A Pair of Past-Related Reviews; Part 2; Action and the Red Baron

In my last post, I had said that I planned to review Cameron Audet’s new record, and then Jason Hebert’s record with “Action and the Red Baron.” I am, however, going to switch the order, and review the Action record today, and presumably tackle the Audet record next, as information-gathering for one entry has taken a bit longer than the other.




Action and the Red Baron is a collaboration between Jason Hebert (“The Red Baron”- vocals, guitar, tambourine, shaker) and Dan Custer (“Action Dan”- piano, bass, turntables, beatbox, programming). As I said before, Jason has previously played with and fronted several bands, including Rusted Tricycle and Theory of Regret. Action Dan produces quite good electronic music under his own name. They recently released a record called “A Dream Awakening,” which is available through CDBaby, iTunes, and Amazon.com.

It seems a requisite part of an indie-rock singer’s recording catalog at this juncture to team up with an electronics-guru at some point, to release a record of vaguely dancy/ vaguely atmospheric emotional techno tracks to cater to the rock-throwback song-structure-and-melody whims of the current electro-hipster crowd. While I have to admit a certain taste-based bias in favor of this format, I also have some critical reservations about the proficiency with which it is often executed, as with most flavor-of-the-minute recording whims that force us to call the motives of its perpetrators into question a bit. Although “A Dream Awakening,” in principle, fulfills many of these qualities, it proves to be a more concisely constructed, and at the same time more diverse, record than many other such experiments.

Throughout the record, one of the easiest things to note is how startlingly crisp the overall production is. I am amazed by how effortlessly the variety of sound-scapes used spin in, out, and around each other. The sonic depth of these songs is immense and cavernous, and the beats are well-varied, atmospheric, and unusually well-suited to the emotional contents of the songwriting.

Jason’s voice opens the track “Still Standing” in a solo tone that is organic enough for the emotional style of the delivery, yet appropriately processed enough to fit with the electronic format of the project (a balancing-act of production rarely achieved in electro-crossover projects). “I was standing at the top of the world when the news came in.” The melody sounds optimistic and downright poppy, until the beats kick in dramatically on the word “in,” proving immediately that Action’s instrumentation is not merely presented as backing-tracks for Jason’s voice, but as integral aspects of the way that the duo intends to convey the overall statement of the song, a theme that is evident throughout the record, and one of the elements that makes the album shine. As the “news” comes in, the mood is shifted on a dime from upbeat to darkly introspective. Even when a guitar part breaks into the mix that by itself sounds downright doom-esque and like it shouldn’t really work, because of the overall tonal coherency of the track, for one reason or another, it definitely does. Some of the vocal-breaks and refrain-repetitions verge closer to Chester Bennington terrain than I ever thought that I would hear Jason doing, but these work surprisingly well, even to those of us who aren’t exactly in Linkin Park’s stylistic demographic.

On the track “Talking Distant Variable,” Jason lets Action Dan take the foreground. With reverb-drenched piano-lines and textural beat-crescendos, there’s definitely a bit of an Air/ Thievery Corporation down tempo vibe going on. Things get a tad muddy when the vocals try to force harder-edged choruses from the depths of the over-arching chill-out-session, with the sudden addition of guitars that are well executed, but a bit over-played and over-stated in the mix.

Like most indie/electronic projects, this record is not lacking for a couple of dancier groove-based moments. The most thoroughly funky track, and the outfit’s most complete foray into indie-dance-electro, is “The Night is Alive,” which is driven by an infectious bass hook and googly-synth modulation, and features a refreshing tenderness that is not often tapped in this format. It reminds me a bit of something in between a more-organic Postal Service and a more-upbeat One AM Radio, with a melody hook that calls to mind the Folk Implosion’s “Natural One.”

“I Am Gone” sounds utterly lush and emotionally rich, in an extremely cinematic way, featuring string-pads that interplay well with piano tinkling and vocal harmonies adeptly manipulated to fade in and out of the bright, breezy (yet lonely) fields of orchestration. This is the track on which I can hear the most evident footprints of Portishead, the band that Action Dan cites first in his list of influences (a reference that I’m personally pleased with, as anyone who recalls related past reviews and fan-geekery I’ve posted may recall).

The record runs the mood-scape gamut. “Phase and Cancelled” features trippy sonic experimentation, and elements of Pink Floyd, Atari Teenage Riot, Collide, Ladytron, and Metropolis Records fodder all come to mind at various moments in the track. On the other end of the spectrum, “In the Distance“, begins with Jason playing a sentimental acoustic song over washes of nature-sounds, building into a solid groove with more of the lush orchestration and soothing vocal textures that these guys do so well, with a bit of a Death Cab For Cutie vibe.

Overall, I can see any of these songs working extremely well on a vast stylistic variety of film soundtracks, and in this regard the record reminds me a bit of Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine.” If for no other reason (as I can’t claim that it sounds terribly similar or bears the same sort of aesthetic) but that the songs off of that record fit in just as appropriately within the myriad of different sorts of films that employed them. As the cinematic nature of its overall sound would require, this record’s moody diversity manages to transcends the somewhat overplayed format that it otherwise might be perceived to fall within. “A Dream Awakening” reminds us of the original purpose of this collaborative trend; if indie-musicians and electro-wizards are doing really interesting things on their own, why wouldn’t a combination of the two prove interesting? On this record, it definitely does.

A Pair of Past-related Reviews- Part 1: You and I, Walk by the Ocean; Back-Catalog, Back-story.

I recently received a link from Cameron Audet, informing me that his acoustic-project’s new record is complete and currently being released. You may or may not remember Cameron as one of the two singer/ guitarists who fronted Rusted Tricycle, an emo/ pop-punk outfit that I played bass for, the better part of ten years ago. The project that the link featured has existed for a while under the name Audet, but, according to the website, is in the process of being re-titled Armor and Rage.

In recent months, I have heard similar updates from Jason Hebert, the other of the Tricycle’s former frontmen. He seems to be most currently active with a project called Action and the Red Baron, who have also recently released a new record.

By this point, the three of us that comprised Rusted Tricycle’s front-stage trifecta have played with quite a few different projects, and each have a fairly diverse back-catalog, of which our time with the Tricycle provides merely a blip in the far-removed past.

Nevertheless, the Tricycle definitely had its place, and provides an important piece in each of our musical evolutions. And, hey, since returning to New Hampshire last fall, no matter how much time has passed, I’ve received at least a few surprising “I know you from somewhere... Aren’t you the guy from...”’s, about that band, more often than any other from my past.

Reviews of the most recent records from these two of my fellow Tricyclists will follow in coming entries. (Unfortunately, I know nothing currently about the post-Rusted musical careers of Mike 59 or Benny, the two R.T. drummers… do you? If so, be in touch, and I’ll try to touch on that as well.)

Art and Ideas in an Economic Recession.

Everyone I know seems to be scrimping a bit financially right now. This is probably redundant; something that goes without saying... and it's probably also a fairly obvious assertion that among those affected are "artists," a group who are often labelled and stereotyped as "starving" to begin with.

These artists, however, seem to me to be in a better place to use the economic hard-times as a growth-period: Rather than dollars-signs, the commerce of our trade and the coin-scale of our success is composed of ideas and creativity. These things are not intrinsically tied to economic fortunes. In fact, I think there are gains to be made by being forced to limit our resources, to need to separate our intellectual capital from our fiscal.

This is a great time to change our cultural thought-processes, to finally make the moves away from consumerism that we've been toying with the hypotheticals of for so long. This economic downturn could function as a golden-period of innovation in arts and ideas, particularly if we strive to view our limited expendable incomes not as a factor that constrains our creative outputs, but instead as a factor that provides much-needed opportunities to reassess the way that we think about and engage in creative tasks.

This is a good time to really enact the old credo that's deep in and important to most of our artistic subconsciouses by now; that we learn the rules so that we know how to best break them. This is an ideal time to utilize all the rules that we've learned in order to break those same rules more thoroughly, and in more creative ways, than ever before.

Think: Do I need this tool? How can I do this differently? What less-orthodox medium can I use to make my point more poignantly? What means can I use to get my message out that could attract more attention than the tried-and-true by way of their unusual and un-tested methods?

In the past, the "starving artist" mantra/ cliche usually involved scrimping on food to buy art-supplies. What I'm saying is rather, for the overall benefit of your artwork, and the potential to say something truly progressive and innovative with it, try not to buy conventional art-supplies. Figure out alternatives.

Is it for any reason, besides past rules that you learned as a foundation for your skill set that, if you're a painter, for instance, you need to purchase canvasses to paint on? What else could be used to fulfill the same purpose, but more creatively, and perhaps to the better demonstration of the concept of the piece (not to mention more economically)? I promise, there are plenty of things, and I definitely feel that more artists being coerced to think this way will produce far more interesting art.

As another example, it would greatly benefit most musical acts to re concentrate their attention on creating more genuinely interesting sounds by stopping dishing out unrealistic sums of money to record in pro- or semi-pro studios to make "radio-ready" demos when they're still quite a few rungs on the industry ladder down from radio-play. Adhering to current "professional quality standards" does not always equate to a more listenable (or even more marketable) product. More creative-sounding recordings and noise-making that not only cost less money, but come about because they cost less money??? How can you go wrong? How are we ever going to hear anything new or original again when even the lowest-caliber local bands in any given city pay to record in the same sort of studios which are stocked with same sort of gear as everything on the radio? Conventional machines (which cost money) make conventional sounds (which sound like money, rather than ideas or creativity).

Utilize this tight time-period. Make it your opportunity. Change the way that we think. This is a great opportunity to remove dollar-signs from the creative-exchange, to make the idea-market decidedly and intentionally our own.

The Slow Season, But Cold.

“It looks like
Summer’s come early
This year,” I mumbled,
Through silver smoke
I can’t discern from
My breath in the cold,
By sub-arctic dumpsters
Behind the mall-attached
Restaurant I work in,
As a coworker and I
Smoked frigid boredom,
Waiting for tables that
Wouldn’t come, reflecting
How similar, though brittle,
It was, to the warmer
Season, the one we expected
To be this very quiet and still.

While waiting to find out where I head next for grad.school, I work in a restaurant that's attached to a shopping mall. Summers are always slow. Last year, this month was still smack in the middle of our busy-season, which didn't end until long after the snow had melted. The last couple of weeks have felt like the summer, in terms of business. I've been trying to put off writing about the current economic situation that we're all grappling with for as long as possible (mostly because I hadn't completely made up my mind if the issue had already been over-tread by the media and blogosphere-at-large, or if the attention has been, and is, warranted because of the all-encompassing nature of the changes in our social-climate). I've had alot of time lately to think about how and why people aren't spending money, while standing around waiting for them to come through our doors and spend the money that, in turn, allows me to spend money. The poem above is a brief musing I jotted down while sitting by the dumpster, grabbing some polluted air... I post it less because of my pride in how it turned out, and more because I felt that it worked as a fitting preface-piece to my next entry, which will feature some musings about the place and potential of arts and ideas in times of economic recession.

Stay tuned.

More updates...

I updated the look of the site a bit. I also updated my blogspot profile. Both were a bit outdated. Let me know what you think.

Also, as an update to the last update, Tipsy Cougar's lost song-files have been recovered, thanks to a friend of guitarist MacAlastair Ming's named Ben. We definitely appreciate it. I was a little bummed out about potentially loosing those songs, as (intentionally)unlistenable as they might be.

I updated that site a bit as well, including some new images, like this piece of photographic brillaince composed by my girlfriend/ the Cougar's synth-player, Sara Jane.



This image was actually captured (partially) during the same photo-treck that I documented with the prior entry about the Pandora sign. Many of her images of our field-trip are FAR more impressive than mine. I would definitely enjoy her work even if I weren't biased; she has a great eye.

Since I have nothing much else for this entry tonight, I guess I'll leave with a quote...

"Will whatever be written in lappish language with inbursts of Maggyer always seem semposed, black looking white and white gaurding black, in that siamixed twoa-talk used twist stern swift and jolly roger?" -James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

Playing Catch-up; A Laundry-List.

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve taken a bit of a break from posting here. This was partly intentional, and partly not. I apologize to anyone who missed my periodic ramblings over this time.

For those that don’t know, I’m looking to enroll in a graduate-school program next fall. The past couple of months have been crunch-time for my application process, which, in addition to working full-time as a server in a restaurant situated in a mall and juggling family obligations through the holiday season, trumped most other concerns. I can’t thank my wonderful girlfriend enough for how supportive she’s been through this stressful time period. It seemed for the last couple of months that whenever time was set aside for some enjoyment, a link didn’t work, a school’s website had been restructured, one assignment led to another I hadn’t foreseen, the internet connection crashed, or the sky decided to drop white shit. (on which note, the “winter parking ban” in Manchester has proven to be a MASSIVE inconvenience.)

Not to mention, technology apparently hates me, and the laptop that’s seemed permanently attached to me for the past few years decided to let a demon possess and overcome it at the worst possible time; about a week prior to my first deadline.

Now I type on a tiny blue baby-robot which will hopefully hold me over until I’m enrolled in a program that requires greater gadget features. I’m still getting used to the keyboard that’s smaller than one of my hands outstretched.

I had written a blog-entry that I planned to post over that time, but decided to scrap it, as it seemed a bit more personal, emotional and bitter than I had intended. Suffice it to say, it pertained to an experience that I had at a local bar/ music-venue that I was extremely put off with, that seemed disturbingly indicative of the problems I’ve witnessed with the current Manchester, NH art scene. Lesson being, think hard about the establishments that you choose to support, and the business-actions that you actively condone. I, for one, would need an almost unrealistically compelling reason to return to Milly’s Tavern.

Over the course of the time that I’ve taken off, I’ve also not written very much for my personal portfolio. The poetry that I’ve composed has been far more short and blunt than prior (which is ironically a skill-set that I had been meaning to hone anyway), and minimal in quantity, at best. I have, however, written more than my share of Statements of Purpose, Statements of Teaching Philosophy, Personal Statements, extensive essay-question answers, etc, and profuse amounts of edits to academic writing-samples.

I’ve been conducting a close-read of a first-edition copy of Julian Hawthorne’s two-volume biography of his father, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,” as well as attempting to wade through Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” in my “downtime” before my classes recommence.

I’ve done a bit of visual-art work, but not as much as in months prior… I’ve been currently working on a painting for my mother, a bit of a belated Christmas present, which is a bit of a tradition (I gave it to her, unfinished, saying that I would take it back and finish it… which has also unfortunately become a bit of a tradition.) This is what it currently looks like; I hope to finish it soon…


(eventually titled) Portsmouth Minor Triad, sus. Blue.

My electro-rock act Tipsy Cougar has taken a bit of a temporary break as well during this time, but we hope to resume recording our debut EP “Immaculate Conceptions” soon… To be fair, what the group has been working on most lately is figuring out how to recover the MP3 files of our past recordings that disappeared when my computer crashed. One of my New Years resolutions is to be better about backing up irreplaceable files. We did take some interesting Cougar photos on New Year’s Eve, though…


(l.t.r.; Sara Jane, Bernard LeVautour, MacAlastair Ming)

I’ve realized a lot lately about what I want (and what I don’t want) as active elements of my life. This time-period has presented me with many successive learning-experiences that have proved exceedingly positive, overall.

Over the break, I have received some interesting (and somewhat humorous) feedback on a rather outdated entry to this blog. You can read my response to the “anonymous” criticism on my myspace page.

In other news, I thought of an interesting idea when I was in the shower yesterday. I want to print shirts that say “[front] Thank you, Yoko, for breaking up The Beatles. [back] Support the Avant Garde. Reject Pop Music. (brought to you by the Asbjorn Arts Collective)”. Who wants one?

Now, if I could only get a volunteer from the audience to serve as Coldplay’s Yoko… What’s Bjork been up to these days?

Pandora, Revisited.

Some of you who have been reading my blog for a while now may remember an essay that I posted a little over a year ago, titled "Pandora; The Slow Death of Amoskeag". (For those of you who are newer readers, or didn't happen to catch that one, click here to read it now.)

When I posted the entry, I regretted that I wasn't able to post the photographs that the piece makes frequent reference to as accompaniment to the prose. They were all captured before I had switched my photography primarily to digital, the hard-copies were buried somewhere at the back of an over-crowded storage-unit, and I was posting from Arizona at the time, making it impossible to recapture the image in a more accessible medium (not to mention I was under the assumption that the sign had long since been removed from its haphazard home against the building.)

Since I've returned to Manchester, however, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that the sign still sits discarded in the same spot. Sara Jane and I took a stroll through the millyard recently with our cameras, so I'm now able to add some supplementary images to the earlier essay that had lacked them prior.

Enjoy.






















Stay tuned, I plan to post some more of the set tomorrow. The rest of the building is interesting and relevant as well. In keeping with one of the predominant themes of the essay, this is definitely a sort of a study in the interdependence of certain concepts of "beauty" and "decay."