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)