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McCarthy Trenching Interview | Hear Nebraska FM by Rabble Media

Chance Solem-Pfeifer and Jacob Zlomke review Dear Herman's debut album, "Sincerely, Dorothy."

Buy the album here:

https://dearherman.bandcamp.com/album/sincerely-dorothy

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Words by Jacob Zlomke

With Sincerely, Dorothy, Lincoln folk-duo Dear Herman issues something of a critical challenge.

It’s an 11-track narrative wherein characters are inseparable from the music that brings them to life. To listen only to the album’s music would be to somehow resist getting swept up in Crystal Davy’s rich characterization. Further, as developed in tandem with a full-scale theatrical production of that narrative, performed January 17 and 18 at the Haymarket Theatre in Lincoln, the task of looking at Sincerely, Dorothy on strictly its musical merits becomes even more convoluted.

Davy and sister/bandmate Melissa Taylor are students of Allison Krauss and Emmylou Harris, developing an active woman narrator who tells her story through close harmonies and rich acoustic guitars. Where musically, Dear Herman takes cues from classic country, Davy’s knack for lyricism paints an ensemble of characters that in turn inhabit a vibrant and believable community and brings William Faulkner to mind before Patsy Cline or Hank Williams.

Dorothy Mains, the title character and narrator, has inside a year left to live. Her son and husband have become estranged after a fight. Dorothy begins writing letters to her son’s wife Annabel in an effort to restore family relationships as her final act of life. Each track on the album is framed as a different letter to Annabel, and each title named for the character whose story Dorothy has chosen to tell.

Somewhere near the end of the album’s first half, it’s clear that reuniting father and son may not be Dorothy’s only, or even primary, goal. Rather, these letters are an effort in tradition and preservation, a way for somebody, anybody, to remember the people that have been instrumental in the life of Dorothy and her family. Why else the digressions, the excess of personal detail?

For Dorothy, it’s urgent that she get these people down on paper before they all slowly fade away with nothing to show for their existence. Someone needs to know that Mrs. Julienne prays every day for Dorothy and that the Ramirez family has been crucial in helping her daughter deal with Dorothy’s illness. These are small, everyday people in an unknown coastal town that will someday sooner than later be swallowed by the Pacific, probably forgotten. But for Dorothy, there is none more important, nothing more worth preserving, even if only in unsolicited letters.

Jacob Zlomke is a Hear Nebraska contributor. Transmedia gets him real excited. Reach him at [email protected].

Audio review by Chance Solem-Pfeifer and Jacob Zlomke

Buy the album here:

https://orionwalsh.bandcamp.com/album/the-tale-of-a-broken-compass

podcast by Dan Scheuerman

On this episode, Scheuerman talks to Califone's Tim Rutili about The Kinks's "Waterloo Sunset," vomiting an entire box of Franken Berry cereal, and writing music that strives to be animalistic.

Califone plays Slowdown on Friday night with William Tyler.

photo of Rutili by Dusdin Condren

interview by Chance Solem-Pfeifer

by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | courtesy photo

Expressing yourself, confessional songwriting and art reflecting self. Jake Bellows has a two-word retort: “Who cares?”

The longtime Omaha songwriter and former frontman of the now-defunct band Neva Dinova contradicts an entire dictionary of the romantic songwriting terminology with his first solo album New Ocean. Released on Saddle Creek in August 2013, the album postulates using music and art as tools for projecting a healthier, brighter future for humankind and the world, as opposed to a force that propagates one person’s human experience.

While the conclusion may seem obvious to Bellows, he knows the execution of such songwriting is uncommon.

“I think every artist thinks that, too,” he says. “They just haven’t considered what their art is for.”

When Bellows returned to Nebraska in mid-January for a pair of solo performances, he reflected on the broader themes of New Ocean, a record for which his primary influences weren’t musical contemporaries of Neva Dinova but rather diverse thinkers like Nikola Tesla, Joseph Campbell and Hazrat Inayat Khan. For inspiration, Bellows (who now resides in California) dove into theories and principles of frequency that give the sleepy pop album its elemental feeling — that the soundwaves we’re processing are, at various frequency levels, the building blocks of the universe.

For this, the ninth installment of Sessions, I sat down with Bellows at the Aromas coffee shop in Benson to discuss visions of a humane apocalypse, the value of artistic voices in society and a moment Bellows could have sworn he was dying.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. In a story of many quotable quotes, he thinks, “We just have to keep in mind that we made all of this up…” is one to live by. Reach Chance at [email protected].

Chance Solem-Pfeifer and Jacob Zlomke review Josh Hoyer and the Shadowboxers' self-titled debut.

Buy it here:

https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/joshhoyerandtheshadowbox

words by Chance Solem-Pfeifer | photos by Chris Dinan

New Year’s Eve at Vega was the fifth time I’d been to a Universe Contest show in 2013.

It’s a riot each time, with the vim undiminished by repetition. But in that it’s now a well-known hysteria, sometime after midnight, the mass of people, washed in green- and blue-lit baths, become an object of fascination as well.

On this night, Universe Contest begins their set just after 11:30, so they can usher the crowd through the midnight countdown and play until around 1 a.m. The towering scaffold lighting they introduced at their Lincoln Calling set is in full effect and the October addition of dancers in tight clothing and strange masks was ramped up, too, with New Year’s Eve’s participation of the Resplendent Jezebel Burlesque.

Once the band has doffed their sparkling tuxedo jackets and the burlesque dancers (men and women alike) are doing a racy version of “the monkey” from the tabletops behind us, I ask my friend if he thinks the band has anything to say about sexuality in their performances.

He laughs and shakes his head. It’s totally possible he didn’t want to talk about what a rock band means at 12:30 in the morning with balloons raining down on us, and I don’t blame him.

And maybe he’s right, Universe Contest might not have any clarified stance to put forward in their lyrics or their stage presence about sexuality or individuality. In the last two years they’ve acted out a costume-store version of their song “Someone Else,” dressing as Santas, robots, wolfmen and glitter queens — seemingly whichever way the wind blows their carnival tastes.

So I watch the sold-out crowd of people spring to life when they hear the familiar haunted funk groove of “Relephants.” They give themselves with literal open arms to be baptized by the shrill cries of “Dying.” And in what’s invariably the most voluminous sing-along of a Universe Contest set, they echo the hidden, depressive moods of “Snake Stand.” Beneath the bouncy chords of that song is a message about the quiet despair in which streamers are to be swept off the dancefloor later that night. And for the song’s five minutes, the band and its fans share a congregational laugh about the thought of the approaching morning.

Even given the mosh that congeals at these shows, step back and watch. It’s 100 people dancing with themselves, inducing their bodies into widely-drawn circles. Following the band’s lead, they chant vowel sounds. To a total stranger, it must look like something primal, tribal even.

Outside of those mainstay songs, Universe Contest music could be about galactic transport, it could be cleverly titled like “The Day The Earth Took Pills,” or it might not even be English. But these hairy men routinely pack a room full of people anxious to throttle themselves, and then watch the room submit to a communal moment. This moment immortalizes all the salty smells and moshing bruises of a local legend people will want to write about in 15 years. Someone will compile an oral history about the anonymous woman in the gas mask or bassist Jon Dell’s assless chaps or the first time a big crowd saw Universe Contest play at Lincoln Exposed in 2012 and some loner screamed “Zeppelin!” into your deaf ear.

Part of that legend may look foolish or rowdy. It may look like beer cans hitting fretboards or guitarist Tim Carr calling the crowd “motherfuckers” three or four different times, each time handcuffed to an apologetic “we love you.”

But it’s not artifice, it’s not neediness. This is not dance-pop that begs you to please let your inhibitions go just for tonight like it’s your last night on earth. Universe Contest would never ask something so fatalistic or so imaginary of its fans.

This fall, what their shows reflected is that the glow from this mammoth light rig was the band’s internal vision of itself. That the “bearded” woman gyrating behind the drumkit is part of the show they imagine in their sleep.

So, yes, Universe Contest has something to say. About shamelessness, about Lincoln, about us and our desire to clamor to the cult of a band that builds an amusement park on stage a few times a year and always seems to giggle once they realize how colorful, how excessive it’s become.

Even if it’s just a shriek in the dark winter of a so-called college town in the middle of nowhere, every time we go to a Universe Contest show and behave like we mean to forget ourselves, it’s more about remembering.

About shaking fists and feet like a bunch of possessed children before somebody long ago told us we had to enunciate, to wear clothes, that there was nothing to see here.

On this episode of Under the Influence, Dan McCarthy of McCarthy Trenching — an Omaha musician who's also played with Bright Eyes and the Mynabirds — talks androgyny, Murphy Brown, and joke songs with host Dan Scheuerman. Meanwhile, he plays a couple of tunes, including a version of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" with psychoanalytical commentary.

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