With back-to-back shows at the end of the month, The Faint has returned to the fore of Omaha music consciousness for the first time since a national tour earlier this year.
The band released the first round of remixes from their April LP, Doom Abuse. Available on iTunes, the four-track release features remixes from three local artists.
The EP is titled Doom Abuse Remixes v.1, so I think we can expect more soon. Here’s the tracklist, remixed by previous friends, collaborators and tourmates:
“Help in the Head” (Dance System remix)
“Evil Voices” (Icky Blossoms remix)
“Lesson from the Darkness” (Darren Keen remix)
“Animal Needs” (Plack Blague remix)
Where Doom Abuse was largely received as a Faint standard, hitting all the same keystones we’ve come to expect from the band, it will be interesting to dig into the remixes to see how that canvas changes with someone else’s hands.
The Icky Blossoms remix, for instance, digs even deeper into the band’s industrial side with giant piston-pounding beats. Todd Fink’s voice from the original is unrecognizably distorted, while Icky Blossoms vocalist Sarah Bohling harmonizes with the robotic melodies. The track seems about half-Icky Blossoms original, using “Evil Voices” as building blocks to reconstruct its own song.
The Faint plays two nights at The Waiting Room this month, Dec. 28 and 29. Tickets here.
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Film Streams is screening the rare filmwork of mid-century pop artist Andy Warhol tonight on even rarer 16mm film.
The independent theater has its fourth night of a six-week run featuring 10 Warhol films. At 6:45 p.m. Film Streams shows The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966) followed by Hustler (1965) at 8 p.m.
The Velvet Underground and Nico was filmed by Warhol during a Velvet Undergound practice at Warhol’s Factory space in New York City. The 66-minute film exists as a long improvisation of songs by the band. It was filmed to be shown before Velvet Underground sets.
“So much of what we do has a film-as-art component, but we also try to analyze the context of film, and music docs and films are just another way we can interpret contextually and empathize with stories and/or people that have a different perspective of our own,” Brooke Masek, Program and Outreach Coordinator for the theater, told us via e-mail. “Additionally, you get the melding of the two different audiences, the music lovers and the film lovers, and we’re all about making connections in that way.”
Masek also mentions the silent films with live scores that the theater has hosted. There was 2014’s Hitchcock 9 series, for instance, that featured improvisational scores by a wide variety of local musicians like Ben Brodin, Aaron Markley and Simon Joyner. The cross-pollination of mediums reinvigorates creativity. For people that like to create or think about art, it’s a way to push our ideas of function, even in what is considered an older form.
Film and writing are in the unique position to be both about art and art themselves, which is surely where the Velvet Underground piece falls.
Speaking of art-about-art, next month, Film Streams begins its Sights on Sounds series every Sunday at 7 p.m. Sights on Sounds will screen four music documentaries through January.
January 4, Björk: Biophilia Live
January 11, David Bowie Is
January 18, Revenge of the Mekons!
January 25, Nas: Time is Illmatic
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Just in time for the holiday season, a book about defunct and demolished Omaha venue Ranch Bowl has been released in hardcover.
The Ranch Bowl — A Party Every Night was collected and authored by Chris Hammel. The book documents presidential stops, Green Day shows the personalities that inhabited the venue and more. It looks to include clips, photos and memories spanning the venue’s near 50 year history.
The storied venue was, for a long time, a community center for Omaha’s music scene, drawing audiences and bands from all genres to the venue/bowling alley.
Order the book here.
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Onward to tonight’s shows:
Bonehart Flannigan plays its second of three Nebraska shows since songwriter and sometimes sole member Jon Dell returned from a lengthy western United States tour/sojourn. He plays with Mitch Gettman and Mike Schlesinger at The Slowdown tonight. Tickets are $7. RSVP here.
On Dec. 28, Bonehart, accompanied by a full band, plays Duffy’s Tavern with Brad Hoshaw and the Seven Deadlies and Orion Walsh and the Rambling Hearts. RSVP here. Sometime after, Dell will hit the road again, this time heading generally east.
Over at Vega tonight, there’s Lemuria with Into It. Over It. and Tie These Hands. RSVP here. The Buffalo-based Lemuria released The Distance is So Big in 2013 on Bridge 9 records. The band’s sound is something like a heavy, melodic pop-emo. Into It. Over It. is one of the leading emo-revival acts working right now.