Tinariwen are not from around here. They’re not from a world of autotune and product placement. They aren’t American Idols, or Guitar Heroes. Tinariwen are “people of the desert,” poets and musicians from the southern Sahara, who wandered into UCLA’s Royce Hall stage Saturday night to share the sound and vision of a world apart. Their bodies draped in robes and faces obscured by tagelmust headwear indicative of their fellow Toureg desert nomads, the musical collective shared their songs of revolution and poems of desert solitude driven by Stratocasters and hand claps. Tinariwen opened a gateway to another reality, holding the thread of ancient rhythms and universal songs sung across the continents, and the ages.

Onstage, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib strums a green Stratocaster, clothed in colorful robes. He doesn’t wear the face-covering tagelmust, like the lanky bassist or drummer, instead his hair extends in every direction, salt and peppered with gray, and his face cut deep with lines carved from his 50 years in the desert.

In the dust and rustle of Ibrahims voice, we hear the pain of his father’s incarceration and execution he witnessed as a boy, the scattering of their cattle heard by Malian army, and exile into Algeria. In Ibrahim’s guitar, we hear the dreams of a young boy who built a guitar from a tin can, stick, and a bicycle wire, inspired by the troubadours of the American west, who roamed the range not unlike his own. His guitar is an extension of his voice, with tiptoing notes, soaring bends, and dissonant chords intelligible in any country. Like the droning dirge cast by opening Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu, (who proved that, as death and drone metal afficinados already know, that one person’s burp is another person’s music), Ibrahim’s voice tapped into universal emotions.

Tinariwen’s effervescent beats are driven by handclaps by Wonou Wallet Sidati, her hands bringing together the waving vocals, lumbering basslines, and Ibrahims short bursts of guitar. When Royce Hall’s crowd began clapping along, she would begin to dance toward the edge of the stage. Clothed in black fabric and a headscarf, Sidati’s face and hands became the focal points. Her hands moved like two birds playing in an updraft, before she returned to the microphone so sing a response to Ibrahim’s call. Touareg women have relative freedom–after all, the men wear the veils– and they are important to driving the rhythms of these nomads. This is little surprise, after all, women are inherent beatmakers, every person ever has listened to a mother’s heartbeat for those nine months in the womb. And so goes Sidati’s steady handclap, the extension of her heart, creating the foundation of a song that everyone can dance to. And they did. Halfway through the show, much of the audience left their seats to dance near the front of the stage: white men Ibrahim’s age raised their hands and swayed, a “Jersey Shore” bro-alike yelled “sooooo good” while punching the air, and a woman performs a lap dance (probably learned from YMCA pole dancing lessons) on her seated companion. All this at UCLA’s concert hall. But that’s the power of the rhythm, the lifebeat, and Ibrahim’s electric guitar.

Tinariwen’s story is not a different chapter in rock music’s history, it’s an entirely different book. While displaced in Algeria and Libya in the late 1970’s, the listless, jobless Touareg youth would gather together and sing songs in camps outside of town. Here, amongst other Touareg who also had been displaced by droughts in Saharan villages, they brought together their own nation, an intangible, borderless country that would materialize whenever these nomads would meet. Here, they shared familiar music and stories, and Tinariwen was born from desert jams sessions where the youth played music ranging from Arabic pop to traditional Touareg anthems to Led Zeppelin. Leading the group was Ibrahim, a rambunctious guitarist and singer, who wrote songs about the political struggles of the Touraeg.

Although the troupe uses the tools of Western music, guitars and electric bass, comparisons are inadequate when it comes to Tinariwen. Aligning them with Western music often falls short. Rock ‘n’ roll found its roots in the blues, and blues found its roots in American slavery, but Tinariwan, quite literally is “revolution rock.”

In 1980, when Colonel Gaddafi encouraged Touareg men to join the army, Ibrahim and Tinariwen followed the call. While training, they met other musicians and even built a studio, where they recorded cassettes. They passed out the cassettes, which reached the far corners of the deserts. They returned to Mali in 1990 just as the revolution broke out. They fought for 9 months for freedom, then put down their guns and picked up their guitars once again.

The Tinariwen who joined Ibrahim onstage is no longer the Tinariwen of the past. The original members have passed on or moved on, but the band itself is comprised of the Touareg raised on those desert cassettes. They continue the lineage and songs that brought the rebels and the outcasts together. As they bring the songs that started a revolution to the Western ears, the temptation to remix, remaster, adapt, option, and exploit Tinariwen is ever-present. But please don’t. Just share the songs, sing the songs, and let their music wander like it always has. Tinariwen’s crossed huge distances and difficult times to get here. Let them enjoy this oasis in the dunes. Like Ibrahim sings in the show-closing “Cler Achel,” “I spent the day and still the following night, I spent the whole season travelling.”

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By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly’s blog, West Coast Sound, Feb 23, 2010

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Timothy Norris

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It all started with a WTF moment.

The stage lights set the Wiltern aglow in a lavender haze, four video screens blasted ambient images, but the Cold War Kids were nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t one of those Sun 0))) moments, where mystique was the goal, instead technical problems made the Cold War Kids begin with a hiccup. Trudging on through the false start, Long Beach’s finest (sorry, Sublime), rolled out a relatively reserved show for a band who used to really rock it.

If we set the Wayback Machine to 2007, we’d see the Cold War Kids owning the stage, Nathan Willet leading his bandmates in sweat-drenched, flailing homages to Bijou porch-stompers. But four years later the Cold War kids have cooled off a little.

(Same Venue in 2007, same band though?)

Their self-described brand of soul-punk, has evolved lately, largely leaving both soul and punk by the wayside. Willet’s pipes still are the finest in rock when it comes to lung-busting crooners, but the new material feels a little “Top 40″ and mainstream. Maybe that’s their goal. There’s nothing wrong with getting big. But can they still rock by taking it down a notch?

They debuted the piano heavy, “Audience,” singing an ode to an “audience of one.” The Wiltern’s audience swayed and chatted over drinks, but only got semi-raucous when The Cold War Kids dropped their phenomenal anthem, “Hang Me Up to Dry.” The song from their 2006 album Robbers and Cowards, still has the power to move. The simple bass riff interlocks with the drums, laying down solid foundation for Nathan Willett’s howling voice that could raise a congregation’s hands to the rafters, or to God, or to whatever.

When Willet pleaded for a death row pardon during “St. John,” the sense of urgency, and passion dripped with the swagger of classic Cold War Kids. With a jammy cover of “Long As I Can See The Light,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, they gave another shout out to the songs of the South. But the South Bay residents have largely abandoned their swaggering, backyard sing-a-longs, for more streamlined pop-rock sound. Cold War Kids aren’t becoming Coldplay, yet, but they are definitely growing up.

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In the twilight hours, that liminal space between sunset and sunrise, the eyes and ears are prone to trickery. The imagination takes over; hazy objects resemble ghosts, and faraway sounds evoke werewolves. But on the precipice of Sunday morning, amid Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s tombstones and mausoleums, the misty fog and leaning palm trees, Bon Iver provided an ethereal soundtrack to sunrise.

It was dreamlike as indie folkster and Wisconsonite Justin Vernon walked onstage with his band, Bon Iver, around 6 a.m. It was almost completely dark when the band opened with Brian Eno-esque layers of sound — their guitars and beards bathed in an icy hue from the blue stage lights — and awakened the slumbering (and some still partying) masses sprawled across the lawn. “We’ve never done anything this weird before,” Vernon said, between the slow-burning stomps and sweet falsetto acoustic solos from Bon Iver’s 2008 album, “For Emma, Forever Ago.”

Bon Iver’s performance capped off six hours of events curated by the band, including Vernon’s handpicked music (a play list ranging from Dirty Projectors to Sam Cooke) and films (”Bottle Rocket” and “Planet Earth”). The audience began to arrive around midnight, the witching hour, with blankets, picnic baskets and wine in hand. Some young women, apparently straight from the club, stumbled across the damp lawn in heels and miniskirts, and Vernon-styled bearded guys in T-shirts roamed from blanket to blanket, searching for their own picnic crews. By 4 a.m., much of the commotion had ceased and the huge quilt of mismatched blankets had become an outdoor slumber party. After a quick nap*, the wake-up call began with a beam of floodlights cutting through the fog, and the droning sounds of Buddhist monks blessing the stage and the audience with guttural chants.

The crowd was captivated, showing a solemn reverence as the band become more illuminated as the sun crept over the horizon. Details hidden in darkness were now revealed; the saw-toothed roof of the adjacent Paramount studios became Bon Iver’s backdrop, and audience members began to recognize friends sitting right next to them, who they couldn’t see just an hour earlier**.

Each song captured a distinct moment in the spectrum of dawn. The sky was faded purple during the swaying, sing-along “Skinny Love”; it was peach when Vernon sang the heart-wrenching croons of “Re: Stacks.” By the time Vernon strummed the lonesome, reverbed-out chords of the show-closing “Wolves,” after a set shared with friends-in-folk Megafaun, the haze overhead had shifted from a yolky yellow to concrete gray.

Then there was silence, as the fog burned away and people in the crowd rubbed their eyes from the sunlight. No tweet, text or photo could replicate the feeling of a cemetery at daybreak.
The night didn’t move; it floated. And they walked out past obelisks and funeral gardens, dazed like awakening from a dream.

*Some people were unaffected by the wake-up chants. One young lady snored loudly throughout Bon Iver’s set, unfazed by her friends poking at her ribs.
**This Pop & Hiss correspondent was sitting next to actor Devon Gummersall — a.k.a. Brian Krakow from the 1990s teen ennui-drama, “My So-Called Life.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Pop & Hiss at the L.A. Times.

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Casey Spooner stood upon a mirrored box, raised his arms to the audience, his face lighted up by a half-halo-half-lamp hat placed carefully atop his head. Four giant mirrors behind him reflected his image in quadruplicate. Then dancers in nude body suits rolled around or haphazardly marched across the stage like broken robots.

Is this hipster Vegas?

Not quite. Welcome to the house of Fischerspooner, the performance art-turned-electroclash duo who provided a beat-pumping, catwalk-strutting soundtrack to the early 2000s. At Saturday’s performance at the Avalon, Fischerspooner unleashed the whimsical world of their new highly theatrical stage show, nearly 11 years after they emerged in New York City’s (sort of) experimental scene. Known almost equally for their stage show as their sound, the Avalon performance proved to be no different as a cornucopia of stimuli was served up. A large projection of the troupe in rehearsals (oh, how post-modern…) glowed above stage while the dancers changed from the silver tutus of their bionic-ballerina get-ups to those not-quite-naked bodysuits.

Oh yeah, and there’s some music too.

Running through songs from their old catalog and the big hits from 2005’s crossover album, “Odyssey,” Spooner fronted the show while beatmaster Warren Fischer twisted knobs and nodded his head behind the DJ console. The deep bass and steady drum kicks intrinsic to their fashionista jams adequately stoked the crowd, who were dancing to the best of their abilities, despite the early set time of 9 p.m.

Although they were once the progenitors of turn-of-the-millennium electroclash, Fischerspooner doesn’t quite advance the sound anymore. What was once an edgy maxim is now just mundane. With their new album, “Entertainment,” Fischerspooner claims to be at the nexus where art and entertainment coincide, and the live show presumably hopes to satisfy on both counts. And while Spooner’s artistic background is undeniable and his work with the notable art collective/dance troupe/miscellaneous multimedia freaks has produced one of the more outlandish shows out there, is it really all that good?

Partially it is. Fischer is well-versed in crafting simple and catchy songs that get booties a-wigglin’. But as the irony age wears thin, so too has electroclash’s snarkiness and cooler-than-thou posturing popularized by Peaches, Chicks on Speed and Avenue D. Back then it was all about party ennui and the reaction against it: Put on some homemade but fabulous clothes, lip-synch onstage and make fun of the pop stars on television. But with no live instrumentation and Spooner’s frequent lip-syncing through a Britney Spears-styled mike, Fischerspooner has come too close to the pop stars they try to satirize. Unlike major pop stars, however, Fischerspooner’s D.I.Y. props and awkward choreography recall a slumber party, where prepubescent popaholics turn on the boombox and perform self-styled dance routines for endlessly patient parents.

Text and Photograph by Drew Tewksbury

from Pop & Hiss, L.A. Times May 26,2009

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Last night, a slice of the Los Angeles music community visited the dark basement space of the Echoplex for a benefit concert intended to raise awareness and money for children with cancer. All proceeds from the sold-out Silversun Pickups show, which was announced only three days in advance, went to the Pablove Foundation, an organization supporting cancer research and arts, music and play programs for young cancer patients.

The show was dedicated to one child in particular, Pablo Castelaz, the 5-year-old son of Silver Lake-based Dangerbird Records co-founder Jeff Castelaz and his wife, Jo Ann Thrailkill. Pablo was diagnosed with a bilateral Wilms’ tumor nearly a year ago, and is receiving treatment at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles.

Dangerbird Records is home to many rising stars of the Silver Lake scene, including The Dears, Darker My Love and last night’s headliners, Silversun Pickups.

The benefit show marked a bittersweet moment for Silversun Pickups, whose newest album, “Swoon,” recently debuted on the Billboard Top 200 chart at No. 7. Lines of people trying to get a taste of SSPU’s new songs stretched down the street.

But the atmosphere inside the ExPlex was more somber as Shirley Manson, frontwoman for ’90s alt-rockers Garbage (and robo-boss from “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”) took the stage to introduce the band. Manson urged the crowd to think about healthcare reform and the uninsured in America.

Then the calmness of the crowd quickly dissipated when SSPU sauntered on stage. Blasting the crowd with the distorted fuzz guitar and tumbling drums of their post-grunge sound, they unveiled many new cuts from “Swoon.” Singer and firebrand guitarist Brian Aubert wafted his effervescent vocals across the room on “There’s No Secrets This Year,” crafting aural spaces for both shoe-gazers and rockers alike.

The scorching set extended well into the night as the band pulled from their earlier albums and ceaselessly offered up a performance that had the intimacy of a show for friends and the professional chops of an arena gig. After all, just by showing up everyone at this benefit became, in some way, a friend of Pablo and kids just like him.

“I don’t know if God exists,” Aubert said between songs, “but I know that the devil does, and the devil is cancer.”

Photo and text by Drew Tewksbury

Reposted from LA Times Blog Pop & Hiss, May 1, 2009

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But make no mistake, Mika is not channeling a Muppet. Although Wednesday night’s sorta-secret show at the Roxy featured the Beruit-born, London-bred popster in a stripped-down acoustic set, Mika’s brand of candy-coated, piano pop is serious business. His 2007 debut album, “Life in Cartoon Motion,” is said to have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide, earning him accolades ranging from Grammy nods to BRIT awards.

The intimate performance at the Roxy marked a back-to-basics setup for the 25-year-old. Just two acoustic guitarists and a drummer accompanied Mika as he helmed the keys. His soaring and stutter-stepping falsetto is the stuff of camp sing-a-longs, and his catchy hooks are like jazzy 1950s detergent jingles.

The audience bought what Mika was selling. Nearly every word and “tra-la-la” wafting from the classically trained vocalist sailed back at him from the singing crowd. His unequivocally unobjectionable hits such as “Grace Kelly” and “Lollipop” channeled the piano-glam of Elton John, Scissor Sisters and Freddie Mercury.

One audience member particularly enjoyed the show: Perez Hilton. The gossip blog titan organized the free gig and announced it the day before. “I wanted this to be a special event for fans,” Hilton said, “and some of the stuff he played is new material.”

The Hilton-sanctioned show preceded the release of Mika’s acoustic EP, which he has been recording in Los Angeles. Mika’s solo piano pieces even moved burlesque goddess and Hilton cohort Dita Von Teese, who broke from her stony-faced shtick to rhythmically nod her head. After all, Mika’s boyish stage presence and bouncing numbers break down the accouterments of the irony age, and resurrect that hidden joy of exuberant, Muppet love.

Text and photo by Drew Tewksbury

Reposted from LA Times Blog, Pop & Hiss

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WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 5, 2007:

With his handlebar mustache curling up at the ends, Zack Wentz from Tender Buttons wailed out low tones into a vintage microphone, while reverse skunk-haired Kate Wince triggered the galloping beats and early ’90s industrial rhythms that dominated their Wednesday set at the Low End Theory. As a side project of Wentz and Wince’s San Diego-based atmospheric experimental-rock trio Kill Me Tomorrow, Tender Buttons displays their theatrical alter-ego. Bathing the stage with only a few lights, Wentz channeled Big Time-era Tom Waits while swinging his hair over his eyes and writhing around more like a performance artist than rock star. They played songs off their new release Hottest Abduction and even laid out a mutated version of Ary Barroso’s swinging 1939 samba “Brazil.” These juxtapositions of old-timey allusions with Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR-esque digital experiments made an interesting listen, especially complimented by the sparse stage show. While Tender Buttons delivered spectacle, DJ and producer (and last week’s L.A. RECORD cover) Thavius Beck, who preceded them, was the night’s true hero, rolling out his drum-machine-du-jour hip hop. MC Nocando layered lyrical flow over the beats, but chose to stay out of sight most of the time. His syncopated rhymes locked with Thavius Beck’s manipulations so seamlessly that it was impossible to separate the man from the machine, or even the live from the track.

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FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2007: The Psychic Paramount, from New York, create a swell of sound meshed with the tumbling inertia of freight-train bass and bombastic beats. Their experimental instrumentals surge with intensity as every riff and rhythm interlock into a rising tide, growing louder with each note. Like the Psychic Paramount, headliner Earthless dispenses with vocals in exchange for the swirling sound of structured psychedelia. They kept the rhythm tight, molding their circular, trance-like beats into songs reminiscent of a faster Black Sabbath, not-annoying Ocrilim or the waves of guitar texture from My Bloody Valentine. Unlike some of their peers from San Diego, where tempo-shifting grindcore has a rich heritage, Earthless seeps improvisation into their extended songs, embellishing a repetitive riff with nuances that never spin out of control into extended guitar solos common with so-called “jam bands.” The performances were a mind-bleeding assault on formulaic rock.

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LA Record:

MONDAY, MARCH 19 2007: If in some strange future world, someone looked into an expansive compendium of music from the 21st century, under the heading “Nightmare-Mod-Rock” would be a single photo of The Horrors. Yet at the U.K. band’s first show in Los Angeles, they probably resembled the Sex Pistols in their infancy: lots of aesthetics and not much experience. With their Addam’s Family attire and botched beauty-college hair cuts, they certainly looked the part of internationally hyped media darlings. They’re a band that has money written all over them, especially in L.A.’s new mutation of the focus-group-oriented consumer-ravaged “punk rock” scene. The show started with a swirl of noise as Faris, the lead growler, stood center stage with his teased hair obscuring his eyes while he unpeeled a banana. They then opened their casket of revitalized Link-Wray-meets-Morrison-on-the-precipice-of-insanity Doors and gyrated like snake dancers. The songs were solid enough, especially “Count In Fives” and “Sheena is a Parasite,” to which Chris Cunningham directed a fantastically surreal video, but the Echo’s sound lacked the punch that they drip on recordings. They tore through their set with a breakneck pace, hitting all the necessary rockers from their Myspace page (which were the only songs to which people actually danced), and leaving the Echo’s small stage empty with the crowd waiting for an encore. They never came back and the audience left as bewildered as the salivating label execs waiting outside with blank checks in hand.

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SUNDAY, MARCH 11: The bulk of the Mountain Goats’ music is fueled by the expansive imagination and playful lyricism of signer/ songwriter John Darnielle, and this show at the El Rey Theater provided a glimpse into the troubled relationships, suburban backyards, and tightly knit communities populating Darnielle’s world. Performing with bass player Peter Hughes and drummer Jon Wurster, the trio revisited the lo-fi recordings from which the Mountain Goats emerged. Overlaying clean acoustic guitar and pop rhythms upon the intensely personal subject matter is essentially the sugar that makes the medicine go down, and the audience lapped it up as Darnielle’s wavering voice poured out his life history in “Dance Music.” Although the sold-out show packed the theater, Darnielle held the audience close between songs with stories about growing up in Southern California and his trips to see shows at the El Rey while he was in college. The performance—sometimes approaching moments of rocking like in “This Year”—felt more akin to a book reading accompanied by a band, where the words captured attention more than the music. Although the trio could have benefited from more instrumentation or the orchestration that fills out their studio albums, the Mountain Goats created an enjoyable night of song and narratives. (DT)

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