The Crocodile Presents
Rubblebucket
Royal Canoe // The Hoot Hoots
The Crocodile presents
RUBBLEBUCKET
Rub-ble-buck-et [ru-bul-buck-it]
Noun 1. A vessel in which workers collect waste materials on a construction site; We need a rubblebucket for all this rubble. 2. A wild art-pop band from Brooklyn, NY; I'm jonesing for the new Rubblebucket album ‘Survival Sounds’. 3. The condition of having hard nipples, or riding a mean yes wave; He has great Rubblebucket. Verb 4. The act of uncrossing one’s arms and letting loose, while strange, new feelings and sounds flood mind and body, leading to uncontrollable dancing, possible injury and definite sweat; Man, we really put the rubble in the bucket last night.
My experience with Rubblebucket goes way back – to the summer of 1987, when I was born and first met lead singer and baritone saxist Kalmia Traver, then four. Kalmia was already well on her way to being a multi-instrument prodigy (penny whistle, recorder, alphabet burping), and I was already drowning in the ginormous shadow that she cast just by breathing. When she put our brother in a dress, blonde wig and heels, let me put on his lipstick, then forced his elastic micro-limbs into a diva pose, I knew she was a natural performer.
Kalmia met Alex Toth (band leader, trumpeter, guy, brother-from-another-mother, Jersey)in a latin jazz combo in Burlington, VT. I’m assuming she also dressed him in drag, because he liked her and they became friends, painting the town with their loud horn playing. In 2006, they moved to Boston, where they did respectable things for money. Kalmia nude modeled for art classes, and Alex was hustling marching band gigs at $50 a pop, for which he was required to wear a black shirt and march around for six hours at a time OR NO PAY NO WATER NO DINNER. It was like that scene in Oliver Twist. Naturally, out of this hot, tarry, magical, broke-ass time, Rubblebucket emerged like a huge, slippery, post-afrobeat baby. Alex had met trombonist Adam Dotson at one of these marching gigs, and the three began composing and playing the first songs in Rubblebucket’s repertoire. Soon, they were joined by three more friends – guitarist Ian Hersey, drummer Dave Cole, and 15-seater van Puppy – and started taking the Rubblebucket show on the road.
The first time I heard Rubblebucket perform live, two things happened: I realized this was the coolest thing on earth, like the lovechild of a unicorn and the Tom Tom Club, and I asked them if I could sell their merchandise at shows. You know what they say – those who can't do, sell merch. Night after night, standing behind that table of CDs, thongs and beer cozies, while Rubblebucket transformed the crowd from a skeptical wall of people into one big, happy, silly, jiving, open-hearted mass was an unforgettable experience. Their music does that – it just does. You can’t know it until you see it. And everyone who sees it, knows it. Like Paste, who said it best: “music that will make anyone with a pulse dance.” (I’ll annotate this by extending it to you pulse-less readers. You, zombie. I know you’re out there.) The Rubblebucket condition has spread, melting cares in its way. It barges in like an escaped rhino and triggers everyone, everywhere, to let loose and feel. Arm-crossing be damned!
I’ve been to many Rubblebucket shows. But it wasn’t until I was mid-crowd in NYC’s Bowery Ballroom and heard a guy in front of me say to his friend “the singer looks so hot tonight” (but? Gross? That’s my sister?) that I knew Rubblebucket had made it. The experts will tell you that, actually, this was when they released their 2011 album Omega La La, with its headlining tracks “Came Out of Lady” and “Silly Fathers,” and reached a whole new, larger audience. Or, when they flew out to LA to play on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and got free pizza and Alex almost puked backstage. Or, when their song “Came out of a Lady” appeared in the movie Drinking Buddies, and I was suddenly one giant leap closer to meeting Anna Kendrick (that’s when I knew I had made it). Or, when their green rooms started stocking guacamole. Or, when their 2012 and 2013 EPs Oversaturated and Save Charlie introduced fans to the next and the next evolution of Rubblebucket, and more and more people fell in love. Now, much to my drool and dire impatience, the band is hovering on the knife’s edge of their next highly anticipated album release, Survival Sounds (Communion Records, Aug. 2014). Prepare yourself, universe.
Rubblebucket is many things and nothing at all; it’s a mindset, a legend, a feeling, a mystery; a mischievous, playful, boundary-smashing blast of sound that you can sit still and wonder at, or turn off your mind and move wildly to. Or both at the same time. As Kalmia said, when she handed me one of her now-famous peanut butter, cheddar cheese, cabbage, honey tacos, “This is the weirdest, most delicious thing you will ever taste.” And if you won’t take it on my authority, take it on the authority of a small, but reputable publication called Rolling Stone, reporting from Bonnaroo: “Rubblebucket revved up like an indie-rock Miami Sound Machine, dancers, horns and all.” And if you won’t take it on Rolling Stone’s authority, cleave to the words of guitarist Ian: “Our music is like being at a raging party, but in the center of it, there’s this beautiful painting that you’re staring at, trying to wrap your mind around.” Or the words of our dad, Tim Traver: “Kids these days.”
- Mollie Traver
Royal Canoe
A six-piece ensemble from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Royal Canoe give you everything, but on their own maniacally hybrid terms. It's one thing to reference a particular style, or even a range of styles. It's another thing entirely to grab huge handfuls of sounds from pretty much anywhere, throw them all together and come up with something both cohesive and totally distinctive—something that also happens to ripple and crack with energy. This is what Royal Canoe does best.
Royal Canoe's dedication to crafting a seamless musical pastiche is obsessive. For live shows, they’d rather lug hundreds of pounds of keyboards, mixers and pedals across the continent (very much like a voyager canoe, in fact) than rely on lengthy backing tracks. They actually play every part, every time. And while their van is packed with hardware, much of that hardware is, in turn, crammed full of widely-sourced samples and adoringly homemade sounds. Their fearlessness about using whatever they feel like is grounded, not in recklessness, but in a decisive confidence.
In 2012 alone, Royal Canoe released two independent EPs, Extended Play and Purple & Gold. They took part in Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival, arranging and performing a portion of Beck's Song Reader, an album released as sheet music and published by McSweeny's. They brought so much musical goodness to CMJ that they landed on Best Of lists of The New York Times, KCRW and Consequence of Sound. And they played nearly one hundred shows. For 2013, the main act (so far) is releasing their full-length album, Today We're Believers, with L.A.’s Roll Call Records and Toronto's Nevado Records.
They have cited their hometown as a core influence for their work, in particular, Winnipeg’s extreme perpetual cycle through euphoric summers under gigantic prairie skies, to near-debilitating winters that instill their own intense, almost aggressive energy into the psyche. While the 2012 EPs feel more consistently located in hot open spaces, more about floating in strangers’ backyard pools without them knowing and biking all sweaty down roads that don’t actually end, Today We’re Believers leans more heavily into urban side of things, cruising the downtown core at night with streetlights fractured and smeared by frost patterns on the windows. The full cycle is balanced out.
If you really, absolutely had to reduce Royal Canoe to a single ‘thing’ you could say they catch the moment of explosive, blissful restlessness that hits you when a savage winter finally eases into light, and you feel some actual warmth on those pasty, vitamin-D deprived limbs and all they want to do, suddenly, is move.
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The Hoot Hoots
Seattle power pop quartet The Hoot Hoots are irresistible party starters. Their songs are powered by fuzzy guitars, fuzzier keyboards, and headhum-inducing hooks, and all these combine in a glorious, slightly insane energy in both their live shows and in their newest EP, Feel the Cosmos.
Seattle Weekly has compared them favorably to the Shins, the Deli Seattle Magazine has praised them for their "flashy, out-of-control pop sensibilities," and Seattle radio 90.3 KEXP named their song “Go For a Walk” their Song of the Day, calling it a “briliant pop tune and nothing you should skip out on”. Think vintage Flaming Lips with a splash of NES and a dash of the Unicorns, and you get the idea.
Lead vocalist/guitarist Adam Prairie grew up with his brother/drummer Chris in the middle of Midwestern corn fields in Clifton, IL. The two played whiffle ball and Nintendo, watched the original Star Wars trilogy obsessively, and learned to play guitars and Casio keyboards in the bedroom they shared for most of their formative years. They wrote a few songs in high school, but they mostly tinkered with sounds until Adam left home to study at Knox College in western Illinois followed by Chris a few years later.
"The Hoot Hoots really took shape at the end of my stay at Knox," Adam said. "Chris and I wrote and performed music for a psychedelic 60's production of Shakespeare's As You Like It, and we were kind of overwhelmed how much people were into it. That was the first time we both thought, 'Maybe we should give this band thing a shot.' "
It was at Knox that the Prairie brothers first met keyboardist Christina Ellis and bassist Geoff Brown, but the current Hoot Hoot foursome never played a note together until they all reunited in Seattle late in 2008.
Since then they’ve released two albums, and the latest, Appetite for Distraction, inspired this praise from Seattle Weekly: "While the group's fun-loving, reverential spirit keeps them orbiting their influences, their high-energy songbook, full of stories about ghosts and robots and brain eating dinosaurs, captures the essence of goof-pop with upbeat, irrepressible glee." The lead track from Appetite for Distraction, Mr. Ghost, was also included on KEXP's Music That Matters Podcast shortly after the album was released.
Their follow up EP, Feel the Cosmos, introduced a whole new audience to the Hoot Hoots and brought more glowing praise. Seattle Metropolitan Magazine named it their album of the month in December 2012, saying it was a “fun-loving and energetic brand of power pop suited for sing-alongs.”Following the EP’s release, Indie Rock Cafe named the Hoot Hoots one of their 5 DIY Band to Watch in 2013.
They’ve also relentlesly hit the road the last couple years, making stops in the Midwest, Southwest, Texas, West Coast, and all over the Pacific Northwest. And they somehow manage to do it stuffed into a Toyota Prius. Right now, the band is hunkering down in the studio to work on their third full length album, which is tentatively due out in Fall 2014.
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$13 ADV // 8pm Doors // 21+
