Jena Ardell

We like reading quotations just as much as we like quoting musicians. So
we illustrated our favorite five quotations from musicians. This week's
topic: WHAT MUSICIANS SAY ABOUT OTHER MUSICIANS.

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By: Jessica Hopper
Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to help you stop doing it wrong. Send your problems to her -- confidentiality is assured, unless you want to use your drama as a ticket to Internet microfame.

Fan,
I'm in a band of moderate renown. We're a D.I.Y. outfit but the band covers its own operating costs and on tour we can draw a crowd anywhere we play. We're on the cusp of releasing our 2nd album, nailing down dates for a summer tour (including some festival gigs) and shooting a music video for the lead single.

And I am so goddamn bored I want to quit immediately.

It took us a year-and-a-half to finish our sophomore album. During mixing, I suddenly realized that for all my avant-gardiste pretense, we're just a rock band. Just like every other bloody guitar band on the planet. How depressing. I've become disillusioned with the very ontology of being in a band. I look at audiences with contempt and disgust. I watch other bands and feel nothing. The whole endeavor seems a laughable waste of time.

Next year my wife and I are leaving the country for good. Do I grit my teeth and continue til the end, for the sake of my bandmates? Or do I say "fuck this, I'm out," to save what precious little sanity I have left?

Signed,
S

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I was doing the whole Ke$ha "dollar sign" thing before she was!

If there is something we've learned about OC native and comedian extraordinaire Brad Williams over the years, it's that he is one hell of a dancer. We know there's no denying he's funny as hell and gets plenty of well-deserved standing O's, but that aside, this guy has moves for days. With an upcoming gig at the Irvine Improv, we used his rhythmic prowess as an excuse to give one of our favorite funny guys a homework assignment. The task at hand? To go through his extensive music library and "take it back" for us to a time long before he was rocking the stage. See, Williams was always rocking the dance floor, which is why we knew he'd get an A+ for his list of top five old-school dance-floor jams.

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Katrina Nattress

Youngblood Hawke
The Observatory
5/21/13
It's been a turbulent 10 years for Sam Martin and Simon Katz. Together, the two saw their former project, Iglu & Hartly, rise to moderate success and then crumble before their eyes. But when one door closes another opens up, and for the longtime friends the demise of one project guided them to something bigger and brighter: Youngblood Hawke.

Recruiting fellow Los Angeles-based musicians, Martin and Katz got their groove back and began writing songs and touring again. And now, a mere few years later, Youngblood Hawke has toured the country, released a successful debut album and single ("We Come Runnin'"), and received placements in "American Idol" and a forthcoming Coke commercial.

"Raise your hand if you were at our last show at the Constellation Room," Martin asked the packed Observatory last night in between songs. Only a handful of fans' hands shot up, and that show was last August. It's hard to believe that in less than a year a band can grow this exponentially, but after watching the six-piece perform, it's understandable.

See Also: Youngblood Hawke Are Flying High After Being Flat Broke

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Havoc

By: Phillip Mlynar
Editor's note: In "Tweets Is Watching," Phillip Mlynar asks local artists questions based solely on the contents of their Twitter timeline for our sister paper, the Village Voice.

Havoc dropped his new 13 album last week, a project he calls "an ode to hip-hop." Tonight, he'll be in Santa Ana rocking the Yost Theater as one half of legendary hip-hop duo Mobb Deep--on tour in celebration of their 20th anniversary. Before the show, we got on the phone to chat with him about his favorite rap stars, being stingy with Lloyd Banks' birthday present, and the time he met the recently departed Chris Kelly of Kriss Kross.

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Lauren Wickline

Death is truly on the way...

"Bring it on, motherfuckers..."
I hear myself whispering that line under my breath and in that moment I've truly lost grip on reality. I'm standing in the middle of a dusty horse arena on a sweltering afternoon with black war paint melting down my face. I'm wearing a cape, gripping an axe with white knuckle intensity, grimacing as I prepare to lunge forward into battle. Yep, that's right, I said battle. I'm not really sure when I fully decided to buy in to the Medieval feud that's brought me to a face-off with the heavy metal warriors of Songhammer. The pair of screaming maniacs decked out in super hero armor are staring back at me, growling and swinging their custom made mallets of death in my direction. They've just slain half a dozen of my fellow evil henchmen and now they look fucking pissed.

The face paint starts to run into my eyes as I charge toward ShredHammer, the taller, balder half of the duo. I swing hard at him and miss. Shred recoils with his weapon and swings it toward my face. Through blurry vision I see the hit coming in slow motion. I feel my feet leave the ground before launching back and landing face first in the dirt. For a split second the world goes dark. This is not the way I expected to spend my weekend.

"And cut!" the associate director yells. "Ok guys, great job. A few more and I think we got it."

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Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!

With all of the adoring fans and success that Zane Lamprey has had over the years with Three Sheets, Have Fork, Will Travel, and Drinking Made Easy, one might wonder why any TV network would keep us from being able to witness what we love watching him do the most--drink his ass off. Well, travel around the world and drink to be more exact. The bad news? That is what's happening. The good news? Zane and his team have taken matters into their own hands and with a little help from Kickstarter, they are creating a new drinking excursion on a global level called Chug.

For the show, Zane will hop aboard a train with his passport in hand to travel and learn about the drinking rituals and cultures from the locals and if you want to see this action take place like we do, you can help make it happen. And let's be real, who doesn't want to see Lamprey try to keep his balance on a train? With ten days to go on his Kickstarter campaign and a wide array of bonuses if you decide to back the project, we decided to get Zane to sing for some extra dollars. Too be more specific, we wanted to see what he's learned over the years so we picked Lamprey's boozy mind for his, "Top 5 International Chugging Songs." Hiccup, Enjoy!

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Sometimes it takes the demise of a semi-successful band to spawn a hugely successful one. That's what happened to Youngblood Hawke. The principal members of the Iglu & Hartly, Sam Martin and Simon Katz, used the lessons learned from their first band in order to propel Youngblood Hawke to heights they never saw coming.

The Los Angeles-based, San Antonio-bred group, named after author Herman Wouk, fuses elements of catchy indie pop and rock, and have caught on with the music listening public on the strength of their surprise hit, "We Come Running." "We love touring and playing shows, it's our favorite thing to do," lead singer Simon Katz says. "We're also writing at every chance we get. If you keep pushing and keep working at it, you're just going to get better. It's a seize the moment sort of thing."

They recently released their debut album, Wake Up, and just returned from a three-week east coast run and are in the midst of their West Coast run before zigzagging the country to begin the first of many festival dates that will keep them busy through the end of the year. Before their show at The Observatory, we spoke to Katz as the band headed down to San Diego, where we talked about "We Come Running," how his experience in Iglu & Hartly helped strengthen his resolve and his thoughts the championship prospects of his hometown San Antonio Spurs.

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Let's get this out of the way first: Kanye West makes incredible music. That much is undeniable. If anyone tries to dispute that, they deserve to be smacked. He's an innovator whose talents are better than a vast majority of rappers and producers in the hip-hop game right now. However, the following rant has nothing to do with his talents in either of those two fields.

The new songs he premiered on Saturday Night Live last weekend are actually really good. Lots of the early reviews and listens have compared "New Slaves" and "Black Skinhead" to harder edged stuff like early Nine Inch Nails and even Death Grips. Lyrically, Kanye comes out swinging against the paparazzi and corporations (of course we all love to hate both) to take his music to new artistic territory. If these two songs are an indication of what's to come, it sounds like he's got a lot to say on this album. And we are right there with him, until...we get to the album title. Yeezus? Really? If there was a question about his God complex before, we certainly can't deny it now.

Somehow, some way, anything that Kanye does now is perceived to be an instant classic, ahead of anything that anyone has ever done before. This past weekend's antics have proven such. For someone of his stature, he carries a gigantic chip on his shoulder that has provided the fuel to his proverbial fire, best demonstrated on his first three albums. Yet at the same time, he took this as a license to do whatever he wanted and no one close to him had the balls to put him in his place.

Along the way, Kanye became bigger than his music. It's everyone's fault for letting his ego to go relatively unchecked outside of the Taylor Swift incident, thus creating an aura of megalomania that's both annoying and infuriating. Usually after event like swiftboatting Swift would humble someone and while it seemed to for a little (just look at how the underrated My Dark Twisted Fantasy was received), it looks like old Kanye is back and more out of control than ever.

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Long Beach Opera

Van Gogh

By Greggory Moore
Van Gogh and The Tell-Tale Heart
Long Beach Opera
May 19, 2013
The epistolary life chronicle may be a thing of the past. Who writes letters these days, let alone eloquent, forthcoming revelations of the psyche and soul? We're lucky Vincent Van Gogh did. We are able to match one of the most compelling painters in history with his experience in his own words. Most of those letters were to his brother Theo and basically provide the libretto for Michael Gordon's Van Gogh, a short opera in six parts, the first four of which shift between a quietly aggressive angularity (I was reminded of mid-period Fishbone, believe it or not) and a spare bleakness that evokes the great artist's profound loneliness, times in which (as he tells his brother) he would go days without speaking to another person, except to order his dinner. Gordon has some nice moments here, such as a sequence of letter fragments, each begun with a "Dear Theo" motif, each with some minor detail that personalizes the voice: "I was on the dunes"; "I spent my last penny on this stamp."

See Also: Stewart Copeland Talks About His Opera Adaptation of 'The Tell-Tale Heart'

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