New Pornos, Girl Talk, Ted Leo Play Fun Fun Fun Fest
Plus: Battles, Okkervil River, Of Montreal, Diplo, Explosions in the Sky, Murder City Devils

Telegraphing its mission statement in its name, the Fun Fun Fun Fest (or FunFunFun Fest, if you will) will gather-- according to its website-- "2 days, 4 stages, [and] 75 bands"' worth of music in Austin, Texas on November 3 and 4. Take that, Austin City Limits!

The second annual version of the festival has tapped quite a lineup as well. Bands performing at this year's Fest include the New Pornographers, Girl Talk, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Of Montreal, Okkervil River, Battles, Diplo, Murder City Devils, Lifetime, Cadence Weapon, Explosions in the Sky, Final Fantasy, Mates of State, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Emma Pollock (ex-Delgados), Neurosis, Busdriver, the Sword, the Saints, Against Me!, and more.

The big gig goes down in Austin's Waterloo Park.

Peter Bjorn and John Tour Magically Grows in Duration

As one born without the superhuman ability to whistle, "Young Folks" is not just the most ubiquitous and infectious tune in the history of recorded music, it's also a constant reminder of my inadequacies as a human being.

Oh well, time to suck it up! Seems relentless Peter Bjorn and John have added a good dozen more performances of "Young Folks" to their never-ending tour, which now extends into December. This latest leg begins November 23 in Houston, and, oh yeah, they'll probably play other songs too.

And if performing as Kanye's backing band this coming weekend weren't proof enough PB&J are on the up-and-up, how about this: the eponymous trio were just nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. They'll need your help though, as they're up against Amy Overdose; folks young and old can cast their votes here. [MORE...]

Bright Eyes Add Shows, Serenade Alaskans

Photo by Paparazzi by Appointment

Just how far will Conor Oberst go to profess his undying love for you? At least as far as Alaska, if we can glean anything from this latest batch of dates that the boy wonder-turned-manchild wonder behind Bright Eyes has added to his fall tour.

In addition to a trio of gigs in America's largest state, wide-eyed Oberst and band have tacked on four more performances along the Western edge of the US of A, in such happening locales as Chico, Spokane, and Boise. Plus he's still playing with an orchestra, still out there supporting Cassadaga, and still more than willing to father your children (but only if you ask nicely). [MORE...]

Animal Collective Squeeze in More Dates
Panda Bear DVD now available

With Strawberry Jam set for a September 11 release via Domino (the day before in the UK) and its first single, "Peacebone", coming out on August 21 (August 13 in the UK), there's not much for Animal Collective to do right now but wriggle their thumbs in anticipation of their North American tour this fall.

It's productive wriggling, though, since the band has added a Panda Bear-sized three dates to the tour since our last report. Oberlin, El Paso, and Norman: you'll get yours. AC have also shed more light on the openers for the tour, including the previously alluded-to slots filled by Black Dice's Eric Copeland and Wizard Prison, as well as support from Philly's Tickley Feather.

Finally, the free Panda Bear live DVD we previously reported is now available for order, and you can get one for yourself here. Thanks to a whole bunch of readers for the heads up. [MORE...]

Shout Out Louds Announce Fall Tour

All set for the Merge release of their Ill Wills on North Americans on September 11 (man, that sound ominous), Shout Out Louds have now added a tour to commemorate their sophomore album's unveiling.

The five Swedes will make their way to these shores on October 6, where they will kick off their month-long North American tour with a show in Los Angeles.

The band has plenty of dates before then, however, continuing tomorrow night (August 11) in Gothenburg, Sweden. [MORE...]

Pitchfork Seeks Video Editor for NYC Internship

Pitchfork is seeking a fast, efficient video editor/production assistant for an internship in New York City. Our ideal candidate is a film major with experience in Final Cut and After Effects (motion graphics experience a plus) who is available to work two days a week during business hours, for credit if possible.

To apply, please send your resume to jobs@pitchforkmedia.com, along with a link to your demo reel. Please do not send your demo reel as an email attachment-- we accept links only. Submission deadline is Friday, August 10 at 6:00 p.m. Eastern.

Chemical Brothers Bro Down With Single, Tour, Contest

Photo by Hamish Brown

The Chemical Brothers are currently hocking their Night moves on tour in Europe, but the duo has announced the first three September dates of a forthcoming U.S. tour this fall.

The Bros will also release We Are the Night's newest single, "The Salmon Dance", on September 10 in the UK. It comes in a variety of formats (listed below), including the requisite digital download, which comes with the track's "Glimmer Mix" when purchased through iTunes.

Additionally, the Chemical Brothers are sponsoring a remix contest for "The Salmon Dance", with the winner receiving a prize pack of Chem Bros 12" singles as well as the opportunity to have his or her remix featured in their MySpace player for two weeks. Contestants must enter by noon (Eastern Time) on August 24. For more details about the contest, visit this entry on the Chemical Brothers' MySpace blog. [MORE...]

Head of Femur Tour, Ready New EP, LP

Since 2005's Hysterical Stars, former Nebraskans and current Chicagoans Head of Femur have paired their numbers down from 20+ to just five, and this reduction to fighting weight has them ready to release new music.

First up is a limited edition EP titled Leader and the Falcon, which will come out October 2 via Extant Records. The EP's title track comes from the band's third full-length, Great Plains, which is tentatively scheduled for release later this year or early next year.

Head of Femur also have a nice little U.S. tour assembled for the fall in support of the EP. Additional dates are forthcoming, and the crew will first dust off its gear for an August 16 gig in Chicago. [MORE...]

Oya Festival Report: Thursday [Stephen M. Deusner]

Photos by Eirik Lande (unless otherwise indicated); text by Stephen M. Deusner

In the middle of Medieval Park are, fittingly, medieval ruins-- the low-lying remains perhaps of a house or public building. They're essentially stone walls forming a layout of rooms, and throughout the festival, people congregate here to find good seats, a place to rest, or just to escape the crowds. Plus, the main ruins allow a pretty good view of the Enga stage. Part of me thinks this is cool, like having an odd, old installation in the middle of your festival. Another part of me-- the American part of me that rarely sees any building more than 100 years old-- is horrified.

"They're not special ruins," an Oslo friend assures me. Besides, they've been here for nearly a millennium, so I don't think a few Tool fans are going to damage them.

Gogol Bordello

It's from this unique vantage point that I watch the first part of Gogol Bordello's show. They take the stage to rapturous applause, and immediately women begin dancing like Stevie Nicks and guys start doing high kicks, which seems like a new, slightly more involved version of pogoing. It proves especially tricky for the shirtless backpacker with a beer in each hand, who merrily sloshes suds in every direction.

The band's self-described "immigrant punk" plays well in this setting. Tall and lanky, Eugene Hutz is a magnetic personality onstage, sporting blue-suede ankle boots and an open red shirt that he eventually rips off to play the cymbals with. Despite the band's exaggerated movements, the show seems tame at first; there's a security area in front of the stage (flanked by signs that read "No Crowd-Surfing"), so Hutz won't be riding a drum into the audience today. But things pick up considerably once the cheerleaders emerge. Ultimately, theirs is an endearingly homemade show, held together by scarves and personality.

Malajube



Photos by Stephen M. Deusner

That Balkan backbeat still reverberates as I hoof down to the Vika stage for Malajube. The cultural contrast between the acts is immediate and immense. Where Gogol Bordello are colorful, multilingual, and manic as they retool rock tropes, the Quebecois quintet are much more reserved. They sing in French, sport drab indie t-shirts, stand intently in their places. Their songs mix Queen-style drama with ambitious post-rock noise, and in the open air and with the sun in the eyes, they sound lusher and larger than on record. It feels somewhat appropriate that the fans watch from beneath convenient trees or from within kiosks, finding shade wherever they can. In this environment, Malajube sound fairly cerebral, playing from the head instead of the gut and best absorbed while sitting in the grass and nursing a beer.

CocoRosie

CocoRosie would seem like one of the more divisive bands at Øya, but every Norwegian I've talked to loves the Casady sisters. Sure enough, when I give up the shade of the Malajube show, there is already a crowd watching intently as the band members do their soundcheck. One woman even shouts, "We love you, CocoRosie," which prompts an ambiguously slight wave from Bianca Casady.

There's an arsenal of instruments on stage, from Sierra Casady's harp to Bianca's table of toys. Re-entering the stage dressed as construction workers, complete with hard hats and reflector vests, they work a determinedly catch-all aesthetic, contrasting beauty with ugliness, high-brow operatics with pop-culture toy instruments. Over a black t-shirt Sierra wears a gold one-piece swimsuit that looks like a valkyrie breastplate; Bianca is decked out in B-boy attire: a sideways Yankees hat, billowy Pit Bull t-shirt, and baggy denim. These hip-hop elements bring them dangerously close to minstrelsy, but it's not Bianca's rapping that's the problem, just her appropriated outfit and gestures.

Their unconventional beatmaking may be the most compelling aspect of the show. They sculpt rhythms from harp, acoustic guitar, and an array of toys and bells, which reverberate into a drone bolstered by a guy beatboxing behind them. Unfortunately, CocoRosie create the same cavernous space for just about every song, which makes their strange set seem a little repetitive. They break the solemnity only with "Japan", which here sounds like a demented "It's a Small World (After All)".

TTC

An interesting counterpoint to CocoRosie is TTC, a Parisian hip-hop crew who are likewise appropriating black American music, but to very different ends. TTC are traditionalists intent on translating the style to their own French concerns. In front of a beer-soaked crowd, they re-create old-school flows and rhythms, down to the technique of ending their lines in unison. Of the three MCs, Teki Latex has the best stage presence, thanks to his hoarsely aggressive voice and hulking charisma.

Justice

I've been warned that the Justice show will essentially be an outdoor rave, and sure enough, the most visually stimulating part of their performance is Xavier de Rosnay's Olivia Newton-John t-shirt. It's essentially two guys standing behind a black table flipping through CDs, which is the first common observation/criticism about electronic acts at festivals. The second is that the show would be better suited to a smoky club at 2 am. I can neither argue with those assertions nor with the overheard remark that they're no Daft Punk.

Nevertheless, de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé work diligently to overcome these limitations, blasting the audience with a continuous volley of bass. They indulge slow fades and triumphant crescendos, and there's a sly wit to the way they tease the audience with snippets of "D.A.N.C.E." long before they actually play the song. The nearly all-female audience responds by singing along when they can. Well, just on "We Are Your Friends", but still. The only egregious element is the heavy-metal riffage on the final song-- showy elements in an unshowy show.

New Young Pony Club

I've missed the midnight sun by a few months, but even in August it doesn't get dark in Oslo until around 10:30 in the evening. 7, 8, and even 9 pm. look the same as 3, only slightly cooler, as if the breeze is timed. The upside is that without the natural stimulus of darkness, your body forgets to be tired and you develop a hardier stamina for the long day of shows. When New Young Pony Club take the Vika stage at 8:40 p.m., it looks and feels like 5.

The band has two guys and three women, but based on stage presence, it might as well be an all-female band. Nothing against guitarist/producer Andy Spence or bass player Igor Volk, but they're immediately upstaged by their bandmates. Keyboardist Lou Hayter, whose entrance in a strapless green dress prompts immediate cheers from the guys in the audience, does a stoic hip-lock dance throughout the show as she adds icy 80s synths to her band's songs. Singer Tahita Bulmer, sporting a half-shaved head that looks like an Annabelle Lwin approximation, performs limb-flinging dance moves that test the strength of her tight purple dress, and her vocals are strong and disco clear, drawing not from punk but from 80s synth goddesses like Madonna and Bananarama.

But any band like this is only going to be as good as its drummer, and Sarah Jones rides her high hat relentlessly, pounding out disco rhythms that propel songs like "The Bomb", "Grey", and "Ice Cream" danceably forward. Onstage as well as on record, New Young Pony Club distill post- and dance-punk sounds into their purest pop forms, and if the teenage girls dancing giddily all around me are any indication, this band will blow up well before !!!.

Tool
Even more than it loves Nine Inch Nails, Norway loves Tool. I watch the show from a hill on the opposite shore of the pond, but from this angled vantage point, I can't even see the band, who stand so far back on the stage that they're out of sight to anyone off to the sides. I'm told that Maynard James Keenan keeps his back to the audience most of the time and that the band don't allow any press photos of live video feeds. So the only people getting shots are those fans holding their cell phones high above their heads, and the only compelling visual element is the crowd itself, which is so impressively dense and sprawling and excited that for a few seconds I wonder if I'm wrong to dismiss the band so cavalierly. Fans even line the bridge that runs parallel to the festival grounds; they didn't have to spring for a day pass but have a better view of Tool's show than many who did. Granted, they also have an unobstructed view of several guys urinating in the pond, backlit by Tool's strobe lights.

Jazkamer




Festival Grounds





Photos by Stephen M. Deusner

Dan Deacon to Unleash Ultimate Reality DVD
Also plays NYC scavenger hunt

Manipulated, neon-colored versions of clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies set to Nintendo-game-style music: What else could it be but a Dan Deacon DVD?

The Ultimate Reality DVD, out this winter on Carpark, consists of a Deacon collaborative performance with fellow Wham City collective member Jimmy Joe Roche [above left] and two live drummers, one from Ponytail and one from Deacon's frequent tourmates Video Hippos.

The performance pairs a 40-minute Deacon composition with Roche's "psychedelic montage of Arnold Schwarzenegger films that is projected at a monumental scale," according to a press release. It premiered at last summer's Whartscape Festival in Baltimore, and has since appeared in various other galleries and museums on the East Coast.

Two clips from the DVD are linked below.

Deacon continues his live madness tonight, August 10, with his appearance in Manchester, England, and he has added a few more tour dates as well.

By its varied, manic, and haphazard nature, one of those shows is a perfect match for Deacon himself: a September 2 performance at the end of New York magazine's Labor Day weekend scavenger hunt.

More info about the event, including the mention of the $1000 prize for the winning team, is in the flier after the jump. [MORE...]

Angels of Light Prep We Are Him LP

Former Swans main man Michael Gira will return with the fifth full-length with his Angels of Light project on August 21. The record, titled We Are Him and set for release on Gira's own Young God Records, is the follow-up to 2005's Sing "Other People"; it also features quite a host of guest musicians.

Previous Gira collaborators Akron/Family served as a backing band to lay down basic tracks for the album, and other contributors include Christoph Hahn (Swans), Bill Rieflin (Swans, Ministry, R.E.M.), Julia Kent (Antony and the Johnsons), Eszter Balint (Stranger Than Paradise), Steve Moses (Lambic), new Young God signee Larkin Grimm, and "Spinning on Air" host David Garland.

To celebrate the album's release, Gira will play a solo show at NYC's Highline Ballroom on September 14. Marissa Nadler and Castanets round out the ace bill. [MORE...]

UNKLE Play First Tour as Live Band

On the heels of the recently released War Stories, James Lavelle has turned UNKLE into a live band for the first time ever and scheduled tour dates through to the end of October.

The band's next show is in Osaka, Japan on August 11, and they will make their North American debut in New York City on October 18, as part of the CMJ Music Marathon. [MORE...]

Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently? Do you have inside info on the bands we cover? Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.)