Video by Danny Matteson

Jack Buck has quickly developed a reputation as one of St. Louis’ most exciting bands in the short time they’ve been performing live. Described by musician and blogger Josh Levi as a band that is “[paving] the way in the art of brainwave eradication. Too noisy to be categorized as hardcore and too avant-garde to be metal, the band fills the niche for stoners and the art damaged alike.” The Riverfront Times listed their last show as one of the ten best of that weekend and tonight’s concert marks the first at The Fox Hole. The band will share the stage with No Sleep Records‘ Xerxes, and locals Anodes, Rotten Souls and Side-Lined.

For more details on the show, check out the Facebook event page and come to The Fox Hole at 8pm. Be prepared for a little brain eradication too.

Flyer by Adam Taylor

Video by Spotify

How many songs do you have in your music library? 10,000? 30,000? 50,000?

Do you have Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, and Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien”? Speaking of aliens, what about Alien Ant Farm’s Michael Jackson cover? Or perhaps the King of Pop’s original?

Can you fit your entire library on your iPod? With Spotify you have access to the four songs mentioned plus millions more. Haven’t heard of Spotify? Here are a few reasons to check it out:

Screenshot of Spotify Desktop

It’s efficient
All it takes is a few quick keystrokes and a tiny tap of the enter key in Spotify’s search bar to find that one song that has been stuck in your head all day. It’s faster than YouTube, it’s legal unlike file-sharing sites like Megaupload, and it allows you to select only the songs you want to hear unlike Pandora (and if you like internet radio, Spotify has you covered.)

Screenshot of Social on Spotify Mobile

It’s mobile
On top of being a fantastic desktop app, you can use Spotify on your mobile device. With Spotify Premium, you can stream a catalog of over 15 millions songs directly to your phone. It would take more than 387 iPod Classics to hold all that music. In addition to a plethora of music at your fingertips, no more wasting time editing your iPods. The music library keeps growing and you never run out of space.

Are you convinced yet? Try it out. After you’re hooked, send me a song or playlist to check out.

Michael Tomko, Photo by Chase Macri

“Ten bands. Ten secret tribute sets. One awesome weekend.”

This is how Michael Tomko describes his annual concert series, An Under Cover Weekend (AUCW), on its website. He considers it an “opportunity to have diverse collection St. Louis’ best bands under the one roof for one amazing concert.” Over two nights, five bands perform an entire set as a different artist, like Union Tree Review as Marvin Gaye.

But this presents an interesting legal quandary: are the bands liable under U.S. Copyright Law? Tomko is pretty sure they are covered; “The venues pay license fees on a yearly basis. There is ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, and they hit up the venues for the fees based on radio play and set lists from the top 100 tours. So in terms of the rights to cover a song, 99% of that is covered by those groups.”

Photo by Chase Macri

In this case, not much. According to U.S. Copyright Law Section 107, a copyrighted work may be fairly reproduced for “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.” Section 107 also outlines four criteria when considering if a use is “fair” or foul:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

In this case, the venue does charge an admission for the weekend, and the performances resemble very closely the original studio recordings. Licensing and fair use do not take trademark issues into account either. While this tends to mostly affect tribute groups, an artist’s commercial name and trademarked logo is protected and use without permission could result in legal action. Not every cover band is as lucky as Australian Pink Floyd to have the original artist invite you to perform at his 50th birthday.

Fortunately for AUCW, the “theft” here is entirely friendly and the show’s purpose is strictly fun. Besides, according to Tomko, they may be too far off the radar to really worry. It’s only for one night.

Daniel Ruder, Photo by Chase Macri

“At a show in Columbia, [MO] this band’s trailer had their band logo and ‘facebook.com slash this band’ and we’re like ‘Woah!’ Do you guys know that even if you put none of your band stuff on this you are already a target? You’ve put a spotlight on this saying ‘Steal this stuff.’ I think they even had their logo on their van too.”

Daniel Ruder, drummer of the St. Louis band Jack Buck, thinks trailers need to go. “People get their trailer broken into and get their stuff stolen. It seems to happen all the time.”

Every band needs a van. That is, every band that wants to play shows outside of its hometown. Since the advent of Marshall amp stacks and drums too big to fit in the trunk of a hatchback, many bands opt for dragging a trailer behind their van. However, Ruder feels trailers are “theft boxes” and actually aren’t necessary for most bands.

Ford Econoline "The Band Van"

It is less safe indeed. In fact, just ask Portugal. The Man, or American Me, or Vital Remains, or consult the 857,000 Google search results for “band trailer stolen”. Then the question is, how does a band better protect its gear? Ruder thinks the van itself is enough:

I think of it as the convenience of having everything in one spot. In [Jack Buck's] specific situation, we don’t have a lot of money to spend so it’s the best option. To have an ‘all-in-one’ everything fits in this one box and we also fit in it. With a 15-passenger van with two benches, everyone except the driver can sleep comfortably; and that’s a pretty good advantage.

While being the more cost effective option, both at the initial purchase and in saving fuel costs, keeping your amps and guitar cabinets in the back of the van makes it easier to discourage theft. “Another really good advantage of storing your stuff in a van is you can park with it backed up against a wall. You can’t even open the door.”

Ruder on tour, Photo by Chase Macri

“MythBusters ran a car into a brick wall at highway speed and found that a box of Kleenex travels with enough force to kill you. “I imagine a guitar going that speed would decapitate someone,” Ruder expounds. “We build this steel thing around our equipment and we crash, our equipment will survive and be all perfect and keep it from crushing us.”

On top of protecting yourself with iron bars, most renters’ and homeowners’ insurance also covers musical equipment at very reasonable rates. Geico’s renters insurance covers theft, and State Farm estimates $20-30,000 of coverage costing as little as $8 a month. “Renters insurance is insanely cheap. It’s like $120 a year and that covers all of your stuff. It’s worth it.”

Jack Buck performing live in Columbia, MO

Last week’s post was the first introducing the topic of my master’s thesis: how people of faith relate to anti-religious music. Particularly, do Christians dig anti-Christian metal?

Impending Doom's "Repentagram" Logo

The feedback that I have received from you all based on my thesis topic has been primarily of interest in the final product. In response to this, I plan to share my progress researching different attributes of Christianity and extreme metal. I would like more feedback from you in the process. Leave comments on the blog, interact with me on Twitter and Facebook. If you have any resources you think would be of interest to me, share them! And I’m still looking for more people to participate in the survey I posted last week.

Last bit I want to share is this quote from Greg Piper, over at the blog Cultural Imperialists, said “Jesus was born knowing he was going to die a violent death in his dirty thirties, a virgin, wearing a loincloth, ignored by his God. Come on, how much more death metal can you get?” Truth.

Photo by Chase Macri

On January 12-14th, the bands Jack Buck and Coward set out across the midwest to play four shows in three days. The tour, entitled the “Home Turf” tour, went through each of the three cities the members of the bands live: Kansas City, Columbia and St. Louis. The below video shows live and candid footage of the bands throughout the three day tour.

For their EP My Heart Is The Eastern Horizon, the Nashville band Clemency decided to release each of the EP’s five songs individually a month at a time as singles, a tactic bands are increasingly exploring. But what makes Clemency unique is each single was also released as a music video.

“We’ve never really shot videos before,” says Jason Watkins, lead vocalist and guitarist of Clemency. “We were like ‘What if we shot a video for every song and release them as singles?’”

The band wrote the music and the screenplays for each of the songs, and videographer Joey Williams filmed and edited the videos. The band released the first single “The Wild Wind” on June 27th to Youtube and iTunes and repeated that process every month until each video was out. Watkins was happy with the results:

“Each video got a couple thousand plays in the first weeks,” he says. “They each topped out at like 5,000 or whatever. We were really pleased as an indie band that doesn’t have a lot of marketing push.”

Clemency are a truly independent band without a record label or access to significant capital to market their music. Beyond promoting with social media, the band used Google Adwords to get exposure:

“Our whole strategy was to put $500 dollars towards marketing for each video,” Watkins explains. “We ended up doing Adwords and different marketing through Google. They had taken notice of what we were doing and the attention we were getting and a representative contacted us and said ‘I think there’s some things we can do to maximize exposure.’ We had one more video to release. So we worked with Google and the video ended up having 73,000 plays in one week. In one week!”

With the success of the videos, and the responses the band has received from fans via Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and in person the band hopes to continue a similar method for promotion in the future.

“It would be kind of hard to sustain; making a quality video for every song you write. But I think it could be done. It’s ambitious, but I think we’ve proved to ourselves we can do it. And if you do it well you can be known as the band that does that. ‘Oh, that’s the band that does videos for all their songs.’”

“My Heart Is The Eastern Horizon” was released digitally on January 3rd and can be downloaded from iTunes. The EP will be available physically at the band’s CD release show on January 11th at The Rutledge in Nashville, TN. Clemency’s videos can be seen on their Youtube page.

Video of Kevin Harris performing at Floating Labs

Floating Laboratories is one of a crop of new underground, do-it-yourself venues hosting alternative, experimental and noise music in St. Louis. Most of the events are spread through word of mouth, or announced via blog posts on sites like Josh Levi’s Flood Yr Face blog (check out an interview with Josh Levi here).

Several such noise and experimental musicians and also a folk guitarist from in and out of town played Friday, December 16th at Floating Labs and it felt nostalgic to fellow St. Louis noise musician Travis Bursik (of the duo Ou Où). “Shows like these remind of when I was living in Ann Arbor, [Michigian]. DIY venues, BYOB, very intimate settings and everyone who’s here is here for the right reasons.”

Floating Labs tend to feature musicians who create their music from samples, loops and synthetic instruments as opposed to traditional band instruments like guitars and acoustic drums. To the uninitiated, this kind of musical production is perceived as random button pressing on keyboards and computers. Bursik is annoyed by this perception: “A lot of the time people don’t understand that we’re not just messing around up there,” he says. “Everything is very meticulously planned. There’s a lot of editing yourself involved too, you’re not just releasing everything because less than half of what you do is good.”

Video of Ryley Walker performing at Floating Labs

The word “success” can mean many things. It can be measured by the level of income an individual makes a year. It can be shown by owning a house, a car, by having a certain prestige in your field or title at your job. For musicians, “success” could be having a record deal, going on tour, having a single on the radio. For Josh Levi, success is more about inspiring people than anything else. Levi is a St. Louis musician, music writer and concert promoter and has been involved in the music scene for nearly a decade. He promotes local music on his blog, Flood Yr Face, and both online and in print for the entertainment, arts and culture newspaper the Riverfront Times. On top of promoting and writing about music, Levi also plays guitar in nrml ppl and performs as a one man experimental noise band under various pseudonyms.

Levi had a chance to talk about how he measures success outside of the mainstream definition in the above audio interview. The photos of Levi below were taken at Floating Laboratories in St. Louis, MO.

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