Quality Control: JURASSIC 5 REUNITE, STORM THE SANTA BARBARA BOWL

Jurassic 5 performs a headline show in March in Perth, Austrailia
Jurassic 5 performs a headline show in March in Perth, Austrailia

One of the highlights of last year’s Coachella music festival was the reunion of Jurassic 5, the well loved (and six-member) hip hop outfit that was totally West Coast in all the best ways: laid back yet totally tight and in control of their craft, individually as well as a team. They had cited artistic differences when they quit in 2007, but none of that was apparent when they got back together last year. Now they’re heading to the Santa Barbara Bowl this Sunday and they recently dropped an ace new single, “The Way We Do It,” which chops up the White Stripes’ “My Doorbell” to devastating effect.

But here’s the thing: they weren’t broken up that long, only by hip-hop standards. And the new single is really from 2006, part of a set of as-yet unreleased songs produced by Heavy D just before his death.

“I remember Heavy D saying, ‘Now I wanna make a hit for you guys,'” says Marc7, one of J5’s four vocalists, along with baritone Chali2na, Akil and Zaakir. “That’s the main thing he kept saying. That particular song was one of the last sessions we did. We had already recorded four or five songs with Heavy D. And on the last day of recording, he had that beat waiting for us. And we just wrote it right then and there … It was one of those songs that was just sitting in the vault.”

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Got your number: 311 headline an unsurprising Summer Roundup at the Bowl

Young the Giant rode the success of their second album "Mind Over Matter" to an appreciative Bowl crowd on Thursday. Guitarist Jacob Tilley, left, and vocalist Sameer Gadhia, right, lead this five-piece alternative rock group out of Irvine.
Young the Giant rode the success of their second album “Mind Over Matter” to an appreciative Bowl crowd on Thursday. Guitarist Jacob Tilley, left, and vocalist Sameer Gadhia, right, lead this five-piece alternative rock group out of Irvine.

Hand it to rock-rap group 311. They’ve been at it for 25 years and have maintained the same line-up ever since, and while they’ve dabbled with changing their sound on albums like “Evolver” and “Universal Pulse,” they still deliver a polished mix of feel-good faux-reggae lyrics, uplifting rap, chugga-chugga metal riffing, and funk bass and drums. On one hand, you can say they have a formula and churn it out; on the other, you can say they’re the most reliable of the ’90s bands that are left.

311 were in town as headliners for KJEE’s Summer Roundup at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Thursday. It had been a beastly day for the heat, way up in 90s, possibly in the 100s, with four different weather services claiming four different temperatures. So the idea of sitting at the Bowl watching three other bands open for 311 may not have been ideal for a lot of folks. Even by the end of the evening, large chunks of seats went unfilled.

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This ain’t no party : The Flaming Lips close off the Bowl season in bloody style

The Flaming Lips played songs from their latest album "The Terror" at the season-closing concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl. NIK BLASKOVICH/NEWS-PRESS
The Flaming Lips played songs from their latest album “The Terror” at the season-closing concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl.
NIK BLASKOVICH/NEWS-PRESS

When the Flaming Lips last played Santa Barbara it was in 2002, and they brought their now famous party to the Arlington — dancing bears, balloons, confetti cannons, and more. Their album at the time was “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” which has gone on to be considered one of their best. Though melancholic underneath, the music bopped along, and so did the band.

When lead singer Wayne Coyne and his cohorts returned to Santa Barbara this last Friday, they did so as headliners on the final show of the Bowl season, and with a locally-created Dia de los Muertos theme to celebrate. But they were also bringing an album considered by critics to be the bleakest of their career: “The Terror.” The resulting concert was disconcerting. How to balance their reputation as one of the best live shows around while pushing ahead with their experimental music? The results were mixed.

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Music for the masses – Depeche Mode does not disappoint in Bowl show

Depeche Mode packed the Santa Barbara Bowl Tuesday night. THOMAS KELSEY/NEWS-PRESS
Depeche Mode packed the Santa Barbara Bowl Tuesday night.
THOMAS KELSEY/NEWS-PRESS

For a band whose reputation rests on the darker side of human nature, the biggest surprise at Depeche Mode’s packed show at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Tuesday night was just how happy the band was on stage.

Smiles abounded. High-fives were given. There was laughter between musicians. And Dave Gahan loves to dance.

But, hey, the band members should be happy. Depeche Mode has lasted longer than most of its contemporaries without really altering its sound, never leaving that operatic, industrial electronica that fans know since the early ’80s.

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New Mode, Same as the Old Mode – DEPECHE MODE COMES TO TOWN WITH A NEW ALBUM, TOUR

Depeche Mode recorded four oftheir albums in Santa Barbara. Anton Corbijn photo
Depeche Mode recorded four oftheir albums in Santa Barbara.
Anton Corbijn photo

Depeche Mode will always be associated with their hometown — the very small hometown — of Basildon, England, but Santa Barbara can lay claim to the band, on and off, since 2001. That’s the first time the band recorded some of its album “Exciter” — with its aloe plant on the cover, very SoCal — in our town. Since then, they’ve recorded three more albums here, most notably 2005’s “Playing the Angel” — entirely created at Sound Design studios downtown — and this year’s “Delta Machine.” Songwriter Martin Gore lives here, and is often seen walking about, and has DJ’d occasionally at clubs.

So their choice to play the Bowl this Tuesday, while in the middle of a massive world tour, is a little thank you to a city they’ve adopted.

Dave Gahan has been through a lot of illnesses since 2009 — there was a long bout with gastroenteritis, the removal of a malignant tumor in his bladder, and problems with his voice. You wouldn’t know it from the album and the tour, where he sounds like the Gahan of old. The band is clean and happy. The new tour is doing well.

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Four legends of hip-hop light up the Bowl

LL Cool J performing at the Santa Barbara Bowl. NIK BLASKOVICH / NEWS-PRESS
LL Cool J performing at the Santa Barbara Bowl.
NIK BLASKOVICH / NEWS-PRESS

Four of the greatest hip-hop acts of that genre’s golden age – roughly 1986-1989 – took the stage on Sunday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl for the Kings of the Mic tour stop.

In order of appearance, this would make a great mixtape back in the day: De La Soul, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and LL Cool J.

On stage it was mostly all positive, with sets chock full of hits and – for the latter two acts – enjoyable light and video shows. As for continued importance, only one of the acts still contributes worthwhile art to the culture.

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Fine Time – New Order’s Bernard Sumner on the new tour, new album, and what Blue Monday is really about

Kevin Cummins photo
Kevin Cummins photo

Traditionally you’d take a year or two to write and record an album, then you’d go on tour,” says New Order’s lead singer Bernard Sumner with his soft Mancunian accent. “But things are working differently in the music business these days. The new idea is that we’re going to play concerts in small bursts, like nine dates, then go back and write a bit, and then play another nine concerts. Just so we don’t disappear off the face of the earth for long.”

New Order (along with opening act Johnny Marr) come to the Santa Barbara Bowl on Thursday, but the announcement of this date was indeed a surprise. Following a rancorous split with founding bass player Peter Hook, the band really hasn’t released an album since 2005’s “Waiting for the Siren’s Call” and the 2011 mop-up B-sides release “Lost Sirens.” But no, here they are again.

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A-Mraz-ing Performance: Jason Mraz effortlessly entertains fans at the Bowl

Jason Mraz MATT WIER PHOTO
Jason Mraz
MATT WIER PHOTO

For an example of how atomized popular music culture has become in the last 10 years or more, how popular groups can run on a parallel line with whole sectors of the population unaware of their success and/or everpresence, look no further than pop singer Jason Mraz. At the Santa Barbara Bowl on Friday night, half the songs were met with applause of recognition, many with the audience singing along. To this reviewer, none of these songs were even remotely familiar, not even in a “didn’t I hear this while shopping/watching television” kind of way. Yet here’s an artist who broke some sort of record by staying in the Billboard Top 100 for 78 weeks with “I’m Yours,” his lilting piffle of a summer song.

OK, so maybe I’m out of touch and listen to KCRW too much (in my basement), but Mr. Mraz was a new one on me. And, despite his predilections and faults, the man is a pure entertainer, at ease onstage like he owns it, and leading the audience like he knows them. Online haters critique this as ballooning ego but hey, you gotta have some to get anywhere, and Mr. Mraz has a Grammy. No, make that two.

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Phoenix has stepped into the arena category without the songs

Phoenix vocalist Thomas Mars sings at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Sunday night. MICHAEL MORIATIS/NEWS-PRESS
Phoenix vocalist Thomas Mars sings at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Sunday night.
MICHAEL MORIATIS/NEWS-PRESS

From one Bowl to another: French band Phoenix stopped by our fair concert venue on Sunday after a sold-out, well-received concert at the Hollywood Bowl the day before, riding high on a career that has gone from cult attention to mass appeal. This is all the more amazing considering Phoenix’s pop-rock music — which settles into push-pull, loud-soft dynamics several times during each song, buoying melody lines that turn back in on themselves instead of stretching out into sing-along choruses — has an arrangement template that varied little each song. That is to say, Phoenix has risen with songs that don’t exactly knock one over with hooks.

So put it down to their style, their musicianship and being at the right place at the right time. And hey, think about it, these guys are French! And when was the last time a French rock band ever made it big in America?

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Sublime’s new singer Rome carried on Nowell’s tradition at KJEE’s Summer Round Up

MICHAEL MORIATIS/NEWS-PRESS
MICHAEL MORIATIS/NEWS-PRESS

When Rome Ramirez was about 6 years old, Bradley Nowell, lead singer of Sublime, died from a drug overdose. That was 1996. Now it’s 2010 and the 22-year-old finds himself stepping into Nowell’s shoes as the frontman of a resuscitated Sublime (with the appendage “with Rome” added after Nowell’s family complained).

A Sublime fan since he was a kid, Mr. Ramirez is now playing in front of crowds like the one that gathered at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Saturday, most of whom probably never saw Sublime play when Nowell was alive. As a capper to the day-long KJEE Summer Round Up, it was a fine enough way to see the sun set.

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