Music – Page 10 – Ted Mills

Phoenix has stepped into the arena category without the songs

September 21, 2010June 18, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

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?

GUITAR WORK : Earning His Stripes – Local artist’s giant guitar graces the Sunset Strip

August 27, 2010June 11, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Local artist R. Nelson Parrish puts the finishing touches on his Sunset Strip-bound concept guitar. Parrish pulled 18-hour days to get it done. Instead of being in a gallery, the guitar will be out in the elements for a year, so one of Parrish's final coats was automobile clear-coat. — Local artist R. Nelson Parrish puts the finishing touches on his Sunset Strip-bound concept guitar. Parrish pulled 18-hour days to get it done. Instead of being in a gallery, the guitar will be out in the elements for a year, so one of Parrish’s final coats was automobile clear-coat.

Above the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip, a giant Gibson guitar stands, beckoning the crowd below to enter and hear rock music as loud as the guitar is tall, which is very tall indeed, at 10 feet. It’s a new, crazy sight on a road that is famous for its odd architecture and famous billboards, and its creator lives here in Santa Barbara.

R. Nelson Parrish doesn’t usually go for things guitar-shaped in his artwork, despite coming from a family with a background in Gibson guitars (his grandfather and uncle both played and owned them). His art since his 2005 MFA at UCSB has been about “totems,” long, multicolored boards of resin, paint and wood that combine the minimal aesthetic of John McCracken’s planks with a SoCal lifestyle of surfboards and skis. (It was the vision of them pitched upright in sand or snow that revealed their totem-like potential.) The work looks both familiar — the colors come straight out of sporting gear — and strange.

Sweat Box – Hot Hot Heat returns with a blistering fourth album and a Velvet Jones show

August 20, 2010June 16, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

When Hot Hot Heat’s first album dropped in 2002, they were the Vancouver band who had made good. With “Make Up the Breakdown,” the band combined XTC-esque New Wave with punk smarts and pop hooks and looked all set to go big. But after signing to Warner Bros., the general consensus, even within the band, is that the members set off in the wrong direction, rounding too many corners.

Dropping their major label and signing to an indie (Dangerbird in the States, Dine Alone in Canada) they’ve shaken off the dust and come firing back with “Future Breeds,” a return to form and the sound of their first album. The band hits Velvet Jones tonight for a gig that promises to be as raucous as ever.

Low-Strung – L.A.’s hard-to-classify-and-quantify String Theory returns to Nights

August 13, 2010June 16, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Conjuring both unique sounds and smoothe moves, String Theory wil be perform at this month?s ?Nights" at SBMA. Courtesy photos — Conjuring both unique sounds and smoothe moves, String Theory wil be perform at this month?s ?Nights” at SBMA.
Courtesy photos

As Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Nights gets ready for its final shindig of a shorter season, the group String Theory is readying a fourth appearance at the party. Attendees at previous Nights over the years will remember String Theory, which is hard to miss: cello, violin, saxophone, flute, keyboard, bass, drums and vocals make up a band line longer than the room. Their gigantic harp of sorts, with its brass strings, has been installed in large theaters everywhere from Singapore to Palm Desert, even for one performance at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Each space has its own acoustics, and each performance is different.

For this month’s Nights, the group will return to the back patio, where they played their first SBMA gig. They’ll also be including video projection on the back walls of the patio.

Rock of Ages – 50 years after they first started gigging in S.B., The Tridents return

August 6, 2010June 17, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Although it may be hard for a young band to believe, not all groups in the 1960s had aspirations for fame, fortune and a record contract. For some, it was just a great job. For band members of The Tridents, an instrumental surf band that rocked Santa Barbara regularly from 1962 to 1966, it was the time of their lives.

Inspired by The Ventures (“Walk Don’t Run” and the “Hawaii 5-0” theme song), The Tridents became a go-to dance band for Santa Barbara’s youth scene. The members have all kept in touch over the years, and now, this Friday and Saturday, they will celebrate 50 years of playing together with a concert at Chuck’s Waterfront Grill. Also on the bill is The Duquanes, a vocal group that has been around for 48 years.

Around the World and Back Again – Ancient Future returns to S.B. for an intimate concert

July 30, 2010June 3, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Back when Ancient Future co-founder and guitarist Matthew Montfort attended high school in Boulder, Colo., his locker partner was Eric Reed Boucher, who would go on to change his name to Jello Biafra and form the Dead Kennedys. The two didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye back then, but neither can deny that they’ve both followed their muse, whether into fiery punk or — in the case of Montfort’s Ancient Future, founded the same year as Biafra’s band — intricately arranged large ensemble world music.

The version of Ancient Future that stops by Yoga Soup this week has been stripped down to just Montfort and Mariah Parker. This makes things different than their last Santa Barbara visit in 1997, when the band was a quartet with a dancer. But that’s the Ancient Future way, a series of fluctuating lineups.

Rip It Up and Start Again – With a new drummer and an album in the works, The Donnas channel a new chapter in their career

July 30, 2010June 5, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

For a long time, The Donnas was a rock band that was all dealt in youth. It was the “American Teenage Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine” at the time of their second album. The band’s fourth album, “The Donnas Turn 21,” featured cover art of the girls sitting in a nightclub booth, pretending this was their first time drink. They’ve all been friends since eighth grade, and now (gasp!) The Donnas turn 30. As it passes through Santa Barbara this week for one of three warm-up shows on the West Coast, the band is about to start a new phase, mature but just as rockin’.

Injury has already claimed one of the original group members. In an on-again, off-again physical ailment that was made official this month, drummer Torry Castellano retired due to tendonitis of the shoulder. That leaves The Donnas with a new drummer (an old school friend Amy Cesari, of The Demonics) and a new phase to a career.

And speaking of A&L…UCSB Arts and Lectures announced its overflowing 2010-11 season this past week

July 2, 2010June 11, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Is it too early to be planning the fall and new year? Didn’t summer just start? If you’re Celesta Billeci and her longtime staff at UCSB Arts & Lectures, thinking years ahead is just part of the job. Long before this story, A&L signed off on a full calendar of events beginning in August and ending next May, with lots of room in between for surprises to happen. (And good surprises, too. This time last year, that surprise turned out to be Elvis Costello.)

“People always ask us, ‘What’s new?'” says Billeci. “But ‘what’s new’ is our modus operandi. We’re always adding new events. We want to keep it fresh and relevant. We don’t want to say this is it, and nothing more.”

Behind the Iron Curtain – An obscure but celebrated Santa Barbara synth band makes a cult comeback

June 25, 2010May 27, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

Iron Curtain's Steve Fields, right, and Doug Norton, left, circa 1983. Rebecca Traver Photo — Iron Curtain’s Steve Fields, right, and Doug Norton, left, circa 1983.
Rebecca Traver Photo

In the early 1980s, a small genre of electronic music began to emerge: minimal, homemade, rough and icy. Influenced by The Cure, Joy Division, Kraftwerk and Krautrock, the sounds were made on early-model, cheap, portable synthesizers. The lyrics took on alienation, paranoia, fear and the general landscape of post-war anxiety. Retrospectively called either “minimal wave” or “cold wave,” the groups came from economically depressed cities like Sheffield, Berlin, Brussels, Manchester… and Santa Barbara?

When record label and Web site Minimal Wave put together its compilation of rare and obscure bands, “The Found Tapes: A Compilation of Minimal Wave From North America ’81-’87,” it included the little-known Iron Curtain, Steve Fields’ short-lived band that seems as out of place now as it did then, in a town used to feel-good beach rock and reggae.

California Dreamin’ – Rooney’s bright sunshine pop rock comes to Velvet

June 18, 2010June 1, 2015 tedmills Leave a comment

There’s been a lot of chanting about Rooney, and not just the band that is coming to Velvet Jones tonight with a popular brand of catchy retropop rock hooks. It just so happens that Rooney shares its name with English soccer player Wayne Rooney, which would not make that much difference if the World Cup wasn’t going on right now. But hey, those mistaken Internet search engine results can’t hurt, can they?

“It’s been going on longer than the World Cup,” says Ned Brower, drummer with the band. When the band toured the UK recently, they heard audiences chanting “Roo-ney! Rooooo-nee-ee!!”