Dan Friel Archives

No Journalists Allowed: Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale talks to noise-pop musician Dan Friel

Black Pus: All My Relations (Thrill Jockey, 3/19/13)

“1000 Years”

Taking noisy and experimental music out of the basement and into the mainstream has been a long journey. From Brian Eno and Lou Reed popularizing it in the 1970s to the current generation performing at large festivals, we’ve reached a point where it’s not only critically praised but a genre with a serious following.

Dan Friel and Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt, Black Pus) — creative souls each with challenging yet accessible new solo albums — recently sat down and talked about the freedom of solo work, performing on the street in the United Arab Emirates, and drunk viking synthesizers.

Dan Friel: Total Folklore (Thrill Jockey, 2/19/13)

“Thumper”

Dan_Friel_Thumper

Brian Chippendale: You just made a super pop record that opens with a 12-minute song, and you didn’t have to bounce the song order or album direction off any band members! Do you feel mega-liberated by that? Or trapped because you had to make every decision?

Dan Friel: 100% liberation. Zero trap. And the track order was an especially fun call to make. With that said, I always end up bouncing ideas off of the same few helpful friends as my solo-project research panel (even if I reserve the right to then do whatever I want).

A neon-soaked, window-rattling synth banger in Dan Friel’s “Thumper” video

Dan Friel: Total Folklore (Thrill Jockey, 2/19/13)

Today sees the release of Dan Friel’s Total Folklore, a soundtrack to the urban environment that’s “halfway between overwhelming noise rock and video-game chiptunes.”

The video for “Thumper,” a melodic yet overblown synth tune that cranks the bass, finds Friel at an electronic workstation, headbanging and hunched over the controls while a big screen delivers trippy neon visuals.

Dan Friel’s “Thumper,” a bass-backed love letter to chiptune melody

50 Unheralded Albums from 2011

In just one more trip around the sun, another swarm of immensely talented but under-recognized musicians has harnessed its collective talents and discharged its creations into the void. This list is but one fraction of those dedicated individuals who caught our ears with some serious jams.

Record Review: Parts & Labor’s Constant Future

Parts & Labor: Constant Future (Jagjaguwar, 3/8/11)

Parts & Labor: “Constant Future”

[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/constantfuture.mp3|titles=Parts & Labor: “Constant Future”]

In 20 years, we will wistfully misremember that all of indie rock sounded like a handful of reliable, definitive bands. It will be tempting to include Parts & Labor in that pleasant exercise of self-delusion. Then again, it wont make our memories any easier to process or simplify.

The electro-rock group’s co-founders, Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw, write lots of lyrical phrases that don’t express a simple opinion or definite image but are tempting to repeat like aphorisms. On the chorus of “A Thousand Roads,” one of the best songs and finest examples of what they’ve achieved on the new album Constant Future, they conjure up one of many fragmentary but astutely realized landscapes: “Come on, praise the progress made, the sharpened grays of a thousand roads / all delays, no lazy days, the latent phase of a thousand roads.”

It may be about touring-band life, or how America seems to measure its worth in paved surfaces. Because it’s not didactic or preachy, though, it can gradually sink in and play with your head, with the internal rhymes and alliterations indicating that there’s some coherent thought running through it that can’t wait to get out.

Parts & Labor’s music also sounds like it reads. Friel’s electronics crawl through the songs like power-line hum given life and dimension, but the hooks, punk-shout-along-worthy choruses, and Joe Wong‘s drums keep insisting that it’s going to make sense to your instincts.