by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Yesterday afternoon, Laura Burhenn of The Mynabirds and now also of Bright Eyes, posted a photo on her Facebook page of her with Norman the Dog taken shortly after yesterday’s taping of BE’s performance on The Late Show with David Letterman. Laura called Norman “the show’s biggest talent,” and other than her band, she was right. Norman, a big shaggy lovable hound, stood on a scooter and pushed it across the studio floor — two paws on handlebars, one paw on scooter, and No. 4 pushing him along. It was part of a Stupid Pet Tricks package that included a border collie that could cook breakfast (an Eggo waffle). The only other part of the show I didn’t fast-forward through was Letterman berating comments from Sen. Rand Paul after coming off of a commercial break, saying how he didn’t understand how anyone could take away collective bargaining while giving tax breaks to “fat cats.” Amen, brother Letterman.

As for the BE performance, these things have become old hat for Conor and Co. A little bird told me Wednesday night that, due to time constraints, they’d be performing “Jejune Stars” off the new album (which Letterman held up in its vinyl format, the sleeve looking irredescent in the studio light), and sure enough that’s what they tore up on stage. Everyone did fine, and the sound was good (as you’ll see on the YouTube version). Laura mostly provided backing vocals as it appeared that Nate Walcott handled most of the keyboard chores. The star of the performance was Clark Baechle, looking like a cross between Anthony Jr. of the Sopranos and Matthew Sweet. Percussion drives this song, and the camara knew it, often focusing on Clark during the frenetic chorus breaks. Very nice, indeed. Next stop for Bright Eyes is kicking off the North American tour next Tuesday night in Miami with Cursive.

The website twentyfourbit.com has compiled a nice online retrospective of Bright Eyes TV performances over the years. Check it out.

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Looks like my whining has paid off. One Percent Productions announced yesterday that Iron & Wine is now slated to perform at Slowdown June 5. Tickets go on sale next Friday.  Yes, yes, you can thank me for the booking (Just kidding, Marc). Iron & Wine was on my list of “why don’t they ever come to Omaha?” bands that I posted Wednesday, here. That post got a bit of feedback, including a “get-your-shit-together” comment from people informing me that Tyvek has played in Omaha the past two years at drug-laden house parties. As I pointed out, I ain’t going to any house parties where I can get my ass thrown in jail because some under-age patrons decided to take a nip of the hooch (or fire up some chronic) when the cops show up to bust the joint. Also the fact that most kids at a house party would think I was a cop and/or an angry father keeping an eye on his daughter is enough to keep me out of Hotel Frank or The Jerk Store or whatever it’s called these days. Someone needs to book Tyvek at a larger space, say O’Leaver’s or The Barley Street or The 49’r…oops, I mean CVS (btw, have you seen the mass destruction of the neighborhood behind The Niner? ’tis a pity.). Someone also pointed out that Ted Leo opened for Against Me… three years ago. Go to the thread and add your “most wanted” bands to the list, or just comment below this blog entry. People are watching…

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And so we made it to the weekend and tonight’s mammoth album release party for Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship’s new LP, Hanga-Fang, at The Waiting Room. This should be a gala event, with opening bands  Yuppies, Ideal Cleaners and The Answer Team, all for a mere $7, so you’ll have plenty of jack left over to pick up a slab of that luscious orange vinyl. Seriously, buy this album, which I believe also comes with a download key that’ll let you add the digital version to your iPhone/listening device. It looks cool (at least in pictures) and is a pretty fantastic collection of songs. Find out for yourself tonight. Show starts at 9. See you there.

What else tonight? Well, Snake Island is playing a set at The Barley Street Tavern with Lincoln band Climates and Watching the Train Wreck. $5, 9 p.m.

Tomorrow night (Saturday) there’s a colorful show slated for The Barley Street Tavern — New York band The Forms along with Kansas City band Soft Reeds, the illustrious Kyle Harvey and Dorkas. The Forms have a new song online with vocals by Matt Berninger of The National and another song featuring Andrew Thiboldeaux of Pattern Is Movement. This could be a hot show. $5, 9 p.m.

Also Saturday night, noise rock masters Back When play at Slowdown Jr. with Bazooka Shootout, Dapose (from the Faint) and Feral Hands. $7, 9 p.m.

Then Sunday Heartless Bastards open for Drive-By Truckers at The Slowdown. Seems like HB is always opening for someone instead of headlining on their own. Tix are $20/$23 DOS. Show starts at 9

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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.

Noah's Ark Was a Spaceship

Column 311: Smells Like Noah’s Ark

Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship runs a golden mile.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

The scene is O’Leaver’s on a Saturday afternoon. How could a bar so fun and full of life in the evening look so bleak and frightening in the daylight? Flat, winter-afternoon sun glared through the dirty windows, cutting the darkness where a handful of faceless people sat stooped over the bar drinking and watching college basketball. The room’s tiny “stage” in daylight was a patch of dirty carpeting behind a couple tiny monitors that I pushed out of the way while dragging a chair up to the table where the boys of Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship sat drinking a variety of tallboys.

Guitarist vocalist Andrew Gustafson was late arriving from a luncheon with his family. We bided time talking about how the band’s music has been influenced by a handful of acts that these guys are way too young to have heard when first released.

“I was in third grade when I first heard Nirvana,” said drummer Rob Webster. “I had a friend whose older brother was really into that shit.”

Guitarist vocalist John Svatos explained how a friend had made a VHS mix tape of “super ’90s bands” that introduced him to Smashing Pumpkins. While bassist Ricky Black professed to being “super into Weird Al. I’m not as cool as these guys.”

Once Gustafson arrived the interview became chaotic, with everyone talking at the same time, made all the more confusing when the jukebox erupted into Thin Lizzy so loud that I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I warned them that I was going to get the story wrong, but they didn’t seem to mind.

Noah's Ark Was a Spaceship, Hanga-Fang (Slumber Party, 2011)

The thumbnail sketch of the band’s history: Gustafson met Svatos during art class at Creighton Prep in 2002. “He had a Nirvana patch on his backpack and was already in (local metal band) Paria at the time,” Svatos said. “We were both into Sonic Youth.”

With bassist Black, the trio played their first gig on the under card of a local metal show at The Ranch Bowl. Drummer Rob Webster didn’t join the band until the winter of 2006, when he was Svatos’ roommate. Back in the old days, Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship was an instrumental noise band, very much influenced by Sonic Youth. It wasn’t until Black returned from the University of Iowa that the band added vocals, which changed everything.

Their discography includes a 7-inch on local Dutch Hall Records and an EP on Slumber Party, the record label that’s releasing their debut LP, Hanga-Fang, at an album release show this Friday night at The Waiting Room. I say “album release” because there will be no CDs — just digital downloads and $15 slabs of 180 gram orange vinyl.

You can get the drift of Hanga-Fang‘s post-punk by playing it on your computer speakers, but you’ll enjoy it much more by dropping it on your Technics turntable hooked to your Harman/Kardon stereo and a pair of beefy Boston Acoustic speakers — or at least wearing headphones — where you can pick up subtle hints of Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Husker Du and Fugazi beneath layers of densely packed guitars and crisp, cracklin’ drums.

Noah’s Ark does more than emulate. They reinvent that ’90s facade in a modern setting without taking their eyes off the past. Their sound reminds me of the Lawrence scene circa 1993 (think Vitreous Humor or Zoom) — noise rock taken to slacker extremes born under a lonely, empty sky.

The album was recorded last spring by long-time Noah’s Ark engineer Mark McGowan at his Suitcase Recording studio, and mixed by AJ Mogis at ARC Studios.

The band pressed 500 copies under the Slumber Party moniker. We talked about the logic of only pressing vinyl, and how they couldn’t afford a distro deal. Money is not high on their priority list. “I encourage bootlegging,” Gustafson said, though I couldn’t talk him into allowing me to post the download link in this article.

Their next step is heading east and south on a tour with pals The Yuppies, followed by a western tour this summer that Black has yet to book. They’ve become renowned locally for their live show, but there also have been miscues, like playing Laslo’s Brewpub last summer, a restaurant where Webster was a cook. He warned them.

“We played to kids and grand parents,” he said. “When we got done, you could hear a pin drop.”

“The guys from Oxygen played after us,” Gustafson said. “They told us, ‘We really love your hard-edged sound.'” Webster quit Laslo’s shortly afterward, and the band never did get paid.

But they made up for it opening for Cursive at a sold out New Year’s Eve gig in Chicago that they nearly missed due to an ice storm. “We almost ran over a cop about a half hour outside of Iowa City,” Webster recalled.

For the band, the best part of the job is touring, and discovering weird new places, like Fairfield, Iowa, “America’s capital for transcendental meditation,” Svatos said, though none of the band knew that when they booked the gig.

Gustafson said Fairfield and that tour stop could be summed up by a conversation between him, a local girl and a guy who had just arrived in the U.S. “We were standing on top of this building, and the foreign guy asked, ‘What is medicine?'” Gustafson said. “I told him it’s like a pill that you take when you’re sick. The girl gave me a stern look and said, ‘NO IT’S NOT.’ And then she pointed at a bird that was flying over and said, ‘Medicine is that.'”

“That turned out to be the best show on the tour,” Svatos said.

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Again, Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship’s album release show is tomorrow night at The Waiting Room with The Answer Team, Ideal Cleaners and Yuppies. $7, 9 p.m.

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Unknown Mortal Orchestra at The Waiting Room, Feb. 23, 2011.

Smith Westerns’ current hype caught my attention, but it was opener Unknown Mortal Orchestra that got me to The Waiting Room last night for what turned out to be a well-attended show (150+?, maybe). UMO was a trio featuring two Portland guys and a frontman from Auckland (who pronounced the headliners’ name “The Smith Way-sterns” — Frodo would be proud). Marketed as a psych-rock band, their sound was a ’70s throwback (one guy compared them to Love), but with enough throaty rhythms to make me think of Manchester in the ’90s. They were at their most interesting when they went all proggy on their relatively straightforward songs, and broke down the tempos while adding frontman Ruban Nielson’s intricate and sometimes strange guitar lines, before shifting gears into a groove that The Kinks would respect. Virtual unknowns, keep an eye on these guys.

Smith Westerns at The Waiting Room, Feb. 23, 2011.

As for Smith Westerns — I liked their pop-’70s revival stuff more than their pop-’60s surf revival stuff, mainly because of Best Coast and every other band doing that ’60s shtick. When they moved up a decade, and filled their sound with gorgeous, glammy electric-soar guitars and much-needed keyboards, it was like listening to a Titan Records tribute band (more Gary Charlson than, say, Boys) combined with Sweet or T. Rex. They even had some falsetto vocals thrown in for good measure. As for stage presence, it was dominated by frontman Cullen Omori’s tit-length black hair that hung in front of his face throughout the set (a la Joey Ramone), distracting him as much as it distracted the audience. When he pulled his hair back, he looked like a masculine Sarah Silverman. The evening’s highlight was an orgiastic version of “All Die Young,” which would have been a mega-hit in 1974, and hopefully will be the style of song that points their way to the future.

And what’s the deal with no encores these days?

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Tonight at the Waiting Room it’s Minneapolis indie band Tapes ‘n’ Tapes with Oberhofer. $12, 9 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.

Noah's Ark Was a Spaceship at The Slowdown, May 24, 2010.

How big was the draw at last night’s MAHA showcase at Slowdown? Well, the parking lot was full, and for a big-stage show the room didn’t feel empty. My guestimate would be that 150 people were in the house at any given time. Not bad for a Monday night. I arrived too late to see the band that I would have voted for if I had voted — Dim Light played first at around 8 p.m. I caught most of Betsy Wells’ set. I’d never seen the band before, and hadn’t even heard of them before this show was announced (even though I’m told they’ve played at The Waiting Room before). They’re a young four-piece with two guitars who someone told me sounded like Arcade Fire, which, of course, they sound nothing like. Instead, Betsy Wells was a conglomeration of influences that no one in the band probably has heard of before. Two people in the crowd referenced The Feelies. One person told me they reminded her of Blitzen Trapper. Someone outside on the patio compared them to U2 and Neil Young (uh, no). I think if you listened to them long enough you’d hear whatever band you wanted to hear in their music.  In other words, they sound like everyone — and no one. They’re a talented indie-pop band with a big-stage sound, but with songs that simply don’t stand out. Generic? Maybe. I think there’s something there, but it just ain’t “there” yet.

Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship added some stage spice in the form of a formal ball gown worn by lead guy Andrew Ancona Gustafson. Seems like everyone compares Noah to Sonic Youth, but to me, they sound like Seattle circa 1992 or one of the heavier, artier bands on Athens Ga. – Inside Out. Gustafson is a great lead singer who will take them far if he can tap into his undiscovered vocal range — and if they ever get “discovered.” They’ve got a new album coming out shortly (or so they said from stage).

Last up was Flight Metaphor, but I didn’t stick around. About an hour after the show ended, the MAHA organizers announced that Betsy Wells had won the ad hoc battle of the bands and would be invited to play the small stage at the MAHA Music Festival. Did the crowd — and conversely, the MAHA organizers — make the right choice? Find out for yourself July 24.

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Tonight at The Brothers Lounge it’s The Lepers CD release party with Bazooka Shootout and Kyle Harvey. $5, 9 p.m.