Murfreesboro it-group Those Darlins play Saturday night at The Independent.

Don’t call Murfreesboro-based rock ‘n ‘rollers Those Darlins an indie-rock band.

“There’s no sex in indie rock,” says 29-year-old bassist Kelly Darlin. “It’s all bookish and literary and boring and trying to be clever and smart. It’s not rock ‘n’ roll.”

It’s quotes like that and songs like “Red Light Love” — even more than the fact they’ve got a dude drummer — that makes describing the increasingly popular Darlins as a “girl band” seem equally inadequate. They’re a woman band.

The group’s musical and spiritual influences — Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline — were never “girls.” They were women. They owned it. Ditto the Darlins.

“I would hope every individual own their sexuality,” Kelly says. “I would hope everyone has awareness of it and control over it.”

Watch Those Darlins keep it under control Saturday night at The Independent. In the meantime, check out our photos from the last (and first) time they played the Plains.

Photo via.

…

Who: Those Darlins, Baby Baby, Bottle Up and Explode.

Where: The Independent, 203 Opelika Road.

When: Saturday, January 29,  10 p.m.

Info: $10 at the door.

…

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What's the first thing to Skinny DeVille's mind when he thinks of Auburn: "Weed smokin' and frats."

Skinny DeVille has a wife, three kids, and a new yard in Atlanta that he mows himself. He believes in God. He smokes a little weed. He pays his bills. He’s a rapper. It’s exciting stuff.

“I think people appreciate that side of life, the reality, just as much as they appreciate the fantasy side,” says Deville, who Rolling Stone described in 2002 as the most philosophical member of famously down-to-earth southern rap sextet Nappy Roots. “We’re all about painting you a very beautiful picture, not of this glamorous materialism, but about taking care of your family and just living life.”

For instance, you’re not likely to find DeVille sippin’ Courvoisier on a yacht, on or off camera; the video for “Ride,” the stellar debut single off the band’s new album “The Pursuit of Nappyness,” has him in the grocery store reaching for the Grapico (before giving a ride to a girl trying to meet her husband, just returned from Iraq. She keeps her clothes on the whole way).

“It’s not just about bitches and hoes and drugs and money and champagne poppin’ and pit bulls,” he says. “My kids can watch that video without me having to explain what sex is or looking at g-strings.”

Nappy Roots formed in 1995 and signed to Atlantic Records in 1998. Riding the millennial wave of mainstream interest in southern hip-hop generated by Atlanta-based acts like Outkast and Goodie Mob, their major label debut “Watermelon, Chicken, and Gritz” eventually went platinum thanks to catchy, urban-meets-country singles “Awnaw” and “Po-Folks.”

The band’s southern but relatively bourgeois background – the members first recorded together while students at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green – contrasts starkly to the bullet-riddled origin myths of many of their more urban contemporaries.

While DeVille acknowledges that going to college doesn’t typically translate into hip-hop street cred, he also acknowledges that he doesn’t really care.

“Some of our guys… almost didn’t make it to college, it could have been college or jail, but there’s nothing wrong with being educated and knowing what you’re talking about and knowing different sides of life,” DeVille says. “People are coming from a lot of different places and a lot hip-hop is about where you come from and credibility. We weren’t street, but we were reality.”

DeVille, who recently moved from Kentucky to Atlanta in order “to be closer to what was going on and have a better shot at supporting my family” says the group retains its style and values on “The Pursuit of Nappyness,” its first independent release in more than a decade.

“People were always saying, ‘you remind me of Outkast, Goodie Mob, Arrested Development.’ To me, ain’t none of those people overly street, overly materialistic, overly anything. If that’s what you’re looking for, then maybe we’re not for you. But if you like to kick it and talk about real things and stuff you can relate to, check out Nappy Roots. I’m a real guy. I just got finished cutting the grass.”

Is “cutting the grass” a euphemism for something street, something illegal?

“Ha… no, but I’ll do that, too,” he laughs. “I’ll take care of the weed a little later.”

…

Who: Nappy Roots.

Where: SkyBar, 136 E. Magnolia.

When: Tuesday, Oct. 12. Show starts at 8 p.m.

Info: Tickets are $10 at the door. Call 821-4001 for more information.

They will rip your face off.

For inspiration, Derek Miller goes on the Internet and watches videos of cheerleaders shouting, stomping, and rocking out for the team (he’s also got a thing for Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss”).

“I mean, honestly dude, if you go on YouTube and type in ‘stomp and clap’ and watch some of these girls doing their routines in the gym, for whatever reason that s— just… floors me,” says Miller, the driving force behind Sleigh Bells, the new blog-buzz champions of Brooklyn’s indie-scene. “It’s so… skeletal and heavy. It’s not necessarily sophisticated, but it’s super percussive and super intense.”

And it’s apparently exactly what Miller (former guitarist for pioneering metalcore act Poison The Well) and partner Alexis Krauss (a former school teacher who once sang in B-list girl group Ruby Blue) were going for: one online review describes the band as “cheerleading music for punks” or “punk music for cheerleaders.”

(A review of that review: “Having been both a punk and a cheerleader-y type, I wholeheartedly concur.”)

Yet Miller shrugs off criticism that Sleigh Bells is intended as a novelty act built around ironic appropriation of jock culture.

“There’s something really bold and unpretentious about the guts it takes to be that straightforward and that’s something that’s just naturally made it’s way into our music because those are the qualities I admire in music,” Miller says of the energy and meter of cheerleading. “Like our song ‘Riot Rhythm’ – that’s nothing. It’s kick and clap and one guitar riff. There’s just nothing to it, but I really like that.”

The cover art for the band’s debut album Treats is a photo of 1970s high school cheerleaders in green mega-phone sweater vests, pompoms at full-attention, their faces scratched, like lottery tickets, as if to the bone; that’s exactly what you would expect on a dance record that at its core – and despite glowing hipster endorsement – is metal (thank you, Matt Lane Harris).

“That description makes perfect sense to me,” Miller laughs. “I don’t actually listen to that much heavy music any more, but I love metal, I grew up on it and it’s a huge part of my life, but I’m also obsessed with pop music. I’m kind of torn in half.”

When he comes together, Miller has the ability take the energy of the breakdown – the part of a hardcore song that even those who roll their eyes at the genre wait for – and stretch it across three minutes of Kraus’ sex-kitten vocals, Tony Basil’s rah-rah, and window-rattling hip-hop beats that summon the stomps and claps of everyone within earshot.

He even gauges the success of every Sleigh Bells show by how quickly it becomes, essentially, a pep-rally.

“I can always tell the second it happens,” Miller says. “I can just tell when they’re on our side.”

The Beach Boys couldn't surf, either.

Two weekends ago, Bombon’s Angela Ramos, 25, went to the flea market – they call them swap meets out west – to prepare for tour. She was looking for sunglasses. She wound up with a Ventures record. That seems like the way the guitarist for a girl surf band from San Pedro, Calif. should spend her Sunday.

Hopefully that doesn’t come across as patronizing.

Ramos has never been on tour before, she’s never been interviewed, she’s only just now put out a record (Las Chicas del Bombon was officially released three days ago at their show in Florence). But she’s dealt with the stigma of being a cute girl in a band of cute girls plenty of times.

“People will come up and say ‘wow, I really wasn’t expecting that. You actually know how to play your instruments,’” says Ramos, a chemistry major at Cal State Los Angeles. “We try to take it as something positive, but it’s also negative, because everyone automatically thinks ‘I wonder how cute they’ll sound’ instead of ‘I wonder what kind of music they’ll play.’”

For those that do wonder what style?

“I just tell them surf-punk,” she says. “I started writing Ventures-style songs and just played them by myself. I’ve always been into surf music, but never found the right people to play it with.”

That changed last year after a couple of girls crashed on the floor of the punk house she used to live in (before the one they all live in now).

“I started jamming out with Jerico (Campbell) cause she played the drums and then Paloma (Banuelos) wanted to learn something so she picked up the bass pretty quickly,” Ramos says.  “All of a sudden, it just started.”

And it works; Ramos’ favorite song “La Playa” – Spanish for “the beach” – sounds as beachy as a surfboard smells, or as beachy as she imagines it might smell.

“People ask us if we surf,” she laughs. “No, none of us surf. If you can’t surf, play in a surf band. I’m ashamed, but only one of the Beach Boys surfed, or kind of surfed. That’s what I heard.”

Who: Rise Up Howling Werewolf (organ-driven garage visions featuring members of The Pine Hill Haints), Almighty Do Me A Favor (the gut-wrenching one-man band of Auburn expat Bradley Williams, backed by two-man Hippy Riot or something), and Bombon.

Where: The Independent, 203 Opelika Road.

When: Friday, July 17,  8 p.m.

*** Bombon also plays (outside – rain or shine) Saturday evening (5-9:30 p.m) at Standard Deluxe in Waverly along with The Pine Hill Haints. Tickets are $10 (kids get ‘in’ free). Proceeds will go the East Alabama Food Bank.

This is a good band.

“It’s kind of a life-changer, I guess,” says Jon Jameson, co-founder and bassist for rootsy Southern California quintet Delta Spirit, on the band’s 2008 appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “I mean, a lot of bands get on Conan – or got on Conan – and all the other late night shows. They have to fill that space, but that was an exciting moment. He really ended up liking us. He came and told us later that he was having a really bad day, and then he heard us playing during our sound check and it, like, changed his attitude.”

How could it not? The song they chose for the occasion, “Trashcan,” is a fantastically-catchy, piano-pounding (and literally trashcan-tapping) gem of pure American rock ‘n’ roll featuring lead singer Matthew Vasquez (discovered while busking on a San Diego street bench, of course) belting lines like Brothers hold the line till we got something, the world is way to small to feel like nothing with his powerhouse gift for grit.

“His producer came up to us and said ‘he never comes out during the sound check,’” Jameson says. “It was cool to make Conan O’Brien’s day.”

Delta Spirit’s knack for altering moods is manifest not only in look-on-the-bright-side lyrics, but an almost mystical musical sincerity a la Springsteen.

The result: somehow a group of California twenty-somethings (with an articulate bassist who never once uttered the term “Americana, or even “roots-rock”) is on the verge of, as one right-minded reviewer put it, “bridging the old and new sensibilities of some of American rock music’s most gripping attributes.”

Indeed, the band’s take on the business of modern rock combos (Ode to Sunshine was recorded in a log cabin in the California mountains) is as evocative of the fruited plains (and as regionally-indistinct) as the Birmingham-area business once operated by Jameson’s uncle from which the band only-somewhat randomly takes it’s name: Delta Spirit Taxidermy Station of North Central Alabama.

“Other than it sounding cool, the name is just kind of a nod to our musical heritage,” Jameson says. “We don’t completely identify with being from Southern California, we don’t find ourselves at home in the surf culture so we’re trying to dig a little deeper and find our musical center in American music. There was a trend a few years back of trying to sound really British, pretending you’re one thing or another. But the one thing we agree on is that we’re Americans and we appreciate the American musical heritage that we came from.”

Relatedly, you get a strong sense that Jameson would much rather Delta Spirit’s success arrive via traditional channels — not from retweets and viral videos, but packed clubs.

“I think a lot of people forget that Pitchfork doesn’t decide what is and isn’t music,” Jameson says. “I don’t mean this in a self-made-man kind of way, but in all reality, we haven’t really benefitted from that kind of blog buzz or counted on it because that’s kind of like a myth.”

Regardless, since forming in 2005, everything for the patriots of American indie-rock – an early tour with Cold War Kids, appearances on Late Night and Last Call, and now stellar reviews of their just released sophomore album History From Below – has been coming up roses.

“We’ll gladly accept success where it is, but for us it’s about playing music in front of people and making a real fan as opposed to a virtual fan.”

Real like Conan?

“Ha, ha… yeah.”

…

Delta Spirit plays Saturday night at The Bottletree in Birmingham, along with David Vandervelde and The Romany Rye.

Down. Set. Rock, baby.

You’d think that the drummer for one of the most acclaimed indie-rock acts of the 2000′s would quickly answer “uh, no.”

But if you’re thinking Jason Hammel of Mates of State, you’d be wrong.

“Football? I played football in high school,” Hammel says. “I was actually captain of the varsity my senior year. I watch the Vikings [he grew up in Minnesota]. I don’t have that kind of pride that some guys or musicians do, like, ‘I don’t like sports, dude, I’m a rock ‘n’ roller.’ I don’t like that s—. It’s silly to limit yourself, to limit your interests. Yeah, I played tight end and defensive end.”

Mates of State and Free Energy play July 10 at WorkPlay in Birmingham.

Bye-Bye Truckers.

True — if pressed, he’s technically a Bama fan (family connections). But Jason Isbell — Muscle Shoals (sound) evangelist, Matthew Stafford doppelganger — does admit that, at the moment, Auburn is riper than Tuscaloosa for the style rock ‘n’ roll (“… I don’t mind [calling it] ‘Americana’) he and the 400 Unit do best.

Isbell, 31, came to roots-rock-ish, Americana-ish fame as lead guitarist for that band you hear about, Drive-By Truckers. He left them in 2007. It was amicable. But his ex-wife was the bass player. That never helps.

I think it’s the exchange about a rock ‘n ‘roll moment right before he left that best illustrates his confidence in that decision, or at least that he knew things were probably going to be all right.

…

TWER: Do you think being from Alabama as opposed to like, Portland or something, gives you a certain street cred in the Americana-alt-whatever scene you’re in?

Jason: I think so… Muscle Shoals more than Alabama, really. Definitely being from this town, a place that’s put out a lot of great music in the past, has helped us a lot as far as people paying attention to what we’re doing, and also the legitimacy concern. We all grew up around rock ‘n’ roll and country and soul music, around a lot of the people who made the best records from those styles. Being from the South helps a lot, too, I think. A lot of the original rock ‘n’ roll and blues musicians were obviously from this part of the country. And there’s something about being a southern American artist, when you’re playing overseas… people really seem to take to it.

TWER: So what’s been the biggest kind of ‘dude…’ moment for you in this business? The biggest professional compliment? Ever looked out into the crowd and seen Willie nodding along, something like that?

Jason: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of that kind of stuff. I got a phone call from Neil Young once. I had this song “Dress Blues” that he wanted to put up on his Living With War website. And at the time, [Drive-By Truckers] were out with The Black Crowes, and I was backstage in the dressing room with Chris Robinson and Marc Ford and so I turned off my phone like anybody else would, and when I turned it back on there was a message from Neil. It took forever to get back with him. He calls you. Trying to call him is not an easy thing to do and I didn’t wind up seeing him and talking to him until that Heart of Gold show in Nashville. We sat down and talked and he liked the music. That was probably tops for random musicians and celebrities and really just, you know, legends. But Slash was at a show, Gene Simmons was at one. Sometimes you hear from people in the country world, but the Neil Young thing was definitely the biggest. It really doesn’t get it any bigger.

TWER: So wait – you’re saying you got a call from Neil Young while you were hanging out with The Black Crowes?

Jason: Yeah, it was great. It was a moment. On the one hand, I kind of wish I had my phone on, but nobody would have their phone on. I couldn’t have expected that to happen right then. It was right after I recorded my first solo record.

TWER: So… does a southern man actually need him around, anyhow?

Jason: Haaaaa – no, he doesn’t need him around. I think the people we need around are better high school teachers.

TWER: Ok…

Who: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.
When: Friday, May 21. 8 p.m.
Where: The Strutting Duck (the old Auburn Ale House), 124 Tichenor Avenue, downtown.

…

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Hopefully no relation to Gary... but wait, weren't most of his family Auburn fans?

Taylor Hollingsworth, Birmingham’s resident acoustic genius (and Conor Oberst confederate), will get his folksy nasal on this Friday night at The Independent.

Hollingsworth recently gave Auburn its rock ‘n’ roll propers in an interview with Paste Magazine:

Paste: Yet in Life With a Slow Ear and some of your other solo work, there’s a pretty heavy punk influence.

Hollingsworth: Yeah, I’ve always loved punk. I’m a big fan of Wire, love The Ramones… But I guess everybody goes through that phase, or at least hopefully they do. I had a lot of older friends who were in to that kind of stuff, like The Replacements—it’s the stuff everybody goes through, growing up. There’s some cool punk bands in the south. I mean, there’s The Quadrajets from Auburn, and they turned out some real cool musicians. Jamie [Barrier] had The Wednesdays and, shit, he’s got this new band, Rise Up Howling Werewolf, or whatever.

… and I swear I remember Auburn Bikini playing a show with him at The Nick back in 2004.

Who: Taylor Hollingsworth, An Abstract Theory, and Callooh!Callay!

Where: The Independent, 203 Opelika Road.

When: Friday, April 16. Show starts at 10 p.m.

"I mean, Radiohead. That's a stupid band name."

Yes, they’ve heard of Japancakes (Athens). Yes, they’ve heard of – even played with – Japanther (Brooklyn). Yes, hindsight is 20/20 – even in Canada (Vancouver).

“Yeah, maybe we would have taken it a little more seriously if we knew what was going to happen,” says Japandroids’ Brian King a few hours before playing a show in Nijemegen, the oldest city in The Netherlands. “But for a band like us, when you name your band, you’re looking for a name to just put on a flyer to play a show. You’re not thinking that anybody is going to know who you are.”

And nobody probably would have had King’s fuzz-breathing guitar and pal ‘n’ partner John Prowse’s chaotically-simple drumming not sounded so freaking good, so freaking sincere, so freaking who-cares-if-they’re-steering-that-hipster-Japan-punwagon. (Japunwagon). And I probably wouldn’t be so bummed that I forgot they were playing Birmingham last night if it didn’t sound so freaking… college, man. That’s it. That’s all I know about music: they sound like college. They sound like the Malformity House. I said it. And God help me, I was actually thinking of going up for that show, just to hear it again.

With buzz-band speed and talent show humility, the Vancouver-based duo has career-making reviews from all the usual blog ‘n’ print barometers (Pitchfork, Spin, NME) thanks to the no-frill thrills of their 2009 Polyvinyl Records debut LP, which fails only in the intended sarcasm behind the ironically unironic (and still great) title: Post-Nothing.

In an interview last October, King was quoted as saying that “Polyvinyl wasn’t really a label we initially thought matched because we’re a bit of a departure from what they have been doing in the recent past.”

I don’t know anything about Polyvinyl’s recent, recent past… but I know that word got tossed around a lot before shows at Malformity back in the day (Travis and I used to have something close to a joke, and I think the punch line was “Polyvinyl”)… I know a few of their bands pulled their vans up Auburn’s midnight gravelways (Calvin Crime / Sean Na Na – oh, but Paris, Texas was technically at the Glenn House… I think Braid may have even played Ford Court or something), and I know that the content of Post-Nothing – in spirit, and yes, yes, in sound – is totally a post-nothing throwback to that young, backpack, proto-hipster house-show exuberance of the mid-to-late 90s – to college! — that Japandroids-ish bands (Jimmy Eat World, maybe some Nothing Feels Good-era Promise Ring on a few songs, and even, at times, the speak-singy Van Pelt) on labels like Polyvinyl helped define.  (Even the early Dischord-ish cover-art kind of gets in on the act.)

And hey, what do you know – King actually kind of agrees.

“Well, I think that’s probably related to something that all those bands have in common,” King says. “It’s that DIY kind of attitude or aesthetic of bands that grew up listening to bands like Fugazi or Sonic Youth… bands into creating our own scene.”

True, when he says “we’re still trying to bring [house show] energy and that style of music and that kind of passion and interaction to every show,” he likely isn’t referring to the video for that 2001 Jimmy Eat World hit “The Middle.” And I’m not really thinking about either. But since that video features kids at a house show in their underwear rocking out to a song almost hummably identical (at least the beginning chord progression or whatever – is that the right word?) to Japandroids’ “The Boys are Leaving Town,” we both might as well be.

“Those bands probably roughly all sound the same to your average listener,” he says to an average listener. “They all have that thing in common.”

Though their MySpace profile lists them as sounding like “2 sweethearts still naive enough to think they’ll never sell out,” I’m obviously above-average enough to know that Japandroids is, of course, far less commercial (for now) than Jimmy Eat World (who also should have given more thought to that first flyer – though zines from back then were filled with those kind of names).

But their just-call-us-garage-rock has connected with enough folks to get them to, you know, Holland, where people don’t care what kind of nostalgia is forced onto it as long as it’s loud, the Japuns don’t even translate, and where King only has to answer for the officially clichéd gimmick of his band’s name when his tour manager hands the phone over for an interview with a writer looking for an angle.

“I think there are a lot of bands that have become quite famous that wish they would have changed their name if they had just realized they would reach that name level,” King says, nicely*, and for the 100^th time in less than a year.

“I mean, Radiohead,” he says. “That’s a stupid band name – it’s not cool, it sounds terrible. If those guys had a chance to go back, what would they think? But it’s sort of like the band is bigger than the name now.”

…

*For the record, I’m all about the Japun bands – I think there should be more: Japantidisestablismentarianism, Japantsuit. Japandora’s Box, Japanda Bear, Japanhandling, Japantheon, Japeterpan…

Alt-country heroes / victims Lucero play the new Strutting Duck next Saturday.

The idea that he and others of his rootsy ilk have sired something magically, musically alt-original sends guitarist Brian Venable’s eyes rolling.

For over 10 years, Venable’s band Lucero has been one of the better-known acts blessed and cursed by the “alt-country” label, a know-it-when-you-hear-it catch-all coined for hipsters who dig Hank Williams by hipsters who dig Hank Williams (Sr. only, duh).

Venable, like everybody, hates the term. And he can tell you exactly when he first heard it.

“It was after we played our very first show,” he says. “Or I guess it was our third show. We were punk rock kids and I started listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Buck Owens and stuff. This guy came up and said ‘Man, that alt-country is getting real hot.’ I was like, ‘what in the world are you talking about?’”

The guy told Venable he should check out the magazine No Depression, the genre’s holy scripture. He did.

“Emmy Lou Harris was on the cover,” he said. “I thought I was being all original. I mean, I knew about The Blasters and The Scorchers, but never thought of it as alt-country. That’s the first time I ever heard of it. I could punch the guy who came up with that term in the throat and kill him. But it’s not as bad as ‘y’allternative.’”

Despite 15 years of semantic baggage, “alt-country” is still supposed to imply disdain for modern Nashville, rhinestones, and the perceived boot-skootin’ dandification of country music, i.e. pop with a twang.

Maybe that’s why Lucero’s first album for Universal, 1372 Overton Park, is a veritable soul record, with nearly every song drenched in the horn arrangements that helped put their hometown of Memphis on the musical map; if Venable has anything to say about it, you can come out to the Strutting Duck on the 27^th and hear exactly what alt-country isn’t.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m really glad [people] like us, but we just play rock ‘n’ roll.”

Who: Lucero

Where: The Strutting Duck Ale House, 124 Tichenor Ave.

When: Saturday, February 27. Show starts at 10 p.m.