The Hippodrome

Rarely in indie-pop do you see an artist using their name as the band. That appears to have disappeared long ago in the early to mid 1990s. But, with artists like Shawn Fogel rising up, it may be making a comeback. But wait! Jeremy Sparrow is not in the band. Is it a made-up name? Or is it a moniker taken from a novel, as that of Harper Lee?

Jeremy Sparrow is a made up name and a fairly new discovery. The band messaged me several… err… months ago about writing a little feature on them, but I never got around to it other than sticking it on my “things to do” list. When I finally checked them out, I found their music to be the hefty style of pop I tend to associate with countries like Denmark (their home) and titles like “experimental” (well… slightly experimental).

While it’s nowhere near as monumental as fellow Denmark cohorts Mew, or not nearly as experimental as The LK side-project Fredrik, Jeremy Sparrow does know a thing or two about crafting a good pop tune. There’s an 80s element to the music, often found in the guitar riffs, bass lines, and jumpy percussion. Just listen to “The Rent’s Due” and you’ll hear it.

Audio: The Rent’s Due
Audio: Outrunning Paper Tigers
Audio: Suburb

Tyler Griffith moved to Queen Creek, Arizona, six years ago, and has been making mostly laid back instrumentals ever since. A bassist by trade, he grabs whatever he get his audio hungry paws on quickest.

Most of Griffith’s tracks are wonderfully postmodern in their self-referential DIY ethic… “Timers” takes the ubiquitous chair creek found in homemade demos and turns it into a fleeting beat. This is even better considering Griffith’s bedroom production tool — Garageband. “Property Ownership” (or P___O) is a super relaxed lounge piece that uses some nice bells, panning, and a false coda to achieve its unpretentiously beautiful effect.

Griffith also has a few interesting videos up on his MySpace, which make sense considering the soundtrack quality of his work.

Audio: Property Ownership
Audio: Timers

For some time now, Calabash Music, an online vendor of international music and a former employer of yours truly, has been shopping around its micro-financing platform for musicians that don’t have the funds to cut a record themselves. Now, Calabash is in the final round of an Ideablob contest that could give them the funding needed to get the idea off the ground. The idea, “Tune Your World,” from Calabash’s page:

Every artist has the same problem of obtaining capital for their next recording. Tune Your World provides the solution of applying micro-financing to the music industry. Our groundbreaking approach is the creation of peer-to-peer micro-financing of new music projects - enabling fans to deliver start-up capital to aspiring musicians from developing countries. Tune Your World operates on a people-to-people model. Musicians obtain funding for new recordings directly from their fans without giving up ownership or control. Our mission is to revitalize the music industry in places where the music industry has never worked very well.

While I did indeed work for Calabash, my opinions on this idea stand separately from my personal relationship with the company. Micro-financing has worked all over the world in many different industries, and while some sites like Sellaband have tried to bring it to western audiences, Calabash is the first company to implement it in places where the mainstream music industry has failed the most. With a business model that makes sense for the consumer and the artist, I encourage you to visit Calabash’s Ideablob page and vote to help them achieve their goal.

Rooftops are a math rock trio heavily influenced by recent Chicago visionaries like Pele and Don Caballero. The band is about to hit the road with The Americas, a Santa Rosa duo that are also looking to make their mark on the west coast. Bellingham, Washington, is the band’s home, and it isn’t a scene to scoff at either; beneath the home town heroes of Death Cab for Cutie lie hearty labels like Estrus Records that have churned out more than a few regional legends.

While Rooftops only have a few demos of recent work available, the band’s chops and groove tactics make them stand out from the crowd. “Robuts” is a rough recording from last year, but it still shows them playing solid instrumentals reminiscent of some of David Longstreth’s earlier music.

Audio: Robuts

(This is a continuation of a multi-part post. For part one, click here.)

Mississippi is a glorious state. If it wasn’t so hot (it was about 95 and humid today in Clarksdale), I’d love to live here for a while. We’ve been dressing fairly low profile and keeping the camera as discreet as possible, but even when they recognize we’re Northern tourists, people are still impeccably friendly and hospitable.

We left New Orleans last Thursday after a refreshing walk on the much hipper Frenchmen street, away from the girls (reluctantly) gone wild over on Bourbon. Local roads took us through the still much destroyed lower ninth ward, hit hardest by Katrina. We made our way up the gulf coast, hugging the shore as much as possible and eventually ending up in Gulfport.

There we visited an austere naval base where my grandfather was once stationed, and a b-b-q joint that was reduced to its foundations, blown away and abandoned. A picture on the wall of Daddy’s Little Kitchen, our replacement lunch locale, showed the building up to the roof in water. Even in the once affluent city of Biloxi, the only significant signs of industry were the massive casinos that rose like mountains off the man made beaches.

Depressed enough with the ravaging of Katrina, we skipped Mobile and headed instead to the sleepy town of Hattiesburg. We finally realized we had no idea what we were doing, and entered our second independent bookstore of the trip in search of a Mississippi guide. I managed to insinuate a “we’re from Boston” in the exchange with the cashier, and within twenty minutes, we had heard the life stories of the bookstore’s owners, the cashier (Diane) and her husband. We diligently wrote down every independent bookstore in Mississippi, and then borrowed Diane’s umbrella, enabling us to visit a local farmer’s market in the sunny rain.

At the market, I talked to a teen selling her photographs. She looked me square in the eye and explained that they “were an attempt to capture the essence of Mississippi.” Dropping another “we’re from Boston, sorry if we look lost” at a soap stand warranted a friendly “oh! I used to be stationed at Fort Devens!” and some friendly banter about the weather. Remarking on the weather is always a good idea.

A couple hours north, we hit the Elite Restaurant in Jackson, the state capital. The next morning at breakfast (which I slept through), my dad told me of a big family proudly reading off a U.S.A. Today every state Obama has won so far. Exploring the downtown in the morning showed another sleepy town, and in a downtown park parched by the heat, this church mural projected itself across the square… super southern Gothic:

West to Vicksburg brought us to the beautiful, 16 mile National Park that showed us the locales of one of the most important civil war battles. The conflicting inner narratives in the visitor’s center and tour were fascinating; the hokey 50s movie that we watched kept calling both sides “valiant” and “indisputably heroic.” My favorite of the 1300 statues was the Kansas memorial. The circles symbolize the union before, during, and after the war:

North to Greenville (via a national wild life refuge where I did indeed come within 20 feet of a wild alligator) created some inner disputes. Greenville was the poorest place I’ve ever visited… a waterfront casino has helped generate enough crime to board up most of the downtown, pushing commerce to the chains on the strip. Junior’s Juke Joint, an excellent delta blues resource, suggests several places in the neighborhood and urges people not to be afraid of the roving pimps and drug dealers that haunt the best places downtown.

We made a good faith effort to find some music, but nothing seemed to be going on. We ate at the now famous Doe’s Eat Place, sitting right in the kitchen between a man explaining to his son the ways the devil can get you, and a party of high school grads, arms tentatively around their girlfriends. A rove around town the next morning demystified some of the previous night’s uncertainties:

Now we’re in Clarksdale, soaking in the crossroads and visiting a few blues places tonight. The ways that music and culture influence eachother down here raise alot of interesting prompts, but that’s for a more detailed examination. I’m going try to take a video of Robert Belfour at Red’s Place tonight, and will have all the details in a few days… assuming an alligator doesn’t get me first.