Four years into a ten-albums-in-ten-years vow, Missoula band Secret Powers is still making good on its pledge – and making more good music in the process. Just a few weeks ago, the band’s third album, “Lies and Fairy Tales,” was named the best power-pop album of 2010, by the Absolute Power Pop blog.
Tonight, the five-piece outfit (featuring Shmed Maynes on keyboards, John Fleming on bass, Dan Strachan on drums, and Ryan Farley and new member John Brownell on guitar) will release its fourth full-length record, “What Every Rose-Grower Should Know,” which reinforces the band’s reign as one of the country’s tightest and most adventurous power-pop outfits. [Read More...]
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Shmed Maynes was too worried about technology to think much about the people coming into his studio on Monday. All he knew was that his Club Shmed Studio off South Russell Street had been booked for the afternoon by a group of singers from Africa, and they needed eight sets of headphones to use while they recorded.
Then they showed up and started singing.
“Dude, they sounded amazing,” said Maynes when reached Monday afternoon by phone. “And then I realized, it was those guys from the Paul Simon album.”
“Those guys” were Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the South African choir that has come to define the sounds of traditional African music for an entire generation of people in America and elsewhere. [Read More...]
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Imagine you’re a cop driving around one night, when you notice a van parked in a dark corner of a school parking lot. Stepping out of your squad car, you notice the subtle back-and-forth rocking of the van, the din of rock ‘n’ roll emanating from within. Feeling like you’ve just stepped into a scene from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” you rap on the window.
The van door opens; and there sit two 30-something women with a guitar and a kid-sized drumset.
“Nothing to see here,” says one bashfully, “just a couple of moms having band practice.” [Read More...]
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With a voice so pinched he sounds like he’s being strangled after inhaling a helium balloon, Wolf Redboy will never count among history’s great smooth crooners. Rather, his voice – both lyrically and musically – falls in the long line of earnestly oddball singers who’ve given grain to the glow of American popular music over the past half century: the Dylans and Reeds, Byrnes and Youngs.
Maddening men all, with their squeaking voices pronouncing profound thoughts, sometimes only barely keeping a tune, always commanding attention. Redboy, a Missoula-raised musician who has played his original music around town for the past several years, may not yet stand shoulder to shoulder among those greats. But he undoubtedly walks in their footsteps, as made evident on a new, three-song demo CD that he and his new band will release this Friday night, Oct. 16, at the Badlander. [Read More...]
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In the first minute of the first track of the new album by Volumen, everything that is great and goofy about the long-lived Missoula band is on display: The lo-fi sing-song keyboards of Chris Bacon, the stutter-fire pounding of drummer Bob Marshall, Bryan Hickey’s no-nonsense basslines, and the confidently raw dual lead vocals of Shane Hickey and Doug Smith.
These are a few of the favorite things that have drawn flocks of fist-pumping fans to gigs by the band, which celebrates its 10th birthday late this year. Born on a lark – as a one-time New Year’s Eve stunt – the band now stands as one of the most enduring and prolific acts in modern Missoula music.
And now there’s a record that lives up to those hazy late-night memories of brain-searing rock shows. [Read More...]
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After an 18-second snippet of music that sounds more like a station-ID jingle than the opening to a rock album, a strangely manipulated voice welcomes you to the latest album by Missoula band Secret Powers.
“Hi, how you doing,” the voice intones through the digital haze, “this is Father Shmed, podcasting live to you from the compound of the Electric Family Choir.”
So begins a conceit that runs through the rest of the album: Father Shmed as cult guru, interspersing loftily nonsensical proclamations about fateful electrocutions and extraterrestrial afterlife between songs. [Read More...]
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