Did You See Them?: Cars & Trucks CD release show was last Saturday night at Pizza Luce, with Twin Cities band The Evening Rig opening, and Cory "Hot Rod" Ahlm performing standup comedy-like right before C&T performed. Hot Rod’s material was … well … one part roast (dissing various members of the audience) and one part pun (as one person later said "We got pun-ished").
Anyway, looks like Cars & Trucks are playing a pre-Halloween show with three other bands starting at 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30 at RT Quinlan’s.
Length of first spin: All day Friday. Starting from when I stole it right out of Matthew Perrine’s hot little CD player while he watched. Helpless. Confused. Alone.
First impressions: Well, this certainly is a fun album. Are you sure it is about death? If so, this is the first time that "death" has made me want to clap along.
Working knowledge of Cars & Trucks: This is probably the Duluth band I’ve seen perform most often, a title once held by the band Crazy Betty. Sometimes it has been a coincidence; Most often it has been on purpose. I think my favorite show was during Homegrown in either 2007 or 2008. There were so many freaks crammed in front of the stage at RT Quinlan’s that it was like raining sweat and breath from the ceiling pipes.
Brief bio: From MySpace: "Here it is. Your first taste of the new musical brew from musicians you know and trust — guys who’ve done time bringing you the Dames, Farewell Tour, Seed Math, and Words to a Film Score. This is Cars & Trucks. This is music to smile like the cheshire cat to. Just sit back, relax, and think: the Beatles, the Monkees, the Who, the Kinks. Dream of Brendan Benson and Matthew Sweet. Have visions of Cheap Trick or Guided by Voices. If you’re into music that is more filled with hooks than Babe Winkelman’s tackle box, this band is for you." Cars & Trucks is Tony Bennett, Mat Milikovich, and Matt Osterlund.
What I say: This is fun and saturated with clever lines. "We’re All Going To Die" is one of those catchy songs you jump into with two feet."Hey! We’re All Gonna Die. Someday," and includes a dose of humor with the line "You better start livin’ it up, before you get stuck in the ground, ‘cuz you’re going to die." Also: "You better make haste before it all goes to waste." The very rock and rolly "Too Bad So Sad" starts out with "Here is my ransom note, it doubles as a resume." Other picks include the songs "Do What you Want" and "Tonight." And you know, I like "Feel So Old," too.
What Somebody Else Says: I asked Matthew Perrine what he is writing about this week, and he said "Oh. Part 2 of my Cars & Trucks story." Apparently Perrine is writing the E! True Hollywood story. Part 1 is here.
Five things Tony Bennett wants you to know about "Mere Mortals":
1. This album really started coming together in my mind after I wrote the song “We’re All Gonna Die” a couple of years ago. I had sorta been blindsided by this crazy existential crisis where I suddenly was having trouble doing anything without fear of it being my last act. I suppose I had gotten to that point where the spectre of death wasn’t just this abstract Halloween costume anymore, and the full import of my mortality was hitting me. It’s a long story. It has to do with personal experiences I’d had, and with reading far too much philosophy for my college minor. Questioning everything, and then getting frustrated with the lack of answers. But I ended up writing that song as an attempt to essentially purge the demons from my brain — to just throw my hands up and say, “screw it — what’s the use in agonizing over this stuff?” Unfortunately, it didn’t cure me, but rather led into a deeper obsession with the topic, one that led me to essentially concoct a whole album about mortality. But I wanted it to be positive and hopeful, not dark and pessimistic. I hope it is. In recent years, all three of us have had some intense, sad, scary experiences that have just fed into us all wanting to make something that is cathartic. It’s a bummer that we all die. But we didn’t want to run away from it. We wanted to shine a light on it, to lose our fears a little.
2. The album art was something Matt O. discovered. He was looking for funeral images, and this painting by Clementine Hunter called “A Funeral at Isle Brevelle” caught his eye. We immediately knew it had to be the cover, because it sorta said in an image what we were trying to say with the music. It’s a depiction of a Louisiana funeral procession, but it’s very bright and colorful and childlike and earthy. It’s not drab and black. This is pretty much what we were trying to do with the album: to make bright music about darkness. We were lucky enough to get the rights to the painting, but we had to write a proposal and everything, so we were pretty nervous about it for a while. I wonder if Hunter would like our music as much as we liked her painting. Probably not.
3. Our first album was a nice collection of songs, but this one feels like it is a coherent whole, even down to the artwork. (The art for the first album had nothing to do with the music at all.) It’s definitely an “album” in the more traditional sense of the word. Hopefully people will listen to it start to finish while they’re putzing around the house or driving in their cars or whatever. It definitely was sequenced to have a certain flow, and I hope it works for people to hear the whole thing as one blob of music. It’s just too bad we couldn’t press it on vinyl.
4. In our band, our roles are pretty well-defined. It’s a trio, so there’s not much wiggle room there. But I’d like us to start getting weirder. I’d like us to get weird while we still can, before we get too mired in the normalcy of our day-to-day lives. We’ve got all kinds of time to just go play some nice chords in a nice, inoffensive way, so I’d like to mess around some more. Maybe the next Cars & Trucks album will be like a Brian Eno album or something. That’d be fun. Maybe we’ll go techno.
5. I don’t know what it is, but I cannot stop listening to the Kinks. I’ve become convinced in the last year or so that Ray Davies is easily one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, and he’s also about as close to a “genius” musician that you’ll ever see. I don’t know anyone who can knit a lyric and a melody with such tossed-off skill, sincerity, razor wit and alacrity. I could just start naming songs off, but all you have to do is listen to anything he did from about the mid-’60s to the mid ’70s, and it’s all there. He’s really been an inspiration to me to talk about real things in the songs instead of just stringing a bunch of singable words together. Everyone else can have their hip bands of the moment. I’ll be listening to Kinks albums that came out before I was born, and learning how it’s really done.
3 Spin Review is a feature where I receive a CD in the mail. Take a quick zip, skipping ahead when a song starts to poke my brain, lingering when it has immediate appeal. Second spin includes listening to it while I’m doing something else. Third spin I actually decide if I like what I’m hearing. These brief reviews will also include my working knowledge of said band, so you know whether my opinion is trustworthy, and then the opinion of someone else who has reviewed the CD. (This plan deviates from its original form when it comes to local bands).
