Melomane: New York-based "pop-noir"




COME SEE MELOMANE AND SEA FOX at TONIC THIS THURSDAY JULY 1 at 10 PM at TONIC. MELOMANE are hard at work on their third full-length album. Basic tracks were recorded at Brooklyn Broadcast Audio using free-range musicians, organic microphones, and hormone-free instruments. No baby animals were harmed. Possible titles for the new album include SKY HORSE, TAP YO FOOTS, and LET'S BE LITTLE POLAR BEARS. If you have a better idea, just say so. GET THE NEW MELOMANE I'M IN LOVE WITH LOVE EP NOW. PIERRE will write a personalized song for you for a modest fee. Name the subject, and PIERRE will write and record a song just for you. This is it folks,your ticket to immortality. NOVEMBER EUROPE TOUR DIARY. Go to the bottom of this page and read the adventures of Melomane in Europe. MAGNET MAGAZINE reviewed SOLRESOL IN THEIR 2003 SIGNIFICANT OTHERS SECTION. Look in the FEBRUARY MARCH Issue of MAGNET for a glowing review of SOLRESOL. New press! Check out the raves for Solresol: Impact Press Splendid Zine Tastes Like Chicken babysue.com All Music Guide The Philler DOWNLOADABLE HI-RES PRESS PHOTOS: GO TO GALLERY and CLICK on PRESS PHOTOS, OR GO DIRECTLY TO Press Photos Many thanks to Pete Kellers at Factory Direct Design for his help on the website. Click here for Pierre's First-hand account of 9/11. I'M IN LOVE WITH LOVE Tour Diary, November 2003 (Written by Pierre with help from the band) Tuesday/Wednesday Nov 4/5 Before leaving New York, I went to vote in the local elections. A TV crew from New York One interviewed me. I told them I was voting Democrat across the board because I didn¹t know enough about the local issues, but I just wanted to undermine the Republicans in any way possible. I said I learned from the Nader fiasco in 2000 that Americans have to put ideals aside and just get rid of Bush. The two older ladies gasped when I said ³get rid of Bush.² Then they whispered ³we agree with you.² Perfect way to start the ³I¹m in Love with Love² Tour. Arrived in Frankfurt the next morning. Met Sasha who brought us our equipment and our big white Mercedes van, Moby Dick, the whale of Europe. Drove straight to Zurich. Met Tom Rist and had dinner at the big castle-like restaurant near the river. Delicious wurst and beer. Ahhhh, Switzerland. Thursday Nov 6 Woke up, had some Fruehstueck, then headed towards Solothurn. I forgot to check the gas gauge. Moby Dick ran out of gas on the autobahn. Merde! A little yellow car marked ³Patrouille² pulled up and a little friendly guy in a green jumpsuit gave us gas, accompanied us to a gas station, and charged us $130 euros. Sheisse! This was my ³retard tax.² Couldn¹t help but think of the time I ran out of gas in the green van touring with C Gibbs somewhere in the South, sometime in ¹98. Arrived at the club and met Gabardine, the opening act. Our Swiss friend and sound guy Freddie was there too. Also Mirko, former bass player of ³Former Franks,² Frank¹s former band, and his wife. He booked our last show in Solothurn two years ag. Gabardine sounded like a lazy and schizophrenic Sonic Youth, lapsing into Weezer territory when the drummer sang lead. Really great guitar tones. Really amazing guitars. Very nice fellows. We had forgotten how cool European crowds are. They gave us not one, not two, but THREE encores. Afterwards we talked to a bunch of locals, including some very friendly guys in a band who lit a big euro-splif which they smoked like a cigarette, taking their sweet-ass time between puffs. To hear them tell it, seeing Melomane changed their lives. Maybe it was the hash. Anyway, a good start to the tour. Friday Nov 7 Drove back to Zurich after walking around the beautiful town of Solothurn. In Zurich, the gig was in a little seedy bar that used to be a junkie/alcoholic hangout near the park. Perfect. Tom Rist organized the whole event last minute. Went over to the Seebad Sauna for a bath by the lake. No better way to get ready for a show than to be naked in a public sauna with your band mates and then jump into a freezing cold lake under the full moon! The show, thanks to Tom, was a smashing success. The place was totally jam-packed with Zurich hipsters and music-lovers. Gabardine played a great set of their weird, sleepy, noisy, pop sludge. Many friends of Frank were in the audience including Adrian, Rainer, Cybil, Tom¹s sisters, Tanja, and Andreas. We rocked the house and they asked for more more more. The precious fluid of our creative oeuvre poured over the heads of the larval audience like a nurturing salveŠ What? We played pretty well. Afterwards we hung out very late. Saturday Nov 8 Woke up very very early and drove to Brussels. Driving around the ³ring² of Brussels, we had our first of many surreal experiences being lost in the Moby Dick trying to penetrate a city. After an hour on the ring, we found club Botanique. Beautiful club with a large garden pathway, overlooking a huge regal garden. Arab Strap was soundchecking. I was very happy to be in a French-speaking country with a French-speaking crew. Backstage, the violin player of Arab Strap ³borrowed² our last piece of bread as we were hungrily munching cheese and salami. That was weird, but she later turned out to be a sweet girl. All of the Arab Strappers were very cool blokes, though I needed subtitles to understand their crazy Scottish brogue. The show was strange but good. Very large stage, large crowd, about 600 people, all there to see Arab Strap, but they were very good to us. Arab strap put on a mesmerizing show, really tight and loud and sweeping, with those deep Calvin Johnson vocals, drum machines, piano, and a string section and trumpets. Made us really miss our whole line-up with Quentin and Jesse. Had a really good dinner after the show, good bottle of red wine. Ahhh Belgium. Afterwards I went to a house party with the Strap, met some English and American students, had a good chat with the guitar player and the drummer of Arab Strap. Back to the five-star Royal Crown Hotel for some sleep. Sunday Nov 9 Woke up to find someone had hit our truck while parked and smashed the shit out of the back lights. Luckily, the guy alerted the police and waited for us to come out and filled out a police report. We didn¹t know at the time that Europe has extremely rigid laws against hit-and-run accidents, so we felt blessed, being hit by a man with a reverse-sociopathic mental handicap. Drove to Hasselt, Belgium for one more show with Arab Strap. Got unbelievably lost. This was the last show of their six-week tour, so they were completely drained of all life-giving energy. Too much party. I think their vibe rubbed off on us and the audience because the show was really lackluster and Sunday night-y. Saying goodbye to Arab Strap, they gave us bottles of Whiskey and Vodka and farewells for the road. Awfully nice moody alcoholic rocker blokes. Went back to the hotel and watched the White Stripes on MTV. Monday Nov 10 Walked around Hasselt. Drove to Koln. Got unbelievably lost driving the ³rings around Koln² trying to penetrate the city. Found the Kantine, a huge club outside of the city that was recently moved from another location. We were the first band to play in the new venue, the guinea pigs. Sound man was still setting up the PA system. Very nice backstage with big red curtains, angel wings, and candles. Ate a delicious chicken and rice dinner with good red wine. No one was showing up for the show, so the promoter decided to make the entrance free to the people attending the ³Over-30 Disco² next door. We decided to get completely trashed on Arab Strap scotch and played a really great show, to about 20 bewildered onlookers. Afterwards we went to the disco and danced like robot monkeys. Met some groovy people on the dance floor, sweating to the hits of the 80s. They were impressed by my dancing. Sometimes it pays to get retarded. Tuesday Nov 11 Got extremely lost driving to Halle. By now, we realized that Germans either have no capacity whatsoever to give directions or someone was playing a joke on us. Most of the maps provided to us by our booking agent had no street names, only vague graphical representations of the cities, as if to say ³I challenge you to find this club, stupid Americans!² Kenny and Frank both speak German, but somehow the information was not being conveyed in a manner suitable to the finding of our way. Halle is a beautiful old city in eastern Germany, but it was not built for a massive Mercedes van navigated by a lost American band. We quickly learned to disregard the angry stares, blinking headlights, and honking horns of the astonished Germans around us. We decided to allot one hour each day of ³getting lost time² in our agenda. We finally found the club, Object 5, and it was in a great old brick building. It is a beautiful club with a cabaret style stage with big red curtains and beautiful lighting like an East German Joe¹s Pub. The crew here spoke very little English but was very polite and helpful. Dinner was an excellent pesto pasta dish with yet another good bottle of red wine. The show went very well, we were turning into a well-oiled chamber-pop machine, despite the lack of Quentin. Frank¹s cello playing was starting to spread out and get more baroque and expressive. The crowd was half exuberant, half bored. It was hard to tell if the people were there to see us or just to have a drink. They applauded loudly and brought us back for an encore. It was here that I discovered a very European concept in concert-going; these people had paid good money to see a show, and they wanted their money¹s worth. This means that even if they didn¹t particularly love the music, they wanted the band to keep playing for a respectable amount of time (an hour and a half) or else they felt gypped. This is in direct opposition to the New York, A.D.D.-style of concert-hopping; you go to a show, check out a couple of songs, and if the band sucks you go somewhere else. Or, if you like the band, you stay until the second they are finished, then go off to another bar, even if there are four other bands on the bill. Here in Europe, there are rarely more than two bands on a bill, and people go out to one place a night. There are fewer places to go, so there is no need to hop around and get the most out of your socializing time. After the show, we were interviewed by a DJ from a local radio station. He looked like he was about 15. His favorite band was Metallica and this was his first interview. He nervously read his questions off of his cell-phone. We wanted to hug him and give him a cup of hot chocolate, but we tried to answer his questions seriously. Afterwards we hung out with some of Kenny¹s friends, music students. Learned the expression ³W.G.² (pronounced ³Way Gay²) which means ³Wohngemeinschaft² (a commune or apartment-sharing community). We realized our van is our ³rolling Way Gay.² Back at the hotel, I shared a beer with some guys smoking and drinking in the hallway. They were the band ³Mellow Mark,² a popular German reggae act. Their opening act, ³Jahcoustic,² a solo acoustic reggae singer, wins this week¹s award for most memorable band name. Wednesday Nov 12 Drove to Leipzig. Our hotel and the club are in a cool old part of town, Connewitz. Leipzig is a big modern city in Saxony, built out of the ruins of the devastation of WWII. Now it feels like Chicago with slightly better fashion. ³The little man¹s castles were under attack.² Back at the club we met the band HIM from New York who shared the bill. They were two hours late, so the sound check was late, but we decided to share gear. They¹re ten guys driving around in a small van. Good to meet some people from home and speak English. We feel guilty for our big fat obnoxious ³rolling Way Gay,² the HMS Moby Dick. HIM are a mixture of Tortoise and Fela Kuti. Great show. Frank set up on a riser behind the drums. All the HIM gear on stage made me feel like I¹m in Pink Floyd. Hamming it up. The sound is very big, very rock. Great audience. Classic Frank moment: While HIM are on stage, Frank walks up to the bass player. He has a laptop set up, and Frank asks him ³Can I check my email?² Afterwards I talked to Yan, the promoter, about ³I¹m in Love with Love.² He loves the song, but he¹s sick of Germans jumping on the ³I hate America² bandwagon. He feels it has become a trend, and people who have never protested a single issue in their life are jumping on it without opening their minds to all of the other injustices in the world. He is a soulful guy committed to social change, and I see his point. My answer is that we have been concerned with politics and social change for years, and our hatred and fear of Bush¹s America is a culmination of that concern, and we are trying to stay informed and aware. We¹re happy to show Europeans that not all Americans swallow the bullshit being foisted on us by the Bush gang. I have an ambivalent relationship to the song because I don¹t believe in violence as a solution. I just want Bush to disappear from the earth and never come back, and ³assassination² is a metaphor for impeachment or just voting out. Violence is something that I¹m still trying to figure out, and I guess writing a song is a way of exploring that. Took a late night walk around the town with Daria, then sleep. Ahhh Leipzig. Thursday Nov 13 Drove to Darmstadt for our day off. Met Ruben and Lexi, the first lady and first son of Melomane. Had a perfect dinner in a typical German pub, wood walls, roaring fire. Delicious roast pork, Schpaetzle, Knoedel, gemixte salad, good wine, great beer, followed by Williams pear schnaps and coffee. Friday Nov 14 Breakfast at a café in Darmstadt, Lexi¹s hometown. Drove to nearby Heidelberg to meet Lexi¹s father, a funny jovial guy who fed us ham and cheese and coffee. We tried to kidnap his teenage son to do merchandise, but no dice. Drove to Freiburg. Tiny little club called Swamp hosted by a great dude called Chico, an Italian-born German music-lover. At first we were wondering how a show could happen in this space, somewhere between the size of Little Frankie¹s restaurant and Pete¹s Candy Store in New York. Chico busted out a bottle of delicious local schnaps at dinner. We were loose and ready and the place was completely packed, people standing on tables and chairs. This may have been the best show of the tour for me. Words that come to mind are ³velvety,² ³unctuous,² and ³ebullient.² Daria hit the schnaps wall and passed out in the back of the club. Saturday Nov 15 - Drove to Ebensee. Beautiful morning drive through the sun-dappled countryside of Austria. Couldn¹t help thinking about a young man named Arnold who grew up in Graz in this hilly beautiful country. What was his childhood like, before he became a bodybuilder, a movie star, and then a Republican power-grabber in California? Weird. Ebensee is a little picture-book town on a lake, little Austrian chalets, men on bikes with little hunter hats with feathers in the brim, the whole thing. Hard to believe it was once a concentration camp. Times change. Club Kino is a beautiful old theater run by two brothers, Klaus (the serious one who likes to get really close to your face when he talks) and Konrad (the mad, drunk one.) They are both the salt of the Earth. Twenty years ago, they lived in Ebensee and played in a rock band, but there were no venues. So they asked their trumpet player, who was also the mayor of the town, if they could use the old Kino for a concert. He gave them the keys, and they have been putting on concerts there ever since. The show rocked, great sound, great response. Afterwards, again we sampled the local schnaps and talked rock history with the brothers. They were totally up on all of their art/noise/pop/rock from Kaspar Brotzman to Howe Gelb to Vanity set to Lydia Lunch to Can to all the obscure stuff happening now. Sunday Nov 16 Woke up late, drove all the way back to Darmstadt. Played in a groovy community center/café called 603 sqM. The promoters and crew of volunteers were so helpful it was almost scary. Weird show. Never quite got off the ground. We sold out of our ³In Love with Love² Ep¹s, so we made some new ones with blank labels and Daria customized them. The people loved it. We stayed in a big old squat/mansion called the Oettinger Villa with many rooms, and some squatter/activists/volunteers living there. Our host showed us our room, only to find a kid sleeping in there because he didn¹t want to go all the way home. ³Do you mind,² he asked us? No I guess not. So we had a roommate that night. Monday Nov 17 - In the morning Frank cooked up some eggs and ham in the squat kitchen. The house would be a beautiful mansion if it wasn¹t all shitted up with graffiti and posters. We slept well and appreciated the hospitality, but realize we¹re getting old or we¹ve lived in New York too long, because all we can think about is cleaning and renovating the place. Later, Daria drops a classic line to the promoter: ³I guess you can¹t be too comfortable if you¹re planning a revolution.² That day I walked around Darmstadt looking for a new distortion pedal. Because of the language barrier, I felt as though I were swimming upstream in a river of warm tar. I had my first incident of serious German language/Euro inconvenience burnout. I just wanted to understand and be understood. I just wanted the stores to be open during lunch. I felt like a fat lazy American. Finally I found my pedal, an Ibanez ³Seventh Heaven,² had a cup of coffee, and it was all OK. Drove to Wurtzburg. Club AKW, in an amazing old brewery turned into an arts compound. ³They¹re turning the beer factory into a discotheque.² It is Monday night, and almost nobody shows up. The promoter was a really cool musician named Bastie who cooked us a beautiful cheese gnocchi dish. We played our hearts out on the big stage to three people plus the sound guy and the staff. Afterwards a woman, one of the three paying customers, told us she had been waiting two years for us to come back to Germany, she had all our CDs, and we were her favorite band. Building a religion one convert at a time. Stayed at a guy¹s house, Uli, who gets paid by the state to house touring musicians. Cool. Tuesday Nov 18 We rolled into Munich at sunset and met our old buddy Ivi who used to book Club 2. Prager Fruehling is a new club he books. Looks like a go-go club on the set of Austin Powers, all orange and disco balls. Met up with Achim Sechig, radio DJ friend and large-mouthed bon-vivant, and his lovely wife Martina. The show was great, solid and rocking. My new distortion pedal sounds like Os Mutantes, feels good. At one point I looked up and saw people singing along to the lyrics. Cool. Met some great fans, including the band Bliss, and Gunther, a die-hard fan who saw us two years ago. Also met lots of wunderbar Germans. Stayed at Ivi¹s house and had his trademark delicious breakfast the next day. Wednesday Nov 19 Drove to Berlin for a day off. Navigating the Moby Dick through the great old streets. Berlin has changed a lot since the last time I was here, in Œ98 with Morning Glories. The east side has lost its crumbling, dark, brooding feeling. It has been cleaned up and renovated, but it is still a hip and vibrant city. We stayed in a huge apartment on Schoenhauser Allee with Heidi the Swiss artist and her two lovely roommates, as well as their bird Vicky. Frank met up with Nikko and Greta and their sons Buckie, our friends from New York. Thursday Nov 20 We have a show at the Kesselhaus, another club in a renovated brewery compound called the Kulturbraurei. In the morning we walk around town and shop at the thrift stores. The economy in Berlin is really bad, so the thrift stores are full of cast-off hipster clothes at bargain prices. We are playing with a Tuvan throat-singing rock band called Yat Kha. They are like a Mongolian world music death metal act. Their bass player, Scipio, is a session cat from the US who has lived in Europe for 20 years and has one of those international accents where you can¹t tell where he¹s from. He is a really sweet guy and makes us feel at home. We finally get to meet Guido from our booking agency, and his two lovely co-workers, Sonya and Julia. Guido is a serious, intense, warm guy and we instantly click. He seems pleased with the tour so far, and so are we. Yat Kha are hanging out backstage, drinking red wine. Two of them are Mongolian dudes with beards and long black hair, and the drummer is a very scary bearded guy who looks like Rasputin and goes by the nickname of Š Rasputin! I tried to speak to him in Russian and he just stared at me. He used to be the drummer of a very famous Soviet-era metal band. Heavy. Our show went really well. 400 people in attendance, and many of them there to see us out of curiosity because of an article in the Berliner Zeitung. The audience was very good to us for an opening act. Yat Kha put on a long and bizarre set of Tuvan throat rock. Weird and beautiful. At one point the singer went on a 20-minute rant about all of the different types of alcoholic beverages. It was hard to tell if he was speaking English, Tuvan, or Russian as he mumbled about Vodka, Heineken, and Beaujolais Nouveaux. During their set, I was introduced to Joey Burns, singer of Calexico. We started casting has-been metal stars as extras in Yat Kha. We wondered what Axel Rose would be like as guest singer in Yat Kha, and how they would overcome their cultural differences as band-mates. I was amazed to hear that Calexico mixed some records at the Distillery, a studio run by my friend Mike McHugh in Costa Mesa, California, my home town. Small world. After the show things just got weirder. Backstage there was a German couple who were throat-singing groupies of Yat Kha. They had a group called Ayropa. The woman was a throat singer with a Punky Brewster meets Steven Tyler outfit, and her bald boyfriend/sex slave was a drummer. They got a ride with us to a bar and did vodka shots in the Moby Dick. At the bar, the woman did a demonstration of throat singing while her partner did lap drumming. It was the most fucked-up, amazing, other worldly sound I¹ve ever heard, like a Star Trek laser gun echoing through a PVC pipe with multiple overtones, coming out of this eccentric woman¹s mouth in a Berlin pub. Whoa. Friday Nov 22 Day off in Berlin. Nikko took Frank on a bike tour of Berlin. The rest of us went off and emailed our loved ones, had business meetings, got lost on the U-bahn, and shopped. Friday night Greta cooked a delicious meal of Koenigsberger Klopps, and then we went to a kaesy Berlin nightclub to meet the fine ladies of Berthold Seliger. We got scared when the pyrotechnics started in the back of the club and we only counted one exit. We got our great white asses out of there. Saturday Nov 23 Had a very good breakfast buffet at the café near the house on Schonhauser Allee. Said goodbye to our lovely hostesses. Drove to Dresden in the afternoon. Back at the Schoene, beautiful graffiti-covered rock Mecca of Dresden. Since our last visit two years ago, the band accommodations have been much improved. Paul, the promoter, is weird and silent, not very friendly. We played with another band from New York called the National. Two sets of brothers, including one set of twins. Nice guys, Ohio transplants living in New York. Very sleepy crowd, not very excited/exciting. Backstage, we saw that Scipio, the bass player from Yat Kha, left us a message on the wall when they played last night. Thanks! The National told us a story about bumping a car when while parking their van in Hamburg, thinking nothing of it, and driving back to their hotel. In the middle of the night, they were woken up, yelled at, taken to prison, and fined 500 Euros. The Germans are very strict about their hit-and-run laws. After the show we went to a local bar and drank and played Tischfussball with the locals, got creamed. I got into a very philosophical discussion with a music student. He told me I look sad. I don¹t feel sad. Sunday Nov 24 Drove to Hamburg for the last show of the tour. We were very late because Š We got lost! Met Nikko, singer of Veranda Music, a great band on our label in Germany. He opened for us with a cello/keyboard player. Also reunited with Ruth and Michael, aka Mommy and Daddy XXS. Nikko¹s show was great. He has a brilliant, very expressive tired old man voice and a truly original conception of songwriting firmly opposed to the usual modern rock pretense. Also picks really great covers. Our show felt hot and loose and chocolaty. A warm blanket of German love. A great way to end the tour. Met some fans from way back and some nice label mates. Afterwards we ordered some foul-tasting Ouzo from the bar, lit it on fire, and drank a flaming toast to our fantastic tour. Ahhh Europe. Merci et bon soir. Coming Soon: TOUR PHOTOS.