Interview with Apollo Vermouth
Where did the name Apollo Vermouth come from?
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Where did the name Apollo Vermouth come from?
The Bassment doesn’t quite live up to its name. Not only does its claustrophobic enclosure constrict and warp acoustics beyond measure (bass especially), it’s also crammed in an attic. Still, the new venue—dreamt up and operated in the spirit of similar DIY venues all across the country—has a distinct charm to it that no degree of accurate nomenclature could ever bring. Sitting unassumingly at a redacted address on a redacted street (sorry, you’ll have to facebook message the owners for the location), when I walked in for the venue’s christening show Wednesday night there was nothing to indicate the beat up living quarters were housing a show that night, aside from a self-made poster taped to the door. Not until you ventured to the attic to find a group of 15 some people (which later swelled to around 50 or so) chatting, laughing, drinking beer and eating homemade cupcakes, surrounded by streamers dangling from the ceiling and even a disco ball.
In contrast to Sean McCann’s dazzling Music for Private Ensemble—another quintessentially 2013 release, a universe away—Pusha-T’s My Name Is My Name opens with a rolling snare. Unlike McCann’s restrained masterpiece though, it doesn’t sputter and die on “King Push”—it roars to life, fueled by Kanye West’s Yeezus-esque primordial production and Pusha’s snarling flow. The track sets the tone for the rest of the album, painting Pusha as a scowling drug kingpin reclining in his throne. He is, after all, only “missing a dash” in the “difference between [him] and Hova.”
So, that’s it then. “Breaking Bad” has ended. Maybe not with a bang, but not really with a whimper either. We got everything we were promised by “Felina”—FeLiNa: blood, meth and tears, as well as a cheeky nudge via Marty Robbins’ song “El Paso”—maybe not in the capacity or bombast expected, but absolutely with the mastery and nuance promised by what seems fair to call one of television’s most astonishingly crafted works.
Dustin Wong’s at it again, and he feels like the long lost friend you didn’t know you loved until they came back. Now, expand and imagine your long lost friend as a droning series of ambient guitar loops with spikes of lightning sharp guitar madness striking through the haze to reveal the empyrean shining through; definitive proof that music is as transcendental as Goethe’s architectural vision would suggest. Music is art unfrozen, and here, in the final quarter of 2013, is an album that embraces the notion with gusto.
Drake may claim everything’s changed, but I think it’s fair to call hyperbole. After all, nothing really has changed in the life of Aubrey Graham—he’s still exceptionally proud of his fancy watches, exceptionally sensitive about his past loves and he still knows how to put together a fun, if predicable, bit of velour-soft hip-hop. His latest album, Nothing Was The Same, follows in the footsteps of chart stomper and critical wunderkind Take Care—sometimes to the point of redundancy and exhaustion.
It’s been a few years since I’ve stopped by Lollapalooza as distance and compounding prices have proved a more woeful deterrent than I’d expected, but this year, armed with my press pass, I’ve been mulling over all my fond memories of festivals past to get myself excited again. To get everyone else out there equally riled up, here’s a short list of the five primary reasons I’m getting antsy all over again for the Midwest’s biggest and showiest music festival.
We entered Saturday with renewed spirits. We’d dried off and so had the world; nothing but blue skies and slightly less health-endangering heats awaited us. The plan was to get to Pitchfork at around 1 p.m. and catch White Lung and Pissed Jeans for a notably punk afternoon, but underestimating both Chicago traffic and the lunch rush threw us off and we arrived too late to do either. Instead we headed over towards the blue stage, our consistently shady bastion, to see Julia Holter.
Every festival during the summer is obligated to some sort of inclement weather, generally either scorching heat or rain. The first day of Pitchfork 2013 unfortunately suffered from an overabundance of both to almost comical, God-rebuking degrees. There’s nothing more disheartening than walking down the road toward Union Park and reading a bank sign’s proud declaration that it’s 104 outside.
As much as Pitchfork gets a bad rap these days (I recently asked a “too-cool” friend of mine if he wanted to go see Pharmakon and Wolf Eyes, making the mistake of mentioning it was a Pitchfork sponsored event. He loves both acts, but responded, “that sounds like the worst thing ever,”) it’s hard to doubt the staff’s intentions and love of music. Even with all the ugly talk of “politics,” “agendas” and “taste making” surrounding their buzz band-birthing empire, you have to give them credit for building a truly devoted monument to the artists they cover. They do it all; interviews, music videos, cover stories, in-house sessions and more. Best of all, they put on the Pitchfork Music Festival every July at Union Park in Chicago.
So you’re coming to The University of Wisconsin, huh? Well, if you want to play ball with the big leaguers, you’re going to have to update your iPod with all the hippest, most sitcom-approved musical representations of collegiate life. For your listening pleasure, here’s a list of the most essential albums for any incoming freshman.
So here we are, seven years later, and our Bluths have finally been saved. If you haven’t been keeping up with “Arrested Development” (which likely means you aren’t part of the show’s frothing and obsessive fanbase in the first place), here’s the deal: “Arrested Development,” frequently lauded as one of the funniest shows on television for its intelligent, rapid fire and frequently painfully subtle humor was cancelled back in 2006 as it’s constant deluge of critical praise and fervent cult following failed to keep the ratings buoyed for a show that, admittedly, benefitted better from the repeat viewings of DVDs than weekly airing.
In light of this whole Mifflin-versus-Revelry fiasco—and I think it is, at this point, fair to objectively refer to it as a fiasco—I’ve never more been distraught over the status of the Madison community. I’ve been hearing left and right, “It’s an essential part of Madison! Mifflin’s part of our culture!” And it’s just been burning my ears. This is our culture? This is what we base our identity as a school around?
The Daily Cardinal: Have you ever been to Madison before?
Like a terrible, blood drenched disco ball ascending from the stygian bowls of the earth, The Knife have finally returned to us.
I’ll preface this with a disclaimer: I’m far from an authority on hip-hop. To contextualize—I’m currently sitting at my desk listening to my dad’s copy of U2’s War on vinyl with Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” adaptation playing in the background. In the reductive language of stereotypes and essentialism, I am currently the whitest man alive.
Passion Pit has had, by all measures, a stellar few years. Their first EP, Chunk of Change, was a love letter to a doomed romance, given as a gift by singer Michael Angelakos in 2008 and never meant to be heard by the general public. Since then they’ve released two albums of stadium-crushing pop, both topping their predecessors’ ever growing repute: 2009’s hit debut LP Manners and 2012’s darkly triumphant Gossamer. Their latest album’s success eschews the traditional pitfall of the sophomore slump, eclipsing the already impressive accomplishments of Manners.
Watching the evolution of Nick Cave is a bit like watching the evolution of man.
I’m not saying anything is definite, but statistically speaking you’re more than likely going to have an awful Valentine’s Day that will probably destroy your current relationship and also any prospects of future happines with the person you’re with.
The first time I heard and saw Liz Harris perform under her Grouper moniker was in 2009, when she opened for Animal Collective after their meteoric rise to relative fame with Merriweather Post Pavilion. The crowd, a robust and remarkably enthused group of largely teenagers and college students, were all hot and bothered at the prospect of Animal Collective playing a presumed hour and a half rendition of “My Girls” and bobbing their heads manically until their collective necks ripped at the tendons.