Shake your Friday groove thang with the Junior Walker & the All-Stars classic, “Do You See My Love (For Your Growing)”, via this mind-popping cover from the Dirtbombs.  Happy weekend, everybody!

Gini.

Photo credit: Chris Crisman.  Interview by Julissa Trevino for Art&Seek.

On Dr. Dog’s seventh album, the Philadelphia psychedelic 60s-infused indie rock band takes a detour back to its roots, evoking an Easy Beat vibe that is both effortless and forward. That album, Be the Void, was released in February to positive reception, but bassist and vocalist Toby Leaman says there’s still a lot to accomplish. Ahead of their headlining Sept. 29 performance at the Fort Worth Music Festival, Leaman talks about Be the Void, their approach to making music and why there’s still a lot left for the band.

Art&Seek: What was it about “Lonesome” that made it the first track on Be The Void?

Toby Leaman: The tone is pretty dirty-sounding, and…musically, it’s upbeat but lyrically it’s kind of down which is pretty much what we’ve been doing for 10 years. That’s what it sounded like. It sounded like a song that kicks off a record.

A&S: Dmitri Manos, who worked with you for Easy Beat, is back for this album. Tell me about what he added to the sound.

TL: He added a ton. He and Eric [Slick], our new drummer. It’s the first record for both of them, or full record I guess. They added a ton. Dmitri in particular, he’s been playing in bands forever and he just has a really good attitude about working with guys and how to record in a studio and just the idea [of] when a problem comes up, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem. It can be just a different way of looking at stuff. He was there with us the whole time, too. Every day, all day. He was probably there more than anybody, I would imagine, because everyone went home and he was still there [laughs]. He’s such an awesome guy to have in the studio because he’s opinionated, but he doesn’t bicker or argue, which is something that I definitely do. He just has a really good attitude about recording. He’s really open to anything and always has great ideas about how to make a song more interesting.

A&S: Some of the same elements and sounds you guys are known for still apply with this album, but songs like “Get Away” and “Heavy Light” are more experimental than what I’m used to hearing. Can you talk about the influences for those songs?

TL: Umm, those songs, I guess they were a little more experimental as far as the instrumentation and things like that. I feel like we’re always trying to do something that sounds new to us and maybe that doesn’t always sound new to other people. “Heavy Light” in particular, I would say, it was one of those songs that was sort of pieced together, [came] together from a demo that Scott [McMicken, guitarist/vocalist] had made that was sort of a soundscape with a song buried in it. We just sort of pieced it together. That was kind of interesting because we started with not really knowing exactly what the choral structure would be but having a basic idea of rhythmic parts and building the song from there.

And then with “Get Away,” that song was a beast. That song was actually the worst song to deal with on the record. It was just a pain in the ass. It almost didn’t even make it because, I feel it’s still not quite where it needs to be. But I like the song so much we left it on the record. This whole album was so [difficult] but that song in particular was a little brat. It did not want to behave.

A&S: What do you mean by that?

TL: A lot of times songs just feel good and you know exactly where you stand with it, and when it goes down on tape, it sounds pretty close to what you had envisioned. And [“Get Away”] never really did for me. A lot of times [songs] will become something different. But this became something different that I was struggling with and battling to get it to what I wanted. It’s just like anything else. Anytime you’re working on a project, sometimes things that seem simple end up being extremely difficult.

A&S: What’s your favorite song off the new album?

TL: Right now, hmm… I actually haven’t listened to it in a while. When we first finished, I listened to it all day, every day. If I was going to listen to a song right now, though, I’d probably listen to “Warrior Man,” just ‘cause I haven’t listen to that song in a while and I’m kind of in that mood. I’m not sure that’s my favorite song on the record, but if I was going to listen to a song right now, that’s what I would listen to.

A&S: Dr. Dog is really energetic on stage. You guys have been playing together for a long time. How comfortable are you on a stage when you’re performing?

TL: We’re not really uncomfortable at all. I mean, sometimes you’ll find yourself on stage and you haven’t prepared on that stage but you have to play. In general, we love it up there. With Eric…I mean, he’s been in the band for over two years. But just having him back there added a whole new level of confidence.

A&S: What kind of things have you learned touring from the first time that you guys did a cross-country tour in 2005? What have you learned that maybe you wish you would have known?

TL: [Laughs.] Wow. I don’t know, ‘cause it’s so different. So [many] of the problems that you run into when you first start playing is ‘cause you’re broke. You don’t have hotel rooms, so you have to stay at a ton of people’s houses I wish I hadn’t stayed at. A ton of food I wish I hadn’t eaten. A ton of stuff I wish I hadn’t done. But, if I were to go back and give myself advice, yeah, I really don’t know. I feel pretty good about it. We took the time to go to parks and look at the city and do that stuff. I think that’s sort of important, especially when you’re first starting out on the road [and] you have a lot more time than you do as a headliner. You don’t have to be there for two hours, maybe an hour, before doors, before they even want you. Yeah, you should definitely take advantage of that when you can and hopefully it gets to the point where you don’t have time for that stuff. That means you’re doing something right. But yeah, I don’t know. I’d probably just say, whatever I was eating, I wouldn’t eat that.

A&S: What’s been your favorite band to tour with?

TL: There are so many awesome bands. My go-to answer to that is a band called Floating Action, which is pretty much my favorite band. The chillest music you can imagine, the playing is just phenomenon. It’s the kind of record[s] you can listen to all day without needing to change records, you know what I mean? The investment you put into it is is as much as you want to get out of it. You can either really get involved or you can just sort of let it go.

A&S: If you could collaborate with any musician right now, who would it be?

TL: I really don’t know. I’m excited to get back in the studio, but I just immediately start thinking about my guys. When you say collaborate, I immediately think it’s something I’m going to have to plan for and make time for [laughs]. It would be this awesome musical thing, but [I think], “Oh fuck, I’ve got to get a studio. We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing. Who’s writing the songs? What’s the band going to be like?”

A&S: What else do you want to explore musically with Dr. Dog?

TL: There’s a lot. The last record was very easy. It was fairly straightforward, didn’t take a lot of time. There wasn’t a lot of fussing around. I like that there’s that element to the band again. We sort of got away from that. Our first couple of records are sort of similar to [Be the Void]. But I’d like to get in there and really almost have the songs chosen before we start recording. Usually we have a plethora of songs that either barely get touched or don’t make the record. I think for [Be the Void] we had 40 that we worked on in some capacity. And I’d love to come up with an idea for an album, before we make the record, and as we’re passing around demos, say, “These are the songs,” to come up with a concise, conceptual element to it that we can do into the studio [with].

A&S: You mentioned you don’t have a lot of time when you’re on the road. What do you do when you’re not setting up for a show?

TL: Not much. We play wiffle ball. I usually read or do crosswords or play wiffle ball or go for a walk. It’s not like we’re going to museums or anything like that.

You can catch Dr. Dog at the Fort Worth Music Festival on Sept 28-29.  

Guest post by Lyndsey Knecht.

It was October of a year I barely floated through, on the kindness of other people. I had just taken a job at an experimental captioning center where they used voice recognition technology Stephen Hawking would approve of. It also required me to leaveDentonno later than 3 a.m. each day.

The first morning of that schedule, I crept down the stairs of my friends’ hundred-year-old house to find a white envelope tucked under my windshield wiper. It wasn’t a ticket, or even a pissed-off note asking me to park my Explorer further away from the elegant house where I stayed. It was a mix CD.

A spaceship drawn in fine-tipped sharpie on the disc identified the gifter. I smiled at the distance of everyone sleeping, even my sly friend, and headed down 35-E into the dark with the unnamed songs.

The third track on the CDR was a song by the Walkmen, “We’ve Been Had.” I’d heard it before, driving through downtown Dallasinto Oak Cliff with another of my favorite people. We let the twinkling intro fade in more than a few times, filling up on the skyline and the smirking drama of the song. Hamilton Leithauser swears off aesthetic expectations while dressing down his Sinatra croon with sparse guitar parts meant to ring your ears, like he’s dragging out his affected past until it’s undone.

What makes the song most memorable is its sense of humor. It was something I needed as I fought through that year, something I still respond to when I hear those first few bars of piano next to the other disillusioned, blurry rock-cum-torch songs on Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone.

Or when I hear them on that mix, which happens to be waiting in my car’s CD player right now.

We’ve been had / I know it’s over

Somehow it got easy to laugh out loud

Photo by Jim Riddle.The Walkmen played last night at The Granada Theater in Dallas.  Look for their in-studio performance soon on kxt dot org.

Wow!  KXT is really feeling the love from North Texas right now!  Thank you readers and editors of the Dallas Observer.

Best Summer Concert Series - For Barefoot at the Belmont. Yeah, the 2012 lineup was amazing.

Best Inaugural Ceremony - For KXT’s Summer Cut. It was phenomenal, wasn’t it? Save the date for June 1, 2013.  It’s on. 

Best Radio Comeback - For our rad playlist.  Hooray for our amazing Program Director Mark Abuzzahab! 

Reader’s Choice for Best Radio Station (music) - Awww, thank you.

Add this to the win over the summer with DallasNews.com for Best Radio Station, and it feels really good to be THAT station in North Texas.  

And the list freaks, too!  Stereogum just compiled their fabbo list of the 10 Best Indie Rock Docs, and We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen tops out at #1, where it belongs.  Not to say the rest of the list isn’t absolutely stellar - but every time you hear the Chili Peppers, you really have D. Boon, Mike Watt and Karl Hurley to thank.  No, really.

The Acoustic Blowout sessions on the bonus DVD still blow my little mind.  For a taste, check out these versions of “Corona,” and “I Felt Like A Gringo.”  And for even more proof that God loves a power trio - and a great introduction to this seminal awesomeness, secure yourself a copy of Double Nickels On The Dime and go to town.

Viva D. Boon, baby…

Gini.

OK, I’m officially declaring this a Grupo Fantasma kind of afternoon.  Enjoy!

Gini.

The new Ben Folds Five album is out. Look for a giveaway next week. If you just can’t wait, please, by all means secure a copy today.

todd pipes

POLAR PATTERNS

 Stream the first song on the album.

All signs indicated Pipes was destined for a creative life. He grew up in the East Texas college town of Huntsville, which is home both Sam Houston State University and to eight state penitentiaries. Pipes describes his childhood and adolescence as “idyllic–like something out of a John Hughes movie.” Pipes and his younger brother Toby lived in a home ”where my parents were always playing Simon and Garfunkel albums, Neil Diamond, and other singer/songwriter types, as well as a endless amounts of classical music…“

In his pre-Internet teenage years Pipes‘ musical lifeline to the outside world was a little record store called ‘The Ear Doctor’ where he learned about and ordered Indie, New Wave, and Industrial imports. The Pipes brothers played in their share of bands, but when Todd entered graduate school and joined Toby at University of North Texas, everything changed. Inspired by the sheer number of bands in the area, they ditched their synthesizers and formed a new group.

That band became Deep Blue Something, which after knocking around the Midwest club circuit for a few years, scored an international hit in 1996 with the album Home and its breakthrough single Breakfast at Tiffany‘s, which reached #3 on the US charts, #1 in the UK, and found top five success in almost every country in the world.

In 2000 the Pipes brothers opened Bass Propulsion Laboratories recording studio in Dallas, where such acts as Cat Power, Drowning Pool, Forever the Sickest Kids, and Five Times August have recorded. DJ Shadow used the studio to remix the Rolling Stones‘ “I‘m Free” for a Chase Bank commercial with the Pipes brothers programming synthesizers as well as playing guitar and bass.

For several years Pipes worked as a producer and session musician, but by 2008 he realized he‘d owned the studio for almost a decade, but had yet to record one note of his own music there. And so in early 2008 he started writing. The result is the concept album Taurus Petals, the title being a homonymic reference to the Moog Taurus pedal keyboard.

Musically the album was inspired by Nick Drake, The Cure, Depeche Mode, and the early solo work of Morrissey, but the ideas behind the album came from a combination of everyday life and his voracious appetite for reading obscure titles concerning comparative religion and philosophy.

Polar Patterns, the new EP, continues where Taurus Petals left off with Pipes again writing, recording, mixing, and playing all instruments.  This time around, however the tracks are leaner and more focused, with Pipes’ primary instrument, the bass, prominently featured on three of the four titles.  Lyrically, the songs are more personal, dealing with friends divorcing, suburban paradise, and the inevitable struggle between fate and freewill.

Brooklyn-based Grizzly Bear’s fourth album, Shields, hits stores next Tuesday, but you can get your First Listen fix here, courtesy of the kind folks at NPR Music.  Thank you, Bob Boilen.  Thank you, Santa.  Thank you, Easter Bunny, et al…

Gini.

Nothing says “happy Friday!” like a little Pin Ups-era Bowie.  Have a fantastic weekend, Pop Kids…

Gini.