Sat
Sep
22
Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees
K-Holes, DJ Jonathan Toubin
The Well
260 Meserole Street
Brooklyn, NY, 11206
Doors 5:00PM / Show 6:00PM (event ends at 10:00 pm)
This event is all ages
Watch & Listen San Francisco psych wunderkind Ty Segall continues a tireless musical assault on ears and minds with his third album, Melted. Segall says it sounds like "cherry cola, Sno-Cones and taffy." Indeed! Over the past two years he's released records more often than most people do laundry, but somehow there is still a heap of anticipation for this new album on Goner packed full of truly psychedelic pop songs with great vocals and exciting arrangements.
On the heels of two critically acclaimed solo albums, Segall holed up in a basement studio with Mike Donovan of the SicAlps in late 2009 and early 2010 to come up with Melted. It's a carefree yet precise balance of acoustic and electric elements. Distorted echo and thunder mix together with enough clean guitar lines and addictive choruses to deliver an album that recalls the '60s without sounding like anything created during that decade. Time melts away, vision melts away, minds melt away. Get Melted!
"Ty Segall's short, sharp songs peal out of the garage without raising the doors, sending 1960s rock riffs crashing through splintered, smart-ass lo-fi buzz." -Pitchfork
"His second album, Lemons, solidifies his standing as one to watch.... There are few moments when Ty Segall isn't irresistibly catchy." -Nylon
"Warped sonics do nothing to diminish the impact of his vigorously nostalgic riff and stomp. Segall thunders along with the timeless, impudently rowdy energy of a cement basement dance-off." -Spin
What's the first thing you think of when someone mentions Thee Oh Sees? Probably their riot-sparking live show, right? Visions of a guitar-chewing, melody-maiming John Dwyer dancing in your head, rounded out by a wild-eyed wrecking crew that drives every last hook home like it's a nail in the coffin of what you thought it meant to make 21st century rock 'n' roll?
Yeah, that sounds about right. But it misses a more important point—how impossible Thee Oh Sees have been to pin down since Dwyer launched it in the late '90s as a solo break from such sorely missed underground bands as Pink and Brown and Coachwhips. (It's now a quartet featuring keyboardist/singer Brigid Dawson, guitarist Petey Dammit, and drummer Mike Shoun, and will soon introduce a fifth member, multi-instrumentalist/singer Lars Finberg.) That goes for everything from the towering, 13-minute title track of their last LP (Warm Slime) to the mercurial moods of 2008's The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In.
Which brings us to Castlemania, the closest Thee Oh Sees have come to creating a scuffed-up, home-brewed symphony. In other words, there's more to its 16 tracks than maniacal pop music ("Spider Cider," "If I Stay Too Long") or the kind of fang-baring, riff-raking garage rock ("Corrupted Coffin," "A Wall, A Century 2") that have made the San Francisco vets one of the underground scene's few standbys. Slip on a decent pair of headphones to hear what we mean, as junk shop synths float through the ether alongside flutes, horns, mellotrons, and enough scorched bells and whistles to reward many a repeated listen. And then there's Dwyer's actual lyrics, which explore familiar themes of love, friends, drugs, and death with a skewed delivery that's uniquely his.
"I guess there is a theme going on in this record," admits Dwyer. "It's shit I didn't realize while making it—songs about bad things, packaged in a summery record about getting numb to life and its little pleasures as you take it for granted with age."
Speaking of taking things for granted, Castlemania is the perfect entry point to spreading Thee Oh Sees gospel. It won't be their only release in the coming months, either. Expect yet another full-length in the fall—"maybe our best yet," according to Dwyer—and maybe a surprise or two on Dwyer's own Castle Face imprint.
"I work a lot alone, and I hate work unless it's mine," says Dwyer, "so I am 'living the life' as my sis would say. It's been a fruitful couple of years."
The K-Holes speak at once of the mystic and the cosmopolitan, the primal and urbane, the earthen and its synthesized cousins. But unlike their contemporaries, theirs is not a sound of the grinning, gregarious panderer. Nor is it one of the bored or at-ease. Rather, it's one of escape.
Escape from the concrete scrabble of New York, that moneyed parking lot for the cynical and privileged; escape from the vulgar materialism sung from the metropolitan mouth; escape from the vacuous r'n'r pantomime that promises mere vaudevillian entertainment in any number of the city's myriad dives. No, the K-Holes set these things afire, and in their stead, they proffer a wet hand, leading you, the wanton listener, down a path to another flame, a funereal white-hot pyre – one that promises more than sheer cleansing nihilism. One that promises freedom amongst cages of different shapes, sizes and colors. A way out.
Their abdication follows a natural extension of the atrophied rock/roll ligament –
unfurling from H. Williams to G. Vincent to Larry & the Blue Notes to the Pagans, Birthday Party, Flesh Eaters, Scientists, beyond – colored, at times, with ethereal smudges of primitive ceremony. As we follow their trajectory, running from the towering urban oppression, we hear whiffs of guttural noir in the honk of the sax, we hear the frustrated yelp in the guitar, we sense the bite and lust in their gang vocal. It's fueled, all the while, by a thundering beat of tribal divination. Their burghal séance urges us onward, upward, and we sense the fire nearing all the while. But the heat emanates not from the flame to which we run. It flowers from the pyre that has devoured us from the inside all along: the one that burns us up and tells us to move – in any direction at all, in any way we see fit, consequences be damned.
The K-Holes didn't put the fire there. But we sincerely thank them for finding and fueling it.
NEW YORK NIGHT TRAIN is the party machine of dynamic DJ/nightlife visionary Jonathan Toubin who is currently changing the world one wild 45rpm hoodang at a time! Making life a spicier by prompting folks to dance at rock shows, bars, art galleries, and other places that used to be no fun. And simultaneously offering a more extciting and exquisite “maximum rock and soul” alternative to the music typically spun at night clubs, discos, raves, loft parties, etc.
In just six years, Jonathan Toubin — rock and soul 45 DJ and proprietor of the New York Night Train brand party production enterprise — has charted a career that is culturally and commercially unparalleled. With a visionary take on nightlife and an obsessively curated collection of obscure 7-inch records, he has sold out clubs and performed at major rock concerts and festivals across the U.S. and around the world. Though known for the burning immediacy of his “maximum rock and soul” sets at the weekly Shakin’ All Over Under Sideways Down dance, his instructional Land of 1000 Dances spectacle, his elaborately grandious multi-media worldwide “Happenings”, and other trademark parties, Toubin’s take on 1960s soul music, the Soul Clap and Dance-Off, has left the biggest footprint on contemporary urban nightlife and put Mr. T on the map as soul man .
Working over 1200 gigs the last six years, Mr. Jonathan Toubin has managed to keep one Beatle boot in the counter-culture from which he emerged (punk bars, DIY basements, loft parties, art galleries, music venues, and shady afterhours spots) while crossing over to dance clubs, prestigious festivals, boutique hotels, museums, ivy league colleges, fashion parties, arena pop/rock shows, and even raves – garnering press in highbrow publications and receiving nominations for nightlife awards from the fancier side of New York culture in the process.
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