Finally.

The Welsh, indie, noise-pop band The Joy Formidable released their fantastic EP A Balloon Called Moaning in the US last week. It’s been available in the UK for the better part of 2009 and is finally making its way stateside after building considerable buzz on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Joy Formidable is a power trio that meshes a lot of noise (loud drums, louder guitars) with lush but delicate harmonies. It’s often quite joyous to listen to how all of the instruments mesh together and form something so cohesive and beautifully messy at the same time. At the beginning of the year when the band was in New York to play a couple of shows, I spoke with singer/guitarist Ritzy Bryan for a brief phone interview and she said that after a few months of working together “we eventually found a sound where we all said ‘yeah, that’s what we want to sound like’ but that came from quite a bit of experimentation and going outside of the box quite a bit as well.” She went on to say that “when we started writing together we set out to be quite experimental but we try to be as expressive as we can with the sonics and the sound. We all had different styles but we just threw it out there and after about six months of writing together we found a way to not be shy and be truthful with it and it locked.”

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The first time I saw British pop star Kate Nash was almost two years to the day prior to the second time I saw her play. It was a sold out show at the Showbox at the Market and the buzz was beginning to make its way to the US after her debut album Made of Bricks hit number one in the UK. Her songs were perfectly catchy bedroom pop numbers accentuated by Nash’s witty lyrics and made with a piano and little else. She had barely gotten out of her teenage years but even then she had a knack with clever wordplay complimented with plenty of memorable hooks. Nash’s music was often like reading your most clever friend’s diary with a melody behind it. Listening to Made of Bricks or seeing her play those songs live, the adjectives that first came to mind would likely be “sweet” or “lovely” or “cute”.

After returning with an excellent and much more realized sophomore album, My Best Friend is You, a catchy-as-hell lead single that pays homage to 1960s girl groups and a US tour whose opening act is called “Supercute”, it would be easy to use those same adjectives to describe Nash in 2010. I interviewed Nash on the morning of her stop in Seattle last week and after I got off the phone with her, like after the first show I saw of hers, I thought she was perfectly lovely. She seemed quite humble after every compliment I gave her (which was often because I do think My Best Friend is You is a brilliant album) and was ready to write exactly that. I spent a lot of the time between our phone interview and when she took the stage at Neumos that same night (around twelve hours) mapping out exactly how I was going to write this article in my head.

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{Exene Cervenka plays at Easy Street Records (Queen Anne) on Friday, April 16 at 6pm, at Tyrannosaurus Records (Renton) on Saturday, April 17 at 2pm and at Damaged Goods on Saturday, April 17 at 5pm, all free and all ages.}

Record stores have, like nearly every business, not fared particularly well in the economic climate of the past few years. In fact, they have likely had a much more difficult time staying solvent as the move towards more people getting their music online than at retail stores. At the beginning of this year, the first two albums to hit number one on the Billboard 200 chart this year (Ke$ha’s Animal and Vampire Weekend’s Contra) were the first two albums in history to top the charts with more than 50% digital sales. The lower prices, huge catalogs and fast delivery methods have made iTunes, emusic and Amazon the often first place for people to go to purchase music (and that’s saying nothing of what is obtained via illegal downloading) and has made it that much harder for record stores to stay in business.

One artist who is doing what she can to help record stores is Exene Cervenka. Best known for being the badass frontwoman for punk band X and the alt-country band The Knitters, she has been one of the most prolific and multi-faceted artists over the past thirty-plus years. Not just a musician, but she’s also a writer, poet and visual artist. My favorite quote about Cervenka came from her X and Knitters bandmate John Doe (which I found in Maria Raha’s great book Cinderella’s Big Score), who said “she was such a badass! I pretended to be but Exene was the real thing. She had the ax to grind…the unusual wiring that made it possible for her to throw a drink in somebody’s face and still be right.” She most recently released a gorgeous solo record called Somewhere Gone last autumn. She is currently on a tour, playing in-store shows at record stores on the west coast that will include appearances at three Seattle-area record stores: Easy Street Records (Queen Anne) on Friday, April 16 and on Saturday, April 17, the actual Record Store Day, she’ll be at Tyrannosaurus Records in Renton and Damaged Goods in Belltown.

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{King Khan and the Shrines play at Neumos on Tuesday, April 13 with The Fresh and Onlys and Unnatural Helpers; 21+, $15 adv.}

When James Brown passed away a few Christmases ago, the title of “Hardest Working Man in Showbiz” had to have been passed to someone, if at all. For my money, the obvious choice would be the Montreal-born musician Arish Khan, better known as King Khan.

Khan has been one of the most prolific musicians over the past several years, constantly touring and working and recording with his projects King Khan and the Shrines and King Khan and BBQ Show, most notably. The rock band King Khan and BBQ Show is a collaboration with Mark Sultan, a musician from Montreal who has worked with Khan since their days in a mid-to-late 1990s band called The Spaceshits. There’s also Almighty Defenders, who released an album last fall on Vice Records, which was a gospel-inspired project between Khan, Sultan and Atlanta punk band The Black Lips, who found rock asylum at Khan’s Berlin home after an ill-advised tour of India where the band fled after learning the world’s largest democracy probably didn’t appreciate The Sex Pistols a generation before and still weren’t ready for their music. Khan is also planning on working with Wu-Tang Clan rapper GZA’s next album, when he can find the time.

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I already have a vagina-neck that fucks my penis-leg…or… How I email interviewed one of my favorite songwriters and learned that phone interviews are better! Adam Green has been a favorite of mine since I saw him perform as part of the Moldy Peaches in 2001. I dare you not to fall in love with his albums Friends of Mine, or his newest work, Minor Love. He has a little Lou Reed, Andrew Dice Clay, Sesame Street,and Peter, Paul and Mary in his lyrics and delivery. He plays at Chop Suey on Friday April 2nd, and I was lucky enough to get to ask him some questions.

I first learned about you when I saw the Moldy Peaches open for the Strokes in my hometown of Tacoma, WA in 2001. I was blown away by the Moldy Peaches. I am pretty sure that Kimya Dawson ended the show by saying, “Let’s go shit in some condoms!” Could this have actually happened?

Yes that’s the last line of “Rainbows” which was released as a B-Side.

How do you write songs? Do you start with a title? A melody? Chords?

Most of my songs I’ve written singing into a digital recorder while I’m walking around. It helps to be walking because there is a natural rhythm to that type of moving. Mostly I’ve made up the words and the melody at the same time but there are many exceptions.

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If you saw the Grammy Awards last January, you may have been left with several questions, most of which involve Lady Gaga. What interested me, though, was who was the bombshell singer performing with Jeff Beck during the tribute to Les Paul? In an evening full of the biggest performers in music taking the stage, she may have been the least-known artist to sing on stage, but gave a captivating and dynamic performance.

The answer to that is query is Imelda May, a thirty-five year old rockabilly singer from Dublin. She released her first album in the US, Love Tattoo, last September and just finished her first tour of the US, opening for British jazz/pop sensation Jamie Cullum. She’s arguably the most exciting female rockabilly singer since Wanda Jackson.

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This is the second part of the first installment of Portrait of an Artist.  D. Crane will interview musicians and artists who blow his mind.  Read along and see him sharpen his interview skills to that of a slightly sharp pencil.  Fred Schneider was the inspiration for the song “(do the) Magic Centipede,” off of BOAT’s  Setting the Paces LP.  His new band is called the Superions.  They make the most ridiculous surreal/silly dance music around. Read part 1 here.

Fred,  here is my attempt to ask you some clever/wacky/personal questions.  The level of cleverness/wackiness/personal-ness seems more minute now that I know that you appeared on Howard Stern, last week!  But here I go anyway!

Assuming you go to Totally Nude Island, what piece of clothing would you miss the most?

My wallet!  To buy all the fabulous things at the gift shop!

Are you vegetarian?  How long?

Since ’72.  A friend talked me into it after I dropped out of college.  I never liked fish anyway!

Where should I eat when I visit Athens for the Popfest?

In Athens there is a great vegetarian restaurant called the Grit, and a lot of other places that are really vegetarian friendly.

What happened with the ham in the video?

We bought the ham and were gonna donate it, but it fell on the floor during the video.

Do you like the song "Monster Mash"?  It’s maybe my favorite song of all time.

Yes!  I love everything Halloween.  I love old school Halloween.

What is Sprechstimme?

Talk singing.  When I started I am just singing as I go along.  If you listen closely there is hesitancy.  It is not for dramatic effect.  I’m trying to think of what to say next.

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Or:  How I Got to Interview Fred Schneider for 25 Minutes---SPONTANEOUS—BASIL LOVER—HERO OF THE SILLY AND ABSURD

This is the first part of the first installment of Portrait of an Artist. D. Crane will interview musicians and artists who blow his mind.  Read along and see him sharpen his interview skills to that of a slightly sharp pencil. Fred Schneider was the inspiration for the song “(do the) Magic Centipede,” off of BOAT’s Setting the Paces LP. His new band is called the Superions, and they have a brand new self-titled EP/LP on Athens, GA's Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records. They make the most ridiculous surreal/silly dance music around. Stay tuned for the second part later this week.

How did you get in touch with Mike from Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records (HHBTM)?

I am a record nut and he runs a record store, so naturally we hit it off. I heard that he runs a label with two of my favorite acts, Cars Can Be Blue and the Lolligags. I knew he was an honest guy and a hard worker, so  I suggested to the Superions, “Hey, let’s put this out on a small label.” Originally, it was going to be a single, but there were some remixes that I thought turned out great, and I couldn’t be happier.

How long ago did the Superions start?

We started about 5 years ago as the Del Morons.  The first song we did was a song called “Totally Nude Island.”  Dan and Noah came up with the music and I just went in the bathroom and came up with the words off the top of my head.  We thought it was fun.  People said they liked it and told us to put it on Itunes, and that they’d buy it. Most of the HHBTM recordings were recorded soon after.

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{Little Boots plays at Neumos on Saturday, March 6 with Class Actress and Dragonette.}

When I saw Little Boots perform last fall, it was the final stop on her brief US tour, at the Independent, a 500-person capacity club in San Francisco. The show, like every stop on that tour, was sold out, even more impressive that it would be almost six months before her excellent debut album Hands would land in US record stores. It was a very exciting set by a gifted performer that could very well become a big pop star in the United States and certainly worth the price of airfare and lodging.

Little Boots is Victoria Hekseth, a twenty-five year old pop ingénue from Blackpool, UK and has quickly become one of my favorite pop stars today, enough so that I would fly to San Francisco to see her perform a week and a half before another trip to the Bay Area for Kylie Minogue’s first ever US show and that I took the name for my pop music blog from one of her songs. Her songs are irresistably catchy and well-constructed and easy to get lodged in your brain for hours at a time.

Her music is straight-forward electro dance pop, with much emphasis on memorable hooks and choruses, or to borrow a line from my favorite Lady Gaga song, "glamourphonic, electronic, disco, baby". Hands was released in June of 2009 in the UK, where it charted as a top five album. It was released in the US just this Tuesday (March 2). The album is full of great, well-produced, -written and -polished pop songs, with the best songs (or at least my favorite) being the singles "New in Town" and "Stuck on Repeat."

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{Nouvelle Vague plays at the King Cat Theater on Thursday, February 4 with Backnbloom; all ages.}

Playing other people’s music is always a risky venture, to be sure. You’re playing music that is (usually) familiar but the comparison to the original composition is always there and can often be unfavorable. With French band Nouvelle Vague, they rearrange songs from punk, post-punk and new wave eras to often bossa nova pop to the point where only the lyrics remain recognizable. Not coincidentally, “Nouvelle Vague” translates from French to English as “new wave” and to Portuguese as “bossa nova”.

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