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Atlanta Music Roundtable ’11 – Visuals
Beatlanta was honored to be included in the 2nd year of the Atlanta Music Roundtable. 10 local music writers talking about an array of topics both local and not. Every site is posting our thoughts on a different topic. Beatlanta is doing Visuals. Its been great to see both the similarities and the differences among us bloggers and I think everyone will enjoy reading and hopefully discovering some new, highly recommended local bands.
Before you read on, you can catch up on Monday and Tuesday’s topics at atlantamusicroundtable.com (click on the topics to the left). You’ll also find the full schedule there.
The Visuals topic was meant to cover a broad range of visual artistry from music videos to stage sets to album art. Here’s what we came up with…
Adam – beatlanta.com: I think Qurious is a band that pushes themselves to be visually creative and weird with their videos and stage presence. They put out videos with psychedelic imagery and wear costumes on stage. Take that along with their exclusive, sometimes spooky but mostly spacey, electronic awesomeness and consider your senses being bombarded.
I like the way Hip to Death uses common imagery in a shady way mixed with their dark take on punk. The video for “Violet Eyes” that they did for Channel Zero’s TV special was awesome. It was a pretty simple video involving static ridden imagery with their under-lit, sometimes morbid — and always macabre — wall of sound.
I haven’t seen much album art this year (see my preferred source of music on the “mediums” topic) so I’ll leave that to the other writers. Other folks with awesome videos this year… Baby Baby with the video for “Kidz,” Gun Party with their video for “Possessions.” Wes Swing from Athens did a stop motion video for his song “Sleeping Moon” that was cool…just a bunch of different colored buttons moving around stop motion style. Jack of Hearts did a well-directed and artful video for, from what I can tell, is a track called “Jack of Hearts.” I’d check it out.
As far as bands with awesome stage presence, stage lights or projections, or a variation of the three — Gun Party, Qurious, Attention System (puts out awesome videos), Hip to Death, Jungol, Cousin Dan, NovaKord, Dark Room. I’m sure I’ve missed many.
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Moe – latestdisgrace.com: I’ve always been a huge fan of album art. It helps establish or maintain whatever themes are brought forth on the record and ties everything together. It’s the finishing touch. A really great cover should inspire you to want to listen to a band’s music regardless if you’ve ever heard of them. I’ve bought more than a few records based on art alone, and while most of them were flops, some weren’t. In any case, I kept most of the records anyway, if only to occasionally to pull out and look at the cover.
These days, the sheer volume of album art is overwhelming. There are so many releases coming out all the time, many of them digital-only, and it’s become increasingly difficult for album art to really stand out. Plus, I think many bands overlook the importance of taking the time to concept something unique and different. There’s a greater urgency on getting things out and into people’s ears. So when you see a band, especially a local one, spend the time and effort to put together a package that’s visually compelling, I think you need to take a step back and applaud it.
If I were giving away an award for best album art, this year the runaway winner would be the N.E.C. for Pineapple. It’s such a crazy, intriguing image that’s beautifully lit and wonderfully framed. It looks like a shirtless Santa Claus sitting on a table. It’s shot from the back, his back fat rippling and one ass cheek hanging out of his red pants. Then there’s a tattoo or a painting of a pineapple in the center of all that odd bodily madness. It’s weird and a little disturbing, and I can’t stop looking at it. Oh, and there website is gorgeous. Easily the best local site I’ve seen this year.
I also want to give a quick shout to local music videos because it was a banner year. There’s some really stellar work out there that more people need to check out. My top five? The Carnivore’s “Second Impulse” (shot in the U.K.) was nice and eerie, the Back Pockets’ “Break Up Song” captured all their outlandish artiness perfectly, Blair Crimmins and the Hookers’ vid for “State Hotel” was gorgeous, and Lyonnais’ “Dusted at Mount Sinai” is a truly transfixing experience.
But far and away the greatest visual achievement by any band this year has to be Little Tybee’s video for “Boxcar Fair,” a one shot masterpiece of artistic vision and collaborative ingenuity. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to do so. You’ll be blown away.
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Bret – hijackingmusic.com: I am going to go on live performance only, though I totally have been inspired this year by artists videos, packaging, and other things outside of the ‘show’.
First up is a non local who blew my mind at this years Identity Festival. The festival itself was a huge corporate crapfest but had a pretty nice lineup. The headliner was DJ Shadow.
Shadow has been a long time favorite of mine, and every time I see him he ups the ante. The first time I saw him was at Center Stage years ago and he was ‘scratching’ DVD’s projected onto two screens left and right of stage.
This year though he went above and beyond. The stage is blacked out, in the middle there is a ball. Inside of this ball is DJ Shadow and all of his equipment. No telling how many projectors were involved, but throughout his set, this ball morphed and changed into so many things it was unreal.
The scale of the production for this was massive. Possibly only topped for me by a Flaming Lips show at Blackwater festival…but that’s a whole other level of awesome that goes beyond just ‘visual’ stimulation.
For locals, I want to give a huge shout out to the people at Music Matters. This production company has been killing it all year at King Plow handling lights and sound for most of the events. As well they are Jungol’s go to.
Jungol recently played their final show of the year, during which time Music Matters brought out all the stops. A huge wall of LED bars, movers, smoke machines, cans, and more. I have not seen any locals go that big on the visual production for their show, this was certainly an epic experience.
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Emily – whollyroller.com: Adam mentioned Cousin Dan and Qurious among his favorites with awesome stage presence, lights and projection. And I definitely agree. Cousin Dan’s stage show is whole different beast from the disco ball jock strap (one complete with a keyboard) to neon lights to just his look in general. It’s totally captivating. And Qurious is just adorable and quirky. I love seeing them live.
I have to mention Real Estate’s It’s Real video. It’s the greatest combination of an excellent song, adorable dogs and cute boys ever.
And I definitely have to agree with Bret, DJ Shadow is so awesome live. Everything about his live show is incredible.
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Tim – imabearetc.com: Cousin Dan is the biggest gimmick as far as visuals go, but I eat it up. I love it. I don’t belong to the camp that he has no talent either (as I’ve heard some rumbling), but audiences love him and I think Atlanta is embracing him at his shows. I saw him go from little shows opening up for Class Actress and playing a room of 5 people to a packed show at Star Bar and Drunken Unicorn.
I had the chance to see Sun Airway again this year, although briefly. They’re not local, but what they do with their live show as far as projection video, is astounding. Their record teases your ears and brings you into an entirely different world, and their live show expands on that even more. I would love to see more bands pairing sound with visuals, but only if it enhances the experience.
As far as album art goes this year, most artists got away from the “let me grab an old faded picture of a relative and use it as an album cover” and back to actual art. One of my favorites is Atlas Sound’s Parallex because it’s such a different look for Bradford. Although he ends up self-destructing in interviews, he spoke with Rolling Stone about his appeal and disgust for the lack of real icons in more independent rock and roll for kids to look up to. Previous covers had him hiding behind various things, but this is Bradford out and ready to be that indie rock icon.
Also; another year, another great My Morning Jacket record, another terrible album cover.
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Denton – littleadvances.com: I agree with Moe, Little Tybee’s Boxcar Fair collaboration with sculptor Tom Haney gets my vote for the year’s best local visual achievement. The band’s music suits an ornately decorated puppet world, and they contributed one of the best songs they’ve written to the project. I was lucky enough to see them present this live at The Goat Farm last month, and it was mind-bogglingly to imagine how much work must have gone into every aspect of this project. It was worth it, as the results are wonderful and unique.
I saw DJ Shadow in a late afternoon slot at Pitchfork this summer, and it was still too bright to make out any of the projections on the sphere. That was a bummer, all the videos I’ve seen from other Shadowsphere performances look incredible.
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Davy – ohmpark.com: I definitely think in terms of stage shows locally, Cousin Dan owned 2011. It may be gimmicky, but it’s really well done. On the music video front, I agree that Little Tybee was king. In addition to Boxcar Fair, which was my fav local music video of the year, they had lots of other really wonderful music videos. Overall, there were a ton of cool music videos that originated from Atlanta artists, a notably huge increase from previous years.
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Rube – Atlanta’s A-List: This last word again (mostly because I am too lazy to do this before the last minute) but what else is there for me to say. Little Tybee created the masterpeice of local videos this year and the Back Pockets’ have set me up to anticipate every new project they commit to film.
If you like hand-crafted and unique CD presentation then check out Philly’s Edible Onion label. Great stuff. (http://edibleonion.com/)
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Don’t forget the show TONIGHT:
