The AV Club Doesn't (But Does) Review The New Off With Their Heads Album

Yesterday, The AV Club ran an interesting anti-review of the new album from Minneapolis punk band Off With Their Heads. What does the term "anti-review" mean? You either review something or you don't? Well, yes. But, AV Club writer Jason Heller argued that record reviewing is highly, highly subjective, and that most record reviewers falsely assume a level of expertise regarding the subject of music. However, Heller argues, most people lie, and if you can have a laugh at your own self-deception, then you're just part of the human condition.

From there, Heller "reviews" From The Bottom, the newest album from the quintet:

Off With Their Heads is a punk band. Not a prefixed, hyphenated kind of punk. Just punk. And From The Bottom is one of the best punk albums I’ve heard in a long time. Their songs are about struggling with being a shitty boyfriend. They’re about being pissed off when the media tries to stir up terrorism fears after a huge bridge collapses in your hometown. They’re about fucking up, over and over, and wondering if you’re learning to get better or simply eroding your ability to ever change.

It’s plainspoken and plainly played. It’s gruff and grim and guilt-ridden and vulnerable. It makes me feel like I’m a kid again. It makes me feel older than I’ve ever felt in my life.

There's much more, including Heller explaining his personal connection to the band, despite not have meeting them, and to No Idea records, (Off With Their Heads' label) in general, and how he can relate much more to the album than to a record review of it.

Read the entire piece, which includes video, here.

Off With Their Heads MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)

The Onion Interviews Martin Dosh

Download: Dosh - "Capture the Flag"

MPLS-based multi-instrumentalist Dosh released his fourth full-length long-player, Wolves and Wishes. Wolves, like its predecessors, does a fantastic job demonstrating what Dosh is all about: minimalist electronic symphonies which, using loops of different instruments like guitar, violin, saxophone, keyboards and drums, build slowly, but surely, to a rousing conclusion. Inquiring minds would probably like to know how Dosh goes about making his records, so the people over at the Onion A.V. Club, the like-minded entertainment section of satirical newspaper The Onion, sought the answers to that question, and more. Here's an excerpt of the interview:

AVC: Wolves And Wishes and The Lost Take brought in a lot of guest musicians, including Bird and Bonnie "Prince" Billy.

Martin Dosh: I want to expand. I'm unable to play instruments like violin and guitar—I play a little bit of guitar, not enough to come up with cool ideas, I think. I just want to have other textures in the music—I don't want it to just be all keyboards, xylophones, and drums. It can be really cool that way, but right now I want to hear those other textures. The violin is awesome, and obviously there are other avenues I could explore by sampling other things. There's so much I like about sampling other people that are reacting to my music. So I have my basic track [with] drums, melody, keyboards, and Jeremy comes over and says, "What should I play?" I'm just, "Eh, try a couple things." And we'll do a few passes through, improv-style, and listen back, find the good stuff, chop it up, move it around.

From there, the interview, conducted by Christopher Bahn, goes on to discuss the effect that touring has on Dosh's creative process, working with frequent collaborator Andrew Bird, and whether or not Dosh worries that a song will be too complex to play live.

Read the rest of the interview here.

In the meantime, check out two videos of Dosh playing live. There's "Capture The Flag", which was captured at Dosh's home, and "Um, Circles and Squares", the video of which was shot by a fan at Dosh's show in Omaha on June 6th. The last is of Dosh playing "Subtractions, Part One" at the Walker Art Center last month in Minneapolis, as part of his "World of Dosh" shows.


(Dosh, "Capture The Flag", live at home)
Via Anticon


(Dosh, "Um, Circles and Squares", Live in Omaha)
YouTube Link


(Dosh, "Subtractions, Part One", Live at the Walker Art Center)
YouTube Link

Wolves and Wishes is out now. Buy it here.

Dosh MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)

Tokyo Police Club Abide By The Onion A.V. Club's "Random Rules"

Download: Tokyo Police Club - "Tessellate" (Tom Campesinos Remix)

"Random Rules" is one of the Onion A.V. Club's more creative, hell, maybe even ingenious, features. The premise is simple, but effective. A band sits down with their MP3 player for a brief interview. The interviewee is asked to put their player on random/shuffle, and then asked by the interviewer to comment on the tracks that come up. No skipping aloud, no matter how embarrassing the results are. For this week's edition, the AV Clubbers interview singer/bassist David Monks of Tokyo Police Club, who are currently hot as shit on the Elbo.ws artists list. The song selections themselves are surprisingly tame--it pretty much consists of every significant indie artist from the past 5 years. Still, it's an insight into the guy's iPod. Can't go wrong with that.

Read the article here.

Elephant Shell is out now.

Tokyo Police Club MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)

Bob Mould Participates in A.V. Club's "Random Rules", Drops Some Science About Chicago Punk

Download: Bob Mould - "See A Little Light"
Download: Bob Mould - "The Silence Between Us"
Download: Bob Mould - "High Fidelity"
Download: Sugar - "Helpless" (all MP3s via Bob Mould's website)

"Random Rules" is a feature over at the A.V. Club where the entertainment section of The Onion asks various artists, musicians, authors, and anyone else relevant to the cultural landscape to put their MP3 players on random and then comment on what comes up. No skipping allowed! This week's participant is Bob Mould, who, to quote Ron Burgandy, "is kind of a big deal" when it comes to his role in Minneapolis music (though who knows whether or not Mould's apartment has leather-bound books or smells of rich mahogany). In order to promote his new record, The District Line, Mould took part in the feature.

Check out the very first song that pops up:

Black Flag, "Rise Above"

Bob Mould: Black Flag, hilarious. Was this the first Henry track, or was "Jealous Again" the first Henry track? It's definitely Henry now that they're singing. I think it was the period where there were five members of Black Flag for that moment, when Dez Cadena went from singing to playing the second guitar.

The A.V. Club: There's that old story about Black Flag seeing Hüsker Dü in Minneapolis and being blown away by the whole frenzied spectacle.

BM: It was Chicago, actually. It was at Oz. It was after a show that they played at another club. They came over and saw Hüsker Dü and sorta flipped out. That was '80 or '81. I can't remember, somewhere in there. Black Flag were quite a band. That was always quite a sight, to see them onstage

Being a young whippersnapper, I had not heard of the club OZ. So I did a bit of the digging, and this is what I found articles which mentioned the now-defunct Chicago club's role in the Chicago punk scene.

Check out Miles Raymer's article about Chicago punk here as well as the Punk Database's Wiki about Oz here.

Listen to various Bob Mould MP3s at the top of the post.

Buy The District Line here.

Bob Mould MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)

The A.V. Club Asks Atmosphere's Slug About Love And Sex

Download: Atmosphere - "YMG"
Download: Atmosphere - "Domestic Dog"


Feeling frustrated with your love life? Feel like you can't get any answers and have no where to turn? Dreading spending another Valentine's Day alone? If so, head over to The A.V. Club by January 28yh, because you'll have the opportunity to ask questions about sex and love to one of hip-hop's foremost experts in those subjects: Slug, from Minneapolis-based hip-hop duo Atmosphere.

In order for you, the reader, to submit a question to Slug, you must do two things: Write your question to email address tastetest@theonion.com or ask your question on the comment board of the A.V. Club article announcing the feature. Do so by January 28th. If your question is one of the better ones, then the A.V. Club will forward the question on to Slug for his advice. Basically, it's the underground hip-hop version of Savage Love.

In other Atmosphere news, the duo's excellent online-only release Strictly Leakage was recently reviewed on Pitchfork. The fork also released Lemon's track
list. Here it be:

When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold tracklist:

01 Like the Rest of Us
02 Puppets
03 The Skinny
04 Dreamer
05 Shoulda Known
06 You
07 Painting
08 Your Glass House
09 Yesterday
10 Guarantees
11 Me
12 Wild Wild Horses
13 Can't Break
14 The Waitress
15 In Her Music Box

First pressings of Lemons will include a DVD of last fall's First Avenue shows which, as you may remember, were in support of Sad Clown Bad Winter 11, as well as a 40-page book which will include credits, lyrics, and a children's story from Slug. I really hope the tale resembles something like the Wonder Showzen Season 2 DVD storybook.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint That Shit Gold is out in April on Rhymesayers

Atmosphere MySpace Page

Speaking Of The Replacements...

Check out this video of The Mats performing "Johnny's Gonna Die" at the 7th Street Entry way, way back in 1981. That's just a little bit older than I am. Whoa.

Thanks to the A.V. Club for unearthing this clip. To read Noel Murray's thoughts on the video (and many, many others), go here.

(Jonathan Graef)

Fog - Saturday Night At The Triple Rock

Download: Fog - "What's Up Freaks"
Download: Fog - "I Have Been Wronged"
Download: Fog - "Your Beef Is Mine (Dntel Remix)"

Experimental Minneapolis rock act Fog is playing Saturday Night at the Triple Rock. The show starts at 9:00 p.m. and is 21+. Buy tickets here. They're touring behind their most recent album, Ditherer, which was released in August.

Also, Fog was recently featured in in the AV Club. Check out that interview with the band by clicking the link.

MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)

The Onion AV Club Hates on Hipsters Who Hate on Other Hipsters

Download: LCD Soundsystem - "Losing My Edge"

The Onion AV Club has a fantastic article about the absurdity and hypocrisy of hipsters who hate on other hipsters. You can read it for yourself, in its entirety, here. It was inspired by Time Out New York's piece about how hipsters must die, which I blogged about here. However, before you do so, check out this choice quote from Steve Hyden's article:

Hipster-hating hipsterism is to the ’00s what anti-political correctness was to the ’90s, on a somewhat smaller scale. Anti-political correctness began as an inevitable backlash against left-wing censorship on college campuses and in elite intellectual circles, and grew into an insufferable, all-purpose complaint used to justify the existence of self-consciously dumb entertainment like The Man Show and Fox News. Similarly, hipster-hating has gone from being a standard and relatively benign mainstay of Internet message boards to an obnoxious, ubiquitous lament no longer on speaking terms with good sense.

I couldn't have said it any better myself. Reading this article made me reflect upon Yoko Ono's performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival (I know, I know. We'll have our coverage up soon). Because as godawful, inexplicable, and annoying as Yoko's performance was on Saturday night, Yoko's baby-boomer haters are even more godawful, more inexplicable and more annoying. I more than understand why someone would dislike Yoko Ono's music (a brief summation of her Saturday night performance: "Confusion! Confusion! WAAAAaaa! WAAaAAAAAaA! WaaaaAAAAaAAAaaa! I love you"). But sweet Christ on a cracker, if I have to hear about how she "broke up the Beatles" one more time, I'm going to vote Republican.

The Beatles broke up nearly 40 years ago. Before that time, they had evolved from poppy, melodious hitmakers to one of the most experimental, influential bands ever. By the end of that time, though, band tensions were to the point where breaking up the band was an inevitable course of action. Yoko Ono may have had something to do with speeding up that inevitability. Again, this was 40 years ago. There have been many developments in the world of popular music. Might I suggest the following groups who have followed in The Beatles' footsteps: Of Montreal, The Flaming Lips, My Bloody Valentine, Big Star, Badfinger, Nirvana...the list goes on and on and on. However...if you still think that it was all Yoko's fault, then allow me to invoke the immortal words of renowned philosopher Judd Nelson's On School Mandated Detention (The Club of Breakfast): B-O-O...H-O-O.

I feel the exact way about hipster-hating-hipsters that I do about Yoko Ono's critics. They both have valid points, but because their criticism is, in essence, a completely knee-jerk reaction, their vehemence totally undermines any valid thoughts that may have legitimized that criticism in the first place.

Because as annoying as it is for someone to be conceited about their own taste in music or cinema, it's even more conceited for someone else to assume that just because a person dresses a certain way, or listens to certain music, that that person is automatically conceited about what they listen to or watch.

Anywho, those are my two cents. How do you feel about all of this, dear readers?

(Jonathan Graef)