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  • First Impressions: Sons of Sylvia

    Hey! Remember this show? Remember the band who won it? Maybe not. It was three years ago, after all, and unlike the American Idol which all but guarantees an annual outlet for its past winners and finalists to remind their fickle-by-design audience that they still exist, the Next Great American Band has not since returned to the airwaves. (I’m actually still holding out hope for Season 2 of Bands on the Run! Flickerstick Rulz!!!)

    Moreover, where Idol winners often have an album assembled and rushed out to the market in time for Christmas shopping, Next Great American Band winners The Clark Brothers seemed to drop off the face of the earth, leaving the few of us who watched the show and fell in love -err mild infatuation with the Appalachian trio’s thrilling (for prime time) acoustic conflagrations of bluegrass, pop, and classic rock to wonder, y’know, wha’happen?

    The Clark Brothers “Gimme Shelter”

    Sometime between then and now, the Clark Brothers – Adam, Ashley, and Austin – were signed to a major label, and then got dropped by the label in a bit of corporate re-shuffling. At which point, they changed their name to Sons of Sylvia, signed with 19 Entertainment and Interscope, and showed up on a duet with Carrie Underwood called “What Can I Say”. Now, the band is on tour with Underwood in support of their long delayed debut album Revelation.

    Carrie Underwood with Sons of Sylvia “What Can I Say”

    Though the Sons of Sylvia had previously, along with three more of their brothers, recorded and even charted a Top 20 Country hit 10 years ago as the Clark Family Experience; and though the instruments they play (fiddle, mandolin, slide guitar) look and sound a little, y’know, bluegrassy; and though they are touring with Carrie Underwood, it becomes clear listening to Revelation that Sons of Sylvia are no more a country music band at this point than OneRepublic, whose lead singer-songwriter (and one of 19 Entertainment’s favorite go-to hit-writers) Ryan Tedder co-wrote and produced the group’s debut single “Love Left to Lose”. As with many of Tedder’s other hits, the song boasts a big, open-air sound with a full-throated campfire folk sing-along of a chorus, making it an immediate winner when you hear it on the radio.

    The band carries that bigness with them throughout Revelation, almost to the point where it becomes a little too much of a pretty good thing, both in the record’s anthemic sound, but also in lyrics (see the title track) that seem to be reaching for the spiritual profundity of Bono, circa 1984. The album opens with “John Wayne”, a gorgeous statement of devotion that gets oversold by Ashley’s trying-too-hard shouty high vocals on the chorus, and ends with a strange assemblage of sounds (is there a song in this?) called “The War Within”.

    There’s no question these guys are talented, and that they’re passionate music-makers. But the fire and brimstone they brought to that cover of “Gimme Shelter” on TV a couple years ago seems to have been compromised in the band’s quest to come up with a great pop/rock record. I’m not one of those people who believes that the words “greatness” and “pop/rock” are mutually exclusive; I think what Sons of Sylvia have attempted with Revelation is admirable, promising, and totally listenable. (I mean, seriously: pop music with actual stringed instruments, people! How awesome is that in 2010?) But listening to Revelation is like watching someone trying to start a fire by rubbing sticks together, generating occasionally thrilling puffs of smoke, but never quite acheiving something we might be able roast marshmallows over.

    Sons of Sylvia “Love Left To Lose”

  • The American Idol Tour Is Getting Cut Short. Is This Bad News?

    In what might be further proof of the faltering of the American Idol franchise, Billboard.com reported in a brief post yesterday that the American Idol summer tour, which features Season 9’s top 10 contestants including this year’s winner Lee DeWyze and shoulda-been winner Crystal Bowersox, will be coming to an early close at the end of August. But while I certainly sympathize with the show’s performers, I have to think this is a good thing – for the performers as well as their audiences. Although by its very definition, the American Idol concert tour should feel current, it has always struck me as a weirdly anachronistic concept, an ugly ghost of the recording industry’s past haunting the summer tour schedules each year. Like the travelling road shows of the 50s and 60s (famously sent up via the “Play-Tone Galaxy of Stars” tour in Tom Hanks’ wonderful 1996 movie That Thing You Do!), it always seemed more about advancing the Idol brand then promoting any of the individual artists.

    Especially as the franchise has maneuvered away from the by-the-numbers big-vocals pop performance template it began with, gradually culminating in this last, much-unloved season’s full-on embrace of “artist” values – varied and often idiosyncratic vocal styles, varied and often idiosyncratic stage personae, singers as both songwriters and (multi-)instrumentalists – the American Idol summer tour has begun to seem out of touch with its own brand. Moreover, as the show has started to find more and more artists who’ve already had their foot in (and slammed by) the music industry’s door, there’s an even greater disparity among its finalists’ in terms of level of experience and/or naivete. Even despite the relative compatibilities of their styles (compared to previous seasons’ first and second finishers), why, but for their common appearance on a hit TV show, should someone like Crystal Bowersox ever have to share a bill with a singer like Lee DeWyze? Or vice versa? (I don’t mean that as a diss to either.) In the real world, there’s no way David Cook would ever co-headline a tour with David Archuleta. I mean, c’mon. The sheer diversity of the show’s contestants has turned what used to be a pretty straightforward pop showcase into an increasingly hodge-podgy (in terms of both stage prowess and style) travelling version of a talent show for which the winner has already been declared, thereby limiting and cheapening what each of the performers can do, reducing their act to a least-common-denominator-ready instant replay of the season’s greatest hits and misses.

    That said, a far more palatable (and possibly far more profitable) alternative to the annual Idol tour is already presenting itself. This summer, last year’s runner up Adam Lambert is currently on tour with fellow Season 8 finalist Allison Iraheta. Not only does it offer Lambert, clearly the more seasoned and exciting performer, the showcase he clearly deserves while giving Iraheta a platform (and a sympathetic audience – surely more of Iraheta’s AI constituents gravitated toward Lambert than Season 8 winner Kris Allen in the final tallies) on which to grow as both an artist and a live performer. Maybe the venues they’re playing are smaller than the Idol tours, but I imagine that after spending nearly half a year watching these singers from the comforts of their living rooms, audiences would both crave and appreciate the intimacy that smaller venues might afford. Seriously, how many people really come to see all 10 artists?

    So. Note to American Idol producers. Ditch the “Top 10” road show. Instead of one big tour, why not criss-cross the country with three or four smaller tours with two or three artists on each bill. For every Adam, an Allison; for every Kris Allen, a Danny Gokey. It will better serve the artist. It could very well better serve the brand as well. The Idol tour might only hit any given concert market once or twice in the summer. With multiple tours, they could hit the same market half a dozen times. And there really may be folks who want to see all 10 artists bad enough to buy tickets every time one of the many AI tours comes to town. Just sayin’.

  • Boys Will Be Boys, and Men… Will Be Boys in Three Awesome New Videos

    Three terrific new videos by just-barely-under-the-radar artists center around men doing what men do best: being boys. Approaching the similar subject matter from three distinct points of view, from the simply fun and nostalgic, to the tragic-comic-pathetic, to the reflective and hopeful, they’re all individually great in their own right. But taken together, it seems that Philadelphia alt-hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang, indie blues duo The Black Keys, and slam poet Sage Francis have inadvertently created a coming of age suite that John Hughes would have loved.

    Already an international Top 10 hit, Chiddy Bang‘s debut single “The Opposite of Adults” (built around a sample of MGMT’s “Kids”) celebrates the carefree life of a kid – basketball, skateboarding, ogling girls at the playground – with rapper Chiddy (Chidera Anamege) promising (with apologies to Mommy) never to grow up. The video attaches cardboard cut-out looking adult faces to live action adolescent bodies as the duo relives all the various awesomenesses of their childhoods. Such as opening a box of cereal to find the prize (A Chiddy Bang 7″? Swwwweeet!).

    Chiddy Bang “The Opposite of Adults”

    The song may not be explicitly about childhood, but the video to the Black Keys‘s latest single, the Danger Mouse produced “Tighten Up” from their latest album Brothers, has to be one of the greatest videos about a lust triangle among the monkey bars. Singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney sit on a park bench watching as their sons (who, we learn in a hilarious exchange of dialogue before the song starts, may not be the best of pals anyway) compete for the attentions of an elementary school hottie. But their efforts to be the responsible, intervening grown-ups go horribly, horribly wrong.

    The Black Keys “Tighten Up”

    “It was the best of times. It was the end of times.” In this incredible new video from his latest album Li(f)e, Sage Francis sits among an array of chairs suggestive of a school classroom – only with a wooden coffin where the teacher’s desk might be. Taking a look inside, Francis finds a trove of snapshots and artifacts, and reflects variously on religion, media, and technology before drifting back to memories of his adolescence. His first crush. Discovering his passion for words. Discovering hip-hop. Contemplating suicide, and contemplating the things he wants from life. Contemplating the apocalyptic paranoia that is being a teenager, and contemplating the wisdom he’ll pass down to his children’s children if he’s lucky enough to live long enough to meet them.

    As the classroom chairs around him fill up, he’s both teacher and student in what Prince once called “this thing called life”. His verses are loaded with richly specific details – like the love note written in code and wrapped up in ten layers of Scotch tape, but deposited in the wrong locker – and poignantly self-deprecating punchlines. The video has a familial intimacy to it that culminates in a sweet little moment between Sage Francis and the kid who plays the young Sage Francis. It’s the kind of song and video that makes me want to write a deeply personal thank you note to the artist. (Thank you, Sage Francis.)

    Sage Francis “The Best of Times”