The Rake Magazine

One might think it is Sting or the second coming of KISS, I mean Christ, or some other hugely popular international act packing the Triple Rock this past Saturday night. The room is awash in colored patterns, setting the evening up for a fierce Stripes v. Plaids / Sharks v. Jets rock and roll rumble. But the cocktail-clutchers and the Pabst-proffers are anxiously awaiting four local bands. The Minneapolis music scene is geared for explosion, and it's hard to believe one of the masterminds is a gentleman quietly hunched over an acoustic guitar.

When Darren Jackson, better known as the leader of Kid Dakota, isn't sending his emotionally raw songs lassoing through the air, he is perched behind his recording console, twisting knobs, fiddling with levels and crafting the sound of many of the city's biggest shiners. He has produced 20 albums in the last year and a half, of the likes of Bella Koshka and Vicious Vicious. Since opening his studio, Jackson has been a catalyst to the scene, playing the role of the mysterious man behind the green curtain. But Jackson has held many roles, one being part-time musician, full-time office drone.

"I was working at the University of Minnesota running reports, just office bullshit. It was a means to an end. It was me for six years," Jackson says. "And the whole time I was there I was acquiring studio gear to build a studio. So about 2006, I got my studio up and running and I quit my job and I started working on that record [A Winner's Shadow] and then started recording other people... and then started recording other people."

That was the obstacle, Jackson says. He spent so much time wiling away in the studio working on other bands' music that he had to put his personal passions on the back burner.

"Pretty soon I was just working every day recording other people. I had no time to work on my own record," he says. "I was working with five or six at a time. I started putting their interests over my own."

This March Jackson finally finished his two-year effort, third album A Winner's Shadow. It was, he says, "utter relief." But his focus has not been in vain, when considering his output and momentum as a producer. One such act he produced, Aviette, is celebrating its CD release at the show.

Aviette is a slow-moving, deeply vibrating machine. Singer Holly Munoz' smooth alto is sleek and flirty. Justin Hartke's bass is deep and rumbling. Aviette can be powerful, but tends to enjoy the demure, with mid-tempo swooners lollygagging on the subject of heartbreak.

Joining Aviette on the bill is The Alarmists, one of Minneapolis' most hyped acts. Largely the title is fitting. The band's psych sound lobs one leg on each side of the pop/rock border and behaves like Brian Jonestown Massacre or The Warlocks riding high on a shot of candy-coated peppermints. Only, the pieces don't fit together. Live, the vocals shudder with pop punk's nasally intonations and stand in opposition to the music's wave of psychedelia. But the keyboards save it. Jorge Raasch's set up consists of three keyboards, from which he elicits Motown ivory-pounding, church chorus chords and ultra-fuzz.

And then comes Kid Dakota, playing to a hushed landscape of faces.

"I think the quiet acoustic drove all the noisy people away," Jackson jokes to the thinned crowd. His bare acoustic filters out other distractions, sending the people who want beer-swilling party music in search of Cedar Avenue's plethora of seedy bars.

Jackson sings about what he knows, a sepia-tinted childhood in South Dakota, Minnesota, its ten thousand lakes and the Weather Channel. The haunting melodies and sparse guitar make listeners feel like they are pulled into his inner sanctum of pure thoughts and tones. This stripped down version of Jackson's music is primitive and emotional. His baritone can be thunderous; it can also evaporate like whispers. Tonight he is just a man, not work-weary producer. He sits, just him and his guitar on a lonely, dark stage, a capo his only adornment. The curtain is drawn.

A small army of bicycles standing guard outside the Walker Art Center glints like miniature sunbursts while lines stretch like anxious snakes down the sidewalk. The sold out crowd of 7,500 brave hour long entry waits, sunburns, and sweat for Rock The Garden and a chance to see indie pop's brightest talents.

As Bon Iver opens the afternoon with his mellow orchestrations and hushed melodies, onlookers pack the closed street allowing only inches of legroom. On the hill overlooking the stage, a man relives childhood revelry by rolling down the grass carpet in shoeless, summer bliss. Squinting eyes are shielded by Wayfarer sunglasses. A speckle of straw hats and a gaggle of patchwork quilts break up the patches of sunbathers. A small gathering on the Walker's roof looks out with a bird's eye view. And as Bon Iver's band ring out the last echoing trumpets, bony arms raise to clap, creating their own grateful windstorms, then return to wiping brows.

Minnesota's own Cloud Cult takes the stage next. Singer Craig Minowa greets the throng with a cheerful "Hi ya!" before launching into the band's emotional and raw set. As a group focused on ecoconsciousness, Cloud Cult no doubt appreciates the festivals "zero waste" policy. Crushed beer cups and litter are noticeably missing, as is moshing and the general raucousness accustomed to outdoor concerts. A beach ball quietly bounces on top of the crowd, as they stand intently watching Minowa hop around the stage, pounding his feet and acting in stark contrast to his lyrics steeped in struggle and loss. His vocals are fragile. If you could reach out and touch them, they would turn to dust and dreams. Embellishing the band's already lush sound, is violist Shannon Frid. She raises her bow in the air, like a lightning rod or a rain stick. The audience applauds at the end of Cloud Cult's cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My," equally for the band and for a brief moment of shade provided by a passing cloud.

Then comes The New Pornographers. There's something about their rich harmonies that make it feel like summer. Maybe it's memories of the Beach Boys with their sandy, tight harmonies and stories of ocean waves that feel like they could drench even the center of this city. This is The New Pornographers' feel: bouncy, upbeat guitar pop. Most of their tunes include heavy doses of harmonious la-la-las, ba-da-das, no-no-nos and a sprinkling of enthusiastic aaaaahhhhhs. This is OK. Save those wallowing songs of heartbreak or spoutings about social causes for the dreary winter-or at least the riots outside the Republican National Convention later this year. Summer is the season of joyous pop music, and The New Pornographers deliver with their trademark boppy, poppy controlled spazz.

As the sun sets on Rock The Garden, the Walker's silver sheen looks like a melted orange popsicle. Smoke from food stands rise in wisps, joining threatening gray clouds. When Andrew Bird steps onstage to close the event, cool breezes storm through the audience, smacking like full kisses on the lips. Bird's music, laden with whistling and tender-sounding violins, sounds like an intricately wound toy. Camera flashes match bolts of far away lightning in their intensity. In turn, a light rain grows fiercer as die-hard Bird fans brave the weather to see the evening's star. A group at the bottom of the hill cowers under a red blanket in an attempt to keep dry. As the wind whips the blanket, it looks like a super hero's cape, readying them to take flight.

See the Rock the Garden Flickr Pool.

The music filled the room. Emanating from a trio of guitars, chords resonated with chords and dispersed throughout the Turf Club on Wednesday night, thick and palpable as the fog that periodically came out from the fog machines. Steady percussion from bass and drums crept under the noise to make it danceable (or at least head-nod-able). Though many were sitting stoic at the bar or in the venue's booths, no one could ignore it: The Warlocks were playing.

The band is touring this summer, often in tandem with The Black Angels, to promote their latest album, Heavy Deavy Skull Lover. The release is darker than their previous outputs, but as one astute concertgoer quipped, "You don't have to be a depressed teenager to like it."

A sizable group of fans, most of them tattooed and/or flannel'd and/or bandanna'd, huddled near the stage, alternately swaying, grooving, and jamming. Though the vocals were somewhat blurred (intentionally), many were able to sing along with vocalist Bobby Hecksher's lyrics.

Hecksher himself, more so than any of the other band members, had a commanding presence on stage. It really appeared as if the music were entering him through some aural version of osmosis. Despite the loud-but-mellow tone of the group, he rocked out as if covering only the loudest of Metallica's canon.

At times it seemed the group was not creating music so much as creating atmosphere, because the layering of distortion and ambient quality defined each song. Yet each song demanded attention, too. The result being that The Warlocks were at once in the foreground and the background of everyone's ears. Which is kind of a strange sensation – at a concert, one can usually either keep an interior monologue going independent of what's on stage, or else let the music serve merely as a backdrop for conversation, as jukebox music might. But at the Turf Club, there was no escape, no reprieve. Like drinking water in a swimming pool.

The most common description I've seen of their music has been, ‘neo-psychedelic.' I'm not sure I quite know what this means, but at the same time it feels like a very apt description. The music is reminiscent of The Doors, if one were to elongate and slur every note of a given Doors song. Maybe think of a hard rock group playing as loud as they possibly can in a tunnel that produces lots of echoes, and hearing the music from outside that tunnel.

The downside was that there was a uniform feeling to the performance. While every song was no doubt engaging, about midway through the show, it began to feel repetitive. Each piece might have started out differently – now with a drumbeat, now with a solo guitar riff – but once all the instruments were inevitably added into the mix, homogeneity took over. While The Warlocks have an incredibly distinct style, their sound from song to song remained somewhat the same.

Nevertheless, it was an appealing show. The Warlocks kept dialogue to a minimum between songs (I think Hecksher said, "Thanks for coming out," once, and that's it), letting the music stand for itself. And even if the set sometimes sounded like one long piece, their style is original enough that one can listen to it for a straight hour or so, and it still does really seem fresh – most bands can't keep that up for more than four minutes.

Very occasionally, this critic can get it all wrong. Looking at the bespectacled electronic trio (black rectangular frames, black rectangular frames, and '80s nerd chic frames) with their unobtrusive fashion (jeans, jeans, and khakis), I drew a few conclusions. Later, I asked keyboardist Ryan Olcott whether I had Mystery Palace figured out.

Erin Roof: Are you vegans?

Ryan Olcott: No. We're conscientious about what we eat, but no.

ER: Do you drive hybrid cars?

RO: I wish we did. That's a good goal. But, unfortunately not. I'm driving a mini van right now, and it gets OK mileage, but its a far cry from anything economically and environmentally sound.

ER: Do you appreciate Moby for his technique?

RO: I hope Moby doesn't read this. I respect him, but I'm not a fan of Moby's music. We were labelmates for a little bit, but no... I have a loose affiliation with Moby, very loose, he wouldn't know who I am.

In other words, no. I struck out. Then again, it's difficult to fit Mystery Palace into the neatly manicured categories music writers love to use. The laid back electronica sounds a lot like Hot Chip if they took a night off from the club hits. The music blurs the line between ambient techno and pop, yet it's not either. With live drums, a keyboard, and a bass, it's an odd conglomeration to tack any label onto.

"We're kind of in between this experimental faction and pop," Olcott explains. "We're just treading this fine line of what our audience is."

This is the biggest problem, he says. Music lovers tend to like one genre or another. For a hybrid band like Mystery Palace, it can be difficult to find its footing.

"[Our audience are] the experimental electronic kids that appreciate a pop song and really like it," Olcott says. "But for the most part, those kids don't. They want to hear atonalities and dissonance and what not. Even though that's where we come from, we've kind of alienated that crowd almost because we're kind of a pop band. But the pop scene is still warming up to us because we're not like a guitar band."

If the band had to drag around a genre, it would be that catch all phrase "indie" because, as Olcott happily espouses, Mystery Palace has its main component: a lack of technique.

"A key thing in indie music is that element of innocence I think that really connects with the indie crowd," he says. "That charming sense of 'We're just having a good time, but don't know what the hell we're doing.' That's the endearing quality of indie music. Me, personally, I lack a lot of keyboard technique. Ask me to sit down behind a piano and play an A tune and I'll be like, 'What?' We lack the element of technique, but we also have a great amount of technique. I have a technique as a producer to create a sound, to envision a sound. As far as, like, playing, performance technique, I'm about as indie as it gets."

One aspect that does define Mystery Palace is its penchant for experimentation. Olcott employs a method called circuit bending, which he describes as "the art of the creative malfunction." Much like classical composer John Cage plucked piano strings and discovered methods of playing instruments outside their intended uses, Olcott uses a rewired keyboard to elicit the strange "clicks and bleeps" that anchor his music. While Mystery Palace's songs may be bleeping, they are not bleating. It's music that could accompany listeners throughout the day-- happy to be the soundtrack to morning cups of coffee, commutes, and lingering moments before sleep. It's about enhancing life through layers of stark emotion. It's not flashy, but it's not to be ignored.

It's non-confrontational, just like the band's approach to its performance.

"I'm never the guy on stage who's hyping the crowd or getting in people's face. I'm just not into that. It's cheesy," Olcott says. "I try to be as mellow as I possibly can on stage. The way I write is pretty abstract lyrically and musically, so any emotion I would portray on stage would definitely have an influence on how people connect to the music. I don't want to do that. I want the music to kind of like evoke a response on a personal level. So the way I act on stage, the way we all act on stage, we downplay it all because we don't want any of that to misrepresent the sound."

Whatever genre-bending style Mystery Palace plays, it's the music that matters.

Forget what the press says. Devonte Hynes does not look like AIDS.

"It's pretty harsh," Hynes says about the cruelest comment published about him. "'You look like a terminal illness. You look like death. I don't know what AIDS looks like."

It definitely isn't him. Decked out in cut-off short shorts, a faux fur hat, and white tube socks, Hynes looks more like a fashion misfit. Strumming a duct-tape adorned acoustic guitar with a Star Wars sticker, he also boldly professes his love of science fiction. But it's OK. Some of the best music was written by misfits and nerds. Hynes's new album, under the moniker Lightspeed Champion, is an easy favorite in the I'm-so-nerdy-I'm-hip category. Songs like "Galaxy of the Lost" and "Everyone I Know is Listening to Crunk" are as catchy as they are endearing. With a flutter of wind instruments, acoustic guitars, and effects kept to a minimum, Lightspeed Champion is a far cry from the out of control screamo act, Test Icicles, that brought Hynes notoriety among the UK's indie elite.

"I've kind of always been solo and occasionally I would play as a band," Hynes says. "When I play with a band, it's always one specific type of thing, and if [Test Icicles did] more than one record, it probably would have changed genre. I could have put out seven different albums of different genres. There was more of a dance based thing, like a Daft Punky thing, there was hip hop, there was stuff similar to Test Icicles. [Lightspeed Champion] was originally going to be more grunge based. As it took longer and longer to the point where I was going to record, I decided I wanted to challenge myself. I stripped away the guitars."

Lightspeed Champion's on-stage act draws closer its heavier origins. Some songs may stray from the acoustic versions on Falling Off the Lavender Bridge, yet there is also a violinist--one who performed a note-perfect rendition of the Star Wars theme. It strikes a balance between Hynes's musical extremes. One part that doesn't change is his charming allure. Hynes's on-stage banter hops from subject to subject, including bowling, his preference for Michael Jackson over Prince, and a simple, "What have you been doing today." He has a natural comraderie with the audience, almost as if he could hop from the stage and sling his arms across the strangers amidst his artful crescendos and witticisms and his "too many solos."

"I tend to do way too many guitar solos," Hynes says. "It's something that gradually, gradually got worse throughout touring. They're just so fun. They're the best thing ever." But some may say there are never enough.

The Explorers Club would probably disagree. They sunny Beach Boys-loving seven piece fits its multi-layered harmonies and composition so tightly, a solo would be nearly undiscernible in its wall of sound. The opening act boasts at times four guitars, two keyboards, drums, a mandolin, a tamborine and sleighbells. Can't forget those sleighbells. With an early '60s sound and a look like the love children of the Bee Gees and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the South Carolina band claims influences from The Beatles, The Zombies, the Beach Boys, and Chuck Berry.

Most of them cite an early appreciation for oldies. For guitarist Jason Brewer, it was The Beatles.

"I listened to The Beatles a lot as a kid, like all the time," he says. "I had like every Beatles album on cassette. If I was a good kid and did my chores, loaded the dishwasher, my mom and dad would give me a Beatles tape. Instead of giving me money, I said, 'I want music.' We listened to a lot of church music, too, because my parents were both choir directors."

Gospel shows itself frequently in The Explorers Club's music, as does the swinging rock of Elvis Presley. He was keyboardist Stefan Rogenmoser's introduction to music.

"When I was a kid, I had this Elvis tape," he says. "When we first bought it, my mom got it at WalMart or something, and they had these tape security cases, this plastic. The lady popped it open, it went flying up in the air, and I caught it just before it hit the ground. I played it so much the tape broke. All my friends were listening to Green Day's Dookie. It was a couple years before I got into that stuff. I was just rocking out to Elvis."

It's this retro influence that sets The Explorers Club apart. In an era that finds bands strip mining New Wave and grunge, few go as far back as the early '60s, relegating it to being their "parents' music." The Explorers Club wants listeners to remember that even our parents were once hip. Likewise, the band rejects rock's ultra-suave attitude.

"We're a very family friendly little band," Brewer says. "We're not the kind of band where you walk in and you think, 'Man, this makes me feel cool.' We just want to make you have fun."

They're the kind of band that appeals to people of all ages, or as guitarist Dave Ellis likes to put it, "zygotes and zombies, man." The Explorers Club's first full length, Freedom Wind, dropped last month. It's a sunny record best listened to in May through early September. Nothing says summer like cheery harmonies and jangly hand percussion. More sleighbells, please.