June 2011 - Page 39 of 39 - Magnet Magazine

For almost 25 years, John Andrew Fredrick and a revolving cast of characters have been issuing records as the Black Watch. The California-based indie-rock institution is back with 11th album Led Zeppelin Five (Powertool), and it’s the first LP to feature the rock-solid lineup of Fredrick, guitarist Steven Schayer (ex-Chills), bassist Chris Rackford and drummer Rick Woodard. When Fredrick isn’t busy writing and recording songs, he’s teaching English at the University of California, so we thought he’d a be a natural choice to guest edit the MAGNET website. Fredrick, with some assistance from Schayer, will be doing exactly that all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Fredrick.

Fredrick: Like my heroine Susan Sontag, I’m against photography, but I’m all for TBW’s friend and mine Steve Keros, who took the shot of Steven Schayer above. Steven had a fine L.A. band in the early ’90s called Clay Idols whose lone full-length, Falling Down Backwards, you ought to hear. Though it’s long out of print. After he was in the Chills during The Soft Bomb tour, Steven quit playing music officially for well more than a decade; he moved to Portland and started working with mentally challenged adults and kids. Not a month went by when I didn’t ring him up and urge him to get back out there. But my not-so-secret hope was he’d join TBW. And 15 some odd years later, he did at last come in—and, goddammit, hate us all you want for saying it, but we are the happiest band in the world. Steven recruited our new bassist, Chris Rackford (Irish, a great guy and so easygoing), and became fast, famous friends with Rick Woodard, our even easier-going longtime drummer. That I love and am close friends with my bandmates is enviable, I know. Not gonna apologize for it, however, as TBW was a fucking miserable band for many, many years. I’ll just say this: Don’t have a band with your girlfriend (my ex is now happier herself, as she gets to tour the world playing violin in a classic-rock star’s group). And don’t have a band with someone who really needs solely to focus on his own songwriting (as was the case with our “old” mercurial, volatile bassist) and not on sabotaging things from within the group.

Get this: Steven’s a singer, I’m a vocalist—what’s the difference? A singer’s voice owns him or her; a vocalist owns his voice. I’m glad I’m not that sorta slave. But in TBW, it’s pretty symbiotic, our approach to vocals—and there are few or no joys like singing with Steve (even when he drowns me out: we call him The Pavarotti Of Pop. Ha ha.) I’m superchuffed I got him to write a song expressly for our new LP—yes, we are already working on the follow-up to Led Zeppelin Five. Steven saved my band, and on tour in New Zealand last year, he saved my life by running incessant interference with all the crazy Kiwis. Those folks, to whom (as he was in a legendary Antipodean band) Steven’s an honorary tribe-member, are absolutely the nicest zanies I have ever come across. They are all of them “sweet as” but bonkers as can be, really quite hatter mad. Excepting Kilgour of the Clean. He’s (all) right as rain. (Hey, Dave!) Maybe it’s cause like me, Steven’s a little “off,” he can: a) work with the mentally handicapped and b) deal with most New Zealanders. I love them, I do, but they’re total kooks. Go on holiday there, and see for yourself. In the midst of making LZ5, Steven turned to me when things were going unreally well and said, “You know, John, it’s your band, it always will be … But it’s my record!” I loved that. I love that he claimed that, seized that. Steven’s voice may hold sway over his every everythingness, but boy does he own his own artistry, especially on guitar. Making the latest album, he made a discovery: He found out that he is a great, a simply superb, lead electric guitarist. He never knew it until he joined up and plugged in! Seriously. How nice is that? For a folky-acoustic, Love-damaged singer/songwriter of yore (who, curiously, declares his fave band is the Germs) not to know he had this dormant talent to play a Telecaster like his life depended on it. Our publicist, Michelle V., seeing him go into utter outer space at her first TBW gig, said, “I have honestly never seen anyone play like that!” And she’s—believe me—seen everything; I mean, she used to manage the Flaming Lips! You know she’s seen it all! On “Kinda Sorta” from the new album, it sounds like he is playing two guitars at once. I was there: it’s only one: a Mexican Tele, black, with his Vox amp on nine, the reverb on six, and one Boss distortion pedal and one Boss tremolo pedal.

Video after the jump.

Nordic crooner Lykke Li’s show at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco sold out more than six months ago. While she is certainly a rising star, at the moment she is more PJ Harvey than Lady Gaga (i.e., my grandma hasn’t asked me if I’ve heard of her yet). I wondered what kind of folks would assemble at the venue: the generic flannel-and-ironic-mustache-sporting San Francisco hipster crowd? Cologne-doused males from across the Bay who heard Kanye rap with Li on “Gifted,” with their girlfriends who wear stripper heels and purple hair extensions? The StubHub speculators who couldn’t scam enough people to get rid of all the tickets they bought in bulk half a year ago?

The show was a stop on her U.S. tour to promote her moody, cerebral sophomore album, Wounded Rhymes (LL). Her beautiful, ice-sculpture vocals mingle with indie electronic pop similar to fellow Scandanavian artists Röyksopp and Peter Bjorn And John. (In fact, Bjorn produced both of her albums.) While her first full-length, Youth Novels, betrayed a blithe, upbeat youth (she recorded it when she was 19), Li’s latest effort is more brooding. Her debut released endorphins and balanced out your serotonin in a quick, superficial high, like eating a Xanax. Wounded Rhymes digs into the deep recesses of your brain and probes through your latent emotions, like spending an afternoon on a plush suede couch in your therapist’s office.

Li has the suitable artistic chromosomal makeup to become a star (her mother was a photographer, her father a musician) and has displayed Gaga-esque world-dominating ambition during her brief career, with two hit albums, numerous EPs and her own record label by age 25. And she doesn’t need to wear hot pants to command the stage.

The demographics of the crowd actually in attendance was about 80 percent female, of the faux-hawked, leather-jacketed, and tattoo-sleeved variety. I’m also pretty sure every Swede within a 100-mile radius came out to support their home girl. There were a lot of flaxen haired, leggy women roaming around, and the lady I chatted with in the 30-minute line for the bathroom said her best friend she was with was Swedish.

Opening in a theatrical style, with spotlights blinking and drums rolling, Li floated to the stage on a billow of smoke that seemed to have been swept from arctic tundra. She had the powerful, fluid movements of a Pilates instructor, the kind that make you unconsciously imitate her. Floor to ceiling, fluttering black curtains whipped around the cloaked singer, in a resurrection of Madonna’s “Frozen” video from the ’90s. Li performed a fair balance of tracks off of each album, including the quivering “Little Bit” from Youth Novels and the bouncy “I Know Places” from Wounded Rhymes.

If there was a disproportionate amount of estrogen in the room, I couldn’t feel it (not counting the Disneyland-long wait for the womens’ bathroom). Most songs leaned heavily on rumbling guitars and rollicking caveman-arm drum beats. At the finale of “Get Some,” the band dropped an atomic bomb of thunderous percussion and an impenetrable firewall of synth that literally knocked me over (seriously, I tripped) and deep-fried my internal organs. I’ve been to plenty of concerts, and no riff or jam has ever been so explosive.

Lykke Li is a pop star with depth. While many young singers have to romp around half-clothed to make sure they fill the month’s quota of People pages, Li is more of a “wink from across the room and turn back to her friends” kind of girl. The beauty of her music is that it’s both digital and unprocessed—she bares her soul, and then sticks it in Fun Dip. Her fans hung on her every tinkling “ooh” and “ahh,” and besides the grizzled homeless dudes who ask for tickets outside of every show ever played, there were no scalpers in sight, StubHub or otherwise. So far, she seems to have found a recipe for success.

—Maureen Coulter