NLtS has moved!

Dedicated readership,

We are excited to announce that our blog has moved! You can find the new and gorgeous version at http://www.neverlearnedtoswim.com. All our old posts have been transferred to the new site, so don't fret if you've gotten behind. Same blog, only more legit. Spread the word like butter.

-RJR and PTC

neverlearnedtoswim.com

Treasure Island

I'd almost forgotten about this one. SF's own Treasure Island Music Festival will return to this year, and in force. Here are the highlights:

Saturday 9/20:
Justice (headlining?!)
TV on the Radio
Hot Chip
CSS

Sunday 9/21:
The Raconteurs
Vampire Weekend
Okkervil River
Tokyo Police Club
John Vanderslice
The Dodos

Ticketing details to come! You can sign up for the mailing list at treasureislandfestival.com to get the scoop on presale. Needless to say, your favourite bloggers are catatonic.

Tracks Review: Beck - "Chemtrails" and The Hold Steady - "Sequestered in Memphis"

Beck - "Chemtrails"

Perhaps I'm not as well-versed with the Beck oeuvre as I'd like, but this seems extremely left-field , even for him. Like The Killers-doing-Americana left-field. Not to imply that the strongest contender for most awesome Scientologist is in over his head. Beck lays an acid-laced bombshell with this new single, producer Danger Mouse etherealising the vocals to the point of nigh unrecognisability and myriad Wall of Sound instrumentation drifting along with them. It changes gears dynamically from poignant to groovy with a (too harsh) drum fill and outros with a stylish guitar break that ends mid-riff.

There was a long road back to be taken from Guero and The Information, but with a little help fromo "it" guy Danger Mouse, Beck may just pull it off. Look for a full LP in the near future and of course, his slot just prior to Radiohead at Outside Lands.

4.8/5.0



The Hold Steady - "Sequestered in Memphis"

Twin Cities via Big Apple rockers The Hold Steady are poised to drop Stay Positive, their fourth album chronicling Holly, Charlemagne, and sundry other drifters' stabs at drunken profundity. Lyricist Craig Finn has had each album orbit a central theme, if not quite a grand "concept": Boys and Girls in America told love stories and made the band's Beat influences explicit.

"Sequestered" gives little hint where the album as a whole might be headed, except to reassure diehards that the THS formula writ large will remain unchanged. In terms of groups with a narrowly defined sound, unlike the broad brush of say, Radiohead; The Hold Steady are possibly the best band in the world today. The band's schtick, basically unchanged from the first moments of "Positive Jam" in 2004, is laid on thick this time 'round: mile-high riffs from Tad Kubler, Franz Nicolay pounding on piano and organ, sing-along background vocals, saxophone, rough vocals from Finn (despite rumoured voice lessons taken for the Album Four sessions). "Sequestered" falls into The Hold Steady catalog somewhere around "Massive Nights" from BaGiA; catchy, certainly good, but not brave.

The band's straight-ahead rock sound works because it's backed with Finn's vivid songwriting, rather than bravado and posturing like most of the Seventies music it apes, but even the greats aren't great forever. Kerouac died too young to see the revolution he and Ginsberg started decay into corporate decadence. After five albums from the same central players (counting the two Lifter Puller records) and a movement to emo/pop-punk haven Vagrant, do Finn and Kubler face a similar future? Track placement will likely make or break this new record. If this first single is a centrepiece, I can't picture the album flooring me like every time I put any other Hold Steady or Lifter Puller long player. More likely, it will sneak on as a back-ender, keeping up the energy between acoustic songs or some such.

Reality check: this is still The Hold Steady.

4.2/5.0

-RJR

Track Review: Weezer - "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)"

Rating: 3.1 / 5.0

I heard this song was Weezer's "Bohemian Rhapsody". That's only true if you count the fact that it's long, and has a lot of different musical motifs. But first of all, it doesn't hang together like Queen's masterpiece did; it doesn't sound as natural. Besides that, what defined "Bohemian Rhapsody" was its humility, it's world-wearied resignedness. Those qualities are nowhere to be found in the self-inflated, quasi-satirical voice of this song. "Bohemian Rhapsody" never had lines like "if you don't like it, you can shove it / but you don't like it, you love it." Now I get it: it's Weezer. But before we make comparisons to "Bohemian Rhapsody", we need to understand: it's Weezer.

That said, it's unlike anything they've ever done before. It's not the stand-alone masterpiece they probably hoped it would be, but it could be better in the context of an album. And hell, I didn't frankly expect this level of ambition out of Cuomo and Weezer; I thought they had lost all creative impulses. It's at least marginally reassuring to know that I was wrong about that much. There's something on this album. But two singles in, it's still hard to say exactly what.

-PTC

Ben Gibbard dispels rumours about Postal Service sophomore effort

There had been some cautious rumblings in select media outlets (and some brazen ones in the blogosphere) that every teen-aged girl's favourite side project - Benjamin Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello aka The Postal Service - would be releasing a second album sometime this year. But according to Gibbard, the follow-up to the platinum Give Up will not come out any time soon due to the overcommitment of both band members (Gibbard is really busy recording and releasing mediocre records with Death Cab for Cutie, and Tamborello is amply occupied by DNTEL and Figurine). Apparently, The Postal Service is as efficient as...the postal service. Haha. Lol. Lmao. Rofl.

He then proceeded to refer to the album as the Chinese Democracy of indie rock. There are, of course, two very obvious problems with such a comparison. First and foremost, it presupposes that anyone gives a flying rat's ass if we get a new Postal Service album. Odds are, the only people who really care are just going to download the single off iTunes (or something less legal) anyway. Second, this comparison loses a lot of its potency given that Axl Rose has just announced the release of Chinese Democracy. Only B-Gib would wait until the first moment in twenty years arrived where that joke wasn't opportune. I'm just saying.

New record from Brian Wilson

In a recent report on the NME, it has been revealed that this September will bring the rising of That Lucky Old Sun, the first record from former Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson. This will be Wilson's first record in nearly half a decade. This album is an 11-track concept affair about Wilson's childhood, featuring the hand of former Beach Boys lyricist Van Dyke Parks. More on this as it develops.

The word on The Streets

Pitchfork reports that after having a track of his denied in favour of a Coldplay track for the soundtrack of a feature film this summer, Mike Skinner has decided to make special use of it anyway. So besides being the purported last track on his new record, "The Escapist" will also be the centrepiece of a film project for Skinner: a music video that chronicles his walk from England to the Franco-Spanish border. You can check out his progress here:

http://www.beatstevie.com/

Speaking of that album, here is the tracklist for it as posted on the aforementioned website. It's due to hit shelves in August.

1. Everything Is Borrowed
2. Heaven for the Weather
3. I Love You More (Than You Like Me)
4. Just Thought of Something
5. On the Flip of a Coin
6. The Sherry End
7. Alleged Legends
8. What Are Chances of That Like?
9. When That Day Will Be
10. Further Away
11. Strongest Person I Know
12. The Escapist

Apparently, he's been working on this record for a couple of years now. According to Beat Stevie, "this album is really good. its mellow, its spiritual and its psychedelic" [sic]. Definitely worth our attention. No matter how many relentlessly MOR releases Skinner puts out, I will always anticipate them eagerly given how fantastic A Grand Don't Come for Free was. Phew.

And while we're on the topic of A Grand Don't Come for Free, there have been delicious murmurings surrounding the conversion of Skinner's 2004 masterpiece into a full length-feature film. One can't be too sure how serious a proposal it is, but the idea itself is certainly worth reporting, because such a movie would blow the collective mind of NLtS. You can decide for yourself: