Big Troubles- Drastic and Difficult at Le Poisson Rouge 1.20.10 from Brendan Toller on Vimeo.

Today is a big day for Visitation Rites. After subsisting for months on expired Trader Joe’s enchiladas, spotty café internet connections, and 99 cent dreams, we are now to ready to step it up to the major leagues of grassroots music blogdom and strike out with our own “TV on the Vimeo,” which VR-consultant and “internet personality” Jon Williams christened thusly last night. And while it may be hard to believe, we didn’t have to suffer through months of flashing Aunt Jemima and belly-fat-reduction banner ads in order to pull it off, because we took those off the site a long time ago. Actually, all we needed was a video camera, a bedroom editing lab, and my very lovable roommate Brendan Toller who, I am finding out, just so happens to be the man behind I Need that Record, a documentary on the death (and possible survival) of the independent record store featuring the likes of Thurston Moore, Ian Mackaye, Chris Frantz, Noam Chomsky, and Lenny Kaye.

Truth be told, this is not the first video collab to grace our custom CSS. Last fall, Los Angeles video artist Samantha Cornwell cooked up some serious televisual sorcery in this video for “Demondzblood” by The Lame Drivers, as part of an ongoing “open call” music video series for songs in need of a Vimeo home (more coming soon). And lo and behold: as though the universe were trying to confirm my suspicion that 2010 will be the year of the cosmic coincidence, The Lame Drivers turned out to be on the same bill as the the subject of this first VR concert video, the mighty Big Troubles.

When they materialized out of a haze of North Jersey pedal fuzz late last summer, these talented young whippersnappers threw me for a double revelation. The first was Big Troubles’ recorded sound, which I can only really liken to a long-lost Jesus and Mary Chain side project shrunk down to PlayMobil size and singing out of a tin can on the moon. The second was Big Troubles’ live sound, which, when I first caught the group at Monster Island Basement last September, was honestly the loudest and most exciting thing I had heard in three months of almost non-stop concert-hopping. Even now, these guys never fail to reconnect me with the shock of my first “wall of sound” experience, wrapping my ears around the mile-long bends on the opening track of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. As you can hear in this snippet from their set at Le Poisson Rouge last week, Big Troubles’ jangling guitar tsunamis are certainly no less infinite.

Video: Brendan Toller
Words: Emilie Friedlander

Big Troubles’ “Freudian Slips” 7 Inch is out now on Blackburn Records. Stay tuned for a forthcoming 7 inch and L.P. on Olde English Spelling Bee.

Tags: Big Troubles, Blackburn Records, Brendan Toller, I Need That Record!, Olde English Spelling Bee, Samantha Cornwell, The Lame Drivers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Sightings, Uncategorized, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.