No Age at the Lamar Pedestrian Bridge in Austin 2008; photo by Rebecca Smeyne

According to No Age's MySpace page, they're playing a free show at the South Street Seaport on Friday, July 11, a date that must be super-secret because the Seaport Music Festival schedule (Friday Nights from June 27 to August 29) hasn't been released. Oooh, someone put this screenshot on Wikileaks now!

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, "Cold Son" (MP3)
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, "Baltimore" (MP3)

Guess which one of these people has a man-crush on Caron Butler?

Pavement questions are like "getting questions about the giant monsoon you survived but [that] killed your whole family"

Stephen Malkmus's latest release Real Emotional Trash, the first with former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, begs comparison to '60s-era jam-band staples like the Grateful Dead and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fittingly, Pavement's former mastermind was recently tapped to provide the singing voice for Cate Blanchett's Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's 2007 biopic I'm Not There. Like Dylan, Malkmus continues to be prolific as he matures--seemingly to spite the ebb and flow of critical reception--and he's also one of America's more lyrically clever rock stars.

Recently, we caught up with Malkmus by phone, where he proved ramblingly lackadaisical and poetic as ever. He and his band the Jicks play three New York dates, starting tonight at the Bowery Ballroom.

VV: Wow, your voice sounds awful.

Stephen Malkmus: Yeah I'm okay. But after five days of shows, my voice is lost for a while.

Rutlemania
Blender Theater at the Gramercy
March 27th

If the handbills posted suddenly around New York several weeks ago advertising four Rutles reunion gigs seemed improbable, as it happened, the probability played out. The Rutles are not performing this week and weekend at the Blender Theater at the Gramercy at Your Mom at 23rd Street. Which is a shame. Instead, as the promoters (eventually) pointed out, it is Rutlemania, staged by creator Eric Idle and Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, and performed by the Fab Four, a Los Angeles-based Beatles tribute. As the dry run for a Spamalot follow-up, the reenactment of Idle's 1978 television parody is dinner theater minus the dinner —something marginally less than a shame because, really, why not? Not quite heavy, Rutlemania is at least lite-to-medium meta, and was mostly empty, despite the opening of Beatles Convention 2008 at the Meadowlands tomorrow.

Cause and effect. Pix by Rob Trucks.

Drive-By Truckers
Terminal 5
Wednesday March 26

Mercifully, they did not play "Bob." I get to feeling pretty bad, though, about disparaging the one subpar Drive-By Truckers song, especially after they've romped through two hours' worth of often pretty magnificent ones, raucous triple-guitar Southern rock manifestos with lyrics ten times better than they have to be: "You know the bottle ain't to blame and I ain't trying to/The bottle don't make you do a thing, it just lets you." That the Truckers passed around and ultimately drained an enormous bottle of Jack Daniels while dispensing this wisdom only made it more poignant.

Patterson Hood is still the ringmaster here, jovial and gregarious, and his "The Man I Shot" is a monster, a surly, tempestuous scuzz-rocker that might actually be the best song ever written about the Iraq War; in any event it's a fine addition to his catalog of tunes about people feeling bad about having killed other people. (I'd forgotten about the even scuzzier "Sink Hole," not to mention "Hell No I Ain't Happy," fine selections from the deep-cut pool.) But Mike Cooley is the mesmerizing one, looming triumphantly over the lip of the stage as he solos, barking out brilliant zen koans in his jagged Jagger croon about all the things the bottle let him do.

DBT encores are generally three or four songs longer than they need to be (go out on top and stop after Cooley's "Zip City," boys), but a shambolic cover of "People Who Died" can't erase the ludicrous grandeur of "Let There Be Rock," in which Patterson thanks AC/DC, .38 Special and so forth for having "kept me from blowing my brains out when I was a teenager" and gets 3,000 or so New Yorkers to scream along to a song about going to a Molly Hatchet concert.

photo by Rebecca Smeyne

No Context

Crystal Castles+Health
Studio B
March 25

Two kids in 40-degree weather, neither wearing jackets. The Studio B bouncers are playing that game where they see how long it takes for the first fifteen-year-old girl to pass out. Perfect time for a game of telephone: Fernando Eats Bagels While Playing the Banjo, some girl whispers in my ear. At that very moment, by that very magic, the line starts moving. The ripsters are saved.

***

Two kids, enormous necks hidden by the new neck-scarves invented by the keyboardist from Vampire Weekend, have a conversation.

“No Country?”

“Just like the movie. Dialogue and everything.”

“The Road?”

“Post-apocalyptic.”

***

Two kids, bald, jacked, dance wildly. Sweat flies off their heads. They don’t clap—they howl. Howling, the taller one says to the shorter one: “When are these guys going to play a good song?”

***

I head for the door. Some girl comes up, whispers in my ear. “Hypothesis: Even a nerd can become buff. Materials and Methods: Weights, running, push-ups, pull-ups. Repeat as needed. Results: Six-pack, muscled pecs.”

“Pass it on,” she says.

Crystal Castles
Health
Studio B
Tuesday, March 25
photos by Rebecca Smeyne

GET YOUR PUNK-ROCK PRIME RIB RANCHEROS!

The CBGB retail store on St. Mark's is closing. There's been a computer print-out in the front window saying something like, "MOVING TO THE INTERNET SALE" for a little while. But this afternoon, a clerk manning the register confirmed that the Hot Topic with historical cred will be shuttering at the end of June, only to exist in the hearts and three-chorded minds of 15-year-old boys online. This is the former address that housed Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, so we just can't wait until it belongs to, dunno, a Quiznos.

Related: CBGB Gallery to become a high-end purveyor of concert photography named after a middling Doors album. The opening April 24 show will be Bob Gruen's "Rockers" and "The show's centerpiece will be a recreation of a punk-obsessed teenager's bedroom from the 1970s." We're supposed to be happy about this, we think!

Full release after the jump.

Tuesday morning afternoon means another episode of Hugs and Kisses, a weekly column from UK-based music writer Mr. Everett True, publisher of Plan B Magazine, a title dedicated to writing about music (and media) with barely a nod towards demographics. Last week, the Converse-footed crit Mr. True told you about a concert in Brighton, UK. This week, he informs you that he knows what Deborah Harry looks like. — The SOC help desk

^^ DCW = David Cronenberg's Wife

Hugs and Kisses


The Continued Outbursts of Everett True

THIS WEEK: Movin' singles

New music. How can it relate to my current predicament? We’re making a major move shortly: and for the past few months, I’ve been stuck in sorting hell, increasingly manic, increasingly sleepless. Melodies and memories flit past as I transfer one more song to iTunes in preparation for the journey: boogie and funk and Seventies disco splendour (Sunday), former Pere Ubu singer David Thomas’ febrile, surf-flecked, pre-apocalyptic imagination (Saturday), the wistful, intricately intimate, guitar laments of Dirty Three’s Mick Turner (Friday). . . and so on.

In this weird twilight world where every song comes loaded with meaning and memory and, more often that not, regret (that we can’t experience every moment at once), what place do fresher, unclaimed sounds have in my day-to-day existence spent shuttling between the attic and lounge with one more empty box, one more cascade of cruelly corroded and cast-aside comics? I really don’t know.

David Cronenberg's Wife, "My Best Friend’s Going Out With A Girl I Like" (forthcoming Blang single).

I’ve seen the main dude in this sardonic, dark Eighties-style independent band perform solo at antifolk (UK) nights a few times, and I've got to say I prefer his style shorn of friends and a drum kit. After all, what is antifolk if not the music of the bereft? He has a nervousness, an edge that is difficult to recapture in the solidarity and sterility of a studio: stuttering his way through pleasingly uncomfortable songs written from the paedophile’s viewpoint, head turned down and wishing he was a star, wishing he was anywhere but here today. This is fine: precisely the sort of vinyl music that I’m currently torn between keeping or flogging (if only anyone was interested—Noseflutes, I’m looking at you!) but I’ve got to say. Space is tight. Space is real tight. The song’s lyrical content can be extrapolated from the song’s title. Not always a good idea.

Amylu and Marcelo;
photo by Danielle Roper

On Saturday night, the Espanish new-wave party that is Nacotheque turned two. That meant that this week's fiesta at Fontana's was extra special: DJs Amylu and Marcelo treated us all to free Dos Equis, chocolate cake, and a live performance from Latin avant-garde duo Miti Miti.