UNKLE's James Lavelle Certainly Has Some War Stories

Last week, my review of UNKLE's latest, War Stories, was published in the Village Voice. I noticed not much has been published about this record, though. Then I saw this Guardian article (via Earplug) in which the author had apparently been thinking the same thing. We're not the only ones, are we?

Au Revoir Simone, Tres Bien

After releasing The Bird of Music and touring with Peter, Bjorn & John, the girls of Au Revoir Simone are taking the top spot on the marquee. The girls hit the road August 10.

Here's an article I wrote, originally published in Amplifier.

As they wrap up a track on forthcoming album The Bird of Music, one of those complicated-looking ganja-vaporizing machines lies on the table in Au Revoir Simone’s studio. The three women in this dreamy, innocent-sounding tweetronica keyboard band are rule breakers who shun the idea of having an image, who don’t believe in playing minor roles in mostly male bands, and who have no idea what the hell this contraption is.

Heather D’Angelo claims to have asthma and Annie Hart says she was home schooled. Like their delicate sounds, the unfeigned pleas cause pause.

“We’re a real hardcore rock and roll band,” Annie laughs.

Au Revoir Simone make no qualms about nurturing their inner dorks. From hoola-hooping in venue parking lots to blushing when magazines name one of them a fashion trendsetter, they’re simply enjoying playing in a band they thought would be relegated to performing cover songs at birthday parties. Though expanding their previously lo-fi instrumentation, Erika Forster recognizes an element of silliness there, too. “In a lot of ways that cheesy ‘80s Casio sound is our music, we just kind of have to go with it.” And it’s working.

With a reissue of their first CD, plus remixes, and a UK tour ahead, ARS focus on finishing Bird of Music, without a US label. “We were very proud and happy with [Verses of Comfort, Assurance and Salvation], but we want to accomplish a more lush, thick sound. Something more like a world you can go into,” Annie explains, gesturing with her arms. So actually mixing the tracks in a studio is really helping, and the fact that they hadn’t ever done that before sends them into fits of laughter. For the last release, they sometimes even recorded before songs were anywhere near completion, like “Stay Golden” — the Outsiders-influenced bitter-breakup closer about a boy nicknamed Pony. “The songwriting decisions are like one us will have a screwball idea that you expect to be totally shot down. But no,” Heather rolls, “not in this band.” When she wandered into the recording of the uplifting “Hurricanes,” she decided she wanted the tempo to abruptly quicken and this rallying almost-chorus to start up right in the middle of the song. “We were all cracking up,” Erika remembers, “because we were like, ‘Yeah, we can do that. We can do whatever we want!’” Agreeing that like their band name (a line from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure), they try things jokingly that end up being “pretty cool.” Clearly they’ve never been interested in orthodoxy.

Each member has a keyboard and a voice box and uses them to sweeping effect; their democratic studio debates seem more supportive than AA; at times, they don’t even verbalize to make group decisions. “There are no rules. Each of us can be so much more creative because there aren’t any specific roles,” Erika blurts excitedly. With no lead singer, no lead keyboardist, and no power struggles, Heather thrills, “We almost act together as one girl, one supergirl!”

08.10.07 - New York, NY (Seaport Music Festival)
08.13.07 - Boston, MA (TT The Bear's)
08.14.07 - Montreal, QC (Main Hall)
08.15.07 - Toronto, ON (Lee's Palace)
08.16.07 - Cleveland, OH (Beachland Ballroom)
08.17.07 - Chicago, IL (Abbey Pub)
08.18.07 - Minneapolis, MN (7th Street Entry)
08.21.07 - Seattle, WA (Chop Suey)
08.22.07 - Vancouver, BC (Media Club)
08.23.07 - Portland, OR (Holocene)
08.24.07 - San Francisco, CA (Bottom Of The Hill)
08.25.07 - West Hollywood, CA (Troubadour)
08.26.07 - San Diego, CA (Casbah)
08.29.07 - Denton, TX (Rubber Gloves)
08.30.07 - Austin, TX (Emo's)
09.01.07 - Baton Rouge, LA (Spanish Moon)
09.02.07 - Birmingham, AL (Bottle Tree)
09.03.07 - Atlanta, GA (Drunken Unicorn)
09.04.07 - Chapel Hill, NC (Local 506)
09.05.07 - Washington, DC (Rock & Roll Hotel)
09.06.07 - Baltimore, MD (Ottobar)
09.07.07 - Philadelphia, PA (Vacuum)
09.08.07 - New York, NY (Mercury Lounge)
09.09.07 - Montreal, QC (MEG Festival)
09.10.07 - Ottawa, ON (Babylon Nightclub)
09.15.07 - Morrison, CO (Monolith Festival)
09.16.07 - San Francisco, CA (Treasure Island Music Festival)

No lockpick required

Take a peak inside a compilation of entries in Leslie Arfin's Dear Diary

by Melody Caraballo
***published on venuszine.com***

Everyone likes to read diaries, even parents, which is exactly why some people just won’t keep that kind of evidence around. Luckily — or unluckily as the case may be — for the reluctant-to-document population, Lesley Arfin lays bare enough of her insecurities, realizations, and addictions for us to vividly recall our own. Dear Diary is culled from her Vice column of the same name, in which she excerpts her diary entries and remarks on them with the wisdom of age and occasionally, the aloofness of, you know, a Vice writer (see her recommendation to teenage girls to do shots of Jäger before losing their “V”). For the book, she took it a step further by calling up (and sometimes calling out) old flames, repudiated BFFs, and even the ‘rents.

“It felt very uncomfortable to interview my dad. It was a really hard phone call to make, probably the hardest. It is also hard for me now knowing that he has read it, but we don't talk about it,” she says. While Dear Diary is a pretty light read and will in no way supplant Go Ask Alice in the annals of young adult literature, Arfin hopes that her publication makes a difference and explains to her father that “Another girl, somewhere in Minnesota, might be going through the same thing and feel the same way. Maybe if she reads this, she’ll realize she’s not the only one who goes through this stuff.”

“This stuff” is both the tribulations of the seemingly trivial and the undeservedly significant nearly all experience on that long journey from the preteen years to adulthood. It’s Arfin’s sheer honesty that is most strikingly potent, reminding us that people are not two-dimensional and that even when reading a person’s diary, true personality is an amorphous and slimy lil’ abstract. In one conversation she says, “It’s starting to occur to me that I wasn’t this innocent victim … and was, in fact, a self-centered and evil bitch who liked to fuck with people and then conveniently forget it. Oopsies.” Here too is what gives Arfin’s writing its flair, call it an ironic breath of fresh New York City air — she is not frontin’, no matter how shitty a statement like that might make her look to the less self-aware.

Arfin faces demons, both bite-size (grade-school goons) and mountain-size (black-tar bundles), with equal fervor, and it looks like her diary has helped her through those ups, downs, and further-downs. “It also helps in sobriety too because I've found that knowing the truth about something in my head and writing it down on paper have lead me to very different results,” she adds. With her drug-addled past behind her, don’t expect this to be the last you’ll hear of Miss Arfin. Typical of her funny endnotes, she says, “I think I have a few more stomach-knotting titles to come in the future. There are a lot of different kinds of knots, as I've been learning from my sailor’s manual.”

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ABOUT THE BOOK:
Dear Diary (Vice Books)
By Leslie Arfin
231 pages
$20.00