Monica Topping
Tri-City Weekly

I don’t usually write record reviews for a couple reasons. For one, I’ve never been very good at creating new genre references off the top of my head, as the hipster reviewers tend to do. Second, who wants to hurt someone’s feelings? This is too small a town for that.

That said, in preparation for the band Quasi to play at Humboldt State University’s Depot this Tuesday, I got a hold of the band’s new album, “American Gong,” and threw it on in the background while I was getting some other work done. When the first listen ended, I started it again. And again after that. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Quasi’s visit to Humboldt has largely been promoted on the basis of the involvement of its band members — Sam Coomes, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme — in other projects, like Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Built to Spill and others. I’d like to think that a band could not have survived for 17 years and released some 15 albums just on the strength of its members work with other groups, so I began paying better attention to “American Gong.”

Getting into “American Gong,” the simultaneously best and worst thing I can possibly say is that the album sounds like it was released in the early ‘90s. For me, that’s fantastic — the early-to-mid ‘90s are a time when I was discovering “alternative” rock music, which eventually led to me working at K-Slug, nearly a decade later. If you wanted to put a negative spin on it, though, it could almost be said that Quasi hasn’t exactly evolved much since the band formed in 1993.

“American Gong” definitely trends toward the more melodic side of the alternative movement. Straight out of the gate, “Repulsion” starts off with a crunchy bassline and heads into distorted guitars (is that a slide guitar I hear?) and male-female vocal harmonies. On “Little White Horse,” Coomes’ voice takes on a Frank Black quality, which mixed with female backing vocals from Weiss and Bolme, sounds very Pixies-like. “Everything and Nothing At All” feels like a down-tempo Flaming Lips song to me — melodic, piano-driven and contemplative. This is the track I expect an audience will be singing along to, lighters (or lit-up cell phones) held high in the air.

By the fourth track, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as I started to reference the relatively obscure mid-‘90s band Hum, it occurred to me that maybe all of these bands that Quasi reminds me of, listened to the same sort of psychedelic records when they were all growing up, leading them to release albums that have the same sorts of noisy, distorted, but melodic nuances, reverbed vocals and all.

In the end, I feel like I’m just now discovering an album that an older sibling of mine (if I had one) would have loved, while my musical tastes were still transitioning from the New Kids on the Block to Pearl Jam.

If the songs on “American Gong” are even a taste of what Quasi will have to offer live, I’m excited about getting to check them out. You can listen to “Repulsion” and “Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouller” on the music player at www.RadioRadioHumboldt.com.

Quasi plays in The Depot on Tuesday night at 9 p.m. There is a $5 general cover, but the show is free for HSU students with a student I.D.

Monica Topping does the Slug Festivities Guide and is the weekend mid-day DJ on 94.1 KSLG-FM. Her ruminations on the local music scene can be found at RadioRadioHumboldt.com, and she can be reached at Monica@kslg.com.

Monica Topping
Radio Radio Radio

Quasi might be the most prolific band you haven’t heard of, releasing some 15 albums since the mid-‘90s.

Quasi’s claim to fame seems to be its band members’ connections with other bands you might have heard of, like drummer and singer Janet Weiss’s time with riot grrl band Sleater-Kinney; singer, keyboard and guitar player Sam Coomes’ work with Elliot Smith and Built to Spill; and Joanna Bolme’s bass playing with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks. Both Bolme and Weiss, in fact, still play with the Jicks outside of Quasi.

The trio actually started out as a Coomes-Weiss duo, born out of the crumbling Portland three-piece Motorgoat, in 1993. After having a number of friends help out with studio recording efforts in the early days, Quasi settled on being a duo, until 2006, when Bolme came on the road with them for a tour with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and joined as a permanent member of the band the following year.

When Coomes refers to the early days of Quasi, he talks about his and Weiss’ decision to continue playing music after Motorgoat’s bass player left.

“We just basically carried on,” he says. “(We) changed the name, changed our approach a little bit,” and released their self-titled cassette in 1993.

“Interestingly, I think maybe now that we’re a trio again, I think we’re playing music a little bit closer to the trio that we had,” says Coomes, “although at that time, I think we were trying to do something a little bit heavier.”

Bolme is a friend of Coomes and Weiss, who Coomes says they’ve known for a very long time. She joined Quasi as a result of the band’s 2006 album, “When the Going Gets Dark.”

“The last record before this one,” says Coomes, “we tracked it as a duo in the studio, but then we overdubbed bass and guitar parts onto the songs and when it came time to tour, we kind of felt like the songs really needed to have at least a bass in there, so we recruited Joanna, and it was so much fun that we just didn’t let her go.”

Quasi’s newest album, “American Gong,” was recorded as a trio and released last month on the Kill Rock Stars record label. The album unmistakably oozes the grit and melodic noise of the mid-‘90s, and with limited overdubs, should be represented pretty closely in a live setting.

The band sets off on a record release tour this week in Arcata, heads down California, over to Arizona and Texas (in time for SXSW), and back home through the Midwest, before landing back in Portland by the end of the month. They’ll be home for a couple of weeks, then head back out to the eastern U.S. and Canada and American South, before hopping on a plane to Europe in May.

Quasi will play at the HSU Depot this Tuesday, March 9, at 9 p.m. with openers, and Kill Rock Stars label-mates, Explode into Colors. There is a $5 general cover and the show is free for HSU students with their current student I.D.

Dragged by Horses played their first local show in six months (members of the band have been busy having babies, I hear), but they came back last night with a pile of newer material and rocked the heck out of the Alibi crowd.

The Long and Short of It, whom I wrote about here, put on a totally insane live show. Singer Ben Johnson is simultaneously the most insane and insanely photogenic frontman I've ever had the luck to encounter.

The Long and Short of it plays tonight in Eureka, at the Lil Red Lion with Electric Jellyfish and The Hard Ride.

Some shots from last night:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Midlake has been through Arcata before, and I missed them, but at the suggestion of my friend Nate, I wrote about them (here), and got out to the show.

Matthew and the Arrogant Sea opened.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Monica Topping
Radio Radio Radio

One of the most common threads in metal music is references to mythology, comics and Dungeons and Dragons. The Long and Short of It is no different.

“We’re pretty nerdy,” says Ben Johnson, the band’s lead singer. “My brother and I are way, way, way into comic books. “

Johnson’s older brother Tim plays drums in the band and is, of course, blamed for Johnson’s love for the world of comics.

“It totally is his fault,” he says. “He’s my older brother!”

The Long and Short of It went so far as to have named their full-length album, which came out last year, “Caw!: An Unkindness of Ravens” — a reference to Sandman Comics.  And if you didn’t know, an unkindness is the plural for a group of ravens (like a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows).
“It’s as if the songs are each birds, and it’s like a flock of birds,” says Johnson. “That’s what it alludes to, a little bit, among other things.”

The San Diego heavy rock band has been together for about seven years now, though its members have known each other for well over a decade. The brothers met bass player Brian Barrabee when they had moved to Santa Cruz from San Diego in the early ‘90s, during what Ben Johnson refers to as their “collegiate years” (though he admits, “we didn’t, any of us, go to college all that much.”)  They met guitar player Matt Strachota upon their return to San Diego.

Oddly, having known each other for nearly 40 years, this is only the third time the Johnsons have been in a band together.

“We both played drums, like I’ve played drums in other things that I’ve done throughout time, so we haven’t been in that many groups together unless I’m singing and he’s playing drums, which this is the third,” explains Ben Johnson, who plays drums in Hostile Comb-over.

The Long and Short of It was formed at a time when Ben Johnson’s band at the time was on the road to breaking up and Barrabee’s band was doing the same. Tim Johnson hadn’t been playing music at all, at that point, so the three decided to search down a guitar player and start playing.

“We were talking about a couple of guys and they didn’t work out and we didn’t really audition anybody, we just kind of talked about it, and we just hung out with the first guy we asked,” says Ben Johnson. “We just started practicing (with Strachota) and it just worked out really well and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

The Long and Short of It has released two full-length albums and two EPs, but Ben Johnson says the band doesn’t really play anything off of the first album and EP, anymore.

“All of our songs have been getting more and more interesting to us and better,” he says. “We write as a collaboration, so it took a while to get where everybody wanted to get.”

“We pretty much just play our last full-length album and this seven-inch now, and we have been for about a year-and-a-half.”

The San Diego band has just released their second EP on seven-inch vinyl and CD, featuring brand new tracks “Welcome to Gnarlsberg” and “The Lancet.” Ben Johnson did the art work for it.

“We’re just pleased as punch with it,” says Johnson. “It’s kind of a meaner, more straight-ahead sound than some of the other things that we’ve done before. We’re excited about it.”

The Long and Short of It’s current tour is taking the band up through California, to Seattle, and back home through Portland and San Francisco. They have two Humboldt shows, allowing them to hang out for a day and take in the sights, which Ben Johnson notes is almost completely unheard of, on tour, but that’s how it goes when a band schedules its tour around playing at the Alibi on a Saturday night. This is the band’s fifth time doing so.

“We now book the Alibi first, or do something with Ian (Hiler, the Alibi’s booking guy) first, and then we book our tour around that,” he says. “There are not a lot of people who put in the work and the passion that Ian brings. He takes care of everything and it’s just a treat — it’s really a treat to have somebody like that, to be involved with them. If you can’t tell, I’m in love with the guy, so we stop through there every time we go through.”

The Long and Short of It will play at the Alibi on Saturday, March 6, with Dragged by Horses, who will be playing their first local show in six months. Doors for that show open at 10:30 p.m. and there is a $5 cover.

On Sunday, March 7, The Long and Short of It will play at the Lil Red Lion, at 5th and P Streets in Eureka, with Australian psych rock band Electric Jellyfish and local heavy blues band The Hard Ride. Music starts at 9:30 p.m. and there is a $3 cover.

Both shows are 21-and-over.

Monica Topping
Radio Radio Radio

Denton, Texas, band Midlake has been at once compared to both Radiohead and Jethro Tull. Conversely, in the recording studio, Midlake is trying to emulate a tone similar to early ‘70s-era King Crimson, which bass player Paul Alexander says is the best recorded sound in rock history.

Midlake’s early days as a band are often referred to as Herbie Hancock-influenced “funk jazz explorations.” It makes sense that at the time, most of the members of the band were soon-to-be drop-outs from the jazz music program at the University of North Texas. Alexander met drummer McKenzie Smith in 1997 and the two threw around the idea of starting a band, before heading off in separate directions. By 1999, Alexander and Smith had reunited and pulled in the remaining founding members of what would become Midlake — Tim Smith on vocals, guitar, keyboard and woodwinds, Eric Pulido on guitar and Eric Nichelson on guitar.

Midlake’s jazz days ended with its various members either graduating (Tim Smith is the only member of the band who actually graduated from the UNT music program) or dropping out of school and staying in the area.

“There’s a lot of music school dropouts around, and they just don’t leave,” says Alexander. “It’s sort of like a mental hospital, this town. You can’t leave it, you know? You just get stuck here.”

The band’s first post-jazz influence was Radiohead, which is pointed out repeatedly in reviews of the Midlake’s first couple of albums — 2001’s “Milkmaid Grand Army” and 2004’s “Bamnan and Silvercork.”

Shortly after the release and touring for the second album, Midlake re-entered their recording studio to begin the recording process for “The Trials of Van Occupanther,” which came out in the summer of 2006. Because the band members were all simultaneously working day jobs, Alexander says that it took a year to finish that album, and while they knew it was the best material they could have put out at the time, none of the band members were as happy as they wanted to be with their work.

As they went into a year-and-a-half of touring for “Van Occupanther,” the band’s sights were already set on getting back into the studio to record an album they could be really proud of.

“In the fall of 2007, we stopped touring and immediately started recording ‘The Courage of Others,’” says Alexander. “And then we took an endless two years to make ‘The Courage of Others,’ which was much longer than we thought we’d take.”

The bass player says that the band members were, at that point, counting Midlake as their full-time job, but they worked a lot of hours, shooting for perfection — so much so that they scrapped an entire album’s worth of material before settling on the songs that would becoming “The Courage of Others,” which came out in early February of this year.

While “The Courage of Others” was in the works, Midlake also spent quite a bit of time backing solo artist John Grant, who has played in a band called The Czars, on his new album, which is due out in April. So in essence, over a two-year span, Midlake recorded three studio albums, two of which are seeing the light of day.

Midlake stayed off the road the entire time they were in the studio for “The Courage of Others,” so when they started touring again in January of this year, they had some cobwebs to dust off of their live performance. And as tight a quarters as a recording studio is, a tour van is even tighter.

“Being in a band is kind of like being married to four other dudes,” says Alexander, who just returned from Europe with his band a couple of weeks ago. “Everything you like and hate about somebody is like a revolving door. It’s a real challenge.”

“The touring is the fun part,” he adds. “It’s really hard on your body and sometimes hard on your friendships, but that’s the fun part. You’re going out and playing the shows — it’s work, but it’s quite enjoyable.”

Midlake is currently touring the West Coast, before heading back toward Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest music festival in a couple of weeks, then going back out to the Northeastern parts of the United States and back to Europe in April. In addition to the five-piece studio band that is Midlake, the touring band includes Max Townsley on electric guitar and Jesse Chandler on piano and flute.

Midlake will be in Arcata on Friday, March 5, at the HSU Depot with Matthew and the Arrogant Sea at 9 p.m. Tickets are $5 general admission and $2 for current HSU students with a student ID.

Scroll up and listen to “Acts of Man” from Midlake’s “The Courage of Others” on the Radio Radio Radio radio.