like Steeples” and “The Occasion” cop this tripped-out and pop-conscious Electro-80’s-Go-Go feel — imagine Trouble Funk joining La Dusseldorf (Neu!?) with two fine taunting Double-Dutch Soul-Sisters fronting. Album’s second half, though, moves into more rarefied, breathtaking air: mesmeric layers of organ, electric piano and spidery reverberant guitars carry the harmonic call-and-response vocals above the vibrating jungle of timbales and congas. The rhythm section provides the vital anchor, prohibiting it all from whirling too-far-off to the too-thin ether. It’s almost like Shuggie Otis jamming with the Boredoms in full late-model dubbed-out housemusic bloom, or Future Days-era Can featuring Maceo Parker and the most-stoned part of Funkadelic. The whole trip is burnished by a marblemouthed sense of humor straight that’s pure Dirty South: like they let some stoned convenience-store thief DJ-toast their jams, time-to-time.
http://www.myspace.com/nootdnoot
http://www.nootdnoot.blogspot.com/
