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Black And White Years “Power to Change” Video

The Lights In The Sky - NIN

Reznor takes us where no one thought he ever would.

When Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails took the stage on Saturday night at the Toyota Center in Houston, the stage was stark and the focal point was Reznor attacking his mic like the aggressive energy of his music. Over the past twenty years of NIN performances this image of Trent has become familiar, and it has always been good, but, I quietly wondered to myself, will there be any new tricks? By the end of the two-hour set, Reznor proved that there was lots of new magic in his bag of tricks as he took the audience to places they would of never expected. It was jaw dropping and stimulating and never, ever, familiar.

After kicking off with three powerful songs from his new, Interscope-less album, The Slip, Reznor began to show us what he had brought with him. The lights. But not just the lights. The light performance. Reznor truly shares the stage with the guy at the back of the arena who is operating the most innovative display of interactive lighting that has ever been presented on a rock concert stage. With this tour, aptly titled “Lights In The Sky Over North America,” Reznor has made a transformation from the angsty, rebellious, industrial rock star to some thing that no one ever thought he would be, a “performance artist,” and, as such he and his lighting director co-star, painted a 1,000 pictures for the audience. And it was stunning.

The show employs walls of movable lights that frame the back and the sides of the stage. The light walls slide up and down in height and they twist and turn to create a sea of light waves. There are also three separate video scrims, which at times divide the stage and separate the band from the audience. This innovative array of lighting ensured that there was never a repeated light sequence throughout the performance.

About halfway through the set, Reznor introduced a sub-set of material from this year’s Ghost I – IV album, a collection of instrumental and ethereal soundscapes that represent a vast departure from the aggro-ness that NIN fans have grown up with. This segment could have been a disaster. But it was anything but.

The band moved to the front of the stage and stripped down to an “orchestra quartet-like setting. Enveloped by two video scrims, with the front scrim separating them from the audience and the back scrim creating a backdrop, the band performs with-in “a tube of video” with images projected behind them and in front of them. The lighting takes center stage at this point as the band themselves are concealed within the images. At times, Reznor “waves” the images away creating a temporary window that the audience may peak through in order to get a glimpse of the musical performance. During one sequence of drifting clouds, a camera close up of Reznor’s facial features is superimposed within a cloud and it appears to be singing. In another sequence the screens twinkle like a million fireflies and Reznor wipes them away to reveal the band performing. It was a mesmerizing 20-minute segment and in the end, Reznor had successfully introduced his challenging new orchestral music to the audience without ever losing a second of their attention.

To end the Ghosts sub-set, Reznor comes out from behind the video scrim to the front of the stage and using a light wand he wipes away the images from the scrim like an eraser on a white board, and the band blasts into “Pinion” and continues to rock non-stop through the last six or seven songs of the set.

The band sounded huge and they played with precision. This version of the NIN line-up included the MVP of all lead guitar players, Robin Finck, who is finally reunited with Trent. He shredded through the night furiously and commanded the stage like an animal un-caged and making up for the lost time that ticked away in captivity while waiting for Axl to take his 14-year dump. Finck is an inventive player and his clever and creative ideas provide the mandatory industrial strength rock the house power and the clement finesse when Trent’s songs call for it.

First time Nail and long time associate of Beck, Justin Meldal Johnson, thumps the bass with confidence and he looked and sounded like he had been playing with the band for years. Rounding out the rhythm section was, of course, Josh Freese, another NIN alumni and founding and core member of A Perfect Circle with Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel. The irreplaceable Alessandro Cortini, a NIN member for the last few tours, is just perfect providing all of the keyboard swirls and pulses and textures that Reznor’s music always demands.

As driven as this show was by the use of visual technology, in the end it was the music that was monumental. Twenty years into a career that could of burnt out at any time there stands a compelling body of work by an artist that has grown into the generational icon that was first hinted at in 1994, when he took the stage at Woodstock covered head to toe in mud in a symbol of zeitgeist solidarity with the Gen X audience in search of their collective self.

The set of songs performed together tonight seemed to come off as classics and not as dangerous as they once were. The 25-plus song set list consisted of songs from all points of the history of NIN; the tried and true, “March of the Pigs,” “Pinion,” “Closer,” “Head Like A Hole,” and the new “1,000,000,” “Letting You,” “Discipline,” and “The Warning” and the afore-mentioned, challenging instrumentals from “Ghosts I-IV,” and, they all blended together, somehow, “warmly.” The four-song encore set included Trent’s most poignant signature, “Hurt,” made most famous as one of the final singles and videos released by Johnny Cash just before his death. Ending there seemed to bring it all to a point of clarity…Trent Reznor has earned the title of the voice of his generation.

Photos by Rob Sheridan

Set List –

1. 999,999 (The Slip – 2008)
2. 1,000,000 (The Slip 2008)
3. Letting You (The Slip 2008)
4. Discipline (The Slip 2008)
5. March of the Pigs (The Downward Spiral 1994)
6. Head Down (The Slip 2008)
7. The Frail (The Fragile 1999)
8. The Wretched (The Fragile 1999)
9. Closer (The Downward Spiral 1994)
10. Gave Up (Broken 1992)
11. The Warning (The Year Zero 2007)
12. Vessel (The Year Zero 2007)

(Ghosts I-IV – 2008) Sub-Set
13. Ghosts 5
14. Ghosts 21
15. Ghosts 19
16. Ghosts Piggy

17. The Greater Good (The Year Zero 2007)

18. Pinion (Broken 1992)
19. Wish (Broken 1992)
20. Terrible Lie (Pretty Hate Machine 1989)
21. Survivalism (The Year Zero 2007)
22. The Big Come Down (The Fragile 1999)
23. Only (With Teeth 2005)
24 Head Like a Hole (Pretty Hate Machine 1989)

Encore

25. Echoplex (The Slip 2008)
26. Reptile (The Downward Spiral 1994)
27. God Given (The Year Zero 2007)
28. Hurt (The Downward Spiral 1994)
29. In This Twilight (The Year Zero 2007)

The Black and White Years from American Songwriter

Ghostland Observatory’s WhiteWater Ride

July 19, 2008 at WhiteWater Rocks in New Braunfels, TX.

Ghostland Observatory has quickly become one of the best bands to inhabit the Austin area in the last couple of years. Their popularity is becoming more widespread than the Austin music scene. On a national level they are taking on fans each time two friends jump in the car to go get a pizza and one turns to the other and says, “i want you to hear something awesome” and plays Piano Man for them for the first time. Maybe they got your attention on youTube with their performance of Vibrate.

July 19 at WhiteWater Rocks did not disappoint. Not only that, they had thousands completely enthralled with every move, every note, every beat, and every word. Beginning with Piano Man and All You Rock and Rollers instantly they began a great set tearing through tracks from all three albums. Notable as always was Vibrate, Sad Sad City, Shoot ‘Em Down, and Rich Man. It’s hard to explain exactly how incredible this band is live. The crowd roared and rarely calmed all night. Behrens seems to carry the crowd on his every twitch and yelp, and trust me, he wasn’t going to have it any other way. Other standout tracks (for lack of a better word, because they were all standouts) included several from their most recent release, Robotique Majestique. Dancing On My Grave, Free Heart Lover and No Place For Me began to transform the crowd into one liquid organic creature moving to the music. Heavy Heart was an incredibly high energy scream and beat machine driving the crowd into the night.

If you weren’t there, sorry. By the time GLO’s set was finished we had made it to front row, and that was the only place we wanted to be. If you haven’t seen them yet, go. Unfortunately, they will not be at ACL this year, but are playing in Houston and Dallas among many other dates. If you have seen them, I’ll see you next time.

www.myspace.com/ghostlandobservatory

Black & White Years for the Presidents

Austin’s The Black and White Years to open for The Presidents of the United States of America.

Austin360.com’s A-List winner for Best Local Song of 2008 for their single, “Power to Change”, The Black and White Years will be opening for recently recharged Presidents of the United States of America. The Presidents are touring in support of their new album These Are The Good Times People, will be in Texas for at least two shows, October 8th at Stubb’s in Austin, and October 10th at the House of Blues in Dallas. The Presidents will be starting on August 29th in Fort Wayne, Indiana on a tour that will take them through New York, Texas, all the way and ending in L.A. on October 24th. Definitely a must-see show for Austin’s live music fans with two very compelling music personalities.

Get tickets at TheBlackandWhiteYears.com

The Godfather of Goth Turns 51

Peter Murphy, Emo’s Outdoor Stage, Austin, TX - July 11, 2008
photo by Lori Bailey Photography

Peter Murphy celebrated his birthday with a packed house of worshipping fans at Emo’s Outdoor Stage on Friday night. When the as-Goth-as-Austin-gets audience, broke into a chorus of happy birthday, he recoiled and came back at them with, “fuck that, that’s not alternative,” and then playfully sang along with them.

It’s been thirty years since Bauhaus, (Peter plus band mates turned Love & Rockets’ Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Hoskins), first emerged from some gloom tomb in Northampton, UK with a dark image and a fiendish sound that was unheard or unseen before then. Goth was born and Bauhaus spawned a thousand children with names like Gene Loves Jezebel, Fields of the Nephilim, The Cure, Human Drama, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Sisters of Mercy…and on and on. Disenfranchised teens wearing black on black on black emerged from the shadows of everywhere and the gothic sub-culture began.

Three generations later, Peter no longer wears the gothic crown but he keeps it proudly on his mantle like a trophy and every now and then, takes it down, and dusts it off and tips it back onto his balding head. In 2005, Peter proved that he could still claim rights to the throne when Bauhaus re-united for a performance at Coachella and he performed the band’s ominous trademark, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” with ankles tied and hanging upside down like a bat, fifteen feet above the stage. Undead, Undead, Undead, Bela Lugosi’s Dead.

In 1982, Bauhaus hijacked “Ziggy Stardust” and made it the biggest single of the band’s career. Ever since, Peter has owed a debt to Bowie and tonight he makes payment on it by taking verses from Mr. B’s “Be My Wife” and “Quicksand,” and weaves them into his own songs

The evening’s set list is fun and at one point Peter announces, “there are no rules tonight,” and then the band kicks into “She’s in Parties.” Twenty-five years down the road the song and the song still rolls with intense energy sounding like it should be in current rotation on 101X. “A Strange Kind of Love” remains lovely and tonight Peter entwines verses with “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” rendering it ethereal and fresh as he strums away on an acoustic guitar.

There is a song, “Black Stone Heart,” from the new Bauhaus album, which Peter introduces by proclaiming, “We play it better!” Doubtful, since it sounded an awful lot like Express-era Love & Rockets with a great guitar part played by Mark Thwaite, which, no offense to Mr. Thwaite because he is an incredible player throughout the night, but it was distinctly an imitation of what is probably some dazzling guitar work by Daniel Ash. I’ll update that once I’ve listened to the new Bauhaus album; glad to know that there is one.

“I Fall With Your Knife” was an obvious attempt to score a top 40 hit in the years following his most successful solo album, Deep. I always thought it was weak and formulaic – far below the standard that Murphy had set for himself. Tonight my wife thought it was a Journey song and I was thinking that it wasn’t a hit so why play it live but the audience surprised me with their most enthusiastic response of the night.

“Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem” was simply beautiful and still needs to be discovered by a filmmaker to tone a forgiving scene. When Peter announces that tonight they are playing a “heavy metal version” of “Cuts You Up,” I prepare for the worst. When the band’s stagehand takes the mic, I think it is time to leave. The surprise, it sounds even more modern than it did in 1978 when it broke the record as the longest running single on the College Music Journal’s chart, upsetting former band mates Love & Rockets. That’s how big these guys were in the eighties.

The highlight of the entire evening though comes when Peter makes a dedication to his wife, Beyhan, who is, no doubt, at home in Turkey where she is the director of the Turkish National Modern Dance Company. He launches into a completely a capella version of “Wild is the Wind,” a song originally recorded by Johnny Mathis and crooned by The Thin White Duke on his 1976 album, Station to Station. That is the third nod of the night to David B.

It is a revealing moment and Peter Murphy comes clearly into focus. He is legendary and he is a curiosity. His theatrical aesthetics are fully in tact. His music remains mostly relevant. Equal parts Marcel Marceau, Peter O’Toole, and the Dark Knight. He Croons. He Jokes. He Swaggers and Sways. Peter Murphy, at age 51, and thirty years on as the Godfather of Goth has re-invented himself as an entertainer. He has become the Alt-Sinatra.

“Life Debt” - Song of the Day - KUT Texas Music

KUT chose “Life Debt” as the song of the day! CLICK THE PHOTO to listen

Black & White Years: Believe it or not

Austin dance band did the accidental boogie.

By Michael Corcoran
picture by Xavier Mascareñas
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, July 03, 2008

Confessed Harry Potter fan Scott Butler, who sings, plays guitar and wears lead mustache for Austin pop/dance band Black & White Years, is either taken with flights of fantasy or his band, not yet two years old, has a most incredible history.

Here’s some of what Butler expects us to believe during a 45-minute phone interview:

1. The band attracted the attention of producer Jerry Harrison (ex-Talking Heads) during a South by Southwest 2007 showcase in which Harrison and his wife composed 40 percent of the entire audience.

2. The band’s first drummer was Steve Ferrone of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who’s also backed Black & White Years faves George Harrison and Duran Duran. (This is a little like losing your virginity to Scarlett Johansson.)

3.And here’s the whopper: The quartet once got a music industry crowd to dance.

Astonishingly, these claims all check out. The SXSW show was in a big tent outside Opal Divine’s on West Sixth Street, with only the band’s managers, Butler’s girlfriend and the soundman in attendance when Jerry Harrison strolled in at the halfway point.

“We looked up and there he was,” says Butler, 25, a native of Longview. “He looked exactly like he did in ‘Stop Making Sense.’ ” The rumor is that Harrison read a review of the Black & White Years that compared them to Talking Heads and so he turned up to see whether that was accurate. But Butler thinks Harrison simply listened to the band’s self-produced demo, which had been mass-mailed to anyone in the music industry who might be interested.

Two months after SXSW, Butler, guitarist Landon Thompson and bassist John Aldridge were in California laying down tracks with Ferrone for their self-titled album, which features the regional radio hit “Power to Change.” A mix of disco, ska, new wave, surf guitar and angular funk rock, Black & White Years sounds like no other band in Austin and, truly, only a little like Talking Heads.

“I think the main comparison is that David Byrne set out to write songs about subjects that songs weren’t being written about,” said Butler. “That’s kind of what I try to do, though I lean more toward anthropology and world history.”

The band used programmed drum beats in the beginning, but Harrison wanted a live drummer for the record and tapped Ferrone. To better duplicate the record live, B&W hired Tyler native and human metronome Billy Potts to play drums.

Potts’ first show was at the MIDEM music conference in Cannes in January, where the band was one of the surprise hits of the festival. “When the band before us came off stage they said, ‘Good luck, fellas,’ ” Butler recalled. “The crowd was pretty dead.” But after the B&W gang busted out such rock/disco numbers as “A Wetter Sea,” with its series of “whoops!” coming from the early days of MTV, and the melodic knee-bender “Zeros and Ones,” the show inspired a sea of dancing badges.

“The thing we kept hearing over and over was that we didn’t sound like a Texas band; we sounded French or Irish,” says Butler, who had never heard of MIDEM, the SXSW of Europe, until the band’s management said they were accepted. He was also unaware, he said, that there was a growing indie dance band movement overseas.

B&W started sounding like a trendy band quite by accident. The three members, who met in 2002 while attending Belmont College in Nashville, moved to Austin together in 2005 and formed a Beatles-inspired folk/rock band called the Trees. After a falling out with their drummer, Butler, Thompson and Aldridge bought a Roland synthesizer and started using programmed drum loops. They called the new project the Black & White Years after an encyclopedia entry about the early era of television. The name has caused several reviewers to remark how “colorful” the sound is.

“When I write songs, I don’t write them to be dance numbers,” Butler says. “I write them to be songs.” Indeed, such tunes as “Lighten Up the Letters” and “A Dense History” could work in a coffeehouse set. And the lyrical darkness of “Hysterical Sickness” is a bit heady for feet music.

But the drum machine took them in a whole new danceable direction. “First of all, the tempos went up in every song,” says guitarist Thompson, a native of Plainview. “Plus we were forced to think about our music in a more loop-based way.”

The band was so wedded to keyboard drums that they were reticent about using a live drummer, even one who once provided the beat for the Average White Band. “It was a little dicey in the studio at first,” recalls Butler. “It’s really hard to listen to your sound being changed, but we’re Texans. We’re polite. We figured, ‘Let’s just go along. These people know what they’re talking about.’ ” After all, the record was being mixed by E.T., the noted Eric Thorngren.

After five weeks of recording, the band came back to Austin, where they received the new mixes by e-mail. “It sounded so different from the Black & White Years,” Butler says. “It was a trying time for us.” Butler flew back to L.A. to have a heart-to-heart with Harrison. “We were happy with 95 percent of Steve Ferrone’s drums, but we wanted loops instead of drums on some tracks.” Butler was able to persuade Harrison to switch to a drum machine on “Power To Change,” and he rerecorded his vocals accordingly. “On that song and on ‘My Broken Hand,’ I think we were able to mix our aesthetic with Jerry’s aesthetic. We were able to walk that fine line where we all felt happy (about how it sounded).”

Butler sums up the sessions with Harrison as “a really amazing experience, overall. It’s not how we would’ve done it, but we’re happy with how it turned out.”

This incredibly prolific and positive-thinking band, who already have enough material for the next record (which they’ll probably self-produce), will celebrate the two-year anniversary of their first gig (at Rockin’ Tomato pizza parlor on South Lamar Boulevard) from the stage of the Austin City Limits Music Festival in September. That month also marks the two-year anniversary of Butler’s furry upper lip, which, coupled with Aldridge’s ’stache, has become a bit of a band trademark. The thought makes Butler groan. “There was absolutely no forethought. I just grew a mustache, and my fiancée likes it,” he says, laughing. “We’re not trying to be trendy or ironic or anything.”

Yeah, right. It’s amazing the stuff that Butler expects us to swallow.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3623

Power to Change: The Black and White Years

From Deep In the Heart of Brooklyn Blog
Posted by Brooklyn Beat on 6/21/08
Pictures by Ben Napoli.

Power to Change: The Black and White Years

As I said on my previous post on this band, based on the large venue performance in Albany and the cd, I thought these guys were about to achieve escape velocity, and at their brief set at Piano’s on Thursday, it was clearer than ever, you can feel it and sense it, the BLACK AND WHITE YEARS have something very special and have what it takes to break through. The fact that they can totally impress a boomer like me and my 17 year old son indicates The Black and White Years are really on to something.

Fantastic, original, funny, theatrical, tight, richly textured tunes and performance. Scott Butler - vocals, guitars, keys, words,Landon Thompson - guitars, keys, vocals , John Aldridge - bass, brass, Billy Potts - drums, cd produced by Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads, Modern Lovers).

It was a great rocking, fun, set. They are going back in the studio shortly to record some additional songs, some of which they played at Piano’s, and which will appear on an EP in the fall. Their current CD, the eponymous “The Black and White Years” with its amazing ready-for-lift-off tune, “Power to Change” (so appropos in the scheme of things, I am surprised it isn’t positioned for use by a presidential candidate, although the lyrics would seem to cut closer to the needs of Al Gore), on Brando Records, currently in limited and iTunes release, will go wide later this summer.

These guys currently reside Deep in the Heart of Austin, Tejas, although I believe they also hale in part from New York State and Tennessee (their tune A Dense History seems to address their current home with the affection of Hamlet holding Yorick’ s skull or if you were holding and addressing a beloved pet rattlesnake). There is clearly an affinity here. With any luck they will be back to NYC to perform (and who knows, even Brooklyn, where one of the guys briefly resided during a past visit) for more live shows.

Check out their downloads, iTunes, or the cd on release. Post-punk, ska, frenetic, with deeply layered Latin, CW, and other surprises, tightly and earnestly played. Deep in the Heart of These Guys, you can tell they are onto something and it is something big.

The Black and White Years Official Website
The Black and White Years MySpace