Much of Voodoo involves the acts you’ve known for all these years; then again, there are some you might not know.
Wilco’s performance of “Kidsmoke” at Jazz Fest 2005 was one of the festival’s finest moments in years. A study in tension and release, they played the German mechanik beat for long, chorus-less stretches so that when the song finally broke for a series of arena rock power chords, the entire Gentilly Stage audience bounced with every up and downstroke.
By now, there’s little to say about Wilco, which headlines Le Ritual Stage Sunday, and the reunited Rage Against the Machine’s reputation precedes the band’s appearance on the Le Ritual Stage Friday.
Still, at a festival with approximately 100 acts on three stages, there have to be a lot of question marks:
“Who’s that?” and “Seriously?” Here are a few tips, but bear in mind that stages and schedules are subject to change.
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Dax Riggs (Friday, 1:35 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): Dax Riggs’s We Sing of Only Blood or Love still embodies Deadboy and the Elephantmen’s swamp rock, but it’s bigger and shinier now. Riggs integrates his electric blues, which sometimes resembles the doom rock he performed in Acid Bath, but with a dour sense of humor. He tackles death and suicide with a poker face, and in these dark moments, Riggs shines.
Check out “Night is the Notion” from We Sing of Only Blood or Love.
—Richard Giraldi
Vavavoom (Friday, 1:45 p.m., Le Carnival, Citi): Vavavoom plays gypsy jazz that would be admired everywhere from Uzbekistan to Romania, France to Frenchmen Street. It has a woozy lilt that is slightly tipsy and very romantic as the violin and accordion lock in with the twin guitars. Their gigs at the Spotted Cat have given them a reputation as a band that can be precise and passionate at the same time.
Check out “Swing 42” from Melomania.
—David Kunian
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (Friday, 4:55 p.m., Le Ritual, Voodoo): Ignore BRMC’s bad attitude lyrics; the grimness is off-the-shelf or confusing (“Suicide’s easy / What happened to the revolution?”). The more convincing darkness and snarl in this year’s Baby 81 are the product of good ol’ distortion, which blurs the guitar, bass and drums into one throbbing instrument that doesn’t mean well.
Check out “Berlin” from Baby 81.
—Alex Rawls
Porcupine Tree (Friday, 5:55 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): They’ve been called progressive rock, psychedelic, and almost everything else in a career spanning longer than most prime ministers of their native England. Their latest record Fear of a Blank Planet shockingly adopts a punk attitude (though not, with its shiny sameness, a punk sound) shades of Green Day, unveiling the volcanic emptiness of mass media and the inevitability of violence (a kid stomps towards a school gun in hand, at the finale of the title song’s video) as young people flail desperately to prove they’re alive in a continental agar plate of such media. The first point needs saying until people start to listen; the second one leaves me shuddering to think they might be right.
Check out “Anesthetize” from Fear of a Blank Planet.
—Andrew Hamlin
Kings of Leon (Friday, 6:55 p.m., Le Ritual, Voodoo): Welcome the new, “mature” Kings of Leon, that hillbilly family band who dared to bring Southern rock into the 21st Century by injecting a little neo-garage attitude and keeping the rockstar bullshit to a minimum. Now they’re back with an album that stretches their previous boundaries by half again while simultaneously shifting their focus from personal songwriting to group dynamics. Advance sightings confirm what this suggests: that we’ll get an arena-rock version of the Kings this time around. But can they turn into an “important” band without becoming self-important?
Check out “McFearless” from Because of the Times.
—Rob Fontenot
Toots and Maytals (Friday, 7:30 p.m., Le Flambeau, WWOZ/SoCo): The Yout’s dem give Toots’ dem a hard rap for the lead singer’s reluctance to embrace the disciplined, world-weary brand of Rastafarianism, which in Bob Marley and Black Uhuru’s work excluded options for skyward-bound Mick Jagger-style screams and “Louie, Louie” covers: but that’s Rasta’s loss, and Voodoo Fest’s gain. Famous for “Funky Kingston,” their unbridled exuberance is more Hippie Rock than Funk with a totally earnest utopianism that would make Steppenwolf blush and Lee “Scratch” Perry paranoid.
Check out “54-46 That’s My Number” from In the Dark.
—Drew Hinshaw
M.I.A. (Friday, 8:10 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): Every time this Sri Lankan militant’s daughter brings her cacophonous mash-up of third world discontent—Dancehall, Banghra, Afrorap, Grime—a national security republican, somewhere, gets four votes. The world her percussive electrojams evokes envisions open borders, strident girl power, and a generation of cosmopolitan poor, for whom class resentment is an outdated myth, and Jamaican patois is the lingua franca. The most endearingly rude form of militarism-as-pacifism since
Abbie Hoffman loaded rifles with daisies.
Check out “Bird Flu” from Kala.
—Drew Hinshaw
The Happy Talk Band (Saturday, 11:30 a.m., Le Carnival, Citi): The Happy Talk Band plays songs about dissipation, lust, and finding hope where there is very little. The music rocks with righteous fury or cries with tears of desperation. Luke Allen, the Happy Talk main man, has probably served you a drink and then written a song about the story you told him or the drink he concocted for
Check out “When I Think About You” from Total Death Benefit.
—David Kunian
Circa Survive (Saturday, 12:15 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): Anthony Green’s distant, falsetto cry is the heavenly taunt pulling you hellbound, into the haunted house, with spacey, discordant guitar melodies swooping down over a rhythm section heavier than that lump in your throat. Smartass white boys who mock dread and self-doubt by faking hysteria, their overstimulating, room-spinning Hardcore is proof that even knife-carrying badasses harbor deep-rooted fears underneath their blood-stained hoodies.
Check out “Holding Someone’s Hair Back” from Juturna.
—Drew Hinshaw
Sinead O’Connor (Saturday, 3:15 p.m., Le Ritual, Voodoo): Almost from the start (well, as early as the second album) O’Connor backtracked into self-righteousness, self-pity, and soon after those, bald expositions of problems both personal and political at the expense of any artistry. We listen because when she gets it right, she does so with righteousness, riffage, savagery, eroticism, and daring. Like the bumblebee wrongheadedly believing its own press, she seems to feel she should not be able to fly—until she tries, and all traces of trying evaporate.
Check out “Black Boys on Mopeds” from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
—Andrew Hamlin
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Coheed and Cambria (Saturday, 4:15 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): Coheed and Cambria make art-metal, “art” meaning no Drop D tuning or military drumming. It also means sci-fi lyrics that only make sense in the comic books they’re also published in, but who could tell? Power and paranoia are so central to the language of metal that you’d only know that No World for Tomorrow (shortened from Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World for Tomorrow)is a concept album by reading the press release. The results? Really good hair metal, but know that that’s not what they’re going for.
Check out “The Running Free” from No World for Tomorrow.
—Alex Rawls
Ratty Scurvics Singularity (Saturday, 5 p.m., Le Carnival, Dungeon): Ratty Scurvics may be a one-man band, but this demented organ grinder runs with a sideshow cast of thousands (well, dozens)—all of them decked in mad rags by the Mojo behind the scenes, Howlpop’s Mo Lappin. Last year it was red-pantied hula hoopers and the Ratty Scurvics Marching Band, a 24-piece menagerie clad in deconstructed evening wear infested with red metallic spiders. This year, Mo’s conjuring a Ratty “bone circus”: “bright yet dead yet alive yet jaded yet hopeful yet.”
Check out “Wonderful” from Ratty Scurvics’ MySpace page.
—Cree McCree
Spoon (Saturday, 6:30 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): This Austin band began as children of the guitar approach mastered by the Pixies and Sonic Youth. Pop sensibilities got the better of them when they were suddenly dropped from their label in 1998, and soon after they issued the carefully crafted Girls Can Tell in which steady rhythms and clever wordplay conjure up images of Elvis Costello. 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga meshes Motown and soul with their indie rock sound to create melodies and enticing hooks without the aid of actual choruses.
Check out “Cherry Bomb” from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
—Richard Giraldi
Smashing Pumpkins (Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Le Ritual, Voodoo): The return of the band that made Billy Corgan famous has been met with much controversy, as can be expected from a band that, despite its multi-platinum status, is maligned by indie kids and Nickelback fans alike. While fans and critics whine about the absence of two founding-yet-inconsequential members, few have pointed out that the hard-rocking Zeitgeist, Smashing Pumpkins’ comeback album, retains the band’s pop sensibilities along with the thunder and lightning of Corgan’s guitars and Jimmy Chamberlin’s inspired drumming. Zeitgeist is Corgan’s heaviest, most melodic and least pompous (but still a little pompous) work in years and the true follow-up to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, hipsters be damned.
Check out “Starz” from Zeitgeist.
—Rory Callais
Good Guys (Sunday, 4 p.m., Le Carnival): Metal and lounge are strange bedfellows, but New Orleans’ Good Guys make it work. Their songs are full of obscure twists and sudden mood changes, so the jazz-inspired opening of “Work Release” gives way to densely distorted guitars before shifting to a smooth piano breakdown. Countless bands have done that before. The Good Guys’ trick? They make it power pop.
Check out “Work Release” from Good Guys.
—Richard Giraldi
Quintron and Ms. Pussycat (Sunday, 5:45 p.m., Le Carnival, Citi): So what if psychedelia’s a lost relic of your youth? Give it a second chance. Miss Pussycat’s puppet theatre and Quintron’s Transformer-like automobile/Hammond organ blows minds and fills dance floors with an avant-garde sound derived from New Orleans soul traditions.
Check out “Wild West” from Jamskate.
—Andre Mouton
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Zap Mama (Sunday, 5:55 p.m., Le Flambeau, WWOZ/SoCo): Zap Mama is a staple in the world music genre with her elegant convergence of disparate cultures and sounds. She brings her truckload of groove to New Orleans, where the convergence of disparate cultures and sounds happens on a Wednesday. Listening to Ms. Zap tackle island jams, ’70s funk, African percussion and avant-garde jazz with her stunning vocals is like buying to a stack of CDs from the World music section at Barnes and Noble. If she hasn’t been profiled on NPR yet, it’s only an oversight.
Check out: “1000 Ways” from Supermoon.
—Rory Callais
Common (Sunday, 7 p.m., Le Ritual, Playstation/Billboard.com): While factory-issue MCs churn out commerce, Common gives us art—painstaking, tedious art without the needless distractions of humor, contradiction, or personal details. In a city where funerals are livelier than your average Intellectual Hip-Hop show, his live set would send eyes rolling in their sockets, were it not for his quirky shortcomings and tonally-pleasing voice, which are always worth more in Rap than overvalued assets like wordplay and “knowledge.”
Check out “G.O.D. (Gaining One’s Definition)” from Finding Forever.
—Drew Hinshaw
Published October 2007, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 20, No. 10.
