It's typical and we should have seen it coming. Although Sufjan Steven's synthpop tune Video Game is a perfectly fine song, it's probably the least interesting of his recent outstanding releases (America, My Rajneesh, etc.), yet it's the one that debuted last week at No. 1 on the New Alternative Top 40 Chart and remains at the Number 1 spot again this week. As I said, typical.
Everything else in the Top 5 debuted this week. England's London Grammar takes the No. 2 spot with Baby It's You (not the Burt Bacharach song covered by The Beatles in 1963 and Smith in 1969), Phoenix are back with a song from the soundtrack of the new Bill Murray movie On The Rocks at No 3, the No. 4 spot is taken by To S,.a one-off single by Father John Misty backed with To R. (for Skyler and Robin of his old band, Fleet Foxes?), and Angel Olsen's Waving, Smiling, which we posted here last Tuesday, takes No. 5.
All in all, not bad for a Top 5 - a little heavy on the ballads but perhaps the best quintet we've seen since we started posting this series.
List compiled "from over 70 alt and new release sources" by alt.nwmsc.com Enjoy!
It's been a big week for Bon Iver. While Justin Vernon's collaboration with Taylor Swift fell off the Top 40 list after just two weeks, his song AUATC(Ate Up All Their Cake) debuted at the No. 1 spot, and mxmtoon has a song titled Bon Iver at the No. 29 spot.
AUATC knocked Angel Olsen's Whole New Mess out of the No. 1 spot, but it only fell to No. 2 (it's been a good week for Angel Olsen). Last week's No. 2, Sylvan Esso's Ferris Wheel, fell to No. 8.
It's been a good week for beabadoobee. Her song Sorry debuted at No. 3, while her song Care remained on the Top 40 for its 4th straight week, now sitting at the No. 21 spot.
It's been a good week for the band Glass Animals. Their It's All So Incredibly Loud remained at the No. 4 spot for the second straight week, while their song Tangerine debuted at No. 10.
Finally, Washed Out's song Paralyzed debuted at No. 5.
I surprise myself, but of these five songs, my favorite is probably beabadoobee's Sorry. It's a good performance by the singer/songwriter, but it's status as my pick of the lot is probably more a process of elimination than preference. Bon Iver continues, in my opinion, to border on the unlistenable with his Autotune experiments and tape manipulation. Angel Olsen is an extremely talented singer, but Whole New Mess is a tad too austere for me. I kept waiting for the bass or any low end to kick in and fill out the brittle sound, and by the time I realized it wasn't going to happen, the song became a tedious experience. I can't put a finger on exactly why Glass Animals don't cut it for me, other than it all sounds a bit too formulaic and derivative - the band sounds to me like what an old-time label A&R man might come up with for fans of Radiohead and Muse. And Washed Out's song is fine, but they're not exactly paving any new territory here - it sounds exactly like any other Washed Out song, which is okay but the lyrics video only serves too reveal how trite and cliche the actual words are. Some things are better left to the imagination.
List compiled "from over 70 alt and new release sources" by alt.nwmsc.com Enjoy!
Last week's No. 2, Sylvan Esso's Ferris Wheel, remains in the No. 2 spot. Everything else is brand new to the list.
Angel Olsen takes the No. 1 spot, knocking Gorillaz out of the Top 5 and down to No. 6. Billie Eilish debuts at No. 3, as Future Islands drops to No. 10.
Glass Animals and Everything Everything take Nos. 4 and 5. Beabadoobee, the former No 4, drops to the No. 8 spot and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, last week's No. 5, drops to No. 7.
It's actually surprising to me, but of these Top 5 tunes, I like the new Billie Eilish song the most. I'll leave it to others to decide whether or not a pop star of her caliber belongs on an "indie" chart.
List compiled "from over 70 alt and new release sources" by alt.nwmsc.com
Angel Olsen provides the first song of the First 100 Days anthology, which describes itself on its Bandcamp profile as follows:
"With Trump's first 100 days in office upon us, action must be taken to protect the causes that will come under threat from this administration.
Our First 100 Days seeks to aid in that protection. Joining together with artists and labels we will be releasing one rare, unreleased or exclusive song per day to you via Bandcamp.
For a minimum contribution of $30, supporters will be able to access all 100 songs in the project, including new music from Angel Olsen, How To Dress Well, Toro Y Moi, The Range and many more.
All profits raised from Our First 100 Days will go directly to organizations working on the front lines of climate, women's rights, immigration and fairness.
The project was started in conjunction with Secretly Group and 30 Songs, 30 Days, and aims to raise funds and awareness for organizations supporting causes that are under threat by the proposed policies of a Trump administration. This project is produced with the help of Revolutions Per Minute, an organization that provides strategy and support for artists making change."
Day Two of our five-day stand of great shows in the ATL (Rocktober in September): Angel Olsen at Terminal West, with Juliana Barwick opening.
Today's hexagram is Number 50 of the I Ching, Ding, The Cauldron, which connotes great fortune. We won't dwell on this one much, other than to note that we had been looking forward to seeing Angel Olsen again, and had bought our tickets some time ago in anticipation of the show selling out (it did).
But just a week ago, it was announced that Alex Cameron, the opening act, had been changed to Juliana Barwick, who we were looking forward to seeing October 2 at The Mammal Gallery anyway, so Ding!, a great show just unexpectedly got better. Great fortune, indeed.
Juliana Barwick plays ethereal, heavenly ambient music, looping her voice and keyboards to create layer over layer of dreamy sound. It's as fascinating watching her create her constructions as it is to listen to the results.
While I have no complaints, Barwick seemed like an odd choice as opener for Angel Olsen, as their music is nothing alike, but my supposition is that Angel just has good taste and wanted someone to open whom she liked. In any event, it all worked, and Barwick performed a wonderful 35-minute opening set consisting of one near-seamless composition.
Angel Olsen is touring behind her great new album, My Woman, released just a week ago, and last night was apparently the first night of her tour with her new band, who all took the stage dressed in identical western suits with bolo ties (cool). They've obviously been rehearsing, though, because no glitches or first-night errors were apparent. Still, at one point Angel told the crowd that she felt anxious about the opening-night performance, especially with her sister in the audience, and her bass player had to tell her to just pause and breathe. Regardless, the show went off without any apparent glitches.
My Woman features a punchier, more pop/rock-oriented sound than Olsen's previous folk-oriented approach to songwriting, and the album is sequenced such that the more energetic songs are featured up front on the A Side, and the longer, more reflective tracks are towards the end. Olsen also sings in a broader range of styles on the album, and last night, while singing Forgiven/Forgotten from 2014's Burn Your Fire For No Witness, she put an urgent warble in her voice not heard on the record and that sounded similar to the effect that Torres gets from her voice at times.
Once again, we got to the show early enough to get a front-row spot, although to the far-right end of the stage, so that all our photographs were shot at a distance from Olsen, who lined up at the left-center side of the stage. Anyway, all my pictures wound up looking grainy and with lots of lens flare from the stage lights, but came out looking much better once run through the Prisma filters.
Including the encore, Olsen's set was almost 90 minutes long, and included about equal amounts of material from the terrific new My Woman and from her previous albums.
We snagged the set list at the end of the show. FWIW, they didn't get around to the second encore.
Angel Olsen is back with a new look, a new sound, a new attitude, and a new album coming out. She'll be performing at Terminal West on September 9, the night after Car Seat Headrest at Terminal West and the night before Quilt and Mutual Benefit at The Earl.
What we all knew is now official - July 2016 was the hottest month ever recorded in the history of recording hottest months. So far, August hasn't been much cooler.
It's also been one of the driest, at least as far as shows go. I haven't heard live music since Swans' July 22 show at Terminal West (although part of the ringing still in my ears is continuing to hear them now).
As hard as it is to believe today, there's just a little over a month from the autumnal equinox. We're two weeks out from football season starting again. Ten weeks to Halloween, twelve to the end of this insufferable Presidential election season.
But my point is this - after a drought of biblical proportions, live music will soon be returning to the ATL. As you can see from the Upcoming Shows gadget over to the right, September will bring an insane amount of good music to town, starting with Car Seat Headrest at Terminal West on Thursday, September 8.
The next evening, Angel Olsen plays Terminal West and the night after that, Saturday, Quilt and Mutual Benefit will be at The Earl.
On Sunday, September 11, Joanna Newsom plays The Buckhead Theater and on Monday, September 12, The Album Leaf will be at Terminal West.
And that five-show/five-night run isn't even all of it for September. On Wednesday, September 21, Okkervil River and Landlady will take the Terminal West stage, and to close the month, Portland's Ages & Ages will be at Vinyl on September 30.
I'm not likely to make all of the shows (work, travel, old age, etc.), but there's not one show in that list that I want to miss.
Faced with fewer bands touring through the American South, club owners appear to have re-evaluated their own profit margins and the sources of their income. Why pay some band from New York a big fee to perform, when a local band can fill the room or at the very least cover the costs for the night at little or no money?
Local music is an important part of any city's music scene and part of the joy of living in a city with a thriving local music scene like Atlanta is watching our local favorites grow and mature as artists. But when the club owners no longer can pack the room with fans of the latest buzz band, they have to figure out how they can afford to keep the doors open with fewer customers, so with lower volume, they have to reduce their costs by paying the locals less and less, and before too long the music fan is faced with enduring whatever band the club can scrape together to play for free that night and with putting up with fewer and fewer comforts (AC, clean toilets) in the club itself.
In a perfect world, our fine local bands would rise to the occasion and fill the empty stages left by the touring bands that refuse to venture too far from home, but in the imperfect world in which we live, there's a downward spiral as owners realize they can make greater profits by paying the bands less, or even nothing at all, and the quality of the music on stage suffers as a result.
So, yes, I've been to fewer shows this year, partly because there's been fewer shows this year, in my humble opinion, worth seeing.
But then, suddenly, an oasis appears in the desert. Over the next week, Atlanta will get to experience Swans (Friday), Fear of Men (Monday), Marissa Nadler (Tuesday), and Boogarins (Wednesday), and then almost nothing for the month of August. But then, just as dramatically, we'll get another overload of shows on September 8, 9, 10, and 11, with Car Seat Headrest, (8th), Angel Olsen (9th), Quilt and Mutual Benefit (10th), and Joanna Newsom (11th).
So don't lose hope, Atlanta, there's still good music to be heard out there, and in the meantime we can support our local artists like Little Tybee at Terminal West on August 5, Takenobu at Eddie's Attic on August 13, and Hello Ocho and Jeffrey Bützer at The Earl on August 29 and September 3, respectively.
