Issue 23 - Soundcheck Magazine

Beach House King Khan and The Shrines The Rural Alberta Advantage Freelance Whales

SOUNDCHECK connecting the artist and the audience

Givers ISSUE 23

Cover Feature 22 Givers

Features 14 Freelance Whales 18 Beach House 28 Q & A: King Khan 32 The Rural Alberta Advantage

Givers at The Parish in Austin, TX photo by Randy Cremean

Contents

issue 23

www.soundcheckmagazine.com Publisher: Michael Marshall Director of Photography and Design: Randy Cremean Managing Editor: Tricia Marshall Director of Public Relations: Joanna Hackney Associate Editor: Caitlin Caven Contributing Writers: Elliot Cole, Ryan Ffrench, Andy Pareti, Kirstie Shanley Staff Photographer: Victor Yiu

Ticket Giveaways

FACT:

Shows are more fun when you get in for free with tickets you win at

CHECK IT OUT AT

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www.soundcheckmagazine.com Register to win tickets to these Austin shows!

The Dead Weather Alkaline Trio w/ Cursive Ted Leo King Khan & The Shrines The Big Pink Camera Obscura Heartless Bastards

Midlake Shearwater Megafaun Coheed & Cambria Hockey White Rabbits

Festival Coverage Austin City Limits Fest 2009

Contributing Photographer: Kirstie Shanley Cover Photo: Givers Photographed by Randy Cremean at Emo’s in Austin, TX

Festival Coverage Lollapalooza 2009

“Connecting the artist and the audience.”

Soundcheck is dedicated to offering artists a vehicle to promote their music to audiences, as well as providing a thorough and objective source of information for music fans. In an effort to keep the content fresh and original, Soundcheck actively seeks creative contribution from new writers, photographers and graphic artists.

Festival Coverage Bonnaroo 2009

Advertising information: michael@soundcheckmagazine.com Writer submissions: tricia@soundcheckmagazine.com Photo submissions: randy@soundcheckmagazine.com Public relations: joanna@soundcheckmagazine.com General questions: info@soundcheckmagazine.com PO Box 164194, Austin, TX 78716 The views expressed in Soundcheck Magazine do not necessarily reflect those of its parent company, Soundcheck Publishing, LLC or its ownership and staff. © ALL CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2008 BY Soundcheck Publishing, LLC. Soundcheck Magazine ® is a registered trademark of Soundcheck Publishing, LLC.

Exclusive Interviews and Photos At Soundcheck, we connect the artist to the audience. Over the last four years, we’ve had the honor of interviewing and photographing many of our favorite bands. Check out our interview archive to get inside the heads of bands like Beirut, MGMT, Vampire Weekend, Grizzly Bear, My Morning Jacket, Justice, Octopus Project, Why?, Dan Deacon, Fanfarlo, Man Man, Sondre Lerche, Justice, Ra Ra Riot, Blind Pilot, DeVotchKa, Los Campesinos!, Annuals, Fujiya & Miyagi, Tilly and the Wall, Yeasayer, The Cribs, The Faint, No Age, The Ruby Suns, Colour Revolt, Flogging Molly, Islands, Cloud Cult, Frightened Rabbit, The Raveonettes, Clinic, British Sea Power, Cut Copy, The Sword, Liars, Les Savy Fav, Architecture In Helsinki, Portugal. The Man, Dirty Projectors, Au Revoir Simone, TV on the Radio, Fleet Foxes, Glasvegas, Girl Talk, The Walkmen, Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s, The Veils, Smoking Popes, Ben Kweller, Noah & The Whale and many more!

Interview Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse

Concert Coverage Jay-Z at the Frank Erwin Center

06 F-Stop: Concert Photography

Contents

issue 23

Featuring Jay-Z, Band of Skulls, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Portugal. The Man, Akron/ Family, Gogol Bordello

King Khan & The Shrines perform at SXSW 2009 photo by Randy Cremean

f-stop

Erwin Center - Austin, TX

Jay-Z Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009 photo by Randy Cremean

f-stop

La Zona Rosa - Austin, TX

Band of Skulls Russell Marsden

Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 photo by Randy Cremean

f-stop

The Independent - Austin, TX

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros Alex Ebert & Jade Castrinos Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009 photo by Randy Cremean

f-stop The Parish - Austin, TX

Portugal. The Man John Gourley

Friday, March 5, 2010 photo by Randy Cremean

f-stop

The Parish - Austin, TX

Akron/Family Miles Seaton

Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010 photo by Randy Cremean

f-stop Stubb’s - Austin, TX

Gogol Bordello Monday, Nov. 2, 2009 photo by Randy Cremean

Th e Evolu tion of

FREELANCE WHALES words by Andy Pareti photos by Randy Cremean

T

here’s a contradictory marriage of naiveté and wisdom that binds Queens, NY’s Freelance Whales--who, in another contradiction, aren’t really from Queens at all.

“It’s really just a birth certificate,” says the spritely and slightly geeky lead Freelancer, Judah Dadone. “The band was born in Queens – none of us are from Queens. Same way that no Americans are really from America.” In reality, most of the band members live in Brooklyn while Dadone hails from outside Philadelphia, yet the band may as well be from Neverland. These five framers of carefully crafted folktronica have focused their collective, wide-eyed imagination on molding a brand of pop music that coalesces the warm beating heart of stringed instruments with the digital shock of synth music. And they’ve done it with the sort of childlike simplicity you rarely see in the age of the blogosphere.

The Whales have earned a reputation—one that followed them right up to their recent tour with London’s Fanfarlo—for their unorthodox dedication to busking on the streets of New York City. In a place that has become oversaturated with new music, Dadone’s band shrewdly overlooked the interweb approach in exchange for, as he puts it, “organic experiences.”

He explains, “We really didn’t want to rely on our friends for our livelihood. We started playing in the streets as a way to make genuine interactions with strangers, and certainly to promote the shows.” He later adds, “We’re trying to find creative ways of helping people find the band in an organic way that doesn’t feel merchandised or trendified.”

That justification may be valid, but it doesn’t deny the fact that a band has to possess a certain whimsical ambition to approach something like busking as a serious business venture. One big reason the Freelance Whales get away with this old-school mentality is that they are dreamers – literally. The band’s newfound partnership with Mom + Pop Records and Frenchkiss Records (which was founded by Les Savy Fav’s Syd Butler) has allowed them to bring to fruition a very unique approach to writing a record. Weathervanes, their debut album slated for an April 30th release this year, is crafted around a series of dream logs Dadone kept for a two-year period toward the end of his college career at George Washington University. This collection of fragmented images and emotions has been sewn into a patchwork story that centers on a male protagonist who falls in love with a female ghost who is haunting his house.

“Everything is going through the lens of dream distortion, so if you encounter people in your dreams, they’re all just different versions of yourself,” Dadone elaborates. “They’re not just yourself, but they’re also strange composites of all the different people you know in your life.”

This results in some enigmatic but visceral wordplay. The fasttalking second track, “Hannah”, features the topsy-turvy chorus, “Hannah takes the stairs ‘cause she can’t tell/That it’s a winding spiral case/Is she right side up or upside down?” The verses sputter in an appropriately spiraling manner, and in the context of Dadone’s dreams, you can only wonder what was really witnessed over a night of REM sleep years ago.

The songs carry an even richer resonance when the fairy tale turns dark. Dadone notes that his dream log idea was given to him by a professor following a tough year when he “wasn’t able to write

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“Ev e ryt h ing is going t hrough t h e l ens of d rea m distortion, so if yo u encount e r peop l e i n yo u r d reams, t h e y’re a l l jus t d iffe ren t v ersions of yo urs elf. Th e y’re not jus t yo urs elf, bu t t h e y’re also s tran ge composites of a l l t h e d iffe ren t peo p l e yo u kn o w i n yo u r life.” in any sort of capacity…[and] didn’t feel like it was important or necessary.” On Weathervanes, this melancholy sometimes accompanies childhood imagery. On “Generator ^ Second Floor”, Dadone sings of “an accident at age 6” and looking “stunning and cadaverous”. The music, however, indicates a hope that is confirmed by the last verse, which tries to comfort those attending the narrator’s own funeral.

This dream tactic is juxtaposed ably by the band’s music, which is flanked by a highly unusual array of instruments that includes harmonium, banjo, glockenspiel, waterphone, bing carbon telephone, and even watering cans. The result is a fusion of rustic folk music, pop sensibilities, humming electronics and an acute sense of the exotic; it recalls anything from The Postal Service to Andrew Bird to Le Loup, one of their favorite bands.

The multi-instrument approach, Dadone says, has more to do with the sonic textures of the songs than it does with any display of prowess or sophistication.

“None of us are really that technically skilled at most instruments,” he admits. “We all got to a point in our music-listening and musicwriting experience where we wanted to have a wide palette and have a lot of textures to choose from.”

The band seems primed to make the next big step on their D.I.Y. journey: building instruments. From knitting flowers to silkscreening their own band t-shirts, the Freelance Whales are no strangers to resourcefulness. Now, after harvesting bamboo with an Amish family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (yes, you read that right), the band plans on building its own bamboo pipe organ.

“I really like making things,” Dadone muses. “That’s gonna show a lot more in the band’s identity on the second record.” As if it doesn’t show in their identity already.

The Freelance Whales are the kind of band that finds a way to survive, even if it makes everyone turn and look confoundedly. They march to the beat of their own microKORG, if you will. There’s another marriage within this band that is integral to their future: that of tradition and innovation. The band forges on into electronic territory in the studio but doesn’t forget the importance of human interaction with their street performances. There’s a versatility about them that allows them to ignore the call of the mp3, the allure of the upload, and instead aim for a pair of ears and a pair of eyes. These days, some will call it a contradiction. The Freelance Whales might call it evolution.

H C A E B USE , O E H VULSIV LL A N T CO OT A N OR

words by Ryan Ffrench

T

hat an artist’s success in carving out and mastering a singular aesthetic can run to the detriment of their continued relevance should by now seem sadly obvious. Without pointing fingers, the story goes something like this: a band debuts with a sound so fully formed and complete in its stylistic vision that its climax is contained within its own inception— album one is a shock, an immediate masterpiece; album two is a worthwhile if somewhat uninspired continuation of the perfected style; and then album three is the tipping point, becoming either entirely redundant, an exercise in shameless brand building, or, worse, an unwitting self-parody.

And so maybe it was the realization that this narrative was being so profoundly shattered that made Beach House’s Teen Dream album release party at Brooklyn’s Bell House feel like such a game changer. If their first two releases, Beach House and Devotion, were pitch perfect monochromes—held in aesthetic stasis behind a distancing veil of reverb— then this performance felt like a full-blooded injection of color and dynamism. If their music had always hovered at an arm’s length away, the physicality of these new songs grabbed for the throat. The performance was disarming— all flailing hair and heartfelt obsession— and the sense of witnessing the birth of something entirely new held the crowd in hushed appreciation. It’s time to take out the list of adjectives used to describe the Beach House sound— languorous, somnolent, atmospheric and hazy— and start again.

Teen Dream is saturated and vibrant and thick with movement. It is full of life and it is intoxicatingly direct. And it is immensely, almost sensually, confident. The core ingredients remain the same— Victoria Legrand’s mesmerizingly earthen voice, Alex Scally’s subtly texture-building guitar slides and loops and a general approach to songwriting that starts with the skeletal foundations and thickens rather than adorns. And yet in every way the album feels bigger, more immediate— a gut punch where

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their first two albums were all motionless embrace. “For us, lo-fi is kind of a gimmick now,” explains Legrand. “We’re different as people.

Our expectations are higher.” And Teen Dream proves it. Beach House have taken these selfimposed expectations, wrapped them in a newfound extroversion and banged them around with an emotional intensity until everything crystallized into a sort of visceral romanticism.

The basic sentiment of Teen Dream is an alluring one: embrace life in its entirety. Embrace the dangers and the disappointments and the loneliness and the humiliations and the contradictions and the rage. Death is coming, eat with relish.

It is an album about capturing and experiencing something that could be called an intensity of living. Explains Legrand: “If you don’t live your life dangerously or on the brink or put yourself in vulnerable situations you are never going to know what certain feelings are like.” But, of course, much of life hurts; embracing pain is hard. And that can make Teen Dream an emotionally challenging listening experience— one that teeters right on the edge of sadness. “It’s an album that’s on the brink emotionally,” admits Legrand. “We just made the record and we were inside of it. I didn’t have any expectations of how it would be for people. I just hoped that the record would feel close physically.”

“I’m attracted to the irrational.

The spontaneous.

Being guilt free.

Thinking: I don’t give a

fuck

what people think

about me I’m going to do it because it feels good .”

That it succeeds so profoundly here is testament to the extent to which the album transcends the anecdotal and taps into something common to us all: the passions and abandon of youth. “A teen’s dream can vanish fast, but it’s a true experience,” explains Legrand. “It’s intense, even if it’s fleeting.” The key concept here is intensity.

Her exploration of the teenage sensibility is not about wistful nostalgia— it is a means by which to actively deepen experience and create meaning in her interaction with life. She is drawn to youthfulness as a force of liberation: “I’m attracted to the irrational. The spontaneous. Being guilt free,” she admits. “Thinking: I don’t give a fuck what people think about me— I’m going to do it because it feels good.”

But in many ways this ability to feel deeply about something (or everything) is thought as being so endemic to the teenage psychology because the rationality and automata of adulthood so perva-

sively dulls and erodes the senses that it needs to thrive. “The world hammers it out of you if you are not careful,” concludes Legrand. “Artists are lucky because they have gifts that allow them to play for a living. We all have responsibilities, expectations, pressure from families— but people with creative outlets get to be more in touch with their youthful side.”

She also understands the teenage consciousness as something of an ingenuous reaction against a cultivated cynicism of taste. “Cynicism requires taking sides. Me vs this—or I don’t like that.

Cynicism is calculated and methodical. It’s a system. And it’s systems that get people in trouble.” For Legrand, the loss of youthful passion, then, is equated with a sort of critical distance from things— an over-intellectualization and sense of cool detachment. “I try to keep myself as open as possible,” she explains. “Creativity requires space, energy and clarity. You have to have energy and reckless abandon.”

And so Teen Dream is both an expression of the passions and intensity of youth and Legrand’s attempt to appropriate it into her own life. “When you are serious all the time, you literally stop seeing all the little joys in life. You stop appreciating the most wonderful things. Life is a combination of being really serious about something and then at the same time letting it all go. It’s the conflict of life. It’s what creates things.”

This awareness of life’s dualities— youth and adulthood, gravity and humor, logic and irrationality— is at the very core of Beach House’s approach to their art. “I’m very intuitive, but Alex’s mind is more scientific,” explains Legrand.

“That’s why we have such a good musical chemistry. We balance each other out.” And it is this balance that creates an album that is sonically fastidious, meticulously sculpted, with nothing that sounds like an accident, and yet the heart of every song emanates from something inherently spontaneous— its inspiration, the moment of inception.

And that is what Teen Dream is all about. Meaning that is felt rather than thought. Passions that are lived rather than analyzed. Beauty that is convulsive, or not at all.

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Givers

words by Andy Pareti photos by Randy Cremean

I

t’s 7 p.m. on a Friday night and I need to interview Lafayette, Louisiana-based Givers before they take the stage at Emo’s in just a few hours.

Rather than huddling in a green room or, better yet, a quiet dressing room, I find myself sitting with the band at a long table in an East 6th Street Latin American eatery. Instead of talking about the band’s mix of Cajun-spiced afro-beat and southern-fried pop, we’re listening to the restaurant’s house mariachi band, and instead of passing around a digital recorder, I’m waiting for a smoked salmon enchilada.

But I’m not getting frustrated; I don’t allow myself to get discouraged. There is something fascinating, almost envious about these five people. As the mariachi band jolts to life, Givers sit in wideeyed awe, lowering the menus to the table as their mouths start to drift open and their heads start to sway back and forth to the song.

It occurs to me then that no matter how much I may love music, I will never love it as much as Givers do.

I was right not to be annoyed. After all, we did the interview, and I still had time to eat my enchilada. But watching a band watch a band is a special experience, especially when the performers are a house band that play mostly for cold shoulders and hungry bellies and the spectators are a rock group that people are paying money to see later that night.

That’s the kind of band Givers are. Ever since they started turning heads while opening for the Dirty Projectors last year, they have radiated with a unique ebullience that goes beyond the face paint, the grins and the on-stage dancing. Givers love life – house bands and all – and they have somehow found themselves in the nirvana that is being a full-time rock band, however taxing that may be.

“I think there’s some aspect of stress that reiterates the importance of your life,” muses singer/songwriter/guitarist Taylor Guarisco philosophically. “Whenever you get stressed out, it makes you realize that this is not just for fun. Even though playing music is fun…to me it’s a serious kind of energy, and that comes with all the logical adjustments [that come] with making this your life.”

From the start, Givers was a logical adjustment for these five young men and women. Their pasts are speckled with improv, punk and jazz. Guarisco toured the world with a zydeco band while the others dabbled in Cajun. Givers, in a way, are a slowcooked gumbo of southern styles, each one mastered over years of practice and immersion in the culture. And yet they feel strikingly modern, legitimately new.

“We live in a city that’s not very influenced by a scene, so it doesn’t put any pressure on us to have this kind of sound or that kind of sound,” explains keyboardist Will Henderson. “It’s like a blank canvas of a city.”

Lafayette may be suitably anonymous compared to its more sleazy southern sister, New Orleans, but it experienced an explosion in culture after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina – Henderson claims 30,000 people moved to Lafayette after the disaster. Guarisco and Givers vocalist/guitarist/percussionist Tif Lamson were hit hardest, as they roomed together in New Orleans when the hurricane struck, leaving them with roughly 15 feet of water in their apartment.

“Whenever you get stressed out, it makes you realize that this is not just for fun. Even though playing music is fun… to me it’s a serious kind of energy, and that comes with all the logical adjustments [that come] with making this your life.”

- Taylor Guarisco Even that, though, was a memory the band was able to spin positively. As Lamson remembers, “Everybody was pulling together and it did cause a lot of uniting. That’s how Taylor and I first started playing music together. The hurricane hit, and then we started to go to open mics together because there was nothing else to do.”

Now, the band is enjoying steadfast attention – coverage in NPR and Paste Magazine as well as an upcoming Daytrotter session are just the beginning – and Givers can’t seem to find anything but happy thoughts these days, both past and present. Speaking casually with the band gives the impression that they are merely passengers enjoying a wild ride, and, in a way, they have been.

Their partnership with Dirty Projectors began with a spontaneous one-off show in Baton Rouge before DP leader Dave Longstreth and company made the quick decision to keep them around for

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their tour.

Mention Longstreth around Guarisco and his eyes light up even brighter than when he saw the mariachi band. Longstreth is something of a hero to him, and he loves to tell people about his previous chance encounters with the band, some of which occurred right here in Austin.

It’s just another example of how Givers share a complete puppy love for all things music, something that explains precisely why the band itself works so well. Their self-titled EP, released last year, consists of four songs and one remix that blow the doors off of anything we have come to consider internationally-influenced indie rock. Songs like “Up Up Up” and “Saw You First”, with their use of Caribbean rhythms, steel drums and unpredictable instrumental breaks, are balls of pure, headfirst positive energy.

“Ceiling of Plankton” combines Annuals-style harmonies with bouncy drums, flutes, and a synth-led coda that recalls electropop acts like Neon Indian. Then there’s “Meantime”, which alternates between slow, piano-trot verses and an explosive afrobeat chorus that could be a close bedfellow to a certain Columbia Universitybased band that specializes in “Kwassa Kwassa.”

All of the songs on Givers’ EP are knockouts, so it should come as no surprise that they have all been re-recorded and revamped to be included on the band’s first full-length album. The ten-song, yetunnamed LP was recorded in January at Dockside Studios, which the band calls “immaculate.” Drummer Kirby Campbell describes it as having “unlimited possibilities of things [the band] could do.

We had amps in the hall and then [would] also be doubling amps downstairs. We could get really cool tones over there.” Not too shabby for a band that recorded its first EP in the drummer’s bedroom.

The recording process may have been the first time the band realized they were in this for the long haul. Cooped up in guest rooms along the banks of the Vermilion Bayou in Maurice, LA, Givers had 20 days with nothing to do but live and make music together.

It was a wakeup call of sorts, as the band recalls the EP recording process as being “sporadic” and stung by limitations. Dockside, which has hosted such artists as B.B. King, Derek Trucks, Mavis Staples and Dr. John, was a virtual utopia by contrast, but it also allowed the band, in some ways forcefully, to focus solely on the music.

“You can’t hear cars, there’s no light pollution, it’s just a beautiful setting to be in,” describes Guarisco. “There were no distractions – just wake up in the morning to record until we were dead tired and just repeat.”

They are more than pleased with the results. Lamson comments, “We really dug into ‘Meantime’ to recreate it in a better light, we feel. I think that it’s starting to become one of my favorites.” She goes on to add, “Everyone pulled a great amount of the weight. I feel like we all put in exact equal portions of energy and time and passion to this record.”

Pulling weight is something the band references many times, illustrating the teamwork and brotherhood necessary to make something like this work. This also comes with facing the realization that some things that used to be fun to do have somehow become burdensome over time. As Lamson puts it, “Booking shows for fun becomes booking shows to see, financially, what do we need?

Or mentally and physically, what can we do? And emotionally,

“You get angry, you get pissed off at each other, then you have the best times ever.

The last time I felt this way was when I lived with all my brothers and sisters and my family.” - Josh LeBlanc what can we handle? I think it’s done nothing but help us grow as individuals and really find ourselves and what we really want out of life.” In other words, the band is consciously aware of itself growing up…before they have even released a single LP. If growth and maturation is one common thread that is weaved into the band, another is family. Most of them have known each other since high school, and they continue to hold their collective bond in high regard. Some even take it farther than that.

“You get angry, you get pissed off at each other, then you have the best times ever,” muses bassist Josh LeBlanc, matter-of-factly.

Then a look of deep fondness appears on his face, and a pause.

“The last time I felt this way was when I lived with all my brothers and sisters and my family.”

Givers themselves are, indeed, a family. And like all families, there is sacrifice and there is compromise. They even split their bill five ways at the restaurant we ate at. But they respect each other, they respect their music, and they respect their growing fanbase. When another face-painted kid in the front row is singing along to their songs, they take notice, and they can tell you when and where it happened.

There can be no family without love, and music is the inexhaustible wellspring from which Givers draw to cement their bonds.

Now, they are just giving it back.

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words by Elliot Cole photos by Randy Cremean

hile performing with his backing band The Shrines, the frantic, eccentric King Khan flails around onstage in a golden tornado of soul revival and garage-tinged rock n’ roll. Amidst the wailing horns and the dancing flapper girls, the scantily clad Khan croons with reckless abandon. The “love-filled mayhem” that has garnered him massive critical acclaim will be on full display at Emo’s on April 5th, which is sure to be one of the most energetic performances you’ll see this year.

available for a show.” But when I changed my name to King Khan. Khan is my real last name, so my mom was happy because she didn’t have to get phone calls anymore from people asking for Blacksnake.

The showman, however, is only half the story of the 33-year-old Canadian. By all accounts, Khan displays a charming, amiable, and hilarious blend of wit and sincerity. Soundcheck Magazine spoke to Khan at his home in Berlin about oral sex, cooking ducks, and the dangers of spraying cleaning supplies on your privates.

SC: How has being a family man changed your outlook on touring or music in general?

Soundcheck Magazine: Do you make family and friends call you King on a daily basis?

King Khan: They go by my real name, which is Arish. But a lot of my old friends from back before I was doing the King Khan stuff, they called me Blacksnake, which was kind of my nickname in my old band [The Spaceshits].

SC: How do you go from Blacksnake to King? Is there paperwork involved?

KK: (Laughs). You have to go through a whole process. [Blacksnake] was cool because it was kind of intimidating; especially when I would try to book shows for the Spaceshits. If I called up and was like, “Hey, this is Blacksnake from the Spaceshits!”…People would get intimidated and then be like, “Oh, yea, sure, we have a date

SC: You’ve been a pretty busy guy for a couple of years now. Is there ever a point where you get tired?

KK: Yeah, of course. I have a family: I’m raising my two kids and my wife. I guess the more and more I do it the more I miss home, but at the same time it’s gotten easier. Now, you know, I’ll go away for a month and come home for two months or a month and a half. That way it keeps everything in check. I love touring and everything but I’d definitely rather be at home cooking duck.

KK: When my first daughter was born I was 22, and it was great. It was a great sort of kick in the ass to get stuff moving and a good inspiration to make rock and roll and soul music, which is basically all revolving around love. For me, it’s really wonderful to raise my kids in such an environment where they can be having a lot of fun with music. You know, we have family jamborees. (Laughs). The rock and roll family is the way to do it.

SC: You have a raucous live show. Does that translate to your personal life offstage when you’re on tour?

KK: It gets pretty crazy sometimes. Definitely, [compared to] the past, there’s been less drug abuse. That was kind of making it a little bit too crazy sometimes. Especially with stuff like Jay [Reatard] passing away and stuff like that. I think everyone has kind of got to be a little more careful.

SC: I know you and Jay were close. Did his passing change how you saw your own career?

KK: Yeah, it made me really sad and it kind of puts everything back into perspective. That’s an-

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other reason that having a family and stuff kind of puts your head in check. So when you have these crazy binges and stuff like that, you have another thing calling you. It’s really sad that Jay was going crazy with that stuff, but at the same time he got buried next to Isaac Hayes. That’s actually a really beautiful thing. And it’s amazing how many things he got to do and places he got to go to and all the great records he did. Yeah, I miss him a lot, but I think that he definitely made a place in rock and roll history.

SC: You first met him when he was a teenager, right?

KK: He was crazy back then, too. I remember one story he told that was really ridiculous. He played at some kind of mechanic’s garage…and he got naked and poured motor oil all over his body. He was trying to play guitar while he was naked and covered in motor oil and was slipping and sliding everywhere. And then some jerk threw a can at him and…he didn’t even look at it properly. He just opened it up and started spraying it on his balls. Then, after about 20 seconds he starts screaming. He looked at the can and it was EZ Off Oven Cleaner. It burnt like a layer of skin off his penis. He had to go to the hospital. I can’t even imagine the face of the doctor that had to examine this guy covered in motor oil with all this EZ Off Oven Cleaner on his dick. (Laughs).

SC: You have your own pretty good tour stories, one involving onstage fellatio.

KK: It was our last show in Brazil…and the girl that did it is kind of the Charles Bukowski of Brazil...and she wanted to do something special for us. She just grabbed her boyfriend. It was funny because he got stage fright and he just couldn’t get it up. Luckily, at the angle she was doing it at you couldn’t really tell that he was flaccid.

SC: That’s a lot of pressure.

KK: Or not enough!

SC: The crazy stories are the ones that come out, but you’ve had some emotional moments on tour as well. Last SXSW your percussionist, Ron Streeter, saw family for the first time in twenty

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years.

KK: That was beautiful. He literally hadn’t seen his brother in twenty years. It was crazy, everyone was crying. It was a very beautiful experience.

You know, I think that’s what makes us a soul band. There’s just these really heartwarming love moments, for example family reunions and stuff. And on the other side we’ve got these really retarded stories of someone getting laid in a dumpster. It’s the yin and yang. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

SC: Personally, you’re a chill, friendly guy. Does the King Kahn persona play into your identity much?

KK: It’s funny, I’ve never thought of it as a character. They kind of interweave into each other.

Obviously, at home it’s different. But we have a lot of fun. I think the most important thing is to laugh at life and to just make things enjoyable.

A lot of people forget that in trying to achieve something that is completely unnecessary. I like to keep every one in a happy state. I think that’s one of the things about the type of music that I play. R&B music and rock and roll music is basically to be able to let yourself go and to kind of ease your pains and to get crazy. I think the world will always need that.

That’s why a lot of the music that is out there right now doesn’t really do anything for me. It’s just so contrived. There’s always a business plan behind it or some bullshit. But, for us, we’re really like a tribe of warriors, but instead of toting weapons we just like to get wasted. (Laughs).

SC: You’ve mentioned family a few times. What is it that makes your collaborators like family to you?

KK: I guess when I was growing up and I moved from my parents’ house at 17, whenever my little brother or sister would visit me at my apartment… they would look through my records. That always kind of bonded us in a weird family way. I don’t know. There’s something about music that just seems to bring everyone together.

Soundcheck presents King Khan & The Shrines at Emo’s on April 5, 2010. Buy Tickets Here

the

rural alberta

advantage words & photos by Kirstie Shanley

Y

ou could sense the anticipation everywhere you looked for the sold-out Saturday night show of The Tomorrow Never Knows music festival at Lincoln Hall in Chicago. Yet, backstage, a different sort of mood emerged: a much more relaxed tone, almost a calm before the storm. Canada’s trio The Rural Alberta Advantage were set to take the stage in less than two hours, but they seemed collected in their thoughts. While talking to them, you could sense they were eager to share their story.

It’s no surprise how familiar they seem with eachother: both onstage in terms of their dynamic timing, and sitting close backstage as they share six years of history. There’s the main singer and songwriter Nils Edenloff with his honest face and nasal urgency; Amy Cole with her natural winning smile, who sings backup and plays keyboard, melodica, drums, and glockenspiel; and Paul Banwatt, who also has a great sense of humor but seems to conserve his energy to later spend on percussion in the climax of each song.

The three first met in 2004 playing open mics in Toronto.

A band that began as a hobby slowly evolved into something cohesive and interesting, and earned them increasingly positive feedback from the supportive music community of Toronto. Fast forward, and the present day finds that they’ve come to terms with the evolution from a casual start into more of a professional endeavor. This shows in both the way the album sounds, a heartfelt but jubilant sort of indie rock, as well as the electricity between them on the stage.

Lead singer Nils Edenloff sits relaxed wearing what must be his favorite shirt, as he’s worn it each of the last three times he’s played Chicago. It’s a bright red garment depicting a magical Alice in Wonderland-like scene. He’s nursing a sore throat, but the show must go on. Edenloff has a look in his eyes of genuine sensitivity, the same glimmer fans see when he is onstage when he introduces his songs. The three sit casually together, interjecting and adding on to the conversation. A clear impression sticks: no matter how famous The Rural Alberta Advantage gets, they’ll always stay modest, with Edenloff humbly thanking the crowd for coming and singing along.

“We’ve only been able to go back [to Alberta] and play once in the summer, but it went far better than I could have hoped for. I had never played there before because I’d moved to Toronto and had a fear about being received poorly as someone from Toronto.

Playing in Alberta, there was such a personal connection and pride, where people realized, ‘This is about us.’” - Nils Edenloff

One thing that easily sets The Rural Alberta Advantage apart is the disarming honesty of Edenloff’s lyrics on their debut 2009 release Hometowns, an album of songs based around the concept of “home” in Alberta, Canada, where

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Edenloff grew up. Though the album references specific places in Canada, such as Edmonton and Lethbridge, there is a universal quality to it that leaves fans understanding the emotions and feelings associated with a place they may have never visited. Edenloff speaks about the rewarding experience of having audience members at shows, across the United States for instance, approach him afterwards to tell him how deeply they felt touched. At first, this may seem surprising, considering how location specific Hometowns is. Yet, at the same time, it’s been a positive experience for the band to return back to the place whose memories inspired such vivid lyrics. “We’ve only been able to go back [to Alberta] and play once in the summer, but it went far better than I could have hoped for,” Edenloff explains. “I had never played there before because I’d moved to Toronto and had a fear about being received poorly as someone from Toronto. Playing in Alberta, there was such a personal connection and pride, where people realized, ‘This is about us.’”

Considering the band’s relentless touring, one can’t help but wonder how new places and landmarks might define the sound of a future second album. Touring has given them new landscapes to be inspired by (and find humor in.)

Banwatt recalls with a laugh how the band drove through the desert searching for a perfect, cartoon-like cactus, and found only 1 in every 200 that fit the bill. “We love touring and we’ve seen so much stuff across the US, especially as we’ve visited most of the states,” explains Cole. “I never thought I would see this much, and the fact is that this band has allowed us to experience this: palm trees one second, mountains and desert the next. It’s true that our songs are influenced by the Alberta landscape, and it’ll be interesting to see if visiting other places will have an effect on our music as well in the future.”

In fact, the way the band uses instrumentation to supprot the lyrics elevates the song’s meaning and helps paint a sense of Alberta. “Four Night Rider”, for instance, comes to life with an accelerated tempo, and Banwatt’s drum line evokes a miner who eventually gets crushed in “Frank AB.” In a new song the band is working on, about a tornado that hit Alberta in 1987, the three adeptly build an acceleration that fits a tornado’s destruction. Though Edenloff writes the words, it’s obvious how the sum of the musicians helps emphasize each image Edenloff spins. “I think that comes out best when we’re working on a new song and I describe how I’m feeling in my head and if I’m thinking about, for instance, a tornado. It definitely helps out to give back stories to them as well.” Truly the band has something special that even a tornado couldn’t take away: strong friendships, obvious talent, and the entire canon of English language to serve as their tour guides.

“We love touring and we’ve seen so much stuff across the US, especially as we’ve visited most of the states. I never thought I would see this much, and the fact is that this band has allowed us to experience this: palm trees one second, mountains and desert the next. It’s true that our songs are influenced by the Alberta landscape, and it’ll be interesting to see if visiting other places will have an effect on our music as well in the future.” - Amy Cole

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