Sugar is the name of the new Dead Confederate album, just released last week, and that’s a perfectly descriptive term for the music contained within. Songs such as “In The Dark” have a dark chocolate feel; syrup-thick guitars are drenched in sweetness that somehow still comes out sounding just a little on the bitter side.
There’s a bit of Dinosaur Jr. in many of the tunes and appropriately enough, J. Mascis himself appears on “Giving It All Away,” lending credence to that argument with his very presence. The best track, however, is a more sedate number, “Run From The Gun,” which offers up a vaguely anti-war sentiment that’s amplified considerably by the vivid, arresting new video just released for it:
The buzz for the past month around South Carolina heavy rockers Isabelle’s Gift has been as deafening as their music; after winning an Eventful.com contest, they opened for KISS in Charlotte, North Carolina’s Verizon Wireless Ampitheather on Saturday night.
backstage before their set
“It was the coolest experience of my life,” drummer Robbie Smith says. “The high point was being out there and playing—I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I was going to be.”
“The high point for me was talking to fans after the gig,” singer Chris Sutton says. “So many people came out here to support us we can’t thank them enough. And so many people who had never heard us, KISS fans, the road crews and stage hands, they all told us how much they loved our music, which was an amazing feeling.”
“This was the twenty year pinnacle and I hope it’s not the last one,” guitarist James Zimmerman says.
The set itself was a short twenty minutes, with the seats up front a little empty, but as you can see from this picture, the lawn was full of Gift fans who had come out to support the band.
“I remember walking onstage and seeing that crazy crowd,” says bassist Jason Carrion. “And it was
Charlotte, not Columbia! I loved the crowd response.”
“It didn’t seem real,” Smith says. “It was so big, and there was so much to take in.”
“I think we did well,” Sutton says. “It was almost like a car crash—lots of good things and a few bad things happened, and I’m not sure we’ll all remember it the same way.”
“Stepping out on that stage made me feel whole, it made me feel alive,” says guitarist Kyle Snell.
“This was the most intense and fun show I’ve ever played,” Carrion adds. “If Isabelle’s Gift were to end tomorrow this would be enough—I’m extremely proud, the show was flawless.”
So, what’s next for Isabelle’s Gift?
“We’ve got to figure that out,” Sutton says. “I didn’t think this would really happen; we need to step back and really think about where to go from here.”
(Thanks to Kay Edgerton and Allen Reynolds for the photos in this post)
Here’s a video wrap-up of the day from Bill Grant of Caveat Films, who also shot the more official-looking video below it:
Today marks the 35th anniversary of the release of one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time, also one of the most important in my own musical history…Bruce Springsteen‘s Born To Run, originally issued on August 25th, 1975. Springsteen has been quoted as saying that he was trying to sing like Roy Orbison and produce the songs to sound like Phil Spector‘s famous “Wall of Sound” records, and that description still holds true today.
The album contains many classics not just of Springsteen’s repertoire, but of rock music in general. The title song “Born To Run”, “Thunder Road,” “Jungleland”, to name a few.
I have a personal connection to the music of Springsteen, in that my parents grew up in his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey and attended the same high school–my aunt and uncle still live in the borough and their sons went not only to Freehold High but also to St. Rose of Lima, the infamous Catholic school Springsteen has told many stories about. It was those cousins who gave me taped copies of all of the Springsteen albums through Darkness On the Edge of Town, the newest one at the time when I was around twelve or thirteen and starting to listen to a lot of music. I bought vinyl copies of all of them soon after that, including a half-speed mastered audiophile-quality heavy vinyl copy of Born To Run. At one point I could have sung you the entire lyrics of that album from beginning to end I’d listened to it so many times, but just memorizing the songs wasn’t the only effect it had on me.
I’ve mentioned before how I love to trace artists’ influences backwards and find the origins of the styles they were inspired by; Springsteen is a veritable flood of potential avenues of exploration. From Born to Run I discovered Roy Orbison, the girl group productions of Phil Spector, the surf rock of Jan & Dean, Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly (via “She’s The One” which uses the famous Bo Diddley beat) and Gary U.S. Bonds’ 1950′s hits. I had missed out on the education in 1950′s rock ‘n’ roll that the film American Graffiti had provided the generation prior to mine, but Springsteen’s interviews and reviewers’ takes on Born to Run filled in admirably.
It’s the original album that sticks with me, however, and not just the big hits and best-known songs. “Meeting Across the River” always struck me as a sad yet poetic narrative, a short story inside an even shorter musical vignette. Of the hits, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is one of my all-time favorite Springsteen moments, a self-referential tribute to the E Street Band that was such a big part of his music. Clarence Clemons, “The Big Man,” is all over the album, and my favorite Clemons moment comes in the waning moments of “Jungleland,” as his sax solo goes from wailing to waning, and the album as a whole draws to a close, its rock ‘n’ roll mission complete until the next time the needle drops on side one.
As good as the album is, the live shows were even better–here’s a few clips from the legendary 1978 Passaic, NJ run that’s been bootlegged numerous times:
Megan McNeil has been fighting cancer since she was sixteen years old, and the budding musician wrote a song about it. Now, that in itself wouldn’t be so unusual, music is great therapy for illness after all, but in McNeil’s case her song got a listen from producer Garth Richardson and it took off from there.
Richardson gathered some pros together and helped McNeil cut a fully produced version of the song, complete with a chorus of kids also battling cancer, and there is a website, a Youtube video, and more. McNeil is donating proceeds of the song’s sales to children’s cancer research, and you can find it on iTunes and Amazon.com.
The kicker, for me at least, is that it’s a pretty good song, not some hackneyed benefit anthem or amateurish attempt at capturing serious emotions–it’s a heartfelt stab in the heart that sounds a little like an Indigo Girls tune, and I dare you to hear it and not shed a tear. Here’s the video, links to all the sites mentioned below that.
