Friday, 3-5

The New Pornographers, Devo, Cymbals Eat Guitars, The Big Pink, Drive-By Truckers, Semi Precious Weapons, My Dear Disco, and Peanut Butter Wolf will be performing at Lollapalooza 2010 between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. on Friday, August 6.

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
Four years after The New Pornographers first played Lollapalooza, the Canadian indie band returns to pull double duty in the city — performing a sold-out show at Metro the night before their appearance on day one of the festival. The band’s fifth album, Together, proves that the well has not run dry for A.C. Newman and company. The infectious pop hooks remain vibrant while the band’s deep collection of talent continues to find new voices. (Friday, 4-5, Budweiser Stage) –text: Chris Castaneda

DEVO
It’d be easy for the gentlemen of Devo to sit back, watch the residual checks from “Whip It” keep rolling in and accept the band’s place in history as a one-hit new wave novelty. But the world is more devolved than ever and this June, Mark Mothersbaugh and company dusted off their trademarked Energy Domes and put out Something for Everybody, the group’s first album in 20 years. Way to “give the past the slip” indeed. (Friday, 4-5, Parkways Foundation Stage) –text: Bonnie Stiernberg–photo: Andrew Boyle

CYMBALS EAT GUITARS
Cymbals Eat Guitars make use of vocals that croon and creep along, with properly complementary instrumentation to boot. Without warning, the melodic tranquility suddenly careens, swells and sometimes explodes into jazzy, groovy and chaotic outbursts that share the same cerebral qualities as their more tame moments. With music that’s explorative and multifaceted, the band is able to successfully span a wide range of moods and textures within a single track. Bottom line: Cymbals Eat Guitars offers a complex and equally rewarding listen. (Friday, 3:30-4:30, Sony Bloggie Stage) –text: Charlie Newton

THE BIG PINK
Edgy and electronic, The Big Pink offer up an innovative sound that stems from their love of all things original. Robertson Furze along with Milo Cordell make up this experimental duo whose expertise has earned them awards as well as a place in the music world carved out for the radical. The pair from London officially became The Big Pink in 2007 while their first album, A Brief History of Love, was released in 2009. (Friday, 3-4, Adidas Mega Stage) –text: Mary Scannell

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
On their eighth studio album, ATO Records debut The Big To-Do, Athens, Georgia’s alt-country rockers Drive-By Truckers spin heartfelt tales of hookers, murder, death and domestic dispute with all the swagger and airtight songwriting you’d expect from this veteran band. Reportedly culled from a collection of 26 new tunes, To-Do is very much a melodic rock album but ballads have a place here too, with plenty of organ, pedal steel and acoustic guitar licks to go around. (Friday, 3-4, PlayStation Stage) –text: Mike Scales

SEMI PRECIOUS WEAPONS
Forming a dirty rock ‘n’ roll band that throws 24-carat gold parties onstage is a familiar concept for NYC’s Semi Precious Weapons. Deliberately defining their glam-rock as filthy fun, ringleader Justin Tranter composes songs crystallized with brazen class. Three years ago, an edgy starlet named Lady Gaga opened their rock parties in New York’s underground bars. Cut to 2010 and the glitz is still on. Only now, they open Gaga’s electro-pop operas in arenas, theaters and Lollapaloozas. (Friday, 4:15-5, BMI Stage) –text: Angie Martin

MY DEAR DISCO
The musical genre known as “dancethink” includes only one band — and that’s because they invented it. Don’t let the word “disco” in the name of Ann Arbor’s My Dear Disco steer you clear of its performance. The quintet brings the perfect amount of synthesizer and thumping to each of their songs, including lone female singer Michelle Chamuel’s tunes “Replaceable” and “All I Do.” Hear them first at Lollapalooza, and next at a club near you. (Friday, 3-3:45, BMI Stage) –text: Lisette Medina

PEANUT BUTTER WOLF
Peanut Butter Wolf (born Chris Manak) perfected his technique on the Technics alongside Nas, House of Pain, and the Pharcyde in the early ‘90s. While his cohorts achieved major notoriety, PBW continued his instrumental career and eventually founded the widely respected indie label Stones Throw Records. His mixes are sometimes silly, but always intentional and not in a hurry to get to the next set of beats. If festivalgoers are lucky enough, PBW will also play his video mash-ups to match his absurdist sounds. (Friday, 3:15-4:15, Perry’s) –text: Cara Slingerland

The New Pornographers

I really like the way you can still read your own story into [the] lyrics. There was definitely an actual concept behind a lot of the tunes. Falling in love and moving to New York was kind of the crux of it.

story by Chris Castaneda
photo by Marina Chavez

The weather report in San Francisco, according to John Collins of the New Pornographers, is “nice”, “breezy” and “not too hot.” The bassist is in search of a calm spot to settle down for a conversation before the band’s show at the Warfield Theatre in a few hours as the Vancouver-based supergroup starts its North American tour in support of Challengers.

The new album (the group’s fourth) is a much more lush and relaxed-sounding piece than its predecessor, Twin Cinema (2005). That said, criticism has already begun to surface alleging that Challengers lacks the twists, turns, and delicious pop hooks of Twin Cinema and that principal songwriter, and recently married, A.C. Newman took a safer, more direct approach. But there is plenty of depth to Challengers that gives it legs from which to proudly stand on its own.

The songwriting efforts of Newman and Danny Bejar create a slightly melancholic atmosphere with songs like the title track, “Adventures In Solitude”, and “The Spirit Of Giving”. But there is also a joyfulness and optimism to the album that keeps it from becoming too heavy. The steady pulse of “All The Old Showstoppers” and the almost-English pop playfulness of “Myriad Harbour” are proof enough that the group didn’t suddenly forget how to craft a pounding tune. The combined strengths of Kathryn Calder (Newman’s niece) and the luminous Neko Case catapult the vocal dynamics, already a key element of the group’s sound, to an even higher level.

Now, as the tour gets going, the New Pornographers get to do what they do best — perform. And if Collins’ advice of keeping a pair of sunglasses handy at the show is any indication of what the group has in store for its loyal yet steadily growing audience, then a good time will certainly be had by all — and that’s all we can really ask of them, is it not?

Chicago Innerview: What was the road like towards making Challengers?
John Collins: We wanted to make another record and feature everybody’s talents as much as we could. We had three songs laid down last year around summertime, and Carl was starting to put songs together. I think the shape of the album, the sound of it, really came out of the songs Carl was writing — which were on balance a bit more, kind of thoughtful and a little less abstract. I really like the way you can still read your own story into his lyrics. There was definitely an actual concept behind a lot of the tunes. Falling in love and moving to New York was kind of the crux of it.

Chicago Innerview: Was there any sort of approach the band consciously wanted to make once recording got underway?
John Collins: We definitely knew we were going to be looking into the same feeling that we got on a song like the beginning of ‘The Bleeding Heart Show’ on the last record and the other more mellow, ballad-y things, but we wanted to make it more rich. It wasn’t like discovering that a tune worked really well mellow. It was actually planning to make it as lush as we could with what we know how to do and everything. For me, the slower a song is, the easier it is to kind of make sense of it. Some of our tunes are very, very dense anyway, like our older tunes, but because they were so quick — everything was just flying at you constantly — it was more of a sonic challenge to make it all work together.

CI: How were you feeling when the album was reaching its completion?
JC: I was really excited about it. About a week before we started mixing it, I started seeing [that] a lot of the tunes were coming together in a great way. We had a lot of stuff we hadn’t done, but I had enough of a sense that we had a bunch of really good songs. I was pretty relaxed when we went in to actually mix it. There were big question marks. We were using a computer a little bit, and so there were times when we would have much more recorded material than we were actually able to listen back to at one time. So, there was a bit of guesswork at times. I won’t do that again.

CI: Were there songs that were definite maybes to make it onto the album but got cut?
JC: Yeah. We just didn’t want to make an hour-long record. Essentially, we did make an hour-long record, but we pared it down a bit. It used to be kind of cool if you had an amazing double record with four sides because you could just take it in little bites. CDs just make it such a steamroller effect that you often just poop out by the end and you lose the whole idea, feeling, shape and context of a record. It stops being a set and just becomes an enormous bail of tunes.

CI: The group has been around now for ten years. Could you have pictured the New Pornographers reaching the point it’s at today?
JC: Well, for several years, until our first record came out, there were about three years there when it just didn’t seem like much ever happened. We were practicing one or two nights a week for a year and a half or so and tinkering around with the band thing. That was really valuable time because the band really got a sound and an identity.

CI: How has it been for you to evolve as a musician and producer?
JC: It’s really fun to be able to be completely self-indulgent and not have someone else’s day being wasted by watching me sort of dick around on the xylophone — it’s why I got into recording records in the first place. I really do enjoy that kind of stuff. That’s my favorite part of the whole process; putting down ideas, tweaking them, editing them, half the time deleting them or ignoring [them]. But it’s still a fun process.

CI: The vocals are a big part of what gives the New Pornographers its unique sound. How hard does the group work on arranging them?
JC: I think the vocal-heavy nature of the New Pornographers, in my recollection, started with Carl doing some demos ages ago at my studio. We had two digital eight DAT machines, and I just loved his voice and singing style. He was very creative too, making musical parts for vocals. I just said, ‘Let’s go nuts. Let’s go completely Brian Wilson and just go past the point of good taste.’ And then we could make ourselves sick and stretch it back to the threshold of bad taste. When we started working on the Pornographers’ first record [Mass Romantic] that was definitely a major thing that I wanted to do, and Carl was into it too. We had a great time stacking his falsetto harmonies and stuff. It became obvious that that was a good idea.

CI: How instrumental has it been for the group to have two vocalists like Kathryn Calder and Neko Case perform live on stage?
JC: They are both a huge asset. They’re superb! They can both sing lead vocals in the New Pornographers, and to have them both sing at the same time is my dream of ABBA becoming real. I love it.

The New Pornographers :: with Emma Pollock and Benjy Fereee :: Metro :: Oct. 18 & 19.

De La Soul, The Field, Klaxons, The New Pornographers, Of Montreal

DE LA SOUL
Since their self-proclaimed death in 1991 via the excellent De La Soul Is Dead LP, the New York trio has remained an important force in contemporary hip hop. Throughout the bulk of the 1990s the news media focused its attention on East Coast/West Coast feuds and performers disintegrated into misogynistic tirades while Kelvin Mercer, David Jude Jolicoeur and Vincent Mason dropped continually thought-provoking beats and lyrics. Combining elements of funk, soul, blues and new wave with rap’s fundamental aesthetics, the group laid the groundwork for acts ranging from Mos Def to N.E.R.D. And with a resurgence on the 2005 Gorillaz track “Feel Good Inc.”, the group reasserted itself as a genre giant while also introducing itself to a generation that was too young or too caught up in rap’s angriest moments to pay attention to their sultry intelligence during the band’s first go-round. (Sunday, 9-10, Aluminum Stage) –text: Derek Wright

THE FIELD
Swedish composer Axel Willner calls himself The Field. Earlier this year, he released his first full-length, From Here We Go Sublime, on the astute German label Kompakt. His music embodies ambience over techno proclivities with its churning and pulsating rhythms subtly filling time and space. Luckily, Willner’s music almost translates better outdoors on a summer afternoon rather than being performed inside a dank club somewhere in the middle of the night. (Sunday, 7:15-8:30, Balance Stage) –text: Garin Pirnia

KLAXONS
Britain’s favorite new rave rock punk band Klaxons charmed fans on both sides of the pond in the past year following the release of the chart-topping Myths of the Near Future. An album based in fantasy with occult sayings as song titles (“As Above, So Below”) and the all-too-soon apocalypse (“Four Horsemen of 2012″), this band makes the end of the world and Thomas Pynchon fun again. After an in-joke of creating a new genre called “new rave” turned into a minor subculture among British youth and a media key phrase, it’s easy to forget how little the band sounds like rave music. Instead, listeners are treated to a dance storm for the ears. The air-raid sirens and guitars that melt faces can bring anyone to break down and bust a move, regardless of whether or not the show takes place in a warehouse. But I would still bring my glowsticks if I were you. (Sunday, 8:30-10, Balance Stage) –text: Justine Reisinger

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
Listening to The New Pornographers can make one lonely, but not sad. It’s the kind of Belle and Sebastian-esque sound that makes you want to dance, eyes closed and smiling through a face of tears. Their newest and third album to date, Twin Cinema, marks a bit of a departure from the softer, wispier side of songwriter/frontman Carl Newman. It’s a little bit more rock and roll than albums past, but the songwriting is even sharper. (Sunday, 8-9, Connector Stage) –text: James H. Ewert Jr.–photo: Steve Dewall

OF MONTREAL
Of Montreal knows no bounds. Having nearly seven albums under their belt after more than a decade of playing together, the band has been mixing trippy-pop and electronic dance elements to make one-of-a-kind songs that ring true in their latest release, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Much like the lead-off track, “Suffer for Fashion,” which sets the energetic tone for the rest of the album, the band offers a chaotic, beautiful, stylistically unpredictable set of songs — making the album a compilation of wonderfully catchy and original material in its entirety. Formed in 1990 in Athens, Georgia, the indie pop/psychedelic band came together when lead singer Kevin Barnes supposedly named the band after a failed romance with a woman from Montreal. Still known for their inventive musical experimentation, wild onstage costumes and unique vibrancies, it’s no wonder that Of Montreal is one of the most talked-about bands these days. They promise an ever-evolving style and musical longevity that isn’t easy to imitate. (Sunday, 7-8, Aluminum Stage) –text: Jackie Bernardo–photo: Rennie Solis

Manu Chao, The New Pornographers, Thievery Corporation, Kanye West

MANU CHAO
It’s easy to get lost in a Manu Chao album. The music for 1998′s Clandestino and 2001′s Próxima Estación: Esperanza was performed by Manu and his band Radio Bemba Sound System. Their albums are full of repeating themes, with lyrics and melodies returning from earlier songs and albums — while samples and sound effects step in and out of the background. The members of Radio Bemba come from bands in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. Manu Chao hails from France, by way of Spanish parents, and his goal with Radio Bemba was to replicate the sounds of street and bar music from countries all over the world. On Clandestino, you might hear the Bedoin influence in a ska song or a French folk song sung in Arabic and Portuguese. And the weird thing is that it fits so well, it’s hard to believe that it isn’t the way it always was. (Saturday, 8:30-10:00, Bud Light Stage) –text: Eric Lab Rat

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
The New Pornographers may be indie rock’s answer to the Super Friends. Hell, they’d even settle for Canadian Temple Of The Dog if bandleader Carl Newman’s cropped red fro were any match for Chris Cornell’s Jesus-mane. Three albums in and Newman’s Vancouver troupe of 7-plus audio savants have wind-milled a pitched-in-perfect sound of polished ’70s a.m. — anchored in tight chord progressions and rollicking choruses. And did I mention they have Neko Case? No longer leading the poppier songs like she did on Mass Romantic and Electric Version, Case lends her signature sultriness on 2005’s breakout album Twin Cinema, fronting the ballads “These Are The Fables” and “The Bones Of An Idol”. When the Virginia chanteuse takes a breather, Newman brings in his niece, Kathryn Calder, to add backing vocals and keyboards throughout the record. With a bench this deep, it’s like taking out Kobe for LeBron. You’re gonna get scored on either way. (Saturday, 7:30-8:30, Q101 Stage) –text: Sean Foran–photo: Steven Dewal

THIEVERY CORPORATION
Thievery Corporation takes techno to a whole new level. Infusing downtempo electronica with heavy influences of dub, bossa nova, acid jazz and other experimental sounds, Thievery has crafted an extremely well respected stable of music and remixes over the course of five albums in the past nine years — culminating with their newest release, 2006′s Versions. While noted for their primarily instrumental approach to music, they do feature the occasional female singer to add substance and meaning to their groovy dance beats. The band’s music has been featured in films from Garden State to Vanilla Sky — and even in a Tiger Woods 2006 EA Sports Game. Thievery was birthed in 1997 in Washington, D.C. by founding members Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, who also run famed D.C. label ESL Music (named after the ultra hip club Eighteenth Street Lounge that they once owned) — which serves as a training ground for up and coming performers of all genres. (Saturday, 7:30-8:30, Adidas-Champs Stage) –text: Virgil Dickson

KANYE WEST
Long before he stepped out from behind the mixing board and topped the charts, the accelerated soul samples and deep instrumentation of Kanye West’s beats propelled top cuts from superstar MCs Jay-Z, Talib Kweli, Lil’ Kim, and many more. Then two years back, he took to the mic, let his sing-song rhymes have the spotlight and became the biggest hip hop artist to call Chicago home. He’s still way more accomplished working behind the studio glass than spitting out rhymes, but Kanye drops his share of clever lines and knows how to make a hook that works. Specifically, his skill at melding an old R&B vocal snippet into a stellar beat is matched by few. Kanye’s never forgotten his roots and has used his success to boost the careers of other talented Chicago MCs. Now he’s earned his headlining set in front of his hometown skyline. (Saturday, 8:30-10:00, AT&T Stage) –text: Noah Levine–photo: Sarah Friedman