Baltimore, Maryland's Celebration. Katrina Ford (vocals, percussion, sometimes TVOTR guest vocalist), Sean Antanaitis (guitar and a bunch of other stuff) and David Bergander (drums and sometimes member of Beach House). I love this band. I'm not quite sure why they aren't more popular. They have a truly unique sound. They have great songs. They have all the right friends (TVOTR, Nick Zinner, they even guested on ScarJo's Tom Waits covers record). They have great songs. They are supremely talented, which, as history has too oft shown, is no guarantee of anything save perhaps poverty, frustration and untimely demise. At least they have all the right friends. Did I mention they have really great songs?
Their 2007 release The Modern Tribe (produced by Dave Sitek) was one of my favorite albums of that year, and it is a singular splash of manic, tribal, but infinitely listenable, polyrhythmic pop. Deftly shifting between contemplative moments of utter sublimity ("Evergreen", "Heartbreak", "In This Land") and frenzied, clangorous post-punk ("Hands Off My Gold", "Pony"), Tribe sounds like nothing else released that year (or since). It is a dexterous, nuanced and complex record made by an adventurous and expert group of musicians that somehow manages to sound both primitive and yet futuristic; like itinerant, percussive, electrified folk music from some distant galaxy.
Well, never ones to rest on their laurels, Celebration has apparently returned to the studio (or "cave" as they seem to insist on referring to it) and emerged with three new tunes for your listening enjoyment. You can download them for free at http://celebrationelectrictarot.com. Be sure to check the website periodically as additional tunes will be posted there as they are recorded (at least, that is, until they have enough songs for an album).
Lest you think this is all some empty gesture of generosity and not a commentary on the present state of the recording industry, we encourage you to consider the following few words from Katrina Ford regarding the aforementioned downloads:
"Greetings Dear Ones, We, as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture's need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. We believe their methods waste resources and time in a "print for market world" that no longer makes sense. The birth of the MP3 has dreamt the death of the CD format, and so all across the board, CD sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, music has grown, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched polycarbonate rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom --freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the environment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the world wide web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want --no waiting. We know nothing of the marketing world and don't care about the vampires any more. Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license. all of our new music will be free to download on our new website launching this Spring Equinox, March 21st 2009. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold."
Heady stuff. For those of you presently wondering, "I really like these songs, but will I ever have the opportunity to remix this material?" wonder no more. Katrina promises that audio stems will be available in the not too distant future.
Ms. Ford raises an interesting point. One does puzzle over just what the end result of all this technology might be. Is the CD a veritable dinosaur or at the very least a dead man walking? Given vinyl's seeming resurgence, will we eventually encounter a music marketplace in which vinyl and audio file formats are the primary modes of content delivery? It's a little too early to say, but it seems something has to give in light of the music industry's current economic woes.
Bands and record labels have responded in many different ways to the ceaseless encroachment of the interwebs and the public's seemingly insatiable desire for more and more content. Celebration seems to have found a way to harness this interest and enthusiasm for good, but it seems a model destined to cannibalize the sale of their album to all but the most fervent of fans (or those listeners wholly aware of this initiative - a small number to be sure). Should they care? Does it really matter? Probably not. As Ms. Ford's earlier comments indicate, the most interesting aspects of the current music industry debate are the complex issues of (artistic) creativity, integrity, motivation and purpose one finds within these larger, more pedestrian consumerist questions. Until record labels discover some way to once again control the distribution and delivery of the content, technology will continue to be the great emancipator of recording artists everywhere. The internet: Allowing bands to be all they want to be since Al Gore dreamt it up.
Interested in hearing new Celebration tunes on the radio? Tune into my One Man in a Small Room radio broadcast this Tuesday (7/28) from 5:00 - 8:00 p.m. on WLUR 91.5.
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