The Rake Magazine

Tag: youtube

  • Story of the Sea

    Thirty seconds is my guess. The generation of 20-something over-stimulated technophiles has notoriously short attention spans, fitting snugly within the confines of rapidly flashing images in 30-second commercials, mind-numbing YouTube videos, maniacal iPod shuffling and ever shifting favoritism to "bands of the hour." But some musicians have managed to cash in on our generational ADD. Girl Talk is the best example. The Pittsburgh-based king of sampling weaves together furious seconds-long bursts of the best and worst dance hall hits to create songs sounding like a schizophrenic radio station that can’t decide which Top Ten number to play. The result is a schlepped-together creation, and a serious copyright nightmare, that stands on the legs of others instead of its own two feet.

    In contrast, Minneapolis foursome Story of the Sea takes on this similar fast-paced blitzkrieg approach in a more intelligent, and listenable, mode. The music is overwhelming. At the July 18 Triple Rock show, the waif-filled audience simply stood and stared, wondering where the band would go next. Story of the Sea may be the very definition of genre-hopping. The music consists of blips and blurbs meshing, coercing, exploding and sinking below the surface, breaking through, thrashing, smashing and ultimately fading away. One moment they fill the room with psych drone– a millisecond later they resonate with guttural fervor. Then the music is melodic, then angular, then it stabs through with jagged dissonance and seeps with interludes of grunge. Story of the Sea splits and reassembles genres like Mary Shelley’s monster and builds an entity just as fantastic.

    But this isn’t a band to watch. It’s a band to listen to. Story of the Sea appears wholly disinterested in lively distractions. It is literal shoe-gaze with no banter or audience interplay. Onstage the four are talented statues, barely acknowledging the existence of anything but their epic sound, this heavy, heady obelisk. Rarely, a thin grin emerges on their faces when they can tell it’s really working. Still there is an enormous presence. Drummer Ian Prince is the ultimate beat blaster with a sound that seems too massive to come from his rig. He is the hidden weapon that ties down the band’s constant, frantic diversions. He is the pace that grounds the intricate but stable fortress of guitars as they swoon, intermingle and coalesce.

    Story of the Sea is indeed a strange machine. Shucking trends, the band is the misfit inside the Minneapolis scene. Yet it is one of the city’s top contenders. I recently sat down with Ian Prince, brother of singer Adam Prince, bassist John McEwen and guitarist Damon Kalar to discuss its encapsulated mischief.

    Erin Roof: Are there any brotherly rivalries?

    Ian Prince: Not really, no. We have very different personality types.

    ER: What are they?

    IP: I’ll give you an example. [Adam] is three years older, and he had a paper route, which I could not wait to get a paper route. He broke his ankle, and I had to take over for his paper route. And people–when we were kids–people thought we were twins because we looked so much alike. And he used to do such a bad job. The route was after school. When he would do the paper route he would go after school and watch TV and deliver the papers a couple hours later. And I was so gung-ho I would do it right away after school. All these people thought I was him, and they nominated him as paperboy of the month. And he totally took the credit for it. Somebody from the paper came and took his picture and interviewed him. They asked him what his favorite band was. I remember his favorite band was Def Leppard. I was just like ‘Go fucking figure.’ That’s the story of our lives, basically.

    ER: When is your new album coming out?

    IP: We don’t have an actual date. Fall-ish.

    ER: Could you explain the difference between this record and the first one?

    IP: The production is different. The first one was really kind of blown out.

    John McEwen: Real glossy.

    IP: [The new album] sounds like you’re a band in a room, instead of in an arena.

    JM: We also got Damon in the band. We were a three piece before. So getting him in the band added that whole new element that we had written for but hadn’t actually played live.

    ER: Why did you decide to add another person?

    JM: The songs were always kind of written for four pieces. All the recordings had four pieces. The songs actually sound the way that we thought they would.

    ER: Damon, how did you feel about stepping into this already established band?

    Damon Kalar: I was just pumped. I heard that they were trying people out, and I jumped out of my seat. It’s so exciting to think about this because I’ve seen Ian playing around a lot, and it’s always been unreal. Adam was pretty good about talking to me about what he wants me to play, what he hears. He’s very specific about the parts he wants. Something I really appreciate is direction. These guys already had a great idea, and it translated easily.

    ER: Describe your sound. It’s very genre-hopping and difficult to describe.

    JM: We never really go into songs thinking we want a song to sound exactly like this, or we want it to sound exactly like that. It’s really whatever feel is on the mind. We like to do a lot of pop things. Really poppy bands or more math rock.

    ER: What are some of the bands you like?

    JM: None of us really listen to exactly the same thing. All of us have a different collection of music that we listen to.

    IP: Adam is the primary songwriter. He’s into old pop– Roy Orbison and stuff like that.

    JM: He also loves Britney Spears, really strange things.

    IP: He’s a sucker for a pop song.

    ER: But you’re not pop at all.

    IP: I think ‘cause we grew up on not really punk, but post rock type stuff, so we have that angular element. They really are somewhat pop songs, in a nutshell.

    DK: I wanted to be in Pearl Jam. Really. I loved grunge. If there was a type of music that influenced me the most, it was that, like Pearl Jam, a little Sound Garden, a lot of Alice in Chains.

    ER: Do you think you, as a band, fit into the Minneapolis scene?

    DK: I don’t know.

    JM: We try to pick good shows. We try to make it a show that everybody wants to go and see. We play with bands that we really like. With a scene, there’s so many different ones. Scene is kind of a tough word.

    ER: I don’t see anyone here trying to do what you do, which is why I asked the question.

    IP: We definitely try to pick oddball shows, where there’s an acoustic guy and a pop band. There isn’t necessarily a scene that we fit into.

    JM: There’s so many bands that fit into so many different scenes. We try not to be in one of those.

    ER: I think you’ve accomplished that.

    JM: Well, I hope so. If we’re not playing for new people all the time, then what’s the point?

  • Stupid Is as Stupid Does

    A story appeared in The New York Times on Valentine’s Day with the headline “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” It cited several recent books that bemoan America’s seeming self-satisfaction in the knowledge, that, well, we don’t need no knowledge, ’cause we’re Amurricans.

    I don’t think that’s the case. I think we don’t need no knowledge because, by golly, there’s money to be made on two fronts: We can sell stuff to stupid people; and we can sell stupid itself.

    Let’s look at the evidence of my first premise: George W. Bush, whom I like to refer to as President Forrest Gump. I’m not necessarily implying that President Bush is stupid, because I don’t think he is stupid. I actually think he’d make a great contestant on that TV show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? I bet, for example, he knows more about the content of your phone conversations than you do.

    I like to call him Forrest Gump because Forrest Gump beat out Pulp Fiction for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1994, just like Bush beat Gore for president in 2000, and for the same reason. He won because Americans prefer the world of Forrest Gump. It’s violent, complex and unfair, but can be successfully navigated the same way Forrest did. After all, life is just like a box of chocolates. Sometimes you get nougat, sometimes you get caramel, and sometimes you get Vietnam, AIDS, or global warming.

    Americans can swallow anything.

    I certainly don’t buy the rest of the world’s assessment of Americans as exemplified in the London Daily Mirror headline the day after Bush beat Kerry in 2004. It read: “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?” First, I ask, If we’re so dumb, how can we count that high (Ohio notwithstanding)? And second, does re-electing Bush make us seem any dumber as a nation than collectively spending over $250 million to see the last Ben Stiller movie?

    Which brings me to my second point. We need to do a better job selling stupid to the rest of the world. Stiller’s Night at the Museum did over $320 million in foreign sales, granted. (It was hurt by the bad weather in Slovenia on opening weekend or it would have made a few thousand tolers more.) Since we can’t sell Escalades in countries where urban streets are about as wide as two donkeys (and, I might add, gas has to be paid for in hard currency like the euro) the only commercial advantage left to us is to sell stupid in Europe and Asia. (I’m sure we’ll make more economic inroads in Africa when more Africans stop obsessing over the whole subsistence farming economic model and get digital cable like the rest of us.)

    I don’t even have to go back to Jerry Lewis’s inexplicable popularity in France to make my point. I’m not even counting President Gump’s backrub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel or his duel with the locked door in Beijing. I’m talking “commercialized” dumb. You know: YouTube’s dogs on skateboards or any movie starring Will Ferrell. Face it, we’re leaving a lot of Will Ferrell money on the international table.

    Americans spent $150 million watching Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, but it only did about $10 million in revenue overseas. Now, this is a movie that could have a lot of appeal for foreigners. First there’s the whole stock car thing, which foreigners think is pretty funny. (“Zut alors! Look at those guys driving around in a big circle when they could be actually displaying the ability to do something other than turn left and bump each other.”) When you throw in Ferrell running off the track in his tighty whities pretending to be on fire, well, it just doesn’t get any funnier than that.

    But, like I said, it seems the only reason that movie showed overseas at all is so the Chinese could bootleg the DVDs and sell them back to us on New York sidewalks for two bucks.

    For some reason foreigners haven’t yet developed a taste for stupid movies any more than they have for our foreign policy, unless of course the movie is Titanic. Titanic did over a billion dollars overseas, which I’m going to guess happened because they do have a taste for movies about rich Americans who die while stoically drinking expensive French brandy.

    So, I have a possible solution to at least part of our balance-of-payments problem. As I write this, President Gump is touring Africa, and since it would only be the Japanese and Chinese who would profit if he were touting HDTVs while doing so, I propose that he do his diplomatic mission, and also throw in a little plug for America’s No. 1 export. Instead of acting like Forrest Gump at the closing press conference, he could do some sample Will Ferrell imitations for the assembled cameras.

    From all reports, he’s really good at it.