Photo Credit: Ben Menghini

An old adage tells us that the road to success is a long and challenging one. Tim Wilson, lead singer of Ivan & Alyosha, will certainly be the first to tell you that. During the set that night he said, “The last time we came to St. Louis was a few years ago and there were six people there. It’s great to see even more of you here tonight.” Through the help of their signing to Dualtone Music Group, having lots of exposure on NPR, and playing every day at SXSW, their buzz has certainly grown. By the end of the night, it was plain to see why there is such a strong buzz surrounding them.

Photo Credit: Ben Menghini

At the start of their set, the five members came on stage, took to their respective posts, and immediately went straight to business. Lined up four across the front, all of the permanent members sang on nearly every song. The band opened up with the first track off their latest release, “Be Your Man,” and quickly set the tone for musical excellence for the entirety of the concert. Song one led comfortably into song two, “Fathers Be Kind.”

A fear that many music critics have when going to a concert is the possibility that there may be things musically that the band simply cannot do in a live setting. Whether it be the slide guitar tone that you fell in love with on the record, the luscious harmonies coming from everyone, or the slight vibrato in the lead singer’s voice that gives it that unique feel, you tend to enter the concert with your expectations a little low knowing that it may not be possible to do it all. However, those expectations were met and exceeded with every passing song during Ivan & Alyosha’s set. The slide guitar from Tim Kim was incredible, the guitar tone and harmonies from Ryan Carbary were spot on, and bassist Pete Wilson was a terrific complement to brother and lead singer Tim Wilson. Around the midpoint of the set, Tim Wilson shared with the vibrant crowd that “Today is the first day on tour that I’ve felt really good.” which garnered a loud cheer from all in attendance.

Photo Credit: Ben Menghini

6 songs in, the band mixed it up a little when lead singer Tim handed his acoustic guitar over to Ryan who threw on a harmonica as they played a song off their Fathers Be Kind EP “Glorify.” The harmonies were never as fantastic and spotlighted as they were in this song; all four vocalists sang in perfect pitch and phrasing in what felt like an old gospel song. The final song of the set, and definitely most highly anticipated, was their single “Running For Cover.” Not only were the 4 vocalists belting out the chorus, but nearly every fan in the crowd was swaying from side to side singing along with the band. After just a few minutes, the band returned to play their encore song and title track from their new release, “All The Times We Had.”

Afterwards, the band stood right off stage and eagerly met with fans. Only a handful of the crowd members left instead of going to meet the band, but those who did stick around left with a huge smile on their face and an armful of wonderful merchandise. In chatting briefly with the band, it was easy to see that not only did they love playing their music live, but they loved seeing the people who had connected with their music and treated them as partners in the creative process.

After the show, Tim Kim talked about how this tour has been a drastic change from those in the past, especially in some cities where they are playing two nights in a row because tickets sold out so quickly. “It’s a good feeling when you have people that stoked about your music in a city you’re not all that familiar with. Somehow you have this following that’s able to help you sell out a room. It’s so good.” Although it was not a sell-out crowd in St. Louis, it was easy to see that the band certainly is on track to be doing some great things in their future, and mentioned that they will be touring throughout the entire summer in support of this release.

Set List

• Be Your Man
• Fathers Be Kind
• Easy To Love
• I Was Born To Love Her
• God or Man
• Glorify
• I Don’t Wanna Die Anymore
• Falling
• Beautiful Lie
• The Fold
• On My Way
• Who Are You
• Running For Cover

• ENCORE: All The Times We Had

The Shouting Matches – Grownass Man
Middle West Records
Release Date – April 16th 2013

Recommended if you like: Justin Vernon side projects, Wilco, The Black Keys

When a new band filled with familiar faces makes its way on the scene, people have lofty expectations. When that band’s frontman is Grammy award winner Justin Vernon, the expectations are even greater. Fans of Vernon’s project Bon Iver discovered his numerous other projects, including Gayngs, Volcano Choir, DeYarmond Edison, and The Shouting Matches following the success of For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Although Bon Iver is certainly the most popular of all of these projects, Vernon and company claim The Shouting Matches is their real focus. In a recent tweet about the release of the new album from The Shouting Matches, Vernon stated that this is not a side project for him and that it has been around longer than Bon Iver.

If you came into this record expecting to hear ethereal music, gorgeous string arrangements, and Vernon’s falsetto indistinct vocals, you are in for a harsh awakening. This record has all the signs of a good old-fashioned blues album: guitar riffs drenched in reverb, an incredibly tight drummer, and raspy strong vocals. “Avery Hill” opens up with a punch, especially when the full band comes in. Although the song is less than two and a half minutes long, it leaves your head bobbing and excited to hear the rest of the record.

Possibly the only thing that has made the move from Bon Iver to The Shouting Matches was Vernon’s tendency to name songs after relatively unknown cities, as he did with “Gallup NM.” Prominent in this song and many more throughout, a Rhodes keyboard makes its way into the record with a grand entrance.

The heaviest track on the album is certainly “Heaven Knows.” The guitar riff running throughout is matched by the bass and accented by the howling harmonica after each verse. The vocals add to the intensity of the song as they sound like they were literally recorded while singing into an empty tin can.

“Seven Sisters” is the most accessible tune on the record; the relatively short song focuses less on the guitar and drums and more on the catchy melody Vernon sings throughout. In a song written about choosing cars over girls, he sings out in the second verse “Got a Chevrolet and Porsche and misses, then there’s Aston and Lexus, just switch it. When you’re old, you’re gonna try to resist it. You’re just paying the whole time to kiss them.”

Although most listeners would agree that this record is hardly adding anything new to the blues/rock arena, The Shouting Matches provide us with a surprising new sound from unassuming suspects. For some, this record may come with strong distaste and a desire to hear a more subdued sound similar to past offerings. For others, they completely embrace the change in style and love the new sound. Regardless of your opinion, Vernon has made it clear that he is “winding down” Bon Iver, and he seems excited with this new road he’s taking.

Rating: 7/10

You can order the album on Amazon and iTunes. You can also like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

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Justin Timberlake – The 20/20 Experience
RCA Records
Release Date: March 19, 2013

Recommended if you like: Miguel, Bruno Mars, Usher

For nearly a decade, 1993 until 2002, male harmony groups dominated the world of pop music. You may have even secretly listened to one the internationally famed “boy bands” when no one else was looking. Their tremendous success is absolutely undeniable; The Backstreet Boys have sold over 130 million records worldwide and *NSYNC has sold over 50 million. All of this fame went away almost as quickly as it appeared, and the jury is still out on why exactly they disappeared the way they did. There was certainly not a shortage of former members trying to make it on their own; nearly every member from Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, 98 Degrees, Dream Street, and countless other tried their hand at solo careers with a high percentage failing to have any commercial success. One did make a very successful name for himself in his attempt, and that was Justin Timberlake.

In 2002, just months after the “temporary hiatus” of *NSYNC, Timberlake released Justified as his attempt to shed the “boy band” image and try his hand as an R&B artist. It was a huge success. As of 2011, the debut release has sold over 7 million records worldwide. His follow-up FutureSex/LoveSounds was an even bigger success, selling over 10 million records worldwide. However, after 2004’s Super Bowl appearance with Janet Jackson and the infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” Timberlake decided to put his musical career on hold to try to move into the movie industry. After nine years, Timberlake has made a return in an attempt to change the status quo of pop music again.

The first thing most people will notice about The 20/20 Experience is the length of each song. Every one of the 10 tracks on the album clock in over 4:30 with the longest one at 8:06. This unorthodox song arrangement style may throw off most pop listeners, but the long songs are hardly noticeable after just a few songs.

“Pusher Love Girl” opens up the album with a stunning  R&B influenced orchestral intro followed quickly by the flawless vocals from Timberlake fitting right into the mix. The lyrics tell the metaphorical story of a pusher girl who he has fallen in love, with the drug she is dealing to him being love. The chorus belts out “So go on be my dealer babe. Cause all I want is you baby.You’re my little pusher love girl.”

The lead single for the album is “Suit and Tie,” with a guest vocal appearance by future tour mate Jay-Z. The introductory chorus comes in at a slow pace, preparing the listeners for a laid back song, but the ad lib bit from producer Timbaland leading into the verse helps push us forward into the dance-worthy tune. Throughout the song, Timberlake sings about the high-class lifestyle of dancing around in suits in a way that makes you want to go out and buy a suit on the spot. The pace of the song kicks back to the first chorus with the introduction of Jay-Z, and the half time feel helps the song feel more versatile.

With the song “That Girl,” we are formally introduced to Timberlake’s backing band, “JT and the Tennessee Kids.” The band definitely does not disappoint with their incredible brass section, jazz guitar sound, and of course JT. Even though the song is pretty simple lyrically, it certainly has the capability of being a future single.

The second single from the release is “Mirrors,” and sonically is the song closest to his former releases. Lyrically though, the song tells a story of completion and wholeness thanks to his wife, which puts him in a much different place than his earlier albums. The song has a very epic feel to it, with an opening guitar riff, some beatboxing to help keep the rhythm, and Timberlake’s vocals doubled over to give a bigger presence. The song builds up to the halfway point in the track where the chorus is repeated a cappella to show off his tremendous vocal talent. In the last two minutes of the song after the instrumental breakdown, Timberlake goes into a laid back verse singing “Baby, you’re the inspiration of this precious song. And I just wanna see your face light up since you put me on. So now I say goodbye to the old me, it’s already gone, And I can’t wait to get you home.”

This 10 song opus is an album that has the potential for a lot of polarity. Traditional pop music fans will have several barriers to overcome in order to fit this into their 4:00 or less music attention span, but many people, including Billboard and Rolling Stone, are up in arms about the potential this album has to change the landscape of the pop music scene in 2013.

You can order the album on Amazon and iTunes. You can also like him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter.

I’m very happy to bring another guest post to my blog this week from one of my best friends Ben Menghini. If you are interested in writing a post for my blog about any subject, feel free to email me your idea and I’d love to post it.

Historian David O’Brien’s has said that Dorothy Day is “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” For young Christians who are seeking to live a life modeled after Jesus, a life of peace and service and humility and worship, Day is a compelling hero who awakens our imaginations to the kingdom. The question “why is it important to study Dorothy Day?” is best answered with an anecdote from the preface of the book Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, by Robert Coles, a friend of Dorothy’s and professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School. Coles is remembering the day that he met Dorothy in Chicago in 1952.  Entering a Catholic Worker soup kitchen on the Lower East Side, he spotted two middle aged women sitting together having a strange conversation. One of the women was very drunk, and carrying on about absurd stories with wild exclamations. The other woman who sat by was in fact Dorothy Day. As Coles stood by and listened the following took place:

I found myself increasingly confused by what seemed to be an interminable, essentially absurd exchange taking place between two middle-aged women. When would it end – the alcoholic ranting and the silent nodding, occasionally interrupted by a brief question, which only served, maddeningly, to wind up the already overtalkative one rather than wind her down? Finally, silence fell upon the room. Dorothy Day asked the woman if she would mind an interruption. She got up and came over to me. She said, “Are you waiting to talk with one of us?”
One of us: with those three words she had cut through layers of self-importance, a lifetime of bourgeois privilege, and scraped the hard bone of pride: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” With those three words, so quietly and politely spoken, she had indirectly told me what the Catholic Worker Movement is all about and what she herself was like (Coles, xviii).

Dorothy Day was a lifetime activist who protested for the rights of women in the 1920s, for poor workers during The Great Depression of the 1930s, for Peace during WWII in the 1940s, against nuclear weapons in the nuclear arms race of the 1950s, and for civil rights in the South during the 1960s. She was baptized Catholic in 1927, but was soon frustrated by a lack of social action in the church. She met Peter Maurin in 1932, a man of similar convictions, and they founded the Catholic Workers Movement, originally a newspaper that expanded to a series of houses of hospitality across the United States. Coles does a phenomenal job of summarizing Dorothy’s life after founding the Catholic Workers Movement:

From May Day 1933 until November 29, 1980, when she died, Dorothy Day lived without interruption as a Catholic Worker. She edited the paper of that name, she lived in the hospitality houses of that name, and she traveled by bus across the United States, teaching and speaking, helping to cook, and sitting with people the rest of us call bums or homeless or drunks. She also kept saying her prayers, going through devotional rhythms, reading and rereading the books she loved, and writing her Catholic Worker column, “On Pilgrimage.” Tamar grew up at her side, then left, married, and made her mother a grandmother numerous times.

During those years Dorothy Day took on many a controversy. She stood up to Franco when he started the Spanish civil war, thereby losing lots of Catholic readers who saw Franco as a godsend who was leading a Catholic charge against the atheists, the Communists who had taken over Spain. She argued the case for pacifism during the Second World War, a lonely stance, indeed, and one that many of her closest friends, her most enthusiastic coworkers adamantly rejected. After the war, she continued her work among the poor and on behalf of those whom we now call minorities… I well remember her during the 1960s, riding buses in the South, involving herself in the civil rights struggle… wherever she was, she found time every day for prayer, for reading the Bible, for attending Mass, taking Communion, and saying confession (Coles, 15-16).

One of her defining characteristics was her devotion to Christian Pacifism and nonviolent activism. These were not “extras” to Day, and neither were works of mercy. She saw all of them as the very heart of what it meant to live like Jesus did. She is often described as a radical, but that would not likely be a title Day would have selected for herself. In here eyes there was nothing radical about what she was doing. It wasn’t radical Christianity, it was just Christianity.

Anyone who met, has read, or studied Dorothy Day would be quick to notice two things about her, possibly the most important things to know: her ceaseless humility, and her devotion to prayer. Cole describes her as one who never tired of lowering herself to be the servant of those around her, just as the story of Dorothy and the alcoholic testify. Indeed, prayer was her routine, and besides calling to Catholics to social action, she was most often heard reminding Catholics to keep their prayers. She tells a story of what it was that set apart the Catholic Worker Movement and various other “charities.”

Many young people have come here and worked with us, and they tell us after a while that they have learned a lot and are grateful to us, but they disagree with us on various matters – our pacifism, our opposition to the death penalty, our interest in small communities, and our opposition to the coercive power of the state. You people are impractical, they tell us, nice idealists, but not headed anywhere big and important. They are right. We are impractical, as one of us put it, as impractical as Calvary. There is no point in trying to make us into something we are not. We are not another Community Fund group, anxious to help people with some bread and butter and a cup of coffee or tea. We feed the hungry, yes; we try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, if we have some, but there is a strong faith at work; we pray. If an outsider who comes to visit doesn’t pay attention to our praying and what that means, then he’ll miss the whole point of things.

We are here to bear witness to our Lord. We are here to follow His lead. We are here to celebrate Him through these works of mercy. We are here, I repeat, to follow His lead – to oppose war and the murder of our fellow human beings, to reach out to all we see and meet (Coles, 97).

Dorothy Day may be among the most important 20^th Century figures that we can study today. She continues to have relevance as her life teaches us the meaning of humility, mercy, grace, and living as Christ did. She provokes in us many important questions. What kind of people do we need to be to love the poor? What does it mean to live nonviolently? Is the Catholic Worker Movement exclusively Roman Catholic, grown out of the Church’s social teaching? Or can the Catholic Worker Movement inspire other Christians to live radical lives of devotion (as it has for Shaine Claiborne, Sean Gladding, and other new monastics?). How can we live more like Jesus did?

In the end, Coles reminds us, as Dorothy reminded him, that the world is full of contradictions, and life is about living in the tension of those contradictions. Coles notes how Dorothy’s own life was a contradiction:

She was always trying to be alone with God, yet she lived in a community where it was hard to find even the conventional privacy of the comfortable bourgeois life. She was always trying to get her own particular moment with God, with Jesus, yet she also loved the crowds in certain Catholic churches and the submergence of all those individuals in worship. She craved secluded study, to be lost in thought and prayer – the nearer the ocean the better – yet she lived near urban din and engaged daily in dozens of collective projects. Though she had both a contemplative and prophetic mind, her life was an active, essentially pastoral one: feed the hungry, house the needy, care for the sick. She was an earthly, political, practical-minded person, yet she could be almost willfully blind to the world’s habits and priorities as she persisted in the direction of her faith (Coles, 159).

Dorothy quoted to Coles Cardinal Suhard, the archbishop of Paris: “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery; it means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist” (Suhard, quoted in Coles, 160).

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Brooke Waggoner – Originator
Swoon Moon Music
Release Date: March 5, 2013
Recommended if you like: Feist, Sufjan Stevens, Fiona Apple

One of the first things you immediately notice about Brooke Waggoner is her vivid red hair. It certainly made her stand out as the keyboard player for The Peacocks, the all-female backing band for Jack White. In an interview with Spinner, Waggoner says touring with White was “a heightened level of touring and live playing that I haven’t ever had to experience.” Over the last six years, she has been writing, orchestrating, and arranging her own releases. In March, Waggoner will be releasing her third full-length album, Originator.

The album opens up with “Shiftshape,” a song that certainly fits the title on an instrumental level. The opening lyrics are sung with a heavy flanger effect, but her voice quickly reverts back to normal to sing the rest of the tune. While the piano certainly leads the way in most songs, the drums, guitars, and orchestral instruments make their presence known throughout every song.

The single from the album is “Rumble,” and it is arguably the most pop-friendly song on the record. The piano riff that opens up the song quickly draws you in for more, and by the end of the first verse, you are completely pulled into the song. The strong brass arrangement and roaring choir leading the march throughout the second half of the song. Weighing in at just over 2 minutes, the song most definitely packs a punch in its limited time.

Led again by the piano, “Perish” brings former listeners to familiar territory. The busy music playing through the verse all clears out during the chorus, making room for Waggoner’s heavenly vocals to belt out: “Go on, go on and steady me out. Oh, I got a lot to say. Take hold, take hold and settle me down. Living like I’ll never die.” Following with the lyrical theme of the song, the song slowly closes out with a gorgeous choir arrangement of the chorus that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.

The first true ballad of the album, “Wellspryng” is a heartfelt song about love. Backed by a piano, a light atmospheric pad, and a lightly picked guitar, Waggoner cries out: “I know I’ll never love like the lamb I was. Ceaseless, it is the promise that I have, this wellspring always runs.”

The album closes on a duet featuring guest vocals from Sanders Bohlke with the haunting song “To Love.” The dissonant piano runs in combination with the chords to open the song certainly set the tone for the duet sung back and forth between the two lovers. While Waggoner certainly takes the lead in the duet, Bohlke takes a verse himself, with his bellowing bass being a strong contrast to Waggoner’s very smooth voice. The album concludes lyrically with the two singing in magnificent harmony, “Be wise, you fool.”

While each track very unique, the album is very cohesive and held together by Waggoner’s unwavering vocals and signature piano style. At the end of the day, Waggoner considers herself lucky to be able to write these songs with such musical liberty. When talking about the recording process on her website, she says, “It was January then and I have a vague recollection of layered coats, dry skin, cracked cuticles on the keys, and passing the chapstick around. Harps, Organs, big gold brassy instruments, field recordings, french films, basses of all different shapes and sizes, a magical choir, new friends and old somehow found their way into this music. I’m forever grateful it did.”

You can order the album on Amazon and iTunes. You can also like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.