Pages tagged “nada surf”

Nada Surf has squeezed in a handful of West Coast dates amidst a host of European music festival appearances slated for the fall.

Someday, an incisive cultural critic will write an epic book about the extraordinary transformation of music production, distribution and promotion over the last few years. Actually, that “epic book” will likely be a blog post, and that “incisive cultural critic” will likely be a 16-year-old kid.

But regardless of who documents the changes, they are definitely taking place. In the most recent iteration, Nada Surf (whom Paste profiled earlier this year) has teamed up with MySpace on the social networking site’s Transmissions project. The band recorded seven songs live, and the videos are available on the Transmissions site, as well as exclusive interviews with the members.

MySpace users will be able to share and add the videos to their hearts’ content, and the recording session is available as an iTunes download. The revolution continues.

Nada Surf's The MySpace Transmissions tracklist:

1. Always Love
2. Whose Authority
3. I Like What You Say
4. Blizzard of ‘77
5. See These Bones
6. Happy Kid
7. Here Goes Something

Related links:
MySpace Transmissions
NadaSurf.com
Nada Surf on MySpace

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Can I tell you about the nerdiest thing I did recently?” Matthew Caws asks, leaning in, voice conspiratorial. We’re squirreled away in the back of a café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, eating sandwiches and trading dorky anecdotes. I nod vigorously, and he continues: “I’ve moved a few times in the last few years, and because of circumstance, I culled my records down to a hundred or something. And I was flipping through them trying to browse, but now that we’re all so spoiled by iTunes and CDs, record spines seem really hard to read.” He pauses. “This is so ultimately nerdy, but they’re hard to read because the color fields keep switching—if the color fields were the same, it would be easier to read the type. So I thought: I’ll put them in color order! It was the most exciting hour of my life. It looks like a sand sculpture. I think I have a picture of it in my phone,” he says, rifling through his pockets.

Caws flashes a photo of his color-coded shelves, and I fuss accordingly. It’s awfully pretty, charted and inviting like a Buddhist mandala. “I don’t want to sound like a fuddy-duddy or a stereo-store guy, but after all the iPod and MP3 action, when you’re at someone’s house and they put on a Zeppelin LP, it’s a flippin’ revelation,” Caws grins. “I hadn’t had a working record player in a couple years, and I just got one and put it in my kitchen, and now I listen obsessively—I’d forgotten what a physical experience it is.” He shakes his head. “Records used to move me—not just intellectually, like ‘that’s a good song, or those are good words or that’s an interesting chord progression,’ but move me, physically.”

Caws—vocalist and guitarist for Nada Surf—is a charming conversationalist, just as happy to chat about restaurants with fireplaces or his work as a reporter for Guitar World as he is to dissect his band’s fifth record, Lucky. The son of two academics—his father teaches philosophy; his mother, comparative literature—Caws’ Manhattan-based childhood was hardly provincial. He attended high school at Le Lyceé Français, a famed bilingual institution on the Upper East Side, where he first met Nada Surf bassist Daniel Lorca. (Fellow graduates include The Strokes’ Nikolai Fraiture, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and romance novelist Danielle Steel).

Caws frequently joined his parents on sabbatical in Provence, camping out in the backyard of their farmhouse. “There was no running water, one lightbulb,” Caws recalls, laughing. “It was one room on top of another room, built into a hill by two brothers who argued and didn’t want to live together, so there were no stairs. You walked around the hill and you were upstairs, and you walked down the hill and you were downstairs,” he continues. “There was no room in the house for my sister and I so we slept in tents, outside, on little army cots, in flimsy sleeping bags.”

Music was omnipresent, and Caws began playing guitar around his 11th birthday. “My mom is from Wilmington, N.C., and my aunt had a place in the mountains. She played folk guitar—fingerpicking—and she was a Bob Dylan and Joan Baez fan. We’d sit around and sing ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ There was a guitar lying around, and I asked her about it one day and she said, ‘Would you like me to show you something?’ and I said ‘I’d love that.’ And she showed me one chord, E. And I took it into the other room and played it for an hour. At the time, I was really into the Ramones, and it was the perfect thing, because even though I didn’t know how the Ramones’ songs went, I intuited that it was just bang, bang, bang. So I just took that one chord and played it for an hour, moving it up one fret, moving it over, playing around with it. I was so thrilled, so excited,” Caws sighs. “Eventually I did the thing where you take lessons from the weird guy in the mothball-smelling apartment down the street, and he teaches you ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” Caws continues. “Then I was recruited to ease tensions at my parents’ dinner parties. Academics don’t always get along. Sometimes there would be loggerhead situations where no one would be speaking all of a sudden, and it was ‘Matthew, could you come out and play something?’ and I would stand there and butcher ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

Survivors of near-death experiences often claim they see a glowing white light immediately before (or after) their hearts sputter out. But for a band staring down a major record deal—like Nada Surf did in 1995—the last thing glimpsed before scrawling away all hopes and dreams wasn’t a rapturous glow. It was Ric Ocasek’s gnarly mug.

In the early 1990s, Caws, Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot were like any other band with a self-consciously quirky name: playing pensive, guitar-driven pop songs in dim-and-sticky New York clubs, wearing T-shirts and jeans and Chuck Taylors, trying to think up new ways to make their rent. But shortly after Ocasek—the former Cars frontman-turned-producer, now an official A&R rep for Elektra Records—popped up at one of their gigs, Nada Surf was offered a major-label deal, with Ocasek signed on to man the boards for their debut LP.

That record—1996’s High/Low—yielded “Popular,” a dopey song about cheerleader chicks and how to score dates (lyrics were culled directly from Gloria Winters’ 1964 etiquette manual, Penny’s Guide to Teen-Age Charm and Popularity, and, with the exception of the chorus, all spoken in an aggravated monotone). “Popular” hit #11 on the Billboard modern rock chart and earned loads of airplay on MTV (its video featuring copious making out and naked football players grinning in a locker-room shower). “Popular” added Nada Surf to a dubious list of alternative bands who managed to score unlikely radio hits in a guitar-friendly, post-Weezer, post-Nirvana landscape (see Better Than Ezra, Blind Melon, The Toadies, Letters to Cleo, Presidents of the United States of America and plenty of others). For folks who lost interest after the song dipped off the charts, “Popular” continues to define Nada Surf; for the band, they consider it a compelling, if otherwise unremarkable, blip.

“‘Popular’ was ultimately a very good thing, a fascinating ride,” Caws says. “It took care of a lot of curiosity about a certain kind of success that [now] we’ll never be tempted into signing away any rights in the hopes of attaining. As strange as our name is, that song made it well-known, which has been a bonus this whole time,” Caws admits.

“I don’t know how people perceive this band, and I don’t want to know,” Elliot adds. “I can’t really tell you how I perceive this band. There are a lot of people who stop listening to music seriously after they get out of college, so I’m not surprised if we’re still ‘That ’90s band’ to them. That being said, I think as a band we passed through the ‘Popular’ Misconception Gauntlet—the PMG—somewhere around [2002’s critically acclaimed] Let Go. We were kind of reborn there. We weren’t the same band as we were in 1996 anymore.”

Nada Surf’s 15-year arc—from unsigned band to MTV mainstay to cred-wielding indie-pop trio—makes for a pretty good parable: Here is how the contemporary music industry fails bands, and here is how to recover, recommit and move on. After the success of “Popular,” Nada Surf returned to the studio to record 2000’s The Proximity Effect, and had to wrestle the record back from Elektra after executives didn’t hear a single. After a couple of unsure years, the band released the much-lauded Let Go, kicking off a symbiotic relationship with Seattle’s Barsuk Records. Using Nada Surf as an example, it’s possible to argue that the contemporary music industry’s fundamental fault isn’t so much its inability to comprehend the wants and desires of its digitally minded consumer base, but its refusal to cultivate, foster and support young artists—pushing bands out of bed the moment they fail to replicate an initial success (or, in Nada Surf’s case, preemptively shelving an entire album). Still, the band is hopeful that things are starting to change.

“I feel very optimistic about the future of the music industry,” Lorca says. “Companies like Elektra will go the way of the dinosaur—oops, sorry, have gone—leaving room for smaller labels which deserve to thrive because of their ingenuity, flexibility, quality and vision. Anybody that thinks that music ‘sharing’ or ‘illegal downloading’ or whatever you want to call it is ‘bad for the industry’ either works for the industry or drums for Metallica.”

The band’s latest LP, Lucky, is another collection of sweet, melancholic guitar songs, a mew-and-strum concoction not so dissimilar from one-time labelmates Death Cab for Cutie (the two bands remain pals: DCFC guitarist Chris Walla produced 2005’s The Weight is a Gift, and Ben Gibbard sings on Lucky’s opening track, “See These Bones”). Recorded in Seattle with producer John Goodmanson, Lucky is pensive without feeling self-pitying—the sonic equivalent of curling up by a window on a grey afternoon, drinking warm tea in your pajamas and thinking about everyone you’ve ever known.

“The title came from the lyrics in ‘From Now On’ [a track that didn’t end up on Lucky], in which I say I’m just a lucky mess,” Caws explains. “Though I’ve been through a lot and don’t always have it together, ultimately I feel really lucky and grateful for so much. All the usual corny suspects: health, friends, family, art. You can either remember how good you have it, or you can forget. I go dark really easily,” he says. “I’m often just one click away from feeling like life is really bleak. So I have to remind myself of another feeling. A better feeling.”

“Without getting too deep,” Elliot agrees, “I think we’re simply very lucky to be in the position we’re in: still making music after a dozen years together; able to pay our bills and live comfortably without having to sell 80-squijillion records; signed to a couple of excellent record labels; we have fantastic, understanding girlfriends; one of us has a beautiful son; We’re healthy and happy and doing what we love the most and we’re fucking old. I’m gonna be 45 in a few months. It’s crazy. It’s fantastic.”

“[But] don’t misunderstand, luck is not the sole reason we’re here,” Elliot adds. “We worked hard and made a lot of difficult decisions that could have gone many ways. But I think this is a good point in our lives to stop and look around and be thankful for our good fortune. And now we simply continue on with the rocking.

“Still, I think we should have called it Chinese Democracy just for the fantastic ‘Fuck You’ of it. Man, that would have been sweet, don’t you think?”

Band’s latest is characteristically elegant but somehow underpowered

After two stellar albums, Let Go and The Weight Is A Gift, Nada Surf has long since expunged memories of the showering quarterback in “Popular” and re-established itself as an indie-rock perennial. With crisp writing and the reassuring vulnerability of Matthew Caws’ voice, the band generally manages to be sweet but not cloying, and wistful but not maudlin. Underneath it all is the energy of a group that, for all its sophistication, still has the urge to rock, as on the joyful release of Weight’s “Blankest Year.” While Nada Surf’s newest album has elegant production touches (“Beautiful Beat”), clever lyrics (“Weightless,” the album’s best), and even gets obscuro points for name-dropping The Sopwith Camel (“Ice on the Wing”), it fails to equal its predecessors. With the exception of “Weightless,” the subtle energy that fueled earlier standouts like “Hi-Speed Soul” or “Always Love” never quite reappears here, and the stacking of one lush mid-tempo song after another starts to blunt the impact of the band’s better instincts. There’s nothing overtly wrong with anything on Lucky, but the temperature of the band’s blood seems to have dropped a few degrees. There’s a brooding and increasingly sad energy to Caws’ delivery on songs like first single “See These Bones,” and while the track steadily grows on you, it’s a hook shy of unforgettable. While never unpleasant, Lucky represents a slowdown from the roll Nada Surf has been on.

The buoyant popsters of Nada Surf have scheduled North American tour dates to follow the imminent Feb. 5 release of their latest and most fortunate LP, Lucky. After sold-out stops on the West Coast and in New York, followed by a short stint in Europe over the next couple months, the band will return to play SXSW and tour our own fair continent at length.

Lucky, Nada Surf's fifth release, will street via Barsuk Records, and is the follow-up to the band's acclaimed 2005 album The Weight Is A Gift. You can sample new songs and get a free download of "See These Bones" at the band's MySpace. The label also invites you to watch a fan video of "Whose Authority" here, as performed at the Apple Store in Chicago this past October.

The album was co-produced by the band and John Goodmanson (Death Cab for Cutie, Blonde Redhead, Sleater-Kinney). It features guest appearances from several others in the Barsuk family, including Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie), John Roderick (The Long Winters) and Phil Wandscher (Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter). A fortuitous combination, hopefully.

The Lucky cities:

March
17 - Tempe, Ariz. @ Clubhouse Music Venue *
18 - San Diego, Calif. @ House of Blues *
19 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Henry Fonda Theatre *
21 - Pomona, Calif. @ Glass House *
22 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Fillmore *
25 - Sacramento, Calif. @ Harlow *
26 - Portland, Ore. @ Crystal Ballroom *
28 - Seattle, Wash. @ Showbox *
29 - Vancouver, British Columbia @ Commodore Ballroom *

April
1 - Denver, Colo. @ Gothic Theatre %
2 - Omaha, Neb. @ Waiting Room %
3 - Minneapolis, Minn. @ First Avenue %
4 - Chicago, Ill. @ Metro %
5 - Detroit, Mich. @ St. Andrews Hall %
7 - Toronto, Ontario @ Opera House %
8 - Montreal, Quebec @ Club Soda %
10 - Boston, Mass. @ Paradise Rock Club %
11 - New York, N.Y. @ Terminal 5 w/ Superdrag
12 - Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club %
13 - Philadelphia, Pa. @ Trocadero %

* - w/ The Little Ones
% - w/ What Made Milwaukee Famous

Related links:
Barsuk.com
NadaSurf.com
Paste: Video of the Day - Nada Surf - "Always Love"

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Forget that "Popular" song right now. Seriously, it wasn't even that amazing a tune to begin with, let alone worthy to stand as a signifier of an entire band's career. Nada Surf is past it. Growing beyond those somewhat bratty beginnings, the group has authored a series of increasingly sophisticated and irresistible pop albums on Barsuk Records. We're rather partial to 2005's The Weight Is a Gift, ourselves.

This coming February, Nada Surf takes the next step. Barsuk will issue the band's fifth proper album, Lucky, on Feb. 5. It's awhile to wait, but the group has already started streaming the album's closing track, "See These Bones" on its MySpace. What's more, the band is currently out on tour, previewing new compositions and revisiting the old favorites. Yeah, maybe even that one hit Nada Surf made way back when.

Lucky track list:

1. Weightless
2. Whose Authority
3. Beautiful Beat
4. Here Goes Something
5. From Now On
6. I Like What You Say
7. Ice on the Wing
8. The Film Did Not Go 'Round
9. The Fox
10. Are You Lightning?
11. See These Bones

Tour dates:

October
15 - Columbus, Ohio @ Basement
16 - Cincinnati, Ohio @ 20th Century
17 - Louisville, Ky. @ Jim Porters
18 - Indianapolis, Ind. @ Birdy's
19 - Chicago, Ill. @ Schubas
20 - Chicago, Ill. @ Schubas
22 - St. Louis, Mo. @ Gargoyle Club
23 - Nashville, Tenn. @ Exit Inn
24 - Birmingham, Ala. @ Bottle Tree
26 - Tampa, Fla. @ State Theatre
27 - St. Augustine, Fla. @ Cafe Eleven
29 - Athens, Ga. @ 40 Watt Club
30 - Asheville, N.C. @ Orange Peel
31 - Carrboro, N.C. @ Cat's Cradle

November
1 - Charlottesville, Va. @ Satellite Ballroom (UVA)
2 - Baltimore, Md. @ 8 x 10

January
30 - Seattle, Wash. @ The Triple Door*
31 - Portland, Ore. @ Doug Fir Lounge*

February
2 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Swedish American Hall*
7 - Brooklyn, N.Y. @ The Music Hall of Williamsburg
8 - New York, N.Y. @ Bowery Ballroom

* acoustic gig

Related links:
NadaSurf.com
Paste: Nada Surf "Always Love" Video of the Day
Nada Surf "See These Bones" mp3

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

(Above: Nada Surf's Matthew Caws after rockin' Neumo's. Photo by Jon Toccaetaev)

Maddest of mad props to Nada Surf. On a chilly Wednesday night in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, lead singer/guitarist Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca, and drummer Ira Elliot accomplished the seemingly impossible: they incited a sold-out crowd of fey baby emogeeks and thirtysomething scenesters to do something beside nod approvingly. From the opening riffs of "Blizzard of ‘77" (off the band's brutally poppy and awesomely ethereal 2003 release, Let Go), the throng of several hundred risked its Jane Fonda-in-Klute bangs and its cred by dancing with abandon, singing along and making out. It was that kind of night.

The evening got off to a rollicking start with a smart, hook-laden set from Nada Surf's Brooklyn compatriots, Say Hi to Your Mom. Singer/songwriter Eric Elbogen is a wry, natural frontman and led his band through most of the tracks from its current release, Ferocious Mopes and a smattering from 2003’s Numbers & Mumbles. Caws and Elliot joined on Say Hi's finale, “Laundry,” from its debut Discosadness and whet the crowd's appetite for Nada Surf’s imminent onstage arrival.

It's worth noting at this juncture that, on Neumo's small stage in front of a giant swirling mural, Nada Surf temporarily shattered the space/time continuum. Just as a 24-hour flu seems to last an eternity, the band's 85-minute set rushed by in seconds. Caws’ blue eyes glimmered beneath his sandy-colored bangs, Lorca's blonde dreads kept percussive time, and Elliot's face was as open and expressive as a teenager: the band members were clearly enjoying themselves and the energy was infectious.

None of which would matter, of course, if they didn't bring the talent. By the second song, “Concrete Bed”—off their current release, the raucous jangle-bomb, The Weight is a Gift— it was clear that Nada Surf was in fine form. Caws' voice has been described as the prettiest in indie rock and it’s true. On lines like, “It's just another wish you wished / in a very long list,” his vocals were stirring. If angels have sex, this is what they sound like. Bonus, also, for singing the word, “ossify” ("Your habits ossify / you don't realize you're fried") without sounding like a dork. Lorca's bass, Elliot's drumming and Caws' guitar wove together like a magical, musical loom: it's hard to believe a three-piece created so much hooky goodness.

The band kept the in-between-song banter lively, too. Before a rousing version of “Always Love,” Lorca asks the teeming balcony, “How's it going in the balcony, you alcohol-drinking, motherf—ers? Have one on us!” Caws sang the Tab jingle after winding up “Happy Kid” and later regaled the crowd with what can only be described as the “Meow Meow Song” ("Meow / meow / I am just a kitten / I barely fit my mittens.”)

The Long Winters’ John Roderick and Harvey Danger’s Sean Nelson, no strangers to pretty vocals, lent their pipes to “What Is Your Secret” and “Your Legs Grow” (Roderick) and “In The Mirror” and “Blonde On Blonde” (Nelson). Nada Surf played two full encores for a crowd that didn’t want to leave and topped the show off with a medley that included a surprise version of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

Gifted indie rockers all but force you to sing along

There’s a cut on Nada Surf’s The Weight is a Gift that begins with frontman Matthew Caws singing, “I look in the mirror / To see what my hair is doing / Is it kind of Skywalker / Or is it kind of stupid?” But it’s more than just Caws’ golden locks that resemble everybody’s favorite Jedi knight. Both lads have the fresh-faced appeal of the boy next door—or next moisture farm, as the case may be—but are clearly haunted by a dark past. (At this point I realize I’ve lost everyone but 25- to 40-year-old males.) Look, you don’t write lyrics like, “Who’s to say why we’re built so strange / Disappointing ourselves before we change?” unless you’ve seen a bit of the Dark Side. And you don’t sing them along to perfectly crafted, instantly memorable pop melodies unless you’ve got some sort of interstellar gift. Further fueled by the precise power of drummer Ira Elliot and bassist Daniel Lorca, The Weight is a Gift is a worthy sequel to the pure pop bliss of 2002’s Let Go.