Tribute albums are trouble, because they’re usually terrible. And tipping your hat to a band like Fleetwood Mac is a complicated act, not to mention one that requires singular talent. There’s plenty of the latter on Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac which includes indie favorites The Kills, Best Coast, J. Mascis, and Antony, among others.

I’m not saying discard (or delete?) your copy of Rumors just yet. In particular Best Coast singer Bethany Cosentino’s cover of “Rhiannon” exchanges the wailing melancholy for a bit of vapid pop sweetness, and it’s not great. If anything, the album is more of a nod to Fleetwood Mac’s legacy, and even the most curmudgeonly fan might appreciate the reminder. The album is set for release on August 14th, and also boasts diverse covers by Lykke Li, Washed Out, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy.

Lee Ranaldo Band featuring J Mascis “Albatross”
Antony “Landslide”
Trixie Whitley “Before The Beginning”
Billy Gibbons & Co. “Oh Well”
Best Coast “Rhiannon”
The New Pornographers “Think About Me”
Marianne Faithfull “Angel”
Lykke Li “Silver Springs”
Karen Elson: “Gold Dust Woman”
Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy “Storms”
Washed Out “Straight Back”
Tame Impala “That’s All For Everyone”
Craig Wedren with St. Vincent “Sisters of the Moon”
The Kills “Dreams”
Gardens & Villa “Gypsy”
The Crystal Ark “Tusk”
MGMT “Future Games”

After seven years of total silence, Fiona Apple has finally reemerged to make the big, brassy entrance we’ve been waiting for. Her rapturous new album The Idler Wheel drops tomorrow, and the singer has added a second leg to her summer tour. She’ll stage her return at San Jose’s Civic Auditorium on September 9th.

The Idler Wheel is the intense and plangent offering that you’d expect from the wide-eyed Apple, the girl with the grudge who grew into a woman with a sense of humor, maybe reading a lot of Sylvia Plath along the way. She caved under the furious discomfort of the public spectacle, then hid, reappearing now with an album that isn’t cautious or pigeon-toed, but wild, terrifying, almost bullying you with its grim passions.

With an ambitious fifty dates scheduled, Apple’s siren song is getting more shrill and courageous with time. And a bit more studied: the shaky, carnal throes bleed into the blackest of humor, springing from an imagination both nightmarish and serene – the quiet before the storm, over and over again. The piano bangs, the voice quivers. If there’s a spectacle on September 9th, let it be mutual.

Tickets for Fiona Apple’s September 9th show at the San Jose Civic Auditorium go on sale at 10 am Friday, June 22 at Ticketmaster.

I won’t mince words: Kimbra’s debut album “Vows” is profoundly boring, though it shows potential. The twenty-two-year old jazz songstress from New Zealand emerged victorious in her duet with Gotye on “Somebody That I Used to Know.” While that song’s expiration date was many moons ago, there’s a chance Kimbra’s for now tolerable, inoffensive whimsy will take risks.

The album is a mix of jazz, lounge, soul, r&b and what can we call it – indie dance? – content, contained. Unfortunate because we wanted her to come away with a success all her own. We expected it. But expectations are unwise.

Remember: she was born in 1990. That she covers Nina Simone’s “Plain Gold Ring” and is auditioning as the kind of singer whose eccentricity is supported by boisterous range and talent calls for minor celebration. That she does it desperately and personality-free, so readymade to fit a commercial for online dating or the elevator at a W Hotel is, given her potential, infuriating. How can music that attempts to be larger-than-life also be so boring?

I think of someone like Feist, who’s easy to love for many of the same reasons, and secures her indie darling status. Every song a sedate lullaby, a pleasant fail-safe. Her voice can be too tranquil, skipping its way into Sesame Streets, shilling iPhones, begging your mom to turn up the volume and exclaim, “oh, I just love this tune!” Which is perfect, should you require a way to fill dead air.

Speaking of mommy jams, Kimbra does have a funky affinity with Melanie, the 60s folk singer famous for “Brand New Key” (used in an ad for a printer – the metric for success in this category: hawking technology) and “Lay Down Candles,” inspired by a performance at Woodstock. Like hers, Kimbra’s voice has a quivering vibrato which can scare and embarrass you a little, but one that could become singular and proud. She does well drawing deep from within, like Adele, another seventies-inspired siren.

Or Prince? That’s what her label wants you to think. On “Home,” that comparison can live. It’s a scaled down take, just as simmering and carefully scripted as “Sign ‘O’ the Times” or “Purple Rain” is. The problem is she’s trying out too many things here. The album is inconsistent, and if she was as weird as her voice suggests, she should own it. That’s how Prince succeeded.

Pop could always use more of the blues, but Kimbra’s phonemic awareness, warping syllables all out of shape, is what keeps her music compelling. She was fantastic on “Someone That I Used to Know,” a brusque, convincing and even reasonable one-act of a performance, proof that if “Vows” is all over the place, it can move – anxiously.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: 1990, remember? Kimbra’s good, but with time, foreseeably excellent.

You might believe the Dum Dum Girls to be coy, which they are. And you might believe them to be precious, or ditzy, or immature about their craft—which they most certainly are not. On their second album Only in Dreams, the band has grown considerably, bucking accusations of triviality and affectation.

But is a yen for the past an annoying quirk when you were never part of it to begin with? Let’s not bother calling the Girls “retro” then. The first album was naïve, raw and we were grateful because yes, it reminded us of something. A reminder is inanimate, but what you put into it is alive and full of projections—yours, not theirs.

That doesn’t mean that the band is without comparison. Lead singer Dee Dee, whose name is a knowing wink at the candy punk of The Ramones, only sometimes broods betwixt the chasms of reverb and lingering refrains that beg comparison against the Mazzy Star and Jesus & Mary Chain of 20 years ago. Mostly she serenades and quivers without spectacle. It’s a nerve exposed, still thriving, in full bloom.

When the mood turns a shade tragic, which will occur on an album rife with lines about “teardrops on my pillow” or how we “abuse the ones who love you,” you surrender to the classicism of the form—teenage love, and how it grows and withers. There’s a wide range of ways to express this and on the album, they fall somewhere between surf guitar and dream pop. On the songs that sway, they sway charmingly and bright. It’s not exactly bubblegum, but coarse, like all good pop music about love is. Picture a very specific sort of girl drifting with it, her shiny bob obscuring the eyebrows that would betray away an emotion or three. There’s a heart somewhere on those full sleeves.

At one point, you get to hear how far that heart carried the Dum Dum Girls on “Coming Down,” the most aching and lovely song on the album. This is a love that came from humble origins and then went celestial, like an astronaut. But it crashed.

Still there’s no space left for cloudless self-pity with the Dum Dum Girls. The songs are brimming with life, whatever the implications, and wherever they roam, they expand up and onward.

The Dum Dum Girls play at the Blank Club on Monday, May 21st. Tickets are $12 in advance. Doors open at 8 pm.

Adam Yauch, member of legendary hip-hop trio the Beastie Boys, has died this morning after succumbing to cancer. The 47-year-old known as MCA formed the group, then a punk band, with Adam “Ad Rock” Horowitz and Mike “Mike D” Diamond in the late 70s.

It was the release of 1986’s License to Ill that helped cement the Beastie Boys as hip-hop iconoclasts, placing them alongside the ranks of still rising acts Run DMC, A Tribe Called Quest, and Busta Rhymes. By the 90s, the Beastie Boys were the epitome of New York cool, gatekeepers to an entire culture, responsible for starting the careers of directors like Spike Jonze, coining the term ‘mullet,’ and making references to everyone and everything from Laverne & Shirley to the Tibetan freedom movement, to which the group remained lifelong devotees.

In 2009 Yauch revealed news of a cancerous tumor and spent the next three years in treatment. Last month, the illness prevented the rapper from attending a ceremony for the group’s entry into the Hall of Fame.

John ‘Juan’ Maclean’s early electronic music was cold, angular, and removed from the blend of arpeggiated disco and romantic synthpop that colored releases like “The Future Will Come” and “Everybody Get Close,” The Juan Maclean’s most recent album. As the title might suggest, things have gotten warmer, with live instrumentation adding more feeling, as well as some needed humanity.

With this, electronic music is figuring its way into the performance, no longer separated by unmoving columns of sound and technology. Maclean’s likely influenced by time spent with post-hardcore outfit Six Finger Satellite, whose final album was produced by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Together they’d go on to build the most important, or maybe just interesting record label of the last decade – DFA Records, a citadel where one goes to worship terse indie rock, Italian disco, new wave, and brooding electro, constructed from the ruins of clubs like New York’s Danceteria or Manchester’s Hacienda. On Friday, The Juan Maclean will recreate some of that during their San Jose show at the Agenda Lounge.

Universal as they may seem, their origins lie closer to Chicago and Detroit. The moniker ‘Juan’ comes from Detroit techno icon Juan Atkins, whose love of the Roland TB-303, a jittery, modulated bass synthesizer, would spawn the infamous ‘acid house’ sound. Nearly thirty years later it lives on in snippets and recollections, and in places like The Juan Maclean’s “Happy House,” a twelve and a half minute trunk line into the history of dance music: hypnotic piano chords, vocalist Nancy Whang’s monotone flirtations, and a climactic acid riff that bubbles brilliantly over the surface.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the simple reason that DFA and The Juan Maclean have been going at it for the last twelve years, it stands to reason that the next twelve years will be even more exciting. Electronic music will never die – its posterity is guaranteed by the medium.

The Juan Maclean plays at Agenda Lounge in San Jose on May 4th at 9 pm. The Workout DJs open. $7 in advance, $10 at the door. RSVP to: theworkoutrsvp@gmail.com

Artists are born unionists. Theirs is a talent that requires support, because if can’t be learned, it must be protected. It’s why they tend to cloister together, in the hopes that a collective effort will yield individual growth—power in numbers and such.
The independent artists organization RAW: natural born artists is one of largest of these creative brain trusts.

RAW is intent not on mere representation but on marketing the works of a nationwide network of painters and photographers, makeup artists and musicians, filmmakers and fashionistas. This Thursday, RAW will play curator to San Jose’s artistically gifted in an evening called “Menagerie.”

Currently operating in 64 cities nationwide, the RAW showcase takes up residence at different venues to host the work of local artists. On April 26, Beso Nightclub on South First Street in San Jose debuts “Menagerie,” an evening of sights and sounds featuring both San Jose’s best and brightest, as well as the underground and rising. Some of the featured creative types include photographers SnapShot Ninja (Annalisa Hackleman, whose pics have been seen in Metro) and Joha Harrison, artists Rikki9 Merle, Jamie Berumen and WJS and stylist Susan Talamantes.

“San Jose was a logical choice,” says RAW San Jose showcase director Greg Gioia. The city already has a “massive, thriving underground art scene but no national outlets for that talent.” RAW wants to be that outlet. It’s done wonders for some places already. A Sundance Channel documentary zeroed in on the work of one Los Angeles–based RAW artist, and a designer in Philadelphia landed a clothing line deal with Macy’s.

The selection process is fairly open ended. Looking for young designers in the first stages of their career, RAW’s talent scouts both actively hunt for new talent, and accept submissions on their website. By mid-June, RAW will span the globe. Its first international show will be held in Brisbane, Australia, with more showcases to be added around the continent, as well as in Germany, where RAW debuts in the fall.

RAW Showcase
Thursday, 8–11:30pm; $10–$15
Beso, 417 S. First St., San Jose

It’s a travesty that as of this morning, there are only 162 comments on the new Fiona Apple single “Every Single Night”, posted three days ago to her SoundCloud page. Looking to flood your respective social media channels with something? Look no further: let the oversharing commence.

This isn’t as dreamy or grandstanding as the early stuff, though stylistically similar – but it is better. “Every Single Night” is a gentle lullaby with an ominous, immediate shade cast over it. Her voice convulses, there’s a chorus, she readjusts into an unsettling serenade, something is not right.

Why do we have so much hope in our hearts for the not-so-young Ms. Apple? The binary personality of a strong female pop persona: fragile and scalding, but so often unmoored and screaming in the wind, unapologetic about her strange desires – this itself will not surprise. Is feminism about choosing things? What has Fiona Apple chosen?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Maybe we prefer our women this way. Maybe Lana Del Rey, with her prepackaged and retrofitted sexuality, actually bores us. Fiona, like Tori Amos, feels like an open wound. And that strikes us as art.

Fiona Apple plays the Fox Theater in Oakland on July 28th. Tickets are sold out.

Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner has a voice like that of a lesser god, demoted because he couldn’t go through the trouble of administering to a needy world. However plaintive the backdrop – alt-country, indie, soul – Lambchop songs all seem like minor pastoral tragedies, strung together with ellipses that transition nicely from place to place. Their newest album “Mr. M” reflects a devotion to the familiar world of the wink and the woebegone.

Wagner, who started playing music in his thirties, understands that Lambchop is a “hard band to like,” but “an easy band to love.” In theory the idea might warrant a sneer, but hold fast. “Mr. M” is warm and narcotic, slipping into that province between pure knowledge and the fleeting memory of a dream, those few minutes of primordial cognition – for nearly an hour. In comes the half-toasted Wagner with a bit of salvation: “Don’t know what the fuck they talk about,” he says once the idyllic strings, piano, and light snare subside on opening track “If Not I’ll Just Die”, an appropriate point of entry for the uninitiated.

The temptation to label this album ‘sparse’ is there, but also wrong. A recording that contains this much instrumentation has to be expansive to let the sum of its parts breathe. This is thanks mostly to engineer Mark Nevers, whose work with Will Oldham and the Silver Jews finds the intimate in wide open spaces. Ponder the rich and shimmering string section, the wistful piano, a muffled voicemail, Wagner’s ambling murmur that alternates between advice and mockery – it swirls.

Lambchop is maybe a band, but more likely the right vehicle for Wagner, a painter who went to art school with the writer Richard Brautigan, to transmute the ordinary into the elegant. I sense he would be this way no matter what the craft, like he could change a tire and make you feel a little weird and lush while doing it.

Country music is the one realm where this can happen freely, extending to its players a poetic license they would have us believe is restrained in their ‘real’ lives. What defines Lambchop are Wagner’s ambiguities. He’s intuitive, feeling more than he lets on, and he lets on much already. It could be another way of embracing the emotional burden, but then also not knowing what to do with it. Lines like “friends make you sensitive” or “knowledge is difficult” save you the trouble of getting into an unpleasant conversation.

That Wagner dumps this much into each song and then distractedly wanders away is fine. “I don’t want to wake up when I’m stoned,” he admits. Who does?

Lambchop performs at the Great American Music Hall on May 4th. Tickets available here.

Fahrenheit, the slick downtown restaurant and lounge, really hit its stride in the last couple years with inspired cuisine, a rarefied but relaxed ambience, and a series of DJ monthlies that’s breathed some life into an occasionally stale downtown scene. Tomorrow evening they’re celebrating their seventh anniversary with champagne, of course. And live music, giveaways, and assorted drink specials all night – which, judging by the weather, promises to be a hot one.

Luckily this might be the only place where you can get something called a “bison grass martini,” a ginger sazerac or a strawberry caipirnha. Is that what the “ultra” in “ultra lounge” means?

Even if the weather and decor are lost on you, DJs Nasty Nick and Charly Fusion promise to hold the movers and shakers to their namesake. If things get too fancy, just remember: Cinebar is only two doors down.

The party starts at 9 p.m. on Saturday, April 21 at Fahrenheit Restaurant and Lounge, 99 E. San Fernando. Complimentary champagne and hors d’oeuvres served from 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. Guestlist available for a limited time.