Sound Stories & Interviews

A lot of bands enter contests. This typically means a high-school battle of the bands, or perhaps engaging in a larger affair, like the recent Last Band Standing. But with the Internet, music competitions take on an entirely new style and scope. In other words, electronic-based contests are a new and different world.
This is something Adventure Galley, a band comprised mostly of Mountain View High School graduates who've relocated to Eugene, discovered when they tossed in an application to the Toyota Music Rock the Space contest this spring. They didn't know what to expect – so they really didn't expect anything, especially when the quintet discovered that some 17,000 other acts had entered the contest.

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse
Capital Records

If you only dig music that makes you feel good, you might want to avoid Dark Night of the Soul, the recently released collaboration between Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. Not that there aren't shiny, bright hooks, but the album's underlying sense of despair gnaws those moments to bone and nerve.

Ritchie Young is playing the Tower Theatre with his band, Loch Lomond this week, but it won't be his first time in the iconic Bend venue. In fact, he's played there a few times, but not as leader of the critically revered folk-pop band that he now helms. This was before the Tower was the Tower we know now – things were different. Really different.
“They'd just give us the key and let us do whatever we wanted,” says Young, “The seats were all torn up – there wasn't much else you could do to the place to make it more burned out, but when you're playing punk rock music in high school that's kind of the ideal situation, ya know?”

Damien Jurado
Saint Bartlett
Secretly Canadian Records
I should know after so many years that Damien Jurado doesn't pen jolly songs. Sure, some of his best character-driven stories are backed with music we classify as upbeat or poppy, but those tunes you tap your foot to tend to be his most grim and heart busting. And on Saint Bartlett, Jurado's ninth full-length release, a record that sounds unlike anything he's created, Jurado still manages to trick the listener into believing he's writing cheery pop songs.

In a way, Colin Hay has lived two musical lives and most people came to know him during that first life when he was the front man for the iconic Australian band, Men at Work. Yes, the same Men at Work that informed the world in 1981 that they had come from the “land down under” and that same year asked us “Who Could it Be Now?” And this is the same Men at Work that popped up in the news in the past few weeks after the band was ordered to pay back royalties because a judge in Sydney decided that a flute melody found in “Down Under” had been copied from a children's song.
But then there's the other Colin Hay – the guy who resurfaced in the middle of the last decade with sweetly seasoned, mostly acoustic songs that appeared in television shows like Scrubs, in addition to the wildly popular Garden State soundtrack. This second career has brought Hay an entirely new group of fans, many of whom probably weren't yet born when Men at Work scored its first round of big hits or only knew the band by way of novelty '80s mix tapes. But Hay, who comes to the Athletic Club of Bend on Wednesday, July 14, just a month before the release of his new solo album American Sunshine, hasn't forgotten about Men at Work.

Every Thursday for the past 11 weeks, 400 or more people have been loading into Boondocks where upon entering they're handed a red (or sometimes yellow) raffle ticket – you know, the kind that are awarded for skee ball prowess or can be redeemed for entry into less-corporate movie theaters. It's with that ticket that those gathered will voice their opinion as to which of the five bands that have been onstage during the past four hours has earned their confidence.

It was 1990. I was 9 and on the TV I watched as Mike Patton, the lead singer in Faith No More, was flopping on the stage like a fish as his band finished playing “Epic” behind him. He seized and convulsed and stared dead-eyed at the ceiling.
Who would have guessed that guy would not only become one of the most respected figures in alternative music, but someone who would release an album like Mondo Cane, a classical record that debuted at number 2 on Billboard's Classical charts? A 65-person orchestra backs Patton's unmistakable pipes here as he covers 1950s and '60s Italian pop songs. He embodies the spirit of these original songs, lending an operatic force that is, at times, beautiful and chilling. These are songs he was meant to sing.

Alex Toth, the trumpet player and bandleader of Rubblebucket, is riding in a van somewhere in Iowa on his way to Nevada while the rest of his Brooklyn-based octet is in Vermont – the band's other home – playing at a hot air balloon festival. It's one of the only times Toth has ever missed a show, but with big booking opportunities arising, like the High Sierra Music Festival this summer, some tough choices had to me made. And that's essentially why Toth found himself accompanied only by a sound engineer, cruising across the country to get things in order for the band's West Coast tour.
It's hard keeping this many people in order, which is why Toth is explaining the reason he keeps eight (or sometimes as many as ten) people in this band.
“When I first started this band, I wanted a medium to express the wildest ideas of my imagination while rocking the shit out of dance clubs,” says Toth.