For a little over a year now, I've been a DJ at the KWVA, which is the University of Oregon's campus radio station. Its pretty fun, it gives me a chance to force my music upon the ears of the one or two hippies who are listening. Its also an oppurtunity to learn about music that I would never hear about outside the station, access to several thousand CDs and a way to meet other people who like to DJ ("Hey you play that spoon song every show too? I thought I was the only one at the station that played that!")
Unfortunately, this being a college radio station that is all about variety and obscurity, meaning its not cool if other people have heard of it, we get some pretty obscure (bad) music. This is fine, I'm all for bands getting a chance to be on the air, but the thing that I can't stand is the way that these bands hype themselves up as if the are the 2nd coming of the beatles (its actually a kind of mellow classic neo-psychadelic vibe we're going for, imagine if Brian Jones with Procol Harem but with the dreamy feeling of the Cocteau Twins, we don't really like what the Beatles stood for). This might be an extreme example, but here are a few of the band descriptions that I came across today.
The Icarus Line,
Black Lives at the Golden CoastThe Icarus Line is Not Dead!
Black Lives at the Golden Coast, their first LP in 2 years, also serves as their first full length for Dum Mak, whom they recently signed with. Recorded completely on tabe,
Black Lives at The Golden Coast is prood that rock is not dead - it's alive and well in the form of The Icarus Line, who go beyond any of their previous releases with BLATGC. The Icarus Line experiment with the traditional definitions of what it is to be a punk or rock band, and make truly original and timeless music.
Kinetic Stereokids
Basement KidsIts not all that hard to detect when a band's members know each other so well that the music becomes a completely cohesive creature. This is exemplified by Kinetic Stereokidsand the 10 tracks on its latest release,
Basement Kids. The childhood friends take rock t an entirely new place--with compelling instrumentation and innovative production details. Not too far off from Sonic Youth's extreme-dabbling, or Elliot Smith's melancholic rock balladry, KSK presents the next step in the evolution of the experimental rock sub-genre. Its no surprise these kids have shared stages with Explosions in the Sky, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of The Dead, The Secret Machines, and Wolf Eyres. Its a genuine and fresh approach, coupled with addictive hooks and vocals, make KSK a must-hear. The individual energies of this four piece combine perfectly to make a kinetic record that will move any listener.
These are pretty representative of most of the little press blurbs. The irony is that if you want to get played, you need to have one of these. The station doesn't have enough people to listen to all the CDs that get mailed to us, and we can't play them on the air until they have been reviewed and checked for profanity. When the cd arrives with one of these reviews--plus warnings of profanity--allows that CD to go straight to the rotation rack, from which I am required to play 4 songs per hour off of. That is why I am forced to look at the CDs of such bands in the first place, because there is usually music that I would rather be playing. In the case that I do feel like a little introspective Elliot Smith combined with the crashing and rebellious guitars of Sonic Youth, I know where to look.
But this is precisely the problem. The struggle for these bands is that if they want to make it, even just to get on the air on KWVA--an consider that this station begs a kid like me to fill an hour of their airtime playing Modest Mouse and Portishead. This is why a dude from some band Levator "Its like Elevator without the first E" calls from outside Diamond Lake asking if they are still scheduled to come perform in our studio this afternoon before their show at the Indigo tonight. Kind of a shoegaze combined with dream pop, Levator has a
myspace you can check out. I actually played two of their songs on the air and they really appreciated it. I also gave them the phone number of Charlotte, the grad student that runs the station and therefore gets to deal with bands like Levator. I don't know whether or not they got into the studio; I had class and couldn't listen, but good luck to them. Levator is just driving around in their van playing for anyone who will listen to them, you and I included. We most likely never will, but as long as there are bands like Levator and kids like me with radio shows, everyone can live out their dream of being a rockstar just a little bit longer.
In pitch dark I go walking in your landscape
