Today's Hotness: Johnny Foreigner, Lilys, Dirty On Purpose

>> If you're strolling around Manhattan next month and you think you see Birmingham, UK-based indie rock geniuses Johnny Foreigner mucking about, you're not crazy. The trio plans to record a full-length record with heavy rock producer The Machine there next month. Said producer's credits include work with King Crimson and Clutch. An interesting choice for a producer, to be sure. If given our choice we would have selected J. Robbins, but we are excited to hear what the striking pairing will bring about for the band. Anyway, if you also happen to see us walking around Manhattan in a month, it's because we just bought tickets to see Johnny Foreigner's U.S. debut -- opening for the hotly tipped Cardiff septet Los Campesinos! and the Delaware-spawned Spinto Band at Bowery Ballroom Friday, Nov. 30 -- scheduled for the tail-end of their stint in NYC. We are excited to break our extended drought vis a vis Manhattan, but even more so we are excited to see Johnny Foreigner live. As we have reported several times before, the band will release the EP Arcs Across The City on Best Before Records in the UK Nov. 21. An interesting sidenote: earlier we bemoaned the fact that kids are going to have to pay import prices for the set (although it is worth it). But we've since noticed that EMusic carries one Best Before title, so perhaps Johnny Foreigner will make a sidelong entrance into the U.S. market via the digital music storefront. Time will tell. Here's some of their pre-existing rock music, taken again from the 15-song demo freely available via their MySpazzzzz.

Johnny Foreigner -- "Yes! You Talk Too Fast" -- I Like You Sometimes Mostly Late At Never [Demos]
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>> If you aren't "friends" with the Lilys on MySpace than you probably don't know that the band is weighing tour dates for 2008, as alluded to in this bulletin. Could that mean a new record is in the offing? Will the band finally make it to Boston again? Inquiring minds want to know. Another pressing Lilys-related question is this: it appears Spin-Art Records has quietly gone the way of the Betamax. So who owns the rights to the master recordings? And what's it going to take to get deluxe reissues of Spin-Art's Lilys catalog, comprised of the unparalleled recordings In The Presence Of Nothing, A Brief History Of Amazing Letdowns and Eccsame The Photon Band. Someone make it happen.

>> Word from the Dirty On Purpose camp is the Like Bees EP will now street in January. You can listen to a few of the tracks at the band's MySpace hacienda and on Facebook, if you're into that sort of thing. We reviewed the band's recent show at Cambridge's Middle East Rock Club here.

>> If you don't think this is the top item on our Christmas list, then you are silly.

Meet North London's Young Pop Fellows, The Video Nasties

Keep Hope Inside's excellent recent series [1,2,3,4] highlighting UK music blogs and bloggers helped us stuff our RSS reader with new feeds, while at the same time hipping us to many great bands. One such act is The Video Nasties, and by surfing around the various blogs mentioned in the series last month we were able to score almost an album's worth of the London-based quintet's infectious, spiky indie rock. Dare we say The Video Nasties' synthy power pop stylings remind us a tad of our favorite semi-lost, wholly under-rated new wave act The Yachts (one time tour support for Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson which recorded for Stiff and Radar; Wikipedia entry). Anyhoo, the teenaged Video Nasties release Monday in the UK its Karl Blau EP on Way Out West. The band previously released and sold out of a double A-sided single "3 New Ideas" b/w "I Wanna." The four tracks in the new collection were recorded in a shed in July 2007; that's in keeping with some of the tracks we've found out on the Internets tagged "Shed Sessions 07" that pack significant verve, but are not included on the EP. Meaning The Video Nasties are sitting on scads of bona fide hits including "Accessory," "Plus One," "Shower," and "Little Flickers" (we think the band gave most of these away gratis via their MySpace yert earlier this year), so don't come crying to us when they are touring the States and they are huge and no one told you ahead of time and you're not on the list and the publicists won't text you back and et cetera and et cetera. We're telling you now.

Speaking of tours, The Video Nasties are about to embark on a series of dates with Icelandic wunderkinds Jakobinarina, who we hastily referenced here last week and who are also quite young (we think we read they are all 15 or 16?!). The Nasties had to bag out on the first date because they will be recording a session for Steve Lamacq and Radio 1 that day. Here's the track "Accessory," which we believe is one of the aforementioned unreleased demos and which was first made available exclusively in July by online UK 'zine Transparent Magazine here.

The Video Nasties -- "Accessory" -- Demo
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[buy The Video Nasties' Karl Blau EP from Rough Trade Shops here]

The Video Nasties: Internets | MySpace | YouTube | Flickr

Logorrhea, Pathos and Superman Revenge Squad

In March, when writing about Meneguar, we broke the hard news to you that Meneguar was both better than your band and better than your favorite band. On this rainy Saturday we are going to tell you to just hang it up altogether. Superman Revenge Squad's Ben Parker is a better songwriter than you and just about anyone, so there's little point in soldiering on with dreams of recording for a mid-sized indie. It is with surprising frequency that Mr. Parker lands a lyric that is excoriatingly personal and pointedly universal in its impact. "Gonna ride around this city on the circle line, going round and round and back again until you feel OK," he plots during the resolution of his song "Women Hating Internet Pornography." Mr. Parker, the man behind the defunct bands Tempertwig and Nosferatu D2 (bands we wrote about here and here respectively), writes remarkable, wordy songs so intense and with sentiments rendered so diamond-hard that the songs seem poised to explode under their own volatile pressure.

Wordier than Morrissey, and dedicated more to emotional impact than rhyming convention and meter, Parker's progression over the years is notable for a steady reduction: Tempertwig was a power trio, Nosferatu D2 a duo, and now, with Superman Revenge Squad, it is just Parker and acousic guitar. And while our inner rock fan is thrilled by the power and release of the Tempertwig recordings and the explosive drumming that punctuates Nosferatu D2's tunes, the dramatic intensity of Parker's current stripped-down incarnation is undeniable. None of this would be the case if it weren't for the astonishing songwriting and lyricism. Superman Revenge Squad songs are bitter and confessional-sounding. If not semi-autobiographical, the songs certainly reference continually Parker's surroundings and fixation with pop music. And of course, in Parker's music romance never goes right: "With just three bullets in a gun, I could bring down the houses of Parliament, but I could never bring back your love." Superman Revenge Squad's hometown gig this past Tuesday was recorded and the songs are posted for free download here. The recordings are excellent and we recommend you acquire them all. Here are two to get you started.

Superman Revenge Squad -- "Been A Private Detective For 17 Months" -- Live At The Green Dragon 10/23/07
Superman Revenge Squad -- "Funny Thing You Said" -- Live At The Green Dragon 10/23/07
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Superman Revenge Squad: Interweb | MySpace | YouTube | Flickr

Where You Been: Haywood's Second Posthumous Release In Store

To hear the band tell it, Haywood has been wasting time just negotiating Times Square crowds. It has been quite some time since we made mention of the late, lamented indie rock dynamos, an act that originally hailed from our hometown -- much like The Fong. The latest word is that Haywood's second posthumous release As Long As There Is Track, I Will Not Go Back is finally for sale here via Insound. Since the band has been selling the record via its MySpace dojo since earlier this year, this is a minor convenience for the already Interweb-savvy. Even so, As Long As There Is Track... was one of our favorite records of 2006 (we had a pre-release copy), so wider distribution is definitely a good thing.

To prime your earbuds for record purchasing, here is an unreleased Haywood track. "Perils Of Fame" was one of several excellent numbers Haywood recorded with a namey indie producer in the summer of 1994. As the band was largely on hiatus from 1994 to 1996 those recordings never saw any sort of release, not even on the full-length debut odds and sods collection Model For A Monument released on Magwheel in 1997. We're also offering "A Pair Of Tragic Paper Kites" from the new record, since the band is already offering it at MySpace. And for good measure we are throwing in "Crosswords," originally from the Great Cats Give Chase cassette and subsequently released on Model. We include this final song because it is awesome and because -- if we recall correctly -- it was recorded on a four track, but still rocks most steadfastly.

Haywood -- "Perils Of Fame" -- Unreleased
Haywood -- "Crosswords" -- Model For A Monument
Haywood -- "A Pair Of Tragic Paper Kites" -- As Long As There Is Track...
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[buy As Long As There Is Track, I Will Not Go Back from Insound here]

Haywood: Interweb | MySpace | YouTube | Flickr

One For Lance: Nostalgic For Nothing

The message board buzz is that the extended illness that has plagued J Church fronter Lance Hahn for years has finally taken his life. J Church's 1995 compilation record Nostalgic For Nothing is our favorite J Church record, filled as it is with pop-punk hit after pop-punk hit after pop-punk hit and a bunch of excellent covers. We played it ad nauseum during our college radio days. Here's the title track. Indie music has lost an amazing songwriter. Lance, you're the pawn and you're the king...

J Church -- "Nostalgic For Nothing" -- Nostalgic For Nothing
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[buy J Church records from Newbury Comics here]

Today's Hotness: Timothy Bracy's Collection Agency, Yah Mos Def

>> News of former Mendoza Line fronter Tim Bracy's new project almost slipped by us earlier this week. Mr. Bracy has re-christened his combo -- which features many of his former Mendoza Line cohorts with one obvious exception -- Timothy Bracy's Collection Agency. You can check in on the Agency's goings-on at this recently commissioned MySpace vessel. Bracy apparently played an acoustic show this weekend as part of the popular College Music Journal music seminar, or whatever they call it now, and we hear talk from informed-sounding talkers that there may be some tour dates to speak of soon. In the meantime, jump back in the wayback machine with us and have a listen to the first Mendoza Line "hit," the original version of "Dollars To Donuts" from the band's debut long-player Poems To A Pawnshop, released on KinderCore 10 years ago. We reviewed a Mendoza Line show in May here; we reviewed the final Mendoza Line release 30 Year Low/Final Reflections Of The Legendary Malcontent here.

The Mendoza Line -- "Dollars To Donuts" -- Poems To A Pawnshop
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[buy Mendoza Line records from Newbury Comics here]

>> Cops shut down their shows. Rupert Murdoch deletes their web pages. Still, it occurred to us after we referenced Yah Mos Def's excellent "The Beat That Make The Natives Nod" last week that it may have moved under the radar for some when it crossed our Internets-enabled transom a couple years ago. We post it for your edification below. My Pal God Records will issue YMD's debut full-length recording Excuse Me, This Is Yah Mos Def sometime before the end of the year, if all goes according to plan. One of the best things about "The Beat That Makes The Natives Nod" is when one of the emcees exhorts you to "Be awesome!" between the rhymes of the chorus. What makes that even bester is that we just learned from the band's bio at My Pal God that Be Awesome is in fact the name of one of the emcees.

Yah Mos Def -- "The Beat That Makes The Natives Nod" -- Demo '05
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That Was The Show That Was: Spoon | The Roxy

Indie fans who have been paying attention know that The Roxy isn't really where Spoon wanted to be Wednesday night in Boston, but the gentrifi-lifestylifi-famili-cation of Lansdowne Street got in the way of the Austin, Texas-based quartet's plans to sell a lot of tickets at Avalon last night, as this Boston Globe article helpfully pointed out a few weeks back. The fact that recent code violations or something at The Roxy had gotten the club's capacity knocked down from 1,300 to 775 meant that Spoon was going to be afforded the... errr... opportunity to sell about 1200 fewer tickets. The upside for the indie rock fan is that is 1,300 fewer tall dudes, or chatty Cathys, or camera clickers, or phone talkers, bar line cloggers, etc. The show was sold out by the time we checked the night before, and we expect it was sold out long, long before that.

A large reason for that is the fact that Spoon has been a band indie rock fans can really set their watches to for more than a decade. With the release of 2002's Kill The Moonlight the band entered the enchanted realm of critical darling-ocity, and the foursome hasn't looked back. This years's awesomely titled and No. 10-charting Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a triumph, a rock record that you can listen to and enjoy a million times over. In this way, Spoon has become dangerously close to becoming, well, beer. When was the last time you had a bad one? You kind of take beer for granted now, don't you? Perhaps what sets Spoon apart from America's favorite beverage is there may be some bad beers out there -- but there's no bad Spoon.

The fact the Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is so good means it should have been little surprise that the band would kill live, but you never know, right? Needless to say the act exceeded our expectations by blasting through about 75 minutes of taut, gritty, cigarette-length tunes. The set began with "Black Like Me" at 9:15PM and the short encore ended with a mind-erasingly good, breakneck-paced "Jonathan Fisk." Along the way the band served up much of the new record (although we don't recall hearing our favorite cut, "Finer Feelings," or "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case") and scads of hits from the back catalog, including "I Turn My Camera On," "The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine," "The Delicate Place" and a ludicrously spirited rendition of "My Fitted Shirt" from 2001's Girls Can Tell. Last night's take on the Motown-channelling tune "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" felt particularly Stonesy.

The highlight of the set was an especially ethereal take on "The Ghost Of You Lingers" from the new record, which featured Mr. Daniel pleading into the microphone while flanked by Eric Harvey and Rob Pope pounding out the ascending melody on two keyboards. Dramatic lighting -- which featured heavily throughout the night and was a nice touch of tasteful professionalism -- alternately flashed a thick green hue across Mr. Daniel, who eventually strapped on Mr. Pope's bass guitar to take the song out. It was hair-raising.

One song that felt a little soft was the exceedingly catchy "The Underdog." The band performed the number without the prominent horn section featured in the recording and the result was amusingly thin. It was hard not to notice Daniel turn to drummer Jim Eno and smile as the first horn riff should have been sounding out. Throughout the set at least one soundman was kept very busy manually riding the fader controlling the degree to which Daniel's vocal was drenched in reverb, and between that shifting aural perspective and the really quite good use of lights (complementary colors were often projected against the band and the white glass-paneled background -- when the reds and blues were paired it was like looking through 3-D glasses) the show was all the more dynamic.

And, for the record, Mr. Daniel did make a crack about how "roomy" the venue was because of the limitations that had been imposed on capacity. "It's a fire hazard, right?" he quipped, before tearing into another track. Spoon continues touring through early November (full dates below), and if you are already thinking as far ahead as the band is, perhaps you'd like to ring in 2008 with them in Chicago? NPR will broadcast the band's upcoming show at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 club; the broadcast begins at 10PM and you can find more details here.

Spoon -- "The Underdog" -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Spoon -- "Idiot Driver" -- Telephono
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[stream Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at the Merge Records web site here]
[buy Spoon recordings from Newbury Comics here]

Spoon: Interweb | MySpace | YouTube | Flickr

10/19 -- Philadelphia, PA -- Electric Factory
10/20 -- New York, NY -- Roseland Ballroom
10/22 -- Washington, DC -- 9:30 Club
10/24 -- Asheville, NC -- The Orange Peel
10/26 -- Nashville, TN -- Cannery Ballroom
10/27 -- New Orleans, LA -- Voodoo Island/City Park
11/01 -- Houston, TX -- Warehouse Live
11/02 -- Dallas, TX -- House Of Blues
11/08 -- Tallahassee, FL -- The Moon
11/09 -- Orlando, FL -- Firestone
11/10 -- Jacksonville, FL -- Metropolitan Park
12/31 -- Chicago, IL -- Metro