On June 28th I had a chance to speak with Joey Andrews, the drummer for six-piece Nashville band De Novo Dahl. We spoke for about 20-25 minutes and this is the resulting audio. We talk about what it is like to be a band in Nashville, the performance aspect of being in a band (De Novo Dahl often wear matching costumes), and about the band in general.

Opening music for the podcast was taken from “Piggy’s Adventure” a track off their album Cats & Kittens. The interview closes with the full song “Monday Morning” from the same album.

Show Length: 20 minutes, 15 seconds
Listen Now | Subscribe Now

De Novo Dahl Related Links
De Novo Dahl Website
De Novo Dahl on MySpace
Theory 8 Records
The PhiLL(er) Review of Cats & Kittens

Reminder: You don’t need an MP3 player or iPod to listen to this podcast. If you can play an MP3 on your computer, you can listen to a podcast; all you have to do is click on the “listen now” link above.

Please let us know what you thought about the podcast. Send an e-mail to: podcast[at]thephiller.com or simply use the comment link below.

continued from Niño Rojo review

Banhart took the stage at the Bowery Ballroom alone, as one might expect, and opened solo with “Little Yellow Spider.” Gesticulating with his right hand as if conducting a parade of the happy-grotesque animals catalogued in the song, the tweaks and vocal flourishes Banhart indulges made the performance of the song significantly different than the album cut.

Nothing, however, had prepared me for the hour of absolute sonorous joy that ensued. Five “friends” — electric bass and guitar players, a drummer, and an acoustic guitar player (a comrade from Banhart’s side project Vetiver) — joined him for the remainder of the show, filling out the bounce and swagger of the guitar-and-singer formula. As a result, the raucous fugue-like shuffle ending to “This Beard is for Siobhan” became an even rowdier stomp-a-long exhortation to “have a real good time, a good time, a real good time.” The additional instrumentation was wisely used not to extend the length of the songs with boring jam sessions, but instead merely added to the breadth of each song’s already finely crafted structure, and occasionally adding a decorative lick.

The set list was noticeably lacking in material from Oh Me Oh My, including only the brief instrumental “Tick Eats the Olive” and a minor-key transposition of the usually warmer tune “Michigan State” (a song boasting some of his best lyrical wordplay). Most songs were from Niño Rojo, but highlights were “Will is My Friend,” “A Sight to Behold” and a surprising but glorious cover of an old reggae tune.

Onstage, the bandmembers often embraced one another, rubbed heads, and otherwise expressed their affection. The bass player wore a crown of bright flowers. Looking around the crowd, this was definitely NOT Woodstock (I think popular culture is too self-conscious for that now), but the love onstage had an effect on the audience and the on the music, too. I was smiling the entire show; it was beyond pleasant. They had a real good time. We had a real good time. We all had a real good time.

Listening to Matt Pond PA is like going through an old photo album and noticing everything in the background: your old couch, the tree you climbed as a kid, or the look in a friend’s eyes that reveals more now than you’d ever have imagined then. MPPA captures those moments, bringing the background into the foreground while acknowledging our failure to realize the beauty in these moments. Using a traditional singer-songwriter approach as the core of each song, the band dramatically expands upon the music’s simplicity with a delicately orchestrated layer that infuses cello, violin, and keyboards into a conventional rock band. Invoking wistful yet loving language, and most strikingly, discarding the common abstractions that plague most artists who are striving to write something meaningful, Matt Pond’s songs paint pictures of moments in everyday life. Each song is to music what a still life is to a painter, capturing the beauty of things that one might pass over otherwise. “There are things that mean things, subtle things, that end up somehow getting stuck in your head,” says Pond. “You can’t let it go and it drives you crazy, so you have to put it outward in some way. Rather than punching trees or kicking things, you write songs.”

Emblems, their latest release, builds upon the so-called chamber pop of past albums, and with a new generation of band members, it has added a new dimension to the music. Although Pond is clearly the primary songwriter and lead singer, the musicians around him deserve more than the secondary role that comes along with the band name. “I think that some people that used to play in this band didn’t like the moniker, and I didn’t really like it either, but I didn’t see how it really deterred from people noticing their contribution. But then other people did, and, you know, I always tried to make it seem that it is a band,” he says. Pond has always found talented artists to surround him, and the recent additions of guitarist Brian Pearl and drummer Dan Crowell, as well as returning cellist Eve Miller and bassist Will Levatino, are no exception. Miller’s cello is the defining feature of the band’s sound, and without her they might be just another solid group of musicians whose songs are pleasant but forgettable. Instead, Eve pulls the quintet together, making Pond’s lyrics seem more poignant and the band’s musicianship more noteworthy. For although the other members lack nothing in particular, they need that extra element that Eve provides to pull it all together.

Matt Pond PA proves that you can still write creative music without turning yourself into a purely experimental band, unless of course you consider a cellist in a rock band experimental. “I don’t think it’s that hard to write music,” he says. “It can be pretty formulaic. I ride the line-like, I can push things to being so obtuse…but you know, I like the Beatles.” Pond has been willing to recognize that being different for the sake of being different does not create meaningful songs. A band can forge a distinct sound without forcing overly complicated rhythms or out of tune guitar work. Matt Pond PA understands this, and has developed an unmistakable style in their music while remaining quite listenable.

Much of the band’s success can be attributed to Matt’s ability to figure out the songwriting process. “I think I’ve found the formula for writing my own songs, but still, how other people react…the most uncomfortable part of working on a song is when you first play it in front of people that are your friends that are going to play on it. They’re the ones that decide whether it’s really worth it or not. I mean, I’ve written some of the worst songs that have ever existed, and thankfully they’ve been like, ‘don’t do that! That’s bad, stop what you’re doing and try something else.’” So ultimately, the key to the band’s songs doesn’t just lie with what Matt comes up with, but what they do (or don’t do) with the many of the ideas that he presents. His formula seems to be as much the process of bringing songs to the table and listening to criticism as it is the ability to put down words, lines, and verses in the right places. “Sometimes other people overtake a song and make it the way I never could. Sometimes I have a definitive idea of what I want it to be,” he says. Therefore, the band is often more PA than it is Matt Pond.

The rough part for Matt Pond PA seems to be in the struggles of life on the road. Like a family vacation that never ends, with hours upon hours packed in a van, conflicts are inevitable. “It’s hard to play with your really good friends…you end up hating each other,” says Matt. “Everything causes conflict, like…eating a muffin. ‘Why would you eat bran muffin when you could eat a blueberry muffin?’” he mimics. The tiniest details and most mundane differences become significant, and these added up and affected the band’s performances in the past. “You couldn’t predict your conditions. I mean, 40% of the shows were really tough, and the [former band members] took it tough and didn’t play hard. If we’re going to play, I’m going to play hard every night. Eve plays hard every night, this band now plays hard every night-they’re weird and they have their own wide array of mental deficiencies, including myself, but you have to consolidate and put them to the side to play.”

Life under the radar of the major music industry has always been a welcome struggle for Pond. “It’s the mid-level American indie rock artist, and it’s the toughest thing in the world,” he says. “People will say file sharing is great-I say its not. Obviously big bands aren’t selling as much music, little bands are selling less. It’s weird the way music is treated. It’s treated like some sort of bastard art, and maybe it is. But I don’t like most reviews and most reviewers and most magazines because I think they take too lightly the thing that they deal with. Bands are still trying really hard to make music and they’re just getting shut down.” Nevertheless, Matt Pond PA has been able to stay afloat due, in part, to a stint writing music for the Oxygen Network a few years ago. “I don’t think we were selling ourselves short,” he says. “It was for a friend, it was with our old producer, and Eve and I and Mike Kennedy [now the drummer of Lefty's Deceiver]. It was one of those things when you try to infuse a popular or populist thing with your own ideals, and basically that’s probably why after a while it just stopped.” Matt admits, “We were riding the line of cheesy, but it was fun to do, and it was fun to spend their money. I’d do it again. We weren’t giving them our songs.” So although some might label them as sellouts, Pond explains, “you see a huge billboard in New York of Blonde Redhead posing for, what is it, the Gap?-and you kind of realign yourself on your principles of what it is to sell out. I think in the early 90’s selling out was such a preoccupation.” Maybe it still is, but “as long as you’re true to yourself,” he says and mutters “that sounds so stupid,” and finally he adds, “as long as you’re true to yourself, who cares?”

Following their performance at Graceland in Seattle, the members of The Race were kind enough to sit down with Yaeka and me to talk a little bit about their new album If You Can and touring in general.

So is this your first time out here on the west coast?
Craig: Yes, this is our first time here.

I was reading that there wasn’t much touring behind The Perfect Gift.
Steve: I think there might have been about two weeks that we did.

So what was it that helped motivate you guys to get out on a full national tour for If You Can?
Steve: I did.
Kevin: He’s the drill sergeant of rock and roll.
Steve: The Perfect Gift was a record where the whole band as it is now was just coming together after it was recorded. It was also the first record that the label that we’re on put out in any sort of serious fashion so everything kind of happened in the wrong order. We got done with two and a half weeks of tour before the record came out and everyone just kind of thought that it didn’t feel right, but on this record, everything was recorded and everything was done in sort of the right order so now we’re touring as much as we can to support that record.

The sound on this album is a little different. It’s a lot crisper and cleaner. Was that a result of putting all the pieces together or is that something you had in mind for the last album, but it wasn’t exactly possible?
Kevin: I think it is due to the recording technique more than anything. Before we were going to tape with inexperienced engineers and now all of a sudden we had a couple of guys on our hands who really knew what to do with the equipment they had and made everything sound really crispy and clean and lovely. I think for the most part it sounds exactly how we wanted it to sound whereas before we never really had the option to try.
Craig: We took a lot of time with this album.
Steve: I think the songs too. The songs evolved to a point on this record where they had the opportunity to be fully realized whereas on the old album it was just set up and play what you got and that’s it. On this one we spent tons of time paying attention to the most minute detail.
Craig: And before that too just working out the parts there was this point before we recorded the record where pretty much all of us somewhat knew all of the different parts. Not drums, but as far as bass and guitar and piano it was very collaborative. We worked a lot of it out in the practice space and also we played all the songs live at shows except for maybe one so we had been playing them for months before we headed into the studio. It was just at a different point. The Perfect Gift was kind of like an explosion of ideas just doing everything we could do since we had this studio we could work with. This one was much more deliberate so we were able to focus on the sound of each different part and were able to rip it apart and decide how it should go. We were able to strip it down to its essence.
Steve: We had these two guys who usually just make electronic music and will spend just hours making one measure of beats and so they got this indie rock band on their hands with a bunch of songs and I think the combination just sort of worked out well. We got to spend a lot of time making songs that were written instead of spending time doing that in the studio.

I also read that you had over twenty written songs before you went into the studio, but overall the album is still under half an hour.
Band: Yeah.
So is it that you guys are perfectionists or…
Steve: No, basically what happens is Craig writes a lot of songs and most of them are just garbage and we have to throw them out.
Craig: Fuck You!
laughter
Steve: Half of it is Jeremy and I going through them and we’re like garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, all right, that’s a good song. We got to rewrite this one. Garbage, garbage, garbage. No, but in this band there’s just an incredible wealth of songwriting. There’s nothing the members of this band enjoy more than writing a song and coming up with ideas so almost naturally there were just a ton of ideas that went into the studio. It was really a collaborative environment where everyone worked on a different aspect. The songs that made it on the record are the ones we all thought deserved to be on the record.

So do you think you’ll ever work with Telefon Tel Aviv again?
Kevin: It might not even be an option. One of the guys moved back to New Orleans and the other guy is just really busy. It’s not generally what they do — recording bands. I think we’ll probably leave it how it was and see what other options we have.
Steve: For whatever we do next, we’ll be exploring a bunch of different options. Really we’re just kind of working on songs right now and then we’ll feel out what the options are for the next record.

How’s the tour going so far besides the breaking car…well not your car, but…
Steve: I’m becoming a really big fan of Old Canes; I’ve got to tell you. They’re really good.
Jeremy: I haven’t listened to their record but I enjoy their live show so much.
Steve: We have the record, but haven’t listened to it once.
Jeremy: I realize that. We’re playing Trivial Pursuit every day.
Steve: Well this is our first time out on the west coast and so far we’ve played in St. Louis and Kansas City. We’ve played in Omaha, then Denver and Salt Lake and now we’re here in Seattle. So far it’s been great. I think the one thing we’ve realized is that we’ve been driving a lot. It’s a 19-date tour and we’ve been driving like eight hours a day. So far there have been great turnouts to all the shows and it’s been a lot of fun.

During the long drives have you come up with any creative ways to pass the time?
Kevin: Trivial Pursuit. The World Series of Trivial Pursuit. We have our own rules. Jeremy, maybe you can explain the rules.
Jeremy: We have so much time that we’ve turned Trivial Pursuit into a baseball game where you’ve got two teams and you ask all the questions on a card. Let’s say we get five and the other team gets four then we get one run because we got one more right than the other team. You play nine innings and whoever has more runs wins that game and we do a seven game series. That’s our big hour eater. We have ten different variations of Trivial Pursuit, that’s our main activity. Once and a while we’ll listen to music, but for the most part we don’t say anything and we just stare into space for hours and hours. It’s hard to make good use of twelve hours in a van. We could play a ton of different cities on the east coast easily because they’re all so close together, but west coast, everything is like 10 hours away so we’re doing some insane driving and I think we’re all losing our minds.

So you’re not making mix tapes ahead of time for your road trips?
Jeremy: Music is such a small element of driving. I don’t know why.
Steve: Well, what the main problem is that we just built a loft in our van with all our equipment in the back and in the front of the van there are two stereo speakers and the one next to the drivers left foot works, but everything else is just sort of blown out and just sounds horrible.
Jeremy: So the original question was how the tour is going.
Kevin: It’s good.
Jeremy: Yeah, it’s going very well. I think that we all love being on the road and have positioned ourselves in our life so that we would be able to do this as much as possible and we want to just keep playing shows. But you really should check out Old Canes. It’s hard to describe their music. I call it “skiffle” because I don’t have a better way to describe it. Every night a different song of theirs gets stuck in my head. Incredible band. Great music. It’s been a lot of fun touring with them.

Tell us about the cover art for If You Can
Craig: There were a few stages in the process of the cover art. The basic idea for it came about from a friend of Kevin and mine and actually Jeremy knew her as well. It’s a really long sad story, honestly, but a person that we all knew very well had this idea that she was going to build a replica of the Biblical arc in the desert of New Mexico and tragically about a year ago she died in a car accident. There’s a song on the record called “Arc Again” and it is kind of about that in a way as much as you can talk about something that is so serious in a song. It’s music and can never convey something like that, but that was the basic idea and there was a song that came about. The album was very thought out and every detail was sort of pored over. So we thought we’d take this drawing that Kevin did which is just sort of this sketch of this idea of a song and it came about that we thought it’d be really cool if we had someone who could hand sew all of this stuff. You know, a sort of quilt and this girl Sara, Sara Kohl, who is related to all these people here hanging out with us right now and distracting me from this interview, stitched all of this stuff for me. So it was sort of this idea and this drawing that Kevin made that kind of encompassed the idea of a song and then something bigger than that. A lot of ideas at once.
Kevin: I don’t know if it comes out like this, but it’s pretty detail oriented as far as the position of the stars in the sky being actual constellations in a certain part of the United States, namely the southwest, during a certain part of the year, but I don’t know if that’s really important at all.
Craig: There’s a lot of things together. In the end the idea is that we spent so much time on this record and that everything is kind of like a stitch everything is sewn together over this long period of time. We really thought about it and analyzed it and were just trying to do something and we didn’t even really know what it was that we were trying to do. Just do something that was…I don’t even know how to say it. It’s overwhelming when I think about it. It doesn’t do justice to anything. Someone spent all this time hand stitching all the stuff; all the words, everything.

It made a lot of sense…you conveyed it well. All the parts and the detail and effort that went into the album is apparent — you hear it and you see it.
Craig: I’m glad that you saw that. I didn’t know if it was apparent. That was the idea when we came up with that. Something that just fit with what we were doing. As soon as we started to actually do it. She was working on it and it made sense.
Kevin: That’s a pretty good spiel about the artwork.

Seeing the freak-folk team Animal Collective live is a lot like listening to their albums (2003’s Here Comes the Indian, 2004’s super good Sung Tongs) — while shoving your head inside a woofer (like some return to some sonic womb) and attaching high-voltage treble cables directly to your brain. And then there’s the darkened stage, the miner’s helmet-ed band member manically pounding things on the floor of the stage, and a severely mesmerized audience. Maybe it was just my first time seeing a show at the Bowery Ballroom, but “blown away” seems to be as much of an understatement as this understatement.

Stage-named Panda Bear and Avey Tare, the expanded duo also was joined by two fellow maniacs, Geologist and Deaken, on-stage to create some thrilling and experiemental folkmusic. Try to picture the physical postures of Animal (from the Muppets) playing the drums, and you have a notion of the mannerisms that power an Animal Collective performance. Like their songs, the players herk and jerk in seemingly hysteric entropy, while at some layer a definite coherence is sustained. While percussion duties are shared by all members at any given time, the band-member stationed in front of what is definitely an atypical drum-kit stood as he played, and when he played it was not with technical precision but with the controlled panic of an artist seized by the highs of creation. It looked/sounded like he was hitting stones, sticks, and logs rather than actual drums. Another Collective member spent most of the night on the floor with a keyboard (?- coudn’t see) and a miner’s light fastened across his forehead.

The highlight of their set came early when said squatting, head-lamped guy leaped up to assist the guitar player/singer in a tribal duet of grunts and chants, so common to the Animal Collective melange. The energy was unreal, telling of the genuine collaboration at the core of Animal Collective. The only song I could actually identify was the first track from their latest album Sung Tongs, “Leaf House.”

Not nearly as lush or acoustic as Sung Tongs ,the live show (at least last night) reflects the bands earlier leanings, which tend toward Black Dice’s latest leanings (note this connection now and recall it when you read the other paragraphs). On the Fat Cat Records site, the band’s intentions were originally to move “pop music in a direction that would place a heavy emphasis on sonic experience.” Their music is not quite so vague, and neither was the experience of seeing them. Microphone distortion was fundamental to all the performing acts, from openers Gang Gang Dance (My Bloody Valentine a la Talking Heads) on down. Somebody at the astoundingly subtle sound-station put the effect-works on all singers: the echo, the reverb, the being-karate-chopped-rapidly-on-the-back effect (Devendra Banhart sounds like this naturally). Layers, sweet layers of interest being applied not unlike flavor is blasted onto Goldfish. Most of their sound consisted of a few acoustic guitar chords played non-conventionally, hummed melodies puncuated by bursts of forest noise (grunts, hoots, howls), and earthy yet esoteric polyrhythms. Astounding. Then came the Black Dice.

An assault best describes Black Dice’s approach to live music, which is really really loud. Hipsters in the know bring ear-plugs, as did the band (cheaters), and the rest of us plebeians left with swollen, battered eardrums. But the violence of the music was a sublime thing, much more beautiful than the noise of war or hatred. The now-trio wheeled three tables onstage and placed upon these tables myriad distortion peddles, wires, knobs, and monitors. Manning the middle station, the lone guitarist would fiddle with the odd chord or scale now and then, at which point they would tweak, reverb, amplify, and dismantle the sound into a massive squall of arthymic electric-shrieks and howling feedback. For nearly fifty minutes the oppressively cool seige assailed the slowly dwindling audience. One girl managed to take a nap in one of the balcony’s back corners; how, I’m not sure. There were no clear demarkations between songs, but singular movements within the set were distinct. Some have called Black Dice pretentious, but I think abusive is a better adjective. Still, it was rather effective when the musician on the left waved his hand in some sort of pre-arranged signal and the stage fell silent for a second before sparse but enthusiastic applause followed the band off-stage. There are plenty of precedents, it turns out, to their approach. Musicians have been experimenting with pure noise since Edison invented feedback (or was it Bell?). At the very least, the band should take the praise of a fan as he departed just after the concert: THAT WAS THE LOUDEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD.

Maybe seeing Animal Collective and Black Dice in the same night is the concert-going equivalent of your mom walking in during the movie’s only sex scene. I’m sure had it been The Presidents of the United States of America or Joan Baez (two acts scheduled to appear at the Ballroom in the coming months), I would have been put more at ease by more conventional song structure and less abraissive acoustic assaults; on the other hand, I feel as though I have been led into a promising and unsettling valley of taste, basking in white sunshine that hurts my ears kindly.