The first time I heard “Billy Pilgrim,” I was convinced that the Sea Monsters were going to make it. I envisioned more shows at Cafe Ambrosia and the Warming House, leading to spots at the Beat Kitchen and Schuba’s, which would in turn garner enough blog hype to propel them into the festival circuit. The Sea Monsters were six wunderkinds from Chicago’s North Shore churning out blood-pumping waves of indie rock. I remember Zack Looman’s muffled warbles, Andrew Heaton and Aaron Ratoff’s shrilly interlocking guitars, Ben Siegfried’s driving bass, Woodie Borre’s kaospads, and Ian Becker’s drums destroying our suburbs one basement show at a time.

The band talked, in their final year, of getting together an Electronic Press Kit to send to Chicago venues after Andrew’s parents paid for studio time at Semaphore (where Sonic Youth recorded[!]) for a graduation gift. Letters were sent, shows were vaguely discussed. But then college scattered the six of them across North America and the Sea Monsters were no more. They had their last show in Woodie’s basement, and in the final moments of the set I realized that a great thing had been lost.
It is in the memory of the Sea Monsters — and so many other incredible bands that have passed all too quickly into and out of existence — that the I Miss That Band project has been conceived. The Sea Monsters left behind them a dozen incredible recordings which, until now, have been stranded in cyberspace and on the computers of the few who were lucky enough to have heard them. IMTB seeks to resurrect dead music everywhere, and to show the music-listening world that bands that burned as brightly — albeit briefly — as the Sea Monsters are worth memorializing.

I MISS THAT BAND is a new compilation project in its fetal stages yet, but with big, big dreams. The idea is simple: capture as much as we can of the great lost music. This refers to all the incredible bands you heard in basements in high school and who played one show eight years ago and then split up with only a couple lo-fi mp3′s to their name. I MISS THAT BAND wants to crystallize the great music that would be otherwise lost through a series of compilations stratified by area and basic time period. Every month or so (depending on YOUR contributions[!]) IMTB will release a new installment, called, say, Kalamazoo, 1998-2003, with maybe ten songs and a liner notes / booklet to boot, of great bands that have been born and died but deserve a proper monument.

So, how to bridge the gap between idea and actual, physical project? That’s where you come in. I MISS THAT BAND is currently (and for the foreseeable future) accepting all submissions!!! Here’s what we need:
- Bands that are for all intents and purposes DEFUNCT. The idea for this format is not to promote current artists but to preserve art for its own sake and blah blah blah. We will, of course, mention any projects the bands/artists have gone on to do in the liner notes, but for the purposes of I MISS THAT BAND send us your old, forgotten bands.
- Any sort of attachment to a recording
- Basic info on the band, such as name, members, years, area, history… anything you can muster. If you don’t know jack about the band, still send it and we’ll try to do some of our research.
- Any leads on worthy music scenes that have flourished and fizzled over the years
- ENTHUSIASM. This project will thrive on people submitting and getting excited about the series.

Hopefully it will evolve into a mail-out service + blog, but that can only happen if people help get it off the ground.

“The words / that you sang / on a track / that you wrote / on a record / that I lost / when I moved two years ago, / Well it all came back loud and clear and made me sad / I miss that band.” – Paul Baribeau

For more info:

I Miss That Band on Facebook

or IMissThatBand@gmail.com

In a brilliant publicity move, The Dead Weather make their live debut on “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” for millions of viewers to see. All four members of the band are uniformly dressed in black leather and dark jeans, like they’re slicked down by an oil spill. As the initial applause dies down, a hiccupping drum beat starts, followed by the drone of a grainy guitar. Alison Mosshart comes out swinging at the mic; she is a combative singer whose lyrics are the taunt before the first punch is thrown in a down-and-out brawl.

But as mesmerizing as Mosshart is as a lead during the performance, it’s the drummer in the back who’s getting an inordinate amount of camera shots. That’s because it’s Jack White who sits behind the drum set and there’s no ignoring him; perhaps it’s how he looks – he’s vampirically white underneath a huge nest of dark hair, or perhaps it’s his unassuming but solid performance, or perhaps it’s the fact that White, named #17 on Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Guitarists of All Time, is not playing the guitar.

The June 2009 cover of Spin magazine features the four members of The Dead Weather. Besides the title, the largest words on the cover are “Jack White,” as in “Jack White’s new new band – The Dead Weather.” Hovering near Jack White’s head is a quotation credited to him.

Undoubtedly, of all four members of The Dead Weather, Jack White has the most recognizable name. This is no fluke – he’s been busy. In the last five years, he’s managed to create a Coca-Cola jingle, write a James Bond theme, front The Raconteurs, open an office in Nashville for his Third Man Records, and take part in “It Might Get Louder,” a documentary following guitar legends from three generations. White toes the line between mainstream and underground; most musicians couldn’t do half of what he’s done without backlash from the music community and its knee-jerk aversion to commercialization.

However, the attention given to him and his band raises two inextricable questions: 1) Is it possible for Jack White to be anything but a frontman? and 2) Will anyone let him? From what can be gleaned from articles about the band, White’s position as a drummer wasn’t a change of pace for dramatic purposes. But it did give fans a heart attack.

For a new group, The Dead Weather is pretty coherent. But then again, the band is a supergroup, the alchemic combination of members from other successful bands. Mosshart is one half of The Kills, guitarist Dean Fertita hails from Queens of the Stone Age, Jack Lawrence the bassist started off in The Greenhornes and later picked up with White in The Raconteurs, and White now finds himself in his third band, after The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. The Dead Weather’s sound is that of the proverbial clash of the titans. Their first single, “Hang You from the Heavens,” is a solid piece to introduce such a sound. The song’s melody is dark, deeply rooted in grunge and blues, while Mosshart tops the song with vocals that harken back to ’60s garage rock.

Alison Mosshart, as the lead in The Dead Weather, holds her own. While part of The Kills, she often was likened to – who else? – Jack White. The comparison holds true: they are powerful leads, with voices dragged raw by cigarettes and hard rock. She even took over White’s vocals for a couple Raconteurs shows during their last tour. But her singing for The Dead Weather takes on a new tone, beyond comparisons to her bandmate: she’s volatile and sensual without apologies.

She and White are the driving creative forces behind The Dead Weather’s songs, of which the general public has only received a tantalizing glimpse. The B-side to the “Hang You from the Heavens” single is a cover of Gary Numan’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” – full of synth (as it should be) and true to the heart of the song. “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” the band’s second single, is a little bit of a letdown. Although it carries the same dark tone as the first single, it’s more erratic, and less enjoyable than the rest. Hopefully, this is the most incoherent the album, Horehound, gets; their other songs seem to be carefully crafted: wild, but not stupid. Critics are, for the most part, very optimistic about the album. If it is a success, it will be a victory not just for Jack White, the eternal frontman, but for the band as a whole.

Horehound, the debut album by The Dead Weather, will be released July 14, 2009. For those in the Detroit area, the band will be performing downtown at The Fillmore on July 24.

I’m currently sitting down at Maxwell’s Café enjoying a Marlboro and a Blue Moon beer in beautiful, boring Toledo Ohio for the summer. There’s plenty of great movies and music to enjoy, but instead of blogging my usual business, I’ve taken it upon myself to re-connect with the nationwide Pop music situation. As someone who’s usual music diet includes underground Norwegian (and Californian) Black Metal, underground political Hip Hop, and 70’s dinosaurian Prog Rock, taking time out to listen to *GASP* the radio in my car seems daunting, but just under a week in, I’ve already made some startling realizations, and begun to separate the Pop from the Plop.

This is actually a pretty good time to listen to the radio. In the past few years Pop music has attempted to regain the heights it enjoyed in the mid to late 80’s, what with Justin Timberlake valiantly trying to steal Michael Jackson’s “King of Pop” crown (and succeeding by my count) and great female singers like Lady GaGa and Katy Perry making the radio if not fun, then at least interesting.

Lady GaGa’s whole album is comfortably Madonna esque, while poking fun at itself and modern culture’s materialism and overwrought sex drive. Her newest single, “LoveGame” is pretty good: catchy, danceable, and relatable. One of its many choruses, though, is refreshingly transgressive; “Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick./ I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.” Not what I’d like my seventeen year old sister yelling out the window in her BMW convertible, but rebellious in the right way. Its remix by Marilyn Manson however( which can be found here, courtesy of Perez Hilton), is superior, more sexual and more driving, even if it blurs traditional verse-chorus-verse song structure. I rather like this direction for Manson; he’s always been much more of a pop musician than a purveyor of darkness by anyone’s regard.

Also, the Auto-Tune wave has yielded some good fruit. T-Pain and Flo-Rida’s “Low” was my drunk jam all last year, and it’s still in heavy rotation. Flo-Rida’s new singles, “Sugar” and “Right Round,” are cool, but they sample other hits so much they may as well be altered covers. Also, watching the live performance of Kesha and Flo Rida performing the song together on MTV disturbs me for some reason. Kesha’s wafer thin and seems helpless in her sexuality, while Flo Rida stomps about the stage like a steroid’ed gorilla. What corporate madman decided that these two people should perform together and flirt on one stage? It just seems creepy… kind of like all pop music. That makes sense.

Next time, the journey continues.

-JS