Column 342: The (Online) Calendar Hung Itself

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Before we get started, full disclosure: I’m on the “board” of hearnebraska.org. Not that it matters — I’m not involved in the website’s day-to-day activities, and have little or no input on things like website content or fundraising events. But I don’t want you to think I’m cheerleading when I make this statement: Hearnebraska.org has emerged as the best resource for local rock show schedule information on the web. I say “among the best,” because this here newspaper’s website, thereader.com, (Full disclosure again: I write for The Reader, as you, uh, know) also has stepped up its online music schedule/calendar. Meanwhile, one website I’m completely unaffiliated with, omahype.com, continues to plug away with its comprehensive arts-focused online calendar.

The “news” here is that the ol’ tried and true go-to place for all things local musicwise — slamomaha.com — has fallen on hard times, especially when it comes to its show calendar. In its heyday a few years ago, SLAM Omaha was the first click of the evening when looking for rock show data, mainly because: 1) It was the only game in town; and 2) The calendar was updated by the bands themselves, who were looking for someplace/anyplace to promote their wares. The fact that the site’s simple design has never been updated turned out to be an advantage, because SLAM Omaha still has the cleanest, easiest-to-navigate calendar of any local entertainment website. Linked off its homepage, it merely lists dates, bands, venues and times, with brief descriptions and prices. Nothing more, nothing less.

But apparently all this new competition for online music news, as well as the rise of Facebook, has distracted bands from SLAM Omaha. Look at its calendar this week and you’ll find very few events listed, despite the plethora of nightly shows.

As part of maintaining this website, Lazy-i.com, I check all the online calendars daily, so I can list the best shows happening every evening (Lazy-i ain’t comprehensive, and was never meant to be). With that research in mind, I can declare that the new go-to resource is hearnebraska.org’s calendar, thanks to its small army of underfed, overworked interns. Unfortunately, finding the site’s calendar(s) can be … confusing. The website doesn’t have a small homepage “portlet” or section that lists the evening’s hot shows. Instead, users have to “hover ” their mouse over the “SHOWS” rollover link. Skip the wonky, incomplete “Today’s Shows” listing and go straight to quicker/easier to navigate “Calendar” listing.

Before getting to the evening’s lineups users must scroll past the month’s outdated past shows, then sort through the double listings. I’m assuming most of those hungry interns live in Lincoln, because there’s a preponderance of Lincoln shows listed, and usually one or two hidden-gem Omaha shows missing. HN’s calendar would be more useful if it segregated Omaha and Lincoln shows for those who won’t be driving to Lincoln anytime soon (and vice versa). Despite design flaws, HN’s calendar is the most up-to-date and comprehensive, thanks to its unique music-only focus.

Next in line is thereader.com, which received a much-needed site redesign this year. Like HN, The Reader also lacks a homepage portlet displaying today’s hot shows. Users must click on a “Calendar” tab. From there, they have to click on an almost invisible “Music Listings” sub-tab, after which a poorly formatted events page is displayed with date headings. The good news is that it’s a (somewhat) comprehensive list (from an Omaha perspective), including shows at smaller venues like The Hole, The Sandbox and O’Leaver’s. Unfortunately, the design is surrounded with outdated news content. Stay away from the page’s confusing sub navigation (today’s events/latest events/choose by day), unless you want to get lost.

The most attractive online calendar is Omahype.com. Omahype, boasting coverage of all things arts and entertainment with a “youth-oriented” spin, is cool and clean, with spiffy fonts and big photos and graphics. But while the Omahype team does a fine job gathering information, clicking on the “Music” tab gets you a hodgepodge of content displayed in no particular order. A music review is followed by an outdated calendar listing, followed by a download link followed by a photo essay followed by a show listing for something that doesn’t happen for a couple weeks. The information you’re looking for is there … somewhere.

Let’s not forget the great, grey Omaha World-Herald. For a newspaper with a multi-million dollar payroll, Omaha.com is one of the worst designed news websites on the www. The hard-to-navigate homepage looks like the Yellow Pages blew up all over it. Stories are interspersed with Husker-related “news,” vapid reader polls and garish click-me-now advertising. Yeah, I realize they have to generate money to cover that multi-million dollar payroll, but they shouldn’t do it at the readers’ expense. Perhaps they purposely made the website ugly to force readers to buy their newspaper? Once found, Omaha.com’s calendar lists a few big events, such as Qwest Center concerts, and ignores small-room shows, making it useless for anyone trying to keep track of the bustling indie music scene.

At the end of the day, despite all the new media, finding rock show information online is still a crapshoot. With so many websites now vying for the same sets of eyes, there’s no way all of them will survive. But until someone can come up with a clean, easy, complete listing of shows like SLAM Omaha used to have, the field remains wide open.

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Missing from the above discussion is Facebook, which though rather ubiquitous and a nice tool for bands and promoters to have in their toolbox, is far from the final answer. Especially if Facebook keeps fiddle-dicking around with its design. As you’re probably already aware, Facebook pushed out yet another “update” this morning that again shuffles how you view wall posts. If you’re like me, you don’t want a robot telling you which stories are “important” and which aren’t. You want Facebook to merely display wall posts in the chronology in which they were posted, and let us decide what’s important.

But I digress… Facebook event invitations are a good way to tell your “friends” that you’ve got a show coming up. On the other hand, people who aren’t your “friends” will never see your announcement. So if you’re only interested in communicating to your predefined social network, go for it. However, if you rely solely on Facebook to get the word out, anyone outside that network will be left in the dark. At this point I get so many Facebook event invitations that I ignore them. If I depended on Facebook to show me everything that’s going on musicwise, I would miss a wide swath of gigs.

If you hear about a show but aren’t sure of the specifics, the club’s website is usually the most accurate place for times and prices. Onepercentproductions.com is another go-to website for high-profile indie shows. Bookmark it now.

By the way, I loved SLAM Omaha. I miss its up-to-date calendar; I miss the conversations that used to take place on its Music Message Board. I wish-wish-wish it could return to what it was just a couple years ago…

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Speaking of One Percent Productions, they’re putting on another high-profile show tonight at The Waiting Room when Gomez returns with Kopecky Family Band. Gomez is on the road supporting Whatever’s On My Mind, their latest LP released on ATO Records this past June. $20, 8 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

I need to come up with a permanent disclaimer to place on any comments regarding hearnebraska.org, which says: “Full disclaimer: I’m on the board of hearnebraska.org.” Not that it matters — I’m not involved in the site’s day-to-day activities and have little or no input on events, such as this weekend’s fund raiser, which is being held tonight at The Zoo Bar in Lincoln.

Called “Take Cover,” the Hear Nebraska posse put out a call to local bands asking them to come up with covers of songs from other local bands — i.e., Nebraska bands covering Nebraska bands. Cool idea.

Among the pairings: All Young Girls Are Machine Guns covering It’s True; Jim Schroeder and Teal Gardner of UUVVWWZ covering Flowers Forever; The Renfields covering Bright Eyes, and so on. Looking at the list, there are 11 bands in the line-up that are new to me, which I guess says more about my knowledge of the current Lincoln music scene than the lineup (actually, there are a number of bands playing the Omaha version of Take Cover next month who also are new to me). So (if you’re like me) there’s a good chance that you’ll be hearing new bands playing covers of songs by other new bands.

While I think this is a cool idea, I’d love to hear bands like Little Brazil covering Cursive or Digital Leather covering Digital Sex or Gus & Call covering The Filter Kings or Wagon Blasters covering Simon Joyner or Conduits covering Kite Pilot or The Fucking Party covering Mousetrap or Blood Cow covering Ritual Device or Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship covering Sideshow or Ideal Cleaners covering Cellophane Ceiling or Icky Blossoms covering The Faint or So-So Sailors covering Bright Eyes or All Young Girls Are Machine Guns covering Mercy Rule. Or vice versa. I’m told that it was hard to get these kinds of bands to participate in a benefit where they’re only allowed to play a few songs. That said, I think a curated version of this same event would raise some interest across the scene, especially if it was recorded…

Anyway, show starts at 8 p.m. at The Zoo Bar and your $5 cover goes directly to the folks at Hear Nebraska. More information about the show, including the line-up, is here.

Also tonight in Omaha, The Filter Kings are playing at The Waiting Room with The Blacktop Ramblers and Matt Cox Band as part of the Sailor Jenny Pinup Pageant. $7, 9 p.m.

Tomorrow night it’s off to O’Leaver’s for Saudi Arabia, Dim Light and Leeches of Lore. $5, 9:30 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Column 341: More Questions (and Answers) with The Faint

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

This week continues last week’s interview with Todd Fink and Jacob Thiele of The Faint, who, along Clark Baechle, also make up Depressed Buttons. DP had its world premier at House of Loom last Friday night.

I figured while I had Fink and Thiele on the line, I might as well ask a few questions that have been burning in the back of my mind for a long time. Questions like:

Why did it take so long — sometimes between three to four years — for The Faint to put out a record? Will writing music for Depressed Buttons be faster than writing music for The Faint? 

“Yes,” Fink said, “but anything would be faster, absolutely anything. Writing a symphony would be faster.”

The story goes that The Faint has always been run like a democracy — nothing gets done without unanimous consent from every band member, which also includes guitarist Dapose and former bassist Joel Petersen. And as we all know by watching our own government, democracy can bring progress to a grinding halt.

“We could bang out a song quickly,” Thiele said, “but then a couple months later, we would decide that we should probably do a version with a different bass line, and then do a whole new version.”

“The fact that we were too democratic was a problem,” Fink said. “There were too many people who were full of themselves. If there was a bully in the band, it was probably me. Making records is tough if you want them to be any good. Having a record done is always so awesome, but it started to become more work than it was worth. It got harder each time, and less fun.”

Fink, who wrote The Faint’s lyrics, also said coming up with the words could be tough, especially since he has a rather random thought pattern. “It’s kind of hard for me to write songs that make linear sense,” he said. “I don’t think the words themselves are hard if you have something to say, but I don’t like to write when I don’t have anything on my mind.”

So why not simply tour with old material? Are you afraid you’d be milking your past success?

“When you go on tour and don’t have a new record, you lose momentum,” Fink said. “Your name is not out there as much, and you’re not in people’s consciousness. It’s inevitable that you’re attendance will go down. And that could be fine, but that is milking it, and eventually you end up with no more milk.”

Still, Fink and Thiele said you’re more likely to see The Faint on stage before you hear a new Faint album. “We love playing shows,” Thiele said. “At this point, we’re putting our efforts into Depressed Buttons. But I’m guessing someday something will come up and someone will want (The Faint) to play a show.”

“It’ll probably be a festival tour,” Fink added. “It’s a big deal for us to get to the point where our show is ready to go. There’s a lot more involved than anyone understands. If we’re going to do a show, were going to do a tour; it would be a huge cost time-wise to do just one show.”

In fact, Fink said The Faint may never make another album. “It seems more likely that we’d just play shows and record a couple songs, because albums… I don’t know about albums,” he said. “It would be cool if you could put them out on vinyl, but otherwise I don’t know why everyone has to put out a collection. We knew when we made the last CD that it would be our last CD, even though we weren’t planning on breaking up.”

If recording is now going to take a back seat to performing, then what about Enamel, the 100-year-old brick building renovated as a state-of-the-art recording studio in downtown Omaha, owned and operated by The Faint?

Thiele said Enamel was always former member Joel Petersen’s idea. “It was sort of his project, his idea to spend our money on it,” Thiele said. “He was recording and mixing bands there for awhile. But he didn’t want to stick around and do it.” Petersen, as mentioned last week, has moved to Los Angeles.

Thiele said the band now uses Enamel for personal projects, including Depressed Buttons, and also rents the space to other bands — a process that resulted in one band’s engineer blowing up some of their sound equipment. Fink said once the studio is back up and running, bookings will resume “and maybe (we’ll) get someone in there that takes it on full-time. We’ll use it when it’s not being used.”

Finally, whatever happened to Goo, the off-the-hook dance party series that launched at The Slowdown shortly after the club opened in 2007?

Fink said Goo parties were hugely successful, that is until Slowdown decided to make the parties 21-and-over. “We thought that room would be too big to do without (the under-21 crowd),” Fink said. “That’s where the energy is — the kids that show up early and start dancing. We were worried that it would become a crappy party, so we only do Goo for holidays and special events, which has been awesome. We’ve decided not to do anymore at Slowdown for now, and are going to try restarting it at Loom on Oct. 28 for Halloween.”

The Halloween connection makes sense, since costumes have always been a part of Goo, whose DJs also included Derek Pressnall (Tilly and the Wall, Icky Blossoms) and Nate Smith. “The difference between Depressed Buttons and Goo is that Goo is kind of a dress-up party centered around themes,” Fink said. “We play classic stuff, some ridiculous things, some indie remixes, some hip-hop, even some commercial-type stuff. Goo is the gateway to actual electronic dance music.”

“For Goo, we’ll play whatever it takes to make a great moment, even it’s the theme song from Team America or MC Hammer,” Thiele said. “We kind of live to see who can play the craziest shit sometimes.”

“Depressed Buttons is more of an artistic expression,” Fink said. “We listen to hundreds of thousands of electronic producers and come up with the best things on the planet (according to us) and share that vision and sound.”

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And though this is getting rather long in the tooth, there’s still more with The Faint that I couldn’t get to in this column or Pt. 1:

What do you think of the Loom concept?

Fink: I think Loom is great. I think Brent (Crampton, one of the founders of Loom) really is good for Omaha, bringing people together, creating awareness for art and music, cultural diversity issues, I think it’s cool that he has a hub at House of Loom to host all this kind of stuff. We’ll see how it is as a dance club. I’ve really only been dancing there once so far. It’s kind of weird to me because it’s a bar, but I think we can turn it into more of a club feel.

With The Faint on hiatus, how do you guys make a living?

Fink: I married a successful musician (Orenda Fink, whose projects have included numerous solo records, O+S, Art in Manila and, of course, Azure Ray), so I’m kind of really lucky in that way. We’re doing fine, but at the same time, we’re living in a house that I bought from a friend 12 years ago and really don’t have much mortgage to pay.

We make a pretty decent living going around DJing; it pays well. It’s on par with what we made with The Faint, which was not much. We never made much money because we bought that building, and then the studio.

So Todd, how did  you end up back in Omaha after moving so many times?

Fink: The last place I lived was Athens, Georgia. I like it there, and it’s no secret that it’s great. We looked at houses there, but all the good places in town are expensive. You don’t get much at all. A tiny house (in Athens) costs twice what it costs here. And we’ve bought enough houses to where we’re really picky. We really want the location to be right and we want the house to be right. It’s prohibitively expensive to get everything you want in Athens. Orenda wanted to move back, and the master plan was to live in this house and never worry about money, and we could leave during the winter and enjoy the summers here.

That’s it for now. If you missed Pt. one of the interview, check it out here. To find out more about Loom, check out their website.

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Tonight at O’Leaver’s, it’s the return of Deleted Scenes. Their latest album, Young People’s Church of the Air, was released Sept. 6 on Sockets Records and already has garnered a 7.8 rating at Pitchfork (right here

). The band describes itself as “something like the Dismemberment Plan playing under water.” With their dreamcore arrangements and heavy use of delay throughout the recording, I’m more apt to compare their sound to Beach House. Check out their latest video (produced by Love Drunk) and decide for yourself

. Also on the bill is Betsy Wells and The Benningtons. $5, 9:30 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

I received some lively feedback (mostly on my Facebook page) from yesterday’s blog entry regarding House of Loom and Depressed Buttons, which made me want to share the following from last week’s interview with Todd Fink and Jacob Thiele that didn’t make it into the column due to space constraints.

I asked Todd and Jacob if people need to dance to enjoy Depressed Buttons’ music. Todd provided this rather profound response that cuts at the heart of people’s apprehension to dance in public:

“I just acquired a small couch or loveseat for the studio of my home where I just lie and listen to music. I have an awesome sound system in here with a sub woofer so you can make it sound just like a club. I’ll just lie on that thing and play dance music as loud as I can, louder than playing rock music — you can’t listen to rock music that loud because it just turns into noise.

“So no, you don’t have to move your body at all, but it’s physically cathartic, and it’s a good exercise for your ego to dance, even if you think you’re terrible, because you’re saying, ‘I don’t care. I’m getting to know my body enough to know I don’t care what anybody thinks about how I look.’ That’s a hard place to get to. We’re not conditioned to do that automatically. I’m proud of hippies when they dance — they’ve gotten above worrying about their dance moves. It feels good to connect with the rhythm of sound to the larger movements of your body instead of just the inner workings of your brain. I listen to dance music all the time, but I don’t dance all the time.”

There’s a ton more from this interview — including why it took The Faint so long to write and record songs (and the roll of band democracy), lyric writing and future Faint recording projects, what’s happening with Enamel recording studio, and the difference between Goo and Depressed Buttons. It’s all in this week’s column, which goes online (and in print) Thursday.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Skypiper at The Waiting Room, Sept. 9, 2011.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

When I first started writing about music years and years ago, one of the first things I needed to get over was being intimidated by the artists I was interviewing. Case in point: I remember visiting the mid-town home of Sydney Buchanan, where I was slated to interview a very young version of Mousetrap (featuring Sydney’s son, Patrick) for a feature in The Note, a Lawrence Kansas-based music publication that’s long since defunct. I was quite a few years older than those teen-aged Mousetrap kids, but I was still nervous as hell — nervous about asking a stupid question, nervous about just looking stupid in general.

It didn’t take long to get over that sense of insecurity, to the point where I eventually became comfortable interviewing anyone, from a nationally renowned rock band, to a politician or the head of a global corporation. We’re all just people, right?

I had to go through a similar thing when it came to going to rock shows by myself, a situation I’ve written about at length before (right here, actually

). I figured as I got older, that stigma that comes with flying solo at shows would ease somewhat, but it really hasn’t. Case in point this past Friday night.

My first stop for the evening was The Waiting Room for the Skypiper CD release show. I got there in time to catch the last song by opener Tarlton, and quickly regretted not getting there sooner. They were followed by Anniversaire, a somber chamber-pop band purposely drenched in melancholy despite a very excited drummer dressed in gym shorts, knee-highs and headband who looked like he’d be more comfortable backing a party band at a kegger. Then came Skypiper. I’ve been listening to the band’s new record off and on for the past couple days, reminded of acts like Jeremy Messersmith and Decemberists. They brought a similar exuberance to their live show, performed in front of a large audience, none of whom I recognized — this wasn’t your typical Waiting Room crowd, and I’m sure there’s a reason for that.

I hung out for about five Skypiper songs before heading to my car and downtown to House of Loom for the Depressed Buttons inaugural show. It was around midnight when I rolled past the building, located just south of Western Heritage Museum on 10th Street. I could hear the chaos boiling out of Loom from my car, where I noticed dozens of people crushed outside the door, not waiting to get in, just enjoying the cool pre-fall night.

And as I looked for a parking spot along the overpass I said to myself, “Who are you kidding? You’re not going in there. Not by yourself.”  So yeah, I chickened out. It’s one thing to go to TWR or Slowdown by yourself and get lost in the crowd with the rest of the people staring at the stage. It’s entirely another thing to show up at a dance club alone and try to inconspicuously mix in with hundreds of people shaking their asses on the dance floor, especially if your ass is older than theirs, and ain’t shaking. As much as I wanted to see and hear what Todd and Jacob were up to, I couldn’t get over that feeling that I would be very much out of place. It’s not a “you thing,” Loom, it’s a “me thing.” And I have to get over it.

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One place where you’ll never feel intimidated is O’Leaver’s, mainly because no matter when you arrive, everyone there is already loaded. Tonight should be no exception when Peace of Shit takes the stage along with Dikes of Holland and The Prairies. $5, 9:30 p.m. By all means, go.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

I have never been to House of Loom. Scratch that. I have never been to a Loom event. Scratch that. I have never been to any Omaha “dance” event (Loom, Goo, Gunk).

Nothing against these sorts of comfabs. Nothing but respect for the DJ culture. I just don’t dance; at least not outside of wedding receptions and goofing off. Ironic, considering how much I like dance music, electronic or otherwise. But I prefer to enjoy it with my headphones on, dancing in my head, rather than in a club. Hence, why I haven’t been to Loom/House of Loom/Goo, etc.

That might change tonight.

House of Loom presents the debut of Depressed Buttons, a.k.a. Jacob Thiele, Todd Fink and Clark Baechle of The Faint creating electronic music to dance to (or whatever you want to do while listening, including just closing your eyes). You read about DB yesterday

. Tonight you can see and hear them live. I have been told that House of Loom, located at 1012 So. 10th St., is not a very large space, so if this show attracts fans of the Faint, it could quickly reach capacity. I recommend you arrive early and then drink heavily. The show starts at 10 p.m., though I’m not sure when Depressed Buttons actually gets behind the wheel. BTW, the trio will be a man down as Clark is on the road with Bright Eyes. You’ll just have to make due. Hopefully he’ll be back for next month’s “performance” (tonight is the debut of DB’s monthly residence at HoL). Cover is $5. Just added: Guest DJ – D.A.M.B. of DJs Are Not Rockstars. They’re not?

Also tonight, local indie band Skypiper has its CD release show tonight at The Waiting Room for their self-titled self-released sophomore effort. Opening is Anniversaire and Minneapolis band Tarlton. $7, 9 p.m.

Meanwhile, over at O’Leaver’s, Celeritas and Lonely Estates open for Bazooka Shootout. The usual $5, the usual 9:30 start time.

Tomorrow night’s big shoe is the return of Tim Kasher to The Waiting Room. Kasher has been on the road supporting his latest EP release on Saddle Creek Records. Joining him on tour has been Aficionado, who will be opening Saturday night along with local heroes Dim Light. $10, 9 p.m.

Finally, Sunday night Brad Hoshaw, Fine, Fine Automobiles (Landon Hedges of Little Brazil), Justin Lamoureux (of Midwest Dilemma), and Kyle Harvey will be kicking off a new Songwriters Showcase series at Little Italy restaurant Q Consumables, 1228 So. 6th St. Show starts at 7:30 and is free (though you can tip the bands). Find out more about Q Consumables and check out their menu at http://qc.qconsumables.com/.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Depressed Buttons, from left, Jacob Thiele, Todd Fink and Clark Baechle.

Column 340: He Disappeared: The Rise of Depressed Buttons

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

It’s not possible to talk about the debut of Depressed Buttons at hot new dance club House of Loom on Sept. 9 without first talking about the apparent demise of The Faint.

Three members of The Faint — frontman Todd Fink, keyboardist Jacob Thiele and drummer Clark Baechle — make-up Depressed Buttons. So before we talked about the new project, Fink and Thiele set the record straight on The Faint, who haven’t released an album since 2008’s Fasciinatiion or performed live since their appearance at the 2010 MAHA Music Festival. Is the band kaput?

“I would say that it’s not happening,” Fink said last week via a phone call that included Thiele. “It could happen again, but it’s not happening and there are no plans for it to happen at this point. Joel moved to California, and I guess he quit.”

Joel is The Faint’s bass player, Joel Petersen. “He doesn’t want to do the band,” Thiele said. “He really kind of lost interest a while ago. He doesn’t really want us to do the band without him because he wouldn’t like the music we’d make. This way he’s not embarrassed by The Faint’s music.”

“He quit the band and assumes the band was over when he quit,” Fink added. “But we’re not just characters in his life. We all have invested the same amount of energy into the band, and felt like we could do it. His quitting is just that, and if we did do some more shows, we would consider checking with him to see if he wanted to do it, but assume he would not.”

Fink said the remaining members of the band talked about doing a Faint tour next year in conjunction with a possible rerelease of Danse Macabre, The Faint’s career-defining album, released 10 years ago this past Aug. 21. The record sold 147,000 copies, making it the band’s all-time bestseller and among the best selling Saddle Creek Records releases. A new live show would be center on Danse Macabre “and maybe Blank-Wave Arcade,” Fink said. “I’d like to see those two remastered. I think they could be improved a lot.”

If Petersen declined an invitation, Fink said, “We could do it with four of us. There’s plenty of people in the band, or we could find someone else, too. I’d rather just do it with the four of us.” The band is rounded out by guitarist Dapose.

As for Petersen, Fink said his quitting was the right thing to do if he didn’t want to be in the band. “I don’t have any hard feelings about it,” Fink said. “People are just complicated.”

Through Fink, Petersen said he didn’t want to comment for this article. There’s more to The Faint story and everything surrounding it, which will appear in next week’s column.

Fink said Depressed Buttons grew out of Faint after parties DJ’d by Fink, Thiele and Baechle. “One thing led to another and we ended up doing that a lot,” Fink said. “We found ourselves wanting music that we couldn’t find, and thinking we should just make our own tracks, what we want to play.”

The trio soon began taking more bookings outside of the after parties. Fink said Petersen, who doesn’t like DJs, didn’t want the events to be listed as “The Faint DJs.”

“So we thought of a new name, Depressed Buttons, to kind of make fun of electronic music,” Fink said.

Last December, Depressed Buttons released its first EP, QWERTY, on Mad Decent, an L.A.-based label owned by Thomas Wesley Pentz, a.k.a. Diplo, the Grammy-nominated producer of “Paper Planes,” by M.I.A. “We plan to keep releasing our originals through them,” Fink said.

Depressed Buttons also has remixed such acts as Of Montreal, Boy 8-Bit, Boys Noize, Shinichi Osawa, Teenage Bad Girl, Herr Styler, CSS, LOL Boys, Para One, Reset!, Felix Cartal, Tony Senghore, Tommie Sunshine, O+S, Autoerotic, Beataucue and Crookers.

The trio’s DJ stints have included NYC’s Webster Hall, Moscow’s Solyanka Club, shows in Vienna, Nottingham, Berlin, and a headlining gig in front of thousands at the mammoth Avalon Hollywood.

Fink said Depressed Buttons wasn’t made for Faint fans. “The point of it is different,” he said. “The Faint was songs. You could dance to them if you like the song. Depressed Buttons may have words, may have lyrics, does have samples, but think of it as instrumental music. If there are voices, they are used as other instruments.”

As for the upcoming Loom performance, which is part of a monthly residency at the club, “This is a dance party with club music,” Fink said. “There’s no performance aspect to it unless you like watching people tweak knobs and faders and press buttons. The point is to have fun and to dance and to expose Omaha to the type of things that are happening in the world in the electronic club scene. It’s some futuristic stuff; it’s not really for Faint fans, but we are people from The Faint.”

“Depressed Buttons is forward thinking, it’s one second ahead of the rest of the club scene,” Thiele added. “It’s sort of about the science of music. There’s a lot of new music being made that couldn’t have been made until now because the technology didn’t exist. If you’re in the right mindset, in the right club with the right vibe and sound system, it can be a really enlightening experience. I think some people prefer not to dance, but to close their eyes. It’s avant-garde.”

“You can’t go too crazy,” Fink responded, laughing. “It’s still dance music.”

Depressed Buttons performs Sept. 9 at House of Loom, 1012 So. 10th Street. The 21+ show starts at 10 p.m., cover is $5. For more information, go to houseofloom.com.

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Bon Iver, whose self-titled album (4AD/Jagjaguwar) received a whopping 9.5 by Pitchfork, and which now sits at No. 14 on the CMJ Radio 200 list, plays tonight at Stir Concert Cove. Tickets are still available at $35 a pop. Opening is Canadian alt-country singer/songwriter Kathleen Edwards (MapleMusic). Show starts at 8 p.m.

Also tonight, Ft. Worth dreamcore band Burning Hotels returns to Omaha, this time at O’Leaver’s. The four-piece opened for Thunder Power and Mynabirds a year ago last May at TWR (read the review here

). Wonder if they’ll have room for those fluorescent light fixtures… With Rock Paper Dynamite (headlining) and The Big Deep. 9:30, 5 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Big Harp at Slowdown Jr., July 8, 2011.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Just a quick note to remind you that Big Harp is playing tonight at Slowdown Jr., opening for ageless troubadour David Dondero (Ghostmeat Records).  Big Harp’s Saddle Creek Records debut, White Hat, is slated for release Sept 13, though you can stream the entire album right here at americansongrwriter.com. Tonight’s show is the closest thing you’re going to get to a Big Harp CD release show. Big Harp vocalist Chris Seseney talked about the origin of the band, which includes his wife, Stephanie Drootin, in this here Lazy-i interview

from July 7. Check it out before you head to the show, which starts at 9, and will run you $10. Also on the bill, Thunder Power.

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Tomorrow: The Rise of Depressed Buttons (and the fall of The Faint?) — an interview with Todd Fink and Jacob Thiele in this week’s column.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Manhattan, Sept. 3, 2011.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

I return from Manhattan without any keen revelations, other than to suggest you try David Burke’s Kitchen the next time you’re in SoHo (Chris Webber did); Follies on Broadway will dominate this year’s musical Tony’s, the Yankees will win the AL-East, and if you get a chance to go to the U.S. Open, by all means do it – it’s cheap, easy to get to, it’s a lot of fun (unless you’re there today – it’s rained out).

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While I was away, Aaron Shipp, host of the Lounge Act Music Podcast, posted his latest episode, which features Omaha World-Herald‘s Kevin Coffey, man-about-town Shout! critic MarQ Manner and yours truly discussing music critical things, like why we write music reviews, the power of Pitchfork, Red Sky and other music festivals, Omaha as a tour stop, and why our opinion does or doesn’t matter. You can hear the entire podcast right here, or download it from iTunes. This is the first time MarQ, Kevin and I have been asked to take part in this sort of thing, and the conversation was fun and sometimes even lively. Thanks to Aaron for putting it together. Check it out.

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From my e-mail box: Touch People, a.k.a. Darren Keen, has a new track called “Depth of Width Pt. 1” that you can download for free right here at RKRD LBL  (registration required). What is RKRD LBL? According to the site, it’s “the premier online destination for free, curated, legal, MP3 downloads from the hottest marquee and emergent artists.”  The blog features music from more than 300 artists and more than 20 independent labels, including Dim Mak, Ghostly, Downtown, Kompakt, Warp, etc. They’ve been around since ’07. Keen, btw, is currently somewhere in Denmark on tour…

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

The Show Is the Rainbow's Darren Keen at Dundee Day, Aug. 27, 2011.

Column 339: Dancing in the Street

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com