Motion City Soundtrack recently released their Acoustic EP exclusively on iTunes. Featuring five acoustic versions of songs from their LP Even If It Kills Me, it showcases the band’s songwriting abilities and gives a new gloss to the included tunes.

Utilizing acoustic guitar and piano in place of the buzzing electricity of the band’s usual high-voltage formation, MCS augments the sound with strings, bells, and handclaps.

Singles “It Had To Be You” and “Broken Heart” maintain the basic feeling and momentum of the album versions when stripped down. “Can’t Finish What You Started” sounds even better in its acoustic form than the original version. The piano at the end of “Point of Extinction” gives it a heart-tugging depth that compliments the song’s original incarnation well.

The standout on the EP by far is opener “Fell In Love Without You”. On Even If It Kills Me the song is a frenetic kiss-off, but here it’s a subdued reflection. The song includes the line “only time will tell if violins will swell in memory of what we used to call ‘in love’” and is cleverly accompanied by violins starting at the second iteration of the chorus, hinting that maybe the narrator and his subject did have something after all.

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Acoustic EP dropped on 05/06/08.
Get more info on Motion City Soundtrack at their official website.

Owen (aka Mike Kinsella) returned to Madison on May 3, 2008 to play to a cozy crowd at Club 770. Kinsella was in good spirits, happily conversing with the crowd and cracking jokes.

“Sometimes I write a song and it sounds like Sheryl Crow, and I think, ‘This is awful.’ Then I write a song and it sounds like ‘Chocolate Rain’…”

After finishing up a set of his own material, Kinsella decided to throw down a few Fugazi songs, a preview of his upcoming benefit show for CAASE on June 19 at Beat Kitchen in Chicago.

At this show we decided to use the video option on our super-cheap camera and captured Owen performing “The Ghost of What Should Have Been” for your viewing and listening pleasure. Of course, we’re idiots and filmed it portrait style, not realizing we couldn’t rotate it in editing. Oops. Just crane your neck to the left and you won’t even notice.

Though things got off to a late start, the May 2, 2008 show featuring Rooney, Locksley, and The Bridges at Madison’s The Annex was worth the wait.

Opener The Bridges was an unexpected treat. Hailing from Alabama, the five-member band features drums, guitars, bass, and keys, but is set apart by its three- and four-part female vocal harmonies. The girls’ voices perfectly compliment each other, and the ease and style in which they perform hints at their roots despite there not being anything overtly southern about their music. Be sure to check out the live videos, as the posted album cuts don’t do The Bridges justice.

Following The Bridges were hometown heroes Locksley. Sporting a new bass player, the band was welcomed with enthusiasm by the crowd. The band has continued to grow as a live act, shedding the matching army jackets and synchronized bows of performances past and finally getting a few scratches in their pretty-boy veneer. The boys of Locksley still deliver tight instrumentals and impeccable vocal harmony, but have toed over to rock and roll from pre-fab pop.

Rounding off the evening was the indomitably happy Rooney. Bringing with them California’s good vibrations, Rooney played a mix of songs from both their LPs, as well as a few covers that clearly inform their sound (The Band’s “The Weight” and The Beach Boys’s “California Girls”). Vocalist/guitarist Robert Carmine had little trouble engaging the crowd, bantering with relatability and charisma. Rooney ended their set with the infectious single “When Did Your Heart Go Missing?“, leaving no one in the crowd standing still. Look for a new album from Rooney, to be recorded after the completion of their summer tour.

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PARTIAL THE BRIDGES SETLIST: All the Words, Pieces, One I Love, Runaway

PARTIAL LOCKSLEY SETLIST: All of the Time, She Does, Why Can’t I Be You, Into the Sun, Get Off Of My Cloud, Hotel Yorba

PARTIAL ROONEY SETLIST: Blueside, If It Were Up To Me, I’m A Terrible Person, I’m Shakin’, Calling The World, When Did Your Heart Go Missing?, Are You Afraid?, Paralyzed, All In Your Head, The Weight, California Girls

For more photos from the show, be sure to check out our Facebook page.

We had a crazy busy week, hence the lack of posts. Check back for concert reviews for The Bridges/Locksley/Rooney & Owen, as well as a mess of album reviews. Until then, here are some videos to pacify you:

Chromeo - Fancy Footwork (we’ve been waiting for a video since July - it’s finally here)
The Helio Sequence - Keep Your Eyes Ahead (Portland at night)
The Wombats - Let’s Dance to Joy Division (love the song to pieces)
The Most Serene Republic - The Men Who Live Upstairs (we’re suckers for boys and girls singing together)
Thrice - Come All You Weary (Live on Conan) (so different, so good)

On April 29, 2008, Oxford dance-rock outfit Foals hit the High Noon Saloon in Madison, WI for an early show.

Opening the night was Milwaukee’s Worrier. The first few seconds were a jarring wall of noise, but the songs managed to take shape with half-yelled vocals and notes plucked from chrome guitars.

After a bit of anxious waiting, Foals took the stage and answered the question of the day: would they be able to perform their ultra-technical brand of rock and roll at the same level set by Antidotes? The answer was a resounding yes. Though there were a host of technical glitches, the band soldiered on and didn’t miss a beat - literally or figuratively. Quipped lead vocalist Yannis Philippakis, “One reason I’m procrastinating is the extremely unpleasant electric shocks I’m getting from everything I touch. We’re in America though, so it’s okay!”

Though a couple of songs were slowed down slightly from the album version (”Balloons” and “Cassius”), Foals’s performance was consistently high-energy and marked with a quiet enthusiasm held by those who truly enjoy performing. In their 50-minute set, they cranked out most of their album, along with an untitled instrumental jam supposedly borne of “listening to too much Slayer and drinking too much American beer.”

Should Foals come to a venue near you, take the opportunity to see them before the crowds get too big for proper dancing.

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SET LIST: The French Open, Cassius, Olympic Airways, Balloons, Heavy Water, Two Steps, Twice, Hummer, Red Socks Pugie, Electric Bloom, Untitled Instrumental, Mathletics

For more photos from the show, be sure to check out our Facebook page.

You’ve all heard him. At more of the shows you’ve gone to than not, there’s that guy. The one who insists on yelling “Freebird!”, regardless of appropriateness of the request. In the first section of his book, The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock & Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling, author Mitch Myers personifies this shady character into the fictional Adam Coil.

Utilizing both straight fact and outright fiction, Myers gives readers a blend of history and tall-tale, often blurring the line between the two. Anti-hero Adam Coil serves to put a personal spin on various musical experiences, such as giving “Freebird”-guy a name and giving a fresh perspective to the hippie-tastic era of The Grateful Dead in San Francisco as a time-traveler from 2069.

Other fictitious tales include a musical face-off between a DJ and jazz drummer for club supremacy and bringing about the world-wide destruction of aliens posing as humans with Black Sabbath recordings (*coughMarsAttackscough*). There are several pieces that are more or less straight-laced music history essays, and a smattering of probably true but most likely embellished stories (like getting locked into a Tower Records overnight).

Though The Boy Who Cried Freebird would tip toward ‘enjoyable’ on a scale, the fuzzy line between real-life and make-believe can get a bit tedious. Also, Myers’s narrative voice skews toward middle-aged male, both in tone and reader appeal. There’s nothing wrong with either of these traits, but it does have the potential to turn off some readers.

Residing on an isthmus, the people of Madison, WI can’t help but love a good sea chantey. Lucky for them, Colin Meloy of The Decemberists brought his hyper-literate musical tales to the Barrymore Theatre on April 23, 2008.

The stage was of a simple set-up: a few guitars, a couple of microphones, and a table complete with a bottle of red wine and a framed picture of a sock puppet. Meloy took the stage and filled the remaining space with his signature vocals and oodles of charm.

Some may have had doubts about Meloy’s ability to carry The Decemberists’ dense material as a solo act, but the bespectacled troubadour stripped them down and made them his own without losing the integrity of the original arrangements. This occasionally required the employment of the audience as backup singers and instrument impersonators, but the crowd was more than happy to oblige.

In addition to several crowd favorites, the set also included a few surprises. One was a surprisingly moving rendition of soul legend Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” with opener Laura Gibson (a recording of the song is available on the tour-only EP Colin Meloy Sings Sam Cooke). The other was a three-part supersong from The Decemberists’ forthcoming album, set for recording later this year. The song has been referred to as “Hazards of Love” and can be heard here.

On the whole, the night was a cozy sing-along, replete with intimate interaction between Meloy and his followers. Laughs were had, requests were taken, and the crowd was treated to the ever-so-rare feeling in live music that they were sharing a night with a roomful of friends rather than an anonymous gathering of individuals dominated by the untouchables on stage.

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PARTIAL SET LIST: Hazards of Love, Cupid, The Sporting Life, Red Right Ankle, The Engine Driver, The Perfect Crime #2

Just a couple things for you kids to check out on this lovely weekend:

1) No Age is offering a free download of “Eraser” from their upcoming release Nouns. You can get it here or listen in the player below. It’s full of jangly summer goodness.

2) More happy summer-friendly music comes your way from Architecture in Helsinki with their tune “Like It Or Not”. The video features some hapless coconuts on an embroidered journey. It takes almost half a minute to get into the actual song, but its worth it.

When I picked up Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, I expected it to be a history of popular music on the radio. After all, when one encounters the term “disc jockey” the mind generally doesn’t jump to an image of a man behind a set of turntables, pulsing lights and thudding bass abound - but this is in fact the type of DJ authors Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton are referencing in their 1999 release.

The radio DJ does get a fair shake in the book, providing context for the history of bringing music to the masses.The focus, however, is a thorough history of dance music and its accompanying culture in the US and UK.

Northern soul is the first trend to be covered, revealing a culture of obsessive collecting of obscure tracks partying until the break of dawn. A celebrated example of northern soul is R. Dean Taylor’s “There’s A Ghost In My House” - a surprisingly gritty Motown track from 1967.

Next to be covered is raggae, with its early remixes and soundclashes. Elements from both the raggae and northern soul scenes paved the way for the two most expansive genres of DJ-led phenomena, disco and hip hop. Brewster and Broughton set the record straight on the origins of these genres and shine a light on their far-reaching impact on both culture and music.

Later forms such as house and techno are also covered, with the final portion of the book tying everything together and offering commentary on the then-current state and future of dance music. At the book’s press time, late-90s dance music was cracking into the American mainstream with acts like Fatboy Slim, Moby, and the Chemical Brothers, but the authors did not comment on the trend, instead focusing on the more established UK/European success of acts like Sasha and Paul Oakenfold.

Though I’d consider myself a dabbler at best in the field of dance music, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life was a a great read. Brewster and Broughton make even the most foreign of experiences seem accessible while seamlessly providing snapshot after snapshot of cultural history.

The first show we decided to sponsor ended up being a bit of a disaster, but all was not lost. On April 17, 2008 at Club 770 in Madison, WI, we were planning on having a wonderful live event featuring Minus the

Bear, Portugal. The Man, The Big Sleep, and The Felix Culpa. Unfortunately, the promoter cut The Felix Culpa from the bill the day before the show, and Portugal. The Man’s van broke down in Chicago on their way to the venue. This led to pushing back doors and starting the show at 9:30 instead of the advertised 8 PM. This also led to many disappointed kids who had come from far and wide (some driving five hours) not getting to see the concert they paid for. Alas, the show did go on.

Kicking things off was The Big Sleep, a name surprisingly apt for the act. There was nothing particularly original or moving about the music, often just coming off as an amalgam of overused hooks and unfocused psychedelia.

Minus the Bear got off to a bit of a rocky start when a fight broke out in front of the stage, but the bassist and vocalist jumped offstage and escorted the offending party outside. The rest of the set went reasonably well, save a few minor technical difficulties. In any case, the crowd enjoyed the set, and playing “…Crisco Twister” was enough to make M|H happy. Thanks to everyone who came out to support us! We hope to bring you more shows in the future.

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SET LIST: Knights, Memphis & 53rd, Thanks For The Killer Game of Crisco Twister, Double Vision Quest, White Mystery, I’m Totally Not Down With Rob’s Alien, We Are Not A Football Team, Dr. L’Ling, Part 2, Throwin’ Shapes, The Fix, Lemurs, Man, Lemurs, Pachuca Sunrise, Ice Monster, Fulfill the Dream, Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse