Friday, Jun. 20, 2008

Think this is a big weekend? Meltdown is right on its heels

By Jeremy Dutton, Special to the Herald

This weekend is shaping up to have some quality music goin' on in the Tri.

The trashcan blues of Portland's Hillstomp along with Plants Eat People at Ray's Golden Lion and Blueprint's post-punk at Dax's.

While this suits me to a T, it's really nothing compared with next weekend, when a slew of the Tri's most notable bands gather for the Meltdown Musicfest.

It would take a lot of space to get a sense of what all 12 of the bands set to play sound like, so you're going to get one idea because A) I don't have that much space and B) I only have one of the band's CDs.

So we'll talk about IV (as in eye-vee). This Tri-City trio just released Second Wind. They tag themselves with classic rock and prog but after listening all I can hear is early 90s alt-rock like For Squirrels or The Nixons.

Second Wind does, however, blow through a lot of styles. Boom Boom carries a great blues riff, and so does Ready or Not. And My Fast One, an ode to driving with the top down, opens with lead singer Rob Ivey doing his best Charlie Daniels impression.

The lyrical meat of the album, though, rests in a trilogy dissecting love's ups and downs. Starting with Love, the ballad laments on the emotion's ability to "cut so deep." That pain turns to cynicism on Love Runs Circles, where Ivey sings "can you ride the merry-go-round?/ One revolution then it spits you on the ground." It's a Rush then refocuses on the physical and the rush only a new beginning can provide.

The only letdown on the album is Good Time for a Party, which features an all-too-repetitive chorus of the song's title. A little too Bon Jovi for me.

I will say this, though -- these guys have got to be pretty rockin' live.

Stay morbid

Last week, I was feeling all morbid and tried to draw a parallel between my life and the early deaths of some of my favorite rock stars. Big leap -- I know. But I'm not the only one fascinated about rock star deaths. I've read Chuck Klosterman's hilarious, yet scathingly insightful account of a rock star burial site road trip. But I was trolling our wires and came across this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel mini-review of a new book that's now on my summer list:

"Mama Cass Elliot did not die from choking on a ham sandwich -- it was a heart attack possibly brought on by crash diets. The Who's Keith Moon died by overdosing on the medication that was supposed to control his alcoholism. Those are just some of the possibly morbid but certainly interesting tidbits in The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars: Heroin, Handguns and Ham Sandwiches (Chicago Review Press, $22.95).

The book, by Jeremy Simmonds, details the final curtain for more than 900 musicians."

* Jeremy Dutton: 582-1525; jdutton@tricityherald.com.