Dulli on Morning 40 Federation
Here’s the ultimate party band - NJ.com
In liner notes to [Morning 40 Federation's album] “Ticonderoga,” Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers leader and nightlife connoisseur Greg Dulli put it this way, recalling the first time he saw Morning 40 bond with its audience in New Orleans: “Though I couldn’t see past my hand, Tom Waits and Prince appeared to be backed by the moans of a Salvation Army Band … . It was as if Tennessee Williams had rewritten ‘Caligula’ for the great unwashed.”
Morning 40 Federation will be performing with our friends Mighty Fine tonight at Mercury Lounge in NYC.
More Whigs Videos at iTunes
iTunes has added a number of Afghan Whigs videos for purchase. In addition to Somethin’ Hot, you can now pick up Going to Town, Honkey’s Ladder, Gentlemen and Debonair.
Sub Pop needs to get busy and round out the collection.
Thanks Jason
Moon Maan’s landing
Local Music: Moon Maan’s landing
Former Afghan Whigs guitarist Rick McCollum has two new CDs out this month, and he’s proud of both.
By Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune
It was mostly coincidence, but good timing nonetheless: The same day Rick McCollum finally issued the debut album by his rhythmic soul-punk band Moon Maan, Rhino Records put out the first-ever anthology by his old group, the Afghan Whigs.
“We would’ve loved to have gotten this out two years earlier,” McCollum said of Moon Maan’s eponymous CD, which came out June 5. “But financially, that wasn’t an option.”
Hardly a rock star anymore, McCollum, 42, met up for a happy-hour interview last week at Grumpy’s in downtown Minneapolis after finishing a shift on one of his two jobs, driving a cab. He has been working steadily since his first band broke up in 2001. The Whigs were one of the most critically revered American rock acts of the ’90s, but that’s not a quality its former guitarist can take to the bank nowadays.
Moon Maan’s slow birth wasn’t just ruled by money, though. It took McCollum a couple years to start the band, which comprises a small posse of Minneapolis vets: drummer Erik Mathison (Balloon Guy, Polara), guitarist Bryan Knisley (Push On Junior) and bassist Mark Pakulski (Signal and Report).
“I sort of had to regroup and start the band on my own terms,” McCollum said of the quartet, which is playing a CD-release party tonight at the Triple Rock. “It was a good thing to step away from being in a band, because I did eventually start to miss it.”
McCollum moved to Minneapolis from the Whigs’ native Cincinnati in 1994. He followed a woman here, Guthrie actress Tracey Maloney. Their relationship ended a year or two after the Whigs did, but he stayed put.
His first batch of post-Whigs gigs were a weekly residency at the Terminal Bar, where he improvised every night with a loop machine, guitar and his trusty theremin, the oddball radio-wave synthesizer that he also plays in Moon Maan.
Even after Moon Maan made its landing, playing its first gig at the South by Southwest Music Conference in 2004, McCollum didn’t want to rush to put out an album. The band recorded the CD over two sessions spread almost a year apart.
“You have to remember, this is only my second band ever,” he said. “I’d like for this one to be taken as seriously as the first. I wanted to be sure we had 12 really good tracks instead of just five, plus some filler.”
Mission accomplished, for the most part. Moon Maan’s 11-song debut kicks off with the hard-boogieing, obsessive rocker “Be Good to Me” and slows it down with two darkly soulful numbers, “Chain Yr Soul” and “Hard to Believe.” That’s a lot of power in just the first three tracks. The best cuts come deep into the album, however: “Feed the Methman,” a dizzying Zeppelin-y jam, and “Yesterday’s Fool,” a stormy opus that demonstrates Moon Maan’s great integration of Ohio soul and Detroit punk.
Moon Maan often sounds like McCollum’s old band, a point he doesn’t deny. For one thing, some of these songs started as riffs he wrote while in the Whigs. Also, he remains one of the Whigs’ biggest fans.
“I look at [Moon Maan] as more of a steppingstone in my life to something different, but it’s a compliment to even be compared to the Whigs,” he said. “That was a band that had the rare kind of chemistry.”
The chemistry turned bad in the end, but McCollum has long since reconciled with his ex-bandmates. He has joined singer Greg Dulli onstage when Dulli came to town with his new band, the Twilight Singers. And all four of the former Whigs reunited at Ardent Studios in Memphis to record two new songs for the anthology, “Unbreakable: A Retrospective (1990-2006),” which includes their work on Sub Pop, Elektra and Columbia Records.
Don’t look for the Whigs to join the fray of reuniting ’90s bands, though.
“It was more a closure thing than anything else,” McCollum said of the Memphis session. “We really enjoyed it. But there was also an inkling of the way things were when we broke up, just because of our personalities. As a band, we had a great bonding, but great clashes, too.”
And anyway, he added, “I kind of like my new band.”
Dulli on Sean Na Na
Har Mar Leaves Spandex at Home For Sean Na Na
‘Family Trees — Or Cope We Must,’ Sean Na Na’s latest effort, stems from writing sessions eighteen months ago. The project incorporates the work of almost a dozen people including former Distiller’s guitarist Tony Bevilacqua and Shins guitarist Dave Hernandez, as well as ex-Afghan Whig singer Greg Dulli and Kate Taylor on backing vocals.
Moon Maan CD Release Show
Moon Maan is celebrating the release of their debut CD with a show at Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis with Heavy Sleeper, the 757’s, and the Screens on this Friday, June 22.
Songs That Saved Your Life:”Gentlemen”
The website “Songs That Saved Your Life” has just posted a wonderful personal reflection on the “Gentlemen” album. It’s a good read, and took me right back to 1995.
→ Songs That Saved Your Life · The Afghan Whigs, “Gentlemen”
Moon Maan - Theremin Thrash
by Steve McPherson
Wipe your finger along the music on Moon Maan’s self-titled debut album and you’ll come away with a gob of grit and grime—but you’ll also have exposed an anodized, metallic finish. Underpinning the mostly straight-ahead classic-rock vibe of former Afghan Whigs guitarist Rick McCollum’s current project is a most unorthodox instrument: the theremin.
“I got one from Big Briar down in North Carolina—Robert Moog’s place,” says McCollum, on the phone from his home in Minneapolis. Moog was the inventor of the now-famous synthesizer that bears his name. “It was on the Whigs’ last album, 1965, and it wasn’t really a forefront thing—it was more a backing-vocal type of thing. It’s kind of the next step past a slide, where slide is fretless, but this is fretless in the air. It was built around the 1920s, so it’s kind of a thing where you have to have the talent for it. That was the appealing thing of it, because anything that’s challenging is more fun. Guitar gets kind of boring after a while; slide gets kind of boring.”
Maybe you’ve never seen a theremin. You might be entertaining visions of Nikola Tesla (as played by David Bowie in The Prestige) emerging from an electrical storm, or maybe you’re thinking about a Jacob’s Ladder, or one of those glass balls with the purple lightning from the Sharper Image catalog. Sadly, a theremin just looks like a set of antennas, but the sounds you can produce by moving your hands through the air around it are otherworldly.
“You can get so low on the thing; even lower than a bassoon or the lowest bass instrument,” McCollum explains. “And you can get some nasty hard horn sounds, too. Especially if you just keep layering the thing and you get this wall of sound behind you. It’s definitely an exacting instrument where you really have to concentrate when you do it.”
The extension out from slide guitar makes sense, since one of McCollum’s most notable contributions to the Afghan Whigs was his excellent slide playing, which is a prominent element of Moon Maan’s sound. Like the Whigs, Moon Maan run their grooves along the seamy underbelly of rock, but with less sex and more menace, as on the hazy, almost Alice in Chains grind of “Feed the Methman.” The bluesy roll of “Yesterday’s Fool” breaks open into a gospel-tinged chorus, McCollum’s vocals recalling Robert Plant’s after being ground down and sandblasted. And where the theremin makes appearances, as on opener “Be Good to Me,” it bathes the swagger and sweat of the track in a ghostly haze of science fiction. The emphasis throughout is on feel over melody, an end result that comes naturally out of McCollum’s songwriting process.
“The main thing that I like doing is working from the drums out,” McCollum says, “rather than coming up with something on acoustic like a straight chord progression. If you work it from the inside, it makes it easier to come up with words that are comfortable to sing in front of people. It gives a little more soul to it.” It’s evident from the record’s jam-soaked vibe that Moon Maan is not a one-man band; McCollum draws heavily on the crackling contributions of drummer Erik Mathison, guitarist Bryan Knisley, and bassists Kate Clements and Mark Pakulski (Clements plays on roughly half the tracks, having left the band after their first recording session).
With the support of Catlick Records and the fortuitous timing of the recently released Afghan Whigs retrospective, Unbreakable, which came out the same day as Moon Maan’s debut, McCollum is hoping to build some momentum. He’s looking toward more local shows and touring in the fall, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have plenty of responsibilities to take care of at home.
“I’ve been working every day for the past three or four weeks,” he says when I first get him on the phone, “and I’m kind of burnt.” So what’s he up to when he gets the chance to catch up? “Folding six baskets of laundry,” he laughs.
Mark Lanegan on Scott Ford Radio
Scott Ford finishes up his Twilight Singers trifecta this week when Mark Lanegan is his on-air guest. You can send questions to Mr. Lanegan via the Ford Radio website.
Unbreakable - SunJournal.com
SunJournal.com - Ear Worm music reviews
Rating: B +
Instead of simply playing footsie with funk, the Afghan Whigs entered into a committed relationship with it, decorating many of their grungiest numbers with good-time grooves and jazzoid freakiness. A snotty, sepia-toned soulfulness informs the best songs on Rhino’s rowdy 18 track best-of collection. Surprisingly, two new ditties - “I’m a Soldier” and “Magazine” - stand up to numbers culled from the Ohio band’s Sub Pop, Elektra and Columbia Records days. Songwriter Greg Dulli’s smart-ass lyrics remain as funny - and ominous - as ever. Besides, there’s no resisting a guy who toggles so effortlessly between self-love and self-loathing.
- Amy Longsdorf
Mighty Fine on TV 2Nite
Mighty Fine’s appearing on MiNDWiPE tonight. The show airs at 3:30 am on Brooklyn cable channel 35 (TimeWarner) / 68 (Cablevision) or online at the same time at http://www.brooklynx.org/bcat on “channel 2″ of BCAT’s website.
The Gutter Twins: Saturnalia The long awaited debut from Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan
Order CD at Amazon.com
