Poptimist

Milwaukee can be tough on childhood. The city itself is mostly red brick and the citizens a dark shade of angry. As a kid in the ‘80s, Jeff Castelaz spent his time in his parents’ basement bunker with the stereo turned up to DEAF to avoid the warring of a dysfunctional family in a city pissed that it’s not Chicago. He listened to Black Sabbath.

Jeff’s brother, Scott, staged a music intervention by turning him onto Joy Division and New Order. Both ends of those spectrums taught Jeff two things: there was a hell of a lot of music out there, and, it can save your soul. But he wasn’t born with god given musical talent, so at 18, he started managing bands.

The first band out of the gate was a group called Wild Kingdom, which begat Citizen King, which begat the song “Better Days,” which went to No. 3 on the charts in 1999. The band got a label and Jeff got some street cred.

Jeff defined his role as that of helping artists achieve their dreams, almost as payback for saving his soul. And when your soul has been saved, there’s only one place to park it: Los Angeles.

By the time Jeff landed in L.A., the business was getting wobbly. Music was coursing through the pipes of the Internet and leaving skid marks on the spreadsheets of the big record companies. They stuck to the established bands that could sell tickets and T’s to compensate for the death of the CD. But they weren’t building bands anymore. Jeff views the label business as micro-venture capitalists. “Are labels still important? Yeah, they are,” he says, “We turn the music into a business.” But the establishment was bleeding money with the bad habits that easy money brings.

Then Jeff met Peter Walker. Peter is a musician. Jeff is a manager. They turned a mutual respect of music into a decision to control their destinies by joining forces, and so, ladies and gentlemen: Dangerbird Records. Jeff says, “We’re like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, where chocolate meets peanut butter and abracadabra! A whole new taste sensation!”

“They must be crazy!” was a common howl they heard in regards to starting an indie label. But that didn’t faze them: In 2004, they opened offices in Jeff’s bedroom in Silver Lake,  an enclave for the indie-alt music scene.

Jeff and Peter agreed that the Dangerbird family would be one of the new management models, one that puts purpose over profits. They both had to like a band’s sound and players to take them on, and their handpicked staff has to feel the love too in order to turn the music into a business. Jeff says, “Signing a band is like getting married. There has to be love.”

2009: It was the best of times and the worst of times. One of Dangerbird’s bands, Silversun Pickups, had built a passionate fan base and the group’s second album, “Swoon,” landed on Billboard’s Top Independent Album chart and copped a Grammy nomination, putting Dangerbird and Silversun more than twenty Google pages deep.  Then, Jeff and his wife Jo Ann discovered that their sweet little six-year-old boy had cancer. His name was Pablo. He was mostly made of laughter.

Pablo had a rare form of children’s cancer called Wilms’ tumor. Jeff and Jo Ann spent 2009 lodged at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles where compassionate doctors focused on saving this boy’s life. Worry and fear went to joy and hope and then right back again to despair as Pablo’s case proved incurable.

On June 27, 2009, Pablo’s fight with cancer ended. His parents’ pain didn’t and Jeff’s would have to be served.

He created the Pablove Foundation to raise money for children’s cancer, then took the show on the road: A 3000-mile bicycle tour to keep the spirit of his son alive. Along the way, he discovered how much people gave a shit. Video blogs went out and money poured in. One man, who also lost a son to cancer, drove 11 hours just to meet Jeff and borrow some of his energy.

“You think being an adult makes you tougher. Pablo would go through hours of chemo, then just get up and want to play. He was as tough as they get,” Jeff says as he stares at a photo of Pablo perched on his shoulders.  “The point is to give a shit. I care about my people, the bands, my family, and every kid and parent out there who is going through what we did.”

Jeff is now back full speed at Dangerbird, working to make his bands’ music into a business. And at Pablove, he’s working to keep Pablo’s spirit alive. – Bruce Dundore

Find out more about the Pablove Foundation here: www.pablove.org & here

[Read more →]

Four Tet is making lots of electronica and post-rock fans smile with the release of his first full-length album in four years, “There Is Love In You.”

Kieran Hebdan, the computer mixing DJ from London with the stage name of Four Tet, gave fans an early taste of the album in November with “Love Cry,” a nine-minute tune that starts out with groovy vibrations that wash over you like smoothly rolling waves on a warm summer day and then gives way to a toe-tapping drum beat with a hypnotic impact. All of this smooth sound is underscored mid-song with the two-word titular refrain uttered by a breathy female.

“Love Cry” is just one part of an “album experience” that Hebdan wants to share with his audience. As he recently told Pitchfork, “I’ve done quite a few records now, and I look back and think of them as documents of my musical journey. I think the most important thing for me is putting out records that document ideas. I want to be able to look back on all this in the years to come and see how I explored those ideas.”

Hebdan is certainly no stranger to exploring ideas, having remixed tracks by Beth Orton, Andrew Bird, Thom Yorke and Radiohead. Kicking off a tour in London on January 22, Four Tet will roll into Los Angeles on February 27 to spread his musical message, laying down sounds with Nathan Fake at the Echoplex – Amy Lyons

[Read more →]

Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound has been around far longer than his ambient band Deerhunter, if you count prepubescence. The successful solo project goes by the same moniker Cox chose during his earliest bedroom recordings and is the name of the recording device he used when he started committing music to tape around age 10. And the Atlanta native, who seems to generate music as frequently as he breathes oxygen, made hundreds of recordings during that period.

Atlas Sound in its current form came about when Cox broke away from Deerhunter’s collaborative environment in the early ‘00s so he could work with a new “palette of sounds,” or in other words, otherworldly music to zone out to. Known for stream-of-conscious songwriting and engrossing live shows, Atlas Sound has played SXSW and CMJ, kicked off the First Fridays series at L.A.’s Natural History Museum in January –  to a packed house — and has landed a spot at San Francisco’s Noise Pop in February. Cox will then reunite on the road with Deerhunter to support Spoon’s spring tour and take the stage at Coachella.

Although it has produced only EPs and two albums – “Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel” (2008) and “Logos” (2009) – Atlas Sound had a solid foothold in the recent flood of top 10 lists, appearing on many best-ofs for 2009 and for the aughts. Cox seems hell bent on earning the title of Most Prolific Indie Artist, and there’s no indication he’s running out of steam. – Karen Nicoletti

[Read more →]

Promising to “warm the cockles of your soul right in the middle if bleak mid-winter,” Hot Chip presents their newest release, “One Life Stand,” on Feb. 9. It’s a decidedly calmer album that’s more mid-tempo and disco oriented than those before.

Perhaps it’s their recent pairing with Peter Gabriel, whom they collaborated with on a cover of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” by the now ubiquitous Vampire Weekend (seriously, those prepster dudes are pushed harder than the Sham Wow). Or maybe it’s Hot Chip’s work on a Joy Division cover for the War Child charity album that has mellowed them from millennial Moroder party animals to their recent offerings.

But don’t despair; the new album will still move you to your feet. The band’s just mixed in a healthy dose of soul and R&B – paying tribute to Arthur Russell, Theo Parish and Prince – and blended that with the synthy Upstairs At Eric’s sound that made their Grammy winning album “The Warning” a dance standout. Their most recent artwork features a black and white illustration depicting the guys as common house cats (get it?), so their early house influences are still there.

The lads from Putney are swinging back through North America this April with the xx in tow. There’s a date scheduled in Oakland and a SoCal appearance at Coachella so be prepared to get your suntan lotion on and road trip it to Indio to see them in the Sahara tent again. – Ali Maclean

[Read more →]

When British quartet Editors first burst upon the scene in 2005, they joined a growing list of young bands that seemingly worshiped at the alter of Joy Division. But as the years wore on, and Editors talked, some people listened. Fact was, they were much too young to be influenced by the band that became New Order following Ian Curtis’ death in 1980.

Editors singer Tom Smith claims that still-active bands like Elbow and R.E.M. are bigger influences than Joy Division. While I’ll buy Elbow, who like Joy Division, hail from Manchester, England, I can’t really hear the R.E.M. influence, unless you count the bands’ mutual cover society. Editors covered R.E.M.’s “Orange Crush” for the Q magazine tribute CD “Best of 86/06.” R.E.M. returned the favor with an acoustic take of Editors’ “Munich” on BBC 1’s Live Lounge.

In an interesting twist of fate, R.E.M. nabbed Jacknife Lee, who produced Editors’ fine 2007 second album, “An End Has a Start,” to helm their 2008 return-to-form “Accelerate.” Later, R.E.M. invited Editors to tour with them, which Smith called a dream come true. On their third and latest album, “In This Light and on This Evening,” Editors still sound a bit like Joy Division and nothing like R.E.M., but they’re definitely worth checking out when they play the Wiltern on Feb. 11. – Craig Rosen

[Read more →]

Imagine five talented Silver Lake-based dudes hanging out in the rafters of an old barn in Iowa, gleefully playing an acoustic cover of “Warning Signs” by the Talking Heads. Were it a one-off gimmick, the roof gig wouldn’t impress so much. But like that other band that took to higher ground at Apple studios in 1969, the Local Natives make music that sticks in the mind the way steak and potatoes stick to the ribs.

The proof is in the band’s self-funded debut album “Gorilla Manor” (named after a house they once shared in Orange County), out on February 16.

On it you’ll find “Sun Hands,” on which Matt Frazier’s drums bring to mind an unabashed tribal dance blended with a Keith Moon crescendo complete with symbol crashes you can feel in your solar plexus. “Airplanes” – which keyboardist Kelcey Ayer explains is about “longing to have met my grandfather, a great man and pilot, who died before I was born” – finds the guys harmonizing in a way that will break your heart, if you’re not too busy being smitten with the song’s instrumentation.

There’s also a cover of “Warning Signs” that switches David Byrne’s original yelped vocals in favor of a three-part harmony. Says Frazier, “We basically flipped the song on its head.”

With three superb instrumentalists who also sing (Ayer, Ryan Hahn and Taylor Rice), Frazier’s crazy good drumming, and Andy Hamm’s basslines, the band is licensed to kill. They’re going to rise far above that old barn rooftop, so try to catch them next time they live up to their moniker and play locally. – Amy Lyons

[Read more →]

In pondering this waning decade’s greatest music makers, we decided to let impact (and a modicum of taste) be our initial criterion. In some cases, an artist’s impact comes from fame; in others, it’s rooted in old-fashioned elbow grease. Others still have done so much to stoke the imaginations of listeners that we’d be remiss to exclude them. One or two of the folks on our list embody all of the above. But getting our precious roster down to a final 10 (plus one) wasn’t easy — we’re Poptimists after all. Thus, an additional standard was implemented: To be a true “Artist of the Decade,” one has to have emerged during the oughts (the ’00s, the singles, etc.), and gone on to have an exceedingly strong run-up to 2010. 

Naturally, a few of our favorite artists fell by the wayside. Bona fide legends like Elliott Smith, Cat Power, Radiohead and Wilco were disqualified because they initially turned our ears in the ’90s. There were records that changed the way we think about music — by up-and-comers like Dirty Projectors, Bon Iver, and No Age — but whose impact will be better felt in the coming years. And of course, there were those who were just edged out: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Lil Wayne, Interpol and the Mars Volta — the tip of the iceberg, really.

So after reviewing the numbers, we’re proud to report that it was a good decade for music. Especially considering that 1999 was hardly the party we were led to believe it would be. To wit, the final No. 1 single of the millennium was Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas’ god-awful “Smooth.” Prince had become a symbol. Pavement had disbanded. Frankly, a good decade was what we were owed. 

Indie Revivalists: The White Stripes and the Strokes
The previous millennium closed on a bubble just begging to be burst. Backstreet, Britney, and the Bizkit reigned supreme, so it made perfect sense that a bunch of slack-shouldered, sweat-drenched, shaggy-haired roustabouts would show up to muddy the waters. Call it garage rock revival or the rebirth of indie, but the simultaneous arrival of the blues-bleeding White Stripes and the effortlessly cool Strokes struck a note that’s been resonating for nearly a decade (hear that, Tesla?), redefining pop in wave after gritty, emanating wave. Jack White has since turned his music, his aesthetic, and his very existence into a small empire comprising three bands, a record label/store and a high-profile duet with Alicia Keys – all while maintaining impressive poise. Meanwhile, Julian Casablancas and co. seem to be splintering into a handful of bicoastal projects that offer excitement – instead of that old N.Y.C. ennui – for the next 10. 

Dance Provocateurs: Gorillaz and LCD Soundsystem
Hoverboards and climatized city domes may not have been invented in time to ring in the year 2000, but the unlikely union of an ex-Britpop icon and an alt-comics illustrator did its part to deliver something just as futuristic. Not only was Gorillaz the world’s first multi-platinum virtual band, it might just be the first success story in a long line of attempts to mash dub, rock, pop and dance into a palatable mix suitable for a party Judy Jetson might attend. With a background in post-punk, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy was the perfect candidate to likewise bring disco into the future (tastefully), nursing the early-’00s dance-punk fizzle into a raging fire. He injected all that four-on-the-floor bombast with analog warmth, jittery swagger and smart artfulness, hence reinvigorating club music for the critics and masses alike. Of course only one of these two entities has gone on to direct its own opera, but the sustaining influence of Murphy’s DFA label (Hot Chip, Hercules & Love Affair, YACHT) is not to be downplayed. 

Autumnal Arrangers: Arcade Fire and the Shins
No two bands did more to color indie rock’s current landscape with the tones of the most melancholy season. But rather than bum us out, the Shins and Arcade Fire gave us unexpected gushing beauty. The former did so by way of gorgeous harmonies, jangly guitars, well-placed spacey effects, and a poetic lyrical earnestness that redefined college rock as wispy but quite rich, ethereal but impeccably arranged. This not only spawned countless imitators (some are signed to the Shins’ former label, Sub Pop), but also helped truncate the clunky descriptive “Beach Boys-like” to a more svelte “Shinsy.” Arcade Fire did its part by bringing chamber pop and sweeping emotion back into the picture (not to mention, new fan Bruce Springsteen). Despite the group’s impressive membership, which sometimes swells to 10, and bulky constellation of instruments (they toured with a pipe organ), no one saw the band coming, and Arcade Fire slew listeners with two truly great — and yes, impeccably arranged – albums. 

Rap Reanimators: M.I.A. and Kanye West
As fundamentally different as they are, it’s perfectly apt that M.I.A. and Kanye West jointly delivered the biggest highlight of 2009’s Grammy Awards ceremony. Perhaps even more than their onstage partner that night, Lil Wayne, this pair has permanently altered the face of rap — redefining not only who can participate in the art, but what topics can be covered therein, which sounds will accompany those words, and what will be worn while the whole thing goes down. Chief among West’s accomplishments is that he finally qualified the suburbs in their own voice — one free of gangsta put-on or stoney spiritualism, but well-versed in hip-hop’s rich history and possessing a po-mo appreciation of other pop-inflected genres as well. M.I.A. had a decidedly more hard-knocks upbringing, but a story which hadn’t heretofore been told by a rap (etc.) artist with her kind of exposure. As a refugee of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Maya Arulpragasam has relocated frequently throughout her lifetime, hence developing the pan-global, politically charged perspective that’s since supplied hip-hop’s veins with fresh, healthy blood.

Artists Unbridled: TV on the Radio and Animal Collective:
Animal Collective formed at the dawn of the decade and after a steady build of increasingly great albums (eight, sans side projects), dropped the monstrous oughts-ender, “Merriweather Post Pavilion.” Seemingly by haphazard experimentation — as is the band’s M.O. — the freaky foursome honed its folksy psychedelic sprawl into something not just listenable, but unbelievably catchy. Alongside bands like Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective has come to represent an astounding showing of 21st century groups who’ve been actively redefining our idea of pop. Also a practitioner of the throw-it-at-the-wall-see-what-sticks method — but contrastingly claustrophobic and city-steeped — is TV on the Radio. The group’s soulful debut EP was a personal response to the fallout malaise of 9/11 (without which the band would never have formed), and each subsequent frenetic, blues-addled album has felt like an attempt to reel in some sort of audio-translatable societal chaos. Still, and despite having just announced a hiatus, TVOTR is fearless and, more importantly, perfectly “of” this messed up, genre-defying, post-everything decade. 

Angeleno of the Decade: Madlib
The archetypical crate digger with a voracious appetite for beat-making, underground legend Madlib has always encouraged his followers to reach deeper to find the soul of a thing. This is by example, of course, because in the man’s 10 years of handcrafting grit-bearing, thump-loving, jazz-informed soundscapes, Otis Jackson Jr. has given precious few interviews and performances. Instead, he’s kept his nose to the grindstone, making roughly 20 albums in that time, utilizing numerous pseudonyms (often within the same “band”), facing off with his helium-voiced alter-ego Quasimoto, and helming historic collaborations with both the late great Dilla and MF DOOM. While Madlib’s abstract touch is felt around the world, it’s inescapable here – evidenced by his influence on L.A.’s burgeoning “Beat Music” scene (Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing, et al.), which will surely be a hallmark of the next decade.

By: Chris Martins

[Read more →]

The video for the feel-good tune “Surprise Hotel” distills the essence of the Los Angeles band Fool’s Gold in four and a half minutes flat: old men in football uniforms spray soda pop on each other, people frolic in hot tubs, iguanas are slung on shoulders, saxophones and cresting Congolese guitar lines co-exist and gorgeous chants are crooned in an unidentified foreign language that turns out to be Hebrew. Nothing was staged and none of it should make sense, but it does. Everyone dances and looks chemically happy. It’s the sunniest advertisement for Southern California since “Entourage.”

Like the clip, local Afro-Pop ten-piece Fool’s Gold fuses influences as diverse as Los Angeles itself, where principals Luke Top and Lewis Pescacov were raised. 

“We’re carrying on the conversation between African and American influences and filtering it through our own chemistry,” said frontman Top. “It has a long tradition, and our magnifying glass just naturally went over certain regions of Africa.” 

Popular perception often paints the musical dialogue between America and Africa as a one-way street, with scarf-swaddled, Ivy League popsters Vampire Weekend recently receiving heaps of scorn for employing Soukous guitar tones. But the reality has always been more complex. After all, the late Fela Kuti, Africa’s biggest icon, drew inspiration from James Brown and the Black Panthers, while Mulatu Astatke incorporated New York City salsa and Duke Ellington into traditional Amharic folk music to construct his smoky blend of Ethiopian jazz. Most recently, Malian guitar heroes Tinariwen, lauded for their authenticity and hardscrabble Saharan roots, venerate Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix as highly as the arid Tuareg sounds they were reared on. 

Fool’s Gold fits squarely into that polyglot lineage, with both Top and lead guitarist Pesacov the products of ambulatory backgrounds. The former is the Israeli-born, Reseda-raised offspring of a Russian father and an Iraqi mother. The latter’s father moved from Barbados to the Los Angeles in the 1970s, with aspirations of producing reggae. 

Engaging Pesacov, a compositional music theory student in college, about his craft is apt to leave you with recommendations on where to find African tapes on the Internet (awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com), the best local spot to purchase Ethiopian music (Merkato in Fairfax’s Little Addis Ababa), and eloquent analyses of everyone from Jerry Garcia, to Ethiopian soul star Mahmoud Ahmed, to avant-garde classical composers Brian Ferneyhough and Chaya Czernowin.

“Fela Kuti, the Grateful Dead and [Ahmed] all make music for the body as opposed to the head.” Pesacov said. “For a long time, I was bogged down in making heavy cerebral music. Fool’s Gold is about being loose and finding the groove. ”

Pesacov’s early musical efforts initially fell victim to this cerebral stiffness, with the first album from his other band, Secretly Canadian-signed Foreign Born, lacking the rubbery funk of Fool’s Gold. Top’s fledgling solo career hewed towards more straightforward influences like the Beach Boys and Big Star. But it wasn’t until the pair bonded at the 2007 wedding of mutual friend Cass McCombs that they discovered a mutual affection for upbeat African pop.

“Not a lot of our friends were into world music and when [we] talked, our love for it came out,” said Top. “It began very loosely. We started putting out word that we were going to do something different. I’ve always felt a calling to this music in a very deep way. Once we started doing it, it just felt right.”

The words “organic” and “natural” repeatedly surface in conversations with both Top and Pesacov, unsurprising considering the spontaneous nature of the enterprise. Though Top hadn’t spoken Hebrew outside the home since he was a toddler, he instinctively gravitated towards singing in the biblical language. Yet rather than seem gimmicky, his quaking, golden-throated wail shrouds the music with an exoticism and incense-clapped mystery. 
“I never even thought about singing in Hebrew, it just sort of happened. It’s almost therapy,” said Top. “It’s opened doors personally and totally changed who I am and how I perform.” 

Jamming at a wide array of gigs from house parties, to backyard BBQs, to a residency at Spaceland, Fool’s Gold rapidly became a fixture in the Silverlake and Echo Park scene. With a wide-ranging and ever-rotating cast of musicians including members of Foreign Born, We Are Scientists, and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, few outfits could match the polyrhythmic poppiness and joie de vivre they brought on stage. 

The band recently inked a deal with rising local indie power IAMSOUND (Little Boots, Telepathe, Black Ghosts), and released their self-titled debut, a sprawling kinetic collection of jams that won raves from bloggers and print outlets. Not only does it mirror the exuberance of their video, but it manages to situate them among the finest contemporary practitioners of Afro-Pop. – Jeff Weiss

[Read more →]