A week after the Inauguration I’ve warmed up from the seven hours spent standing on the National Mall in front of a jumbo-tron—not nearly as cold as my recently adopted Windy City, but you stand in place on cold ground for any length of time and you’re bound to get chilled—but the high of last week’s Inaugural Day has not quite worn off. It’s a feeling I hope we can bottle and sell and look back on the way people talk about JFK.
There were a lot of festivities that weekend besides the main event (or the surreal musical stylings of Garth Brooks and Beyonce at the concert on the Mall Sunday). Having had an opportunity to buy tickets for the Midwest Ball, I opted instead for the Hideout Big Shoulders Inaugural Ball last Monday night at the Black Cat—located on 14th Street near the U Street corridor in Washington, DC. The night brought a lineup of eight, mostly Chicago-based, bands and full coolers of Goose Island to our nation’s capitol. And for me, it brought my two favorite venues—from my new city and my old home—together for one night. A strange collision of hang-outs in honor of our new president.
U Street was awash with crowds lining up at Ben’s Chili Bowl (no chance of a half-smoke unless you were willing to stand in a line stretching down to 12th street, thanks to Obama and Mayor Fenty’s TV appearance the week prior), but down the block the folks from the Hideout had managed to give the Black Cat the intimacy of its own gigs. The upstairs’ stage was festooned with streamers, bunting, Chicago flags, and the iconic Obama print that a few weeks earlier had hung from outside the Hideout itself. Tim Tuten held forth from a podium, delivering the characteristic introductions as Freakwater, Ken Vandermark, Tortoise, Andrew Byrd, and the Waco Brothers, among others, all took their turn at the Chicago talent show. Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” led the crowd in singing “Solidarity Forever” along with Jon Langford of the Waco Brothers. There was vintage “thrift store” fashion, traditional black tie ball attire, and the rest of us hipsters who preferred to stay warm in our jeans.
Butcher Boy is a 7 piece outfit out of Glasgow, Scotland.
Lead singer John Blain Hunt hosted successful pop night The National Pop League (immortalized in the Camera Obscura song “Knee Deep at the National Pop League”) in Glasgow up until this past summer.
According to band mate and lead guitarist Basil Pieroni, Butcher Boy is named for a Booker Prize-winning novel by John McCabe: “It’s beautifully written, dark, disturbing and makes fun of stifling small town mores with the blackest of humour.”
Their first album, Profit in Your Poetry was released last year in the UK by London-based label (and club night of the same name) How Does it Feel to Be Loved?. Profit will make it stateside via Red Eye Distribution on October 7th.
These details might give you some idea of the pedigree of the band and its bent. Butcher Boy has been compared to some fine bands—Felt, the Tindersticks, Belle & Sebastian, and the Smiths, to name a few. But while the influences are there, Butcher Boy succeeds at making a lovely chamber pop all its own. Its lyrics conjure up an interior landscape of observations and emotions well suited to the current change of seasons.
The strength of Profit in Your Poetry is that influences inform songs rather than serving as quick indie pop shortcuts. Sure there’s jangle, sure there might be a nice tambourine here and there, but these classics aren’t the only tricks Butcher Boy has under its sleeve. Hunt’s voice and lyrics color Butcher Boy’s broad pop sensibilities with an autumnal layer of melancholy. Says Basil, the band’s agenda is “to make beautiful music that means something to the people who hear it.” The mood is set in opening track, “Trouble and Desire,” all pensive viola, cello, and guitar. Things build momentum with the title track, an urgent guitar and nice beat filling out the sound, leading to more jangle on “I Lost Myself” and “Girls Make Me Sick.”
A strategically timed business trip brought to me to New York in time to catch days two through four of the NYC Popfest, the 2nd year of a festival that “brings together the very best local indiepop bands, to showcase alongside special guests who’ve been knocking our socks off from too far away” (see www.nycpopfest.org for a full line up). The festival took place at a number of venues in the city, mostly concentrated around the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, including the very cozy Cake Shop, which has nurtured many recent up-and-coming New York indie pop bands. Fellow popsters from Australia, Sweden, the UK, and Finland, as well as Seattle and the North East also represented. Sadly I missed festival opener, Sweden’s Love is All, but the rest of the festival was by no means an anticlimax. Events ended with a “Recovery BBQ and Farewell Party” at Brooklyn’s Union Pool, by which time you really had a feeling of being with a bunch of friends, chatting, buying one another beer for as long as you could still stay awake, and swapping CDs. The festival organizers were able to cultivate an impressive sense of community amongst the indie pop fans. Below a quick round-up:
Pants Yell!—I had been excited to see them after some recent radio airplay (What? Independent radio you say?). The sound system didn’t do them a lot of credit, but they got the mood going, challenging audience members to name the most female indie stars for a free t-shirt. It seemed a bit like cheating since the t-shirt itself featured names of their favorite indie chanteuses, but whatever.
Cats On Fire—a lot was made of their very first U.S. appearance, at the Mondo indie dance party and at Union Pool. Truth be told, I liked their music—jangly acoustic guitar with some good hooks and fairly amusing lyrics (they were careful to explain Scandinavian idiosyncrasies, noting that “The Borders of this Land” applied to Finland and a song about a ferry boat ride referred to “that special ferry place in-between Finland and Sweden.” Ahem.). By night four I broke down and picked up their CD. The audience had also broken down by this point and started openly heckling the preening and posturing of lead singer Mattias Bjorkas, who appeared to be simultaneously channeling the spirits of Morrissey and Johnny Cash to ill effect. Observing Bjorkas wander Popfest events with his short-panted and satchel-clutching band members made one wonder if this twee thing could be taken a bit far…one got the impression they were all stars of their very own DIY movie of dubious genre, and we were their unwitting extras. Can you really be a fan of a band with such a ridiculous image? Well, I suppose my affinity for Falco is a case in point. Check out “Higher Grounds” on their first release, “The Province Complains.”
Cats on Fire performing “Mesmer and Reason” at Union Pool for NYC Popfest.
The work of the Chicago Independent Radio Project is supported in part by a generous grant from the Crossroads Fund. More information at crossroadsfund.org.
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