Destroy This Place

Fervent guitars and propulsive rhythms, avalanching bass grooves and whipping, whooping vocals – that’s the way to start your summer – drum hails you can lose your shit to pushing songs you can still sing-along-to – Detroit’s superchunky thunder-pop quartet Destroy This Place cut two songs for split a 7” with Chicago’s comparably guitar-glorifying (yet disarmingly melodious) trio Hospital Garden.
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With our local boys, (made up of members from groups like Thunderbirds Are Now and New Grenada), it’s ferocious, clatter-kick drums and blurring bass leading the way while those guitars churn out gnarly storms of fuzz. The windy city rockers are more about augmenting the intricacies of what most would slap as: “noise-pop,” weaving sweet melodies from a mellifluous mid-range rustbelt-nasally narrator over chugging riffs churning through ear-smooshing feedback fields.

Destroy This Place / Hospital Garden / Savage Seven / Cotton Museum – June 9 – Berkley Front – release show – 9pm

Here’s a small taste from the bitter-fruit buffet he’s serving up in his lengthy piece, “A Ghost Story: Restructuring Detroit,” on the CounterPunch website:

Detroit’s reality is already the neoliberal nightmare; relentless cutbacks in education, health, and other social services. What seems inevitable is that ‘restructuring Detroit’ (unless resistance can prevent it — as I have previously argued elsewhere) will look an awful lot like the now-notorious ‘structural adjustment’ programs imposed on the developing world by the major multilateral financial institutions — the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank — throughout the neoliberal era. Systematic privatization of common pubic resources; deregulation of corporate power; savage attacks on social services, working standards and basic quality of life for ordinary People; all as a way to even further enrich and empower elites. The infamous “Shock Doctrine,” in Motown rhythm. This is the noxious, authoritarian political reality of “restructuring.” No wonder they hide the term behind comforting lies like ‘”consent” and “fiscal stability.”

Just over a year ago we wrote about and shared pictures from a benefit for singer Belita Woods in the wake of her massive heart attack. The Detroit singer’s resume goes back to sides with producer Ollie McLaughlin in the ’60s and the group Brainstorm in the ’70s and work with P-Funk circle from the ’90s on.

We recently found out that Woods died on Monday at age 63. This clip of her with George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic from 2004 is a look back at why she created such a fuss. (Thanks to Terry Thunder Hughley via Facebook for turning us on to the clip.)

Doc Waffles – Ambulance Chaser – – 5/30/12

The business card reads:
Doc Waffles –

▪erudite/absurdist rap wrangler

▪antiquarian rare book dealer

▪Dadaist wordsmith

▪bon vivant
▪Ambulance Chaser.

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Waffles raps have a weird charm to them; you can almost see him suavely smirking with a nod and a wink as he delivers his lines of capricious cadences and head-spinning surrealism. He’s either enriching his street-set scenes with that Victorian verbosity, or maybe mucking up his two-dollar-vocabularies with seedier settings of gas station vending machines zoomed by buses behind-schedule… where Catherine the great is a suspect for stealing his pop-tarts, while he maintains his average on the golf team despite suffering alcohol withdrawals and that elegant evocation of codeine being stored up in a chandelier.

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Waffles is cooking; picking up some momentum as Ambulance Chaser  is his 2nd album in six months. And he’s got a lot of fans as contemporaries in Detroit’s hip-hop community, Eddie Logix, Dial 81, Mister and SelfSays all pitch in, either in beat production or auxiliary rap relays.

 And …a few of his equally talented fans, (and fellow rappers), like The Anonymous, will be joining the good Doc-tor, on May 24th at the Magic Stick for a “Rap Party” – headlined by Emcee-quartet Cold Men Young and including a set by Doss The Artist

Waffles’ latest will be available at the end of the month.

Camaraderie

What’s up Internet world? I am writing a tour diary for the band I sing and play guitar in–The Sights. The journey began this morning, with the actual preparation starting months earlier. But here I am, in a van with others who look and smell like me, and already it feels Iike home.

I was speaking with my uncle about his service in Vietnam at a family party recently and he conveyed the importance of camaraderie. That camaraderie is such an important aspect of touring, and I can feel it here with me now (even though a few of these guys met each other this morning).

So what has today brought us? Well, we met our first character of the tour. Our first stop was just outside of Chicago to pick up my Sears Silvertone amp from Schmocco (from here on all characters of the tour will be ‘schmomebody ‘ to protect privacy). His watermelon left on the porch says something about the way he eats… And how he repairs amps. Dude finishes the job.

We also played a game of Beatle-themed Monopoly. We quit midway through, and Skip needs to learn how to barter properly. A thousand dollars for some property? Uh, right.

So here I am, a few hours outside of St. Louis, shirtless and awkwardly typing on an iPad for the first time and I feel like my father with his calloused hands trying to do something deft. We just heard the local 88.3 FM high school station play a few Misfits songs prefaced with a Clone Defects tune. The chick DJ even messed up and restarted a song. Classic. But good to hear some local homeboys getting some love outside of Detroit.

All the best,
Eddie
Current tour weight: 131 lbs ( but I’ve been snacking all day)

Photos by Shades

-Tom Morello

“…we travel as equals, or not at all…”

-Joseph Arthur

I don’t know what it is… But music is inherently inspiring.

Music, as is noted in any  history book or on any Wikipedia page, has played an integral role in most every protest movement – particularly the tunes that stride with chips on their shoulders, the tunes that rasp with collar-wringing provocations and rouse with fist-pumping rally-cries, the tunes that have a toughness, a certain sinewy splendor – not the top-40-fluff flaked out from popcorn machines, but the tunes that bend your ear, purse your face into a determined grimace, narrow your eyes, nod your head, the songs you want to walk to, want to march to, want to fight to…

Music is inherently inspiring. Best, then, when a large group of people want to  a.) maintain the motivation to keep up the fight  and  b.) feel unified.

How else best, then, to achieve that, then with an affective soundtrack? If this is a chance for you to stand up, to feel some shred of heroism or vindication in your rat-race world of day jobs, student loans, water bills and spare-change for gas money, if this is your one chance to feel like you’re swinging back against a tide of corruption, wouldn’t you want some kind of cinematic soundtrack to spur you ever forth?

 Here’s a song that didn’t make the cut of the Occupy This Album compliation:

Listen: Joseph Arthur – “Travel As Equals”

Makes you wanna move, doesn’t it? “…in the light of freedom’s call, in the heat of any matter, we travel as equals or not as all…the only way we can survive…”

Arthur, an indie/underground singer/songwriter born and raised in the rustbelt, did contribute another song, called “We Stand As One” to Occupy This Album: “…a compilation of music by, for and inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the 99%. Released by the non-profit record label Music For Occupy, Occupy This Album is available digitally (featuring 99-tracks + 1 hidden track) at iTunes and Amazon as well as physically (featuring 78-tracks) on a four-disc compilation distributed worldwide by Razor & Tie Records”

The Hollywood Reporter struck upon this in mid-November of last year: “How Music Is Playing an Integral Role in the Occupy Wall Street Protests - The compilations organizer, singer/activist Jason Samel is interviewed in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine where he speaks to the vitality of contributors like Jackson Browne or David Crosby or Willie Nelson, as they can endear the Occupy Movement, seen mostly as a Gen-Y / Millennials -type fight, to the Babyboomers who still have some flower-power in their hearts.

Notables on the comp:

Patti Smith

Jackson Browne

Willie Nelson

Thee Oh Sees – “Robber Barrons”

Yoko Ono

Toots & the Maytals

Mogwai

Ladytron

Ani DiFranco

VIDEO: Joseph Arthur – “Occupy This Album” -Interview

The final, up-to-date schedule for the Movement Festival, taking place May26-28 at Hart Plaza, is now online at the official Movement website.

Ted Nugent has been named Detroit’s Greatest Guitar Player of All Time by a poll initiated through Mlive! Nugent pulled in over 51% of the votes. The Nuge is currently out on the road with REO Speedwagon and Styx.

Motorcity Special is hosting a free show on May 31st at the Udetroit Cafe on Randolph in Detroit. The bill is the Mythics, Body Holographic, and the White Ravens.

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The study looks at the way Michigan treats juveniles found guilty of first-degree murder. It is grim reading.

As noted in the introduction:

To date, 376 young people have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in Michigan. Only one other state has more.

Michigan (358), New York (475), Florida (355), California (301) and Louisiana (238) at one point accounted for two-thirds of all children imprisoned in the United States, according to the report.

What’s infuriating is that treating children as young as 14 in this manner is clearly irrational, and morally indefensible.

There is good reason why the law mandates someone has to be 18 before they are allowed to  vote or sit on a jury or sign a contract. And there’s also good reason why no other country in the world puts juveniles behind bars for life without the possibility of parole. Again, from the report:

Contemporary neurological science confirms the cognitive differences between a child and an adult. An examination of the human brain demonstrates the undeveloped frontal lobe in adolescence compared to adults. This is the area of the brain that is associated with impulse control, planning, risk  evaluation, and comprehending consequences. Scientific research confirms that the part of the brain which allows for mature decision making in not yet fully developed in teenagers.

It  is not that children fail to recognize right from wrong. Instead, it is this cognitive underdevelopment of the brain, coupled with an inability to appropriately respond to peer pressure, adult persuasion, and lack of control over their environment, that increases the risk of impulsive and dangerous activity among youth.

So, if it makes sense that a kid must wait until the age of 18 to vote, how can anyone justify sentencing a 14 year old to prison for life without the possibility of parole?

Part of the problem is that judges are prohibited from exercising digression.

As noted by Kimberly Thomas, a University of Michigan Law School professor:

The most sympathetic 15-year-old accomplice to a felony-murder and the most sociopathic adult serial killer will receive the same sentence,  without any judicial ability to take stock of the difference between the two for sentencing purposes.

One-third of youth currently serving life without parole sentences in Michigan did not themselves commit a homicide but instead were convicted for their lesser involvement as tagalongs,  lookouts, or  for following the orders  of adult co-defendants.

And then there’s the truly heartbreaking part: photos and stories of kids who will spend the rest of their lives in prison unless change occurs.

Stories like that of Nicole Dupure, who was 17 when her 19-year-old boyfriend robbed and killed an elderly Macomb County woman while Dupure sat in a restaurant next door. Looking to cut a plea deal, the boyfriend implicated her. She maintains she had no involvement in the crime, but will spend her life behind bars while the boyfriend, who was allowed to plead to a second-degree murder charge, will be eligible for release before he turns 40.

The principal author of the report is Ann Arbor attorney Deborah LaBelle, director of the Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative.

Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send back catalog material too. Send CDs, vinyl, cassettes, demos and 8-tracks to Brett Callwood, City Slang, Metro Times, 733, St. Antoine, Detroit, MI 46226. Email MP3s and streaming links to mt.cityslang@gmail.com.

Former City Slang stars Destroy This Place have returned with a split 7″ single alongside Chicago alt-rockers Hospital Garden. Both bands contribute two songs, and the best from our boys is “We Never Learn”, a characteristically caustic yet catchy, Fugazi-esque, attitude-heavy tune that is as short as it is sweet. Other references would be Irish bands Therapy? and Kerbdog, with maybe a little Sonic Youth thrown in. This band is evolving before our very eyes and ears, and it is a fantastic thing to behold.

The new video from I Love Lightning Bugs for the song “Not the Hopeless Kind” is absolutely stellar. The song is a Cure-esque example of goth-tinged indie rock, the kind of music Smiths fans would want to listen to while burying their heads in their pillows and crying about the fact that nobody “gets” them. The actual video is cool too; the band are seen as white-eyed silhouettes, moving speedily past the Loch Ness Monster, giant robots and satellite dishes. It’s like Tim Burton meets Ed Wood (as they once did in the Depp movie).

The new album from DandyLyon Whine, Coelacanth, is a fuzzy little gem. It opens with the title track, which lumbers along, threatening to take off but never quite making it, then the second song does pretty much the same thing. Then it sinks in, these guys are making lumbering, monolithic alt-rock that has hints of Dinosaur Jr. but also Nick Cave and even Tom Waits. When you stop waiting for the big bang, you can actually enjoy the thing.

Finally, Broken Day Machine’s Crossroads starts horribly with a radio-rock tune called “The Devil and Me” which features the line “this town’s been dragging me down” (hope he’s not talking about Detroit). Next song, “Gravity” continues along the same line (“don’t want to be here no more”). And so it goes on. The songs would go down a storm with fans of bands like Staind. WRIF listeners might well adore it. But this mainstream take on the self-pitying post-metal ballad does nothing for these ears.

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Janice Fialka

Her entire family — husband Richard Feldman, son Micah, and daughter Emma — has worked to create more just treatment for disabled people, work informed, in part, by Micah’s intellectual disability. Micah, 27, meanwhile, is a leader on disability issues in his own right. In 2009 the family received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Family Voices, a national organization that promotes family-centered care for children with special healthcare needs or disabilities.

Fialka approaches the subject with humor, poetic vision and a powerful sense of inclusion. She will be discussing the issues involed and signing copies of her book Partnering for Children with Disabilities, A Dance that Matters on Saturday, May 19, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the Source Book Store (4201 Cass in Detroit). Call 313-832-1155 for more information.