Radiohead and the Dilemma of Delivering

By: Caroline Grand

With every great, career-changing album comes the redheaded stepchild of artistic success: the problem of setting the bar too high.  We’ve seen it happen time and again with debut albums which will forever remain the best albums (see: Is This It) or with bands who, with one sub par release, banish themselves to the realm of nostalgia-listening (looking at you, MGMT and Modest Mouse.)  Higher expectations, it seems, create greater room for disappointment.

Radiohead, with their peerless catalog of iconic and innovative albums, seems like a perfect candidate for such disappointment.  A Moon Shaped Pool, released with limited fanfare and promotion this past May, will be held to a standard wholly unlike that of any of its contemporaries.

That being said, had A Moon Shaped Pool been released by any other artist, it would immediately be hailed as their best. From the lush melody of “Daydreaming” to the arrestingly eerie “Decks Dark” and “Ful Stop,” Radiohead’s latest release demonstrates a kind of meticulous care and attention to detail rarely found in today’s ethos of immediate gratification. There is something in A Moon Shaped Pool which is elusively beautiful and difficult to define, yet not a single moment feels underdeveloped or incomplete, as evidenced in how long tracks like “Burn The Witch” and “True Love Waits” have been in the works before their final arrangement.  A Moon Shaped Pool is vulnerable and emotionally engaging without losing any intrigue in its honestly; it is a dark statement beneath a glimmering surface; it demands a second listen, and many more.

Is it Radiohead’s best album?  In light of their previous work, it’s difficult to tell.  But A Moon Shaped Pool is certainly Radiohead at their most complete and gorgeously human, and it more than meets the standards of its predecessors.  Even with a remarkable career behind them, Radiohead shows no signs of burning out or falling into irrelevance; to demand “the best” now from a band with clearly still so much creative energy, actual and potential, would be a foolish request indeed.

Experiencing the Flaming Lips at Maverick Festival 2016

"Okay hold up," says front man Wayne Coyne, halting the third song of their set at San Antonio's Maverick Festival in it's place. "The 'chop-chops' are an indication as to how the rest of the show is gonna go. Let's go again." The Flaming Lips kicked back into their famous "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1" and when the time came the audience screamed "CHOP CHOP" with such intensity that all of La Villita shook. As the band played through several songs from 'Clouds Taste Metallic', 'At War With the Mystics', and 'The Soft Bulletin', the San Antonio crowd got the real Flaming Lips experience: seemingly out of place stage props, copious amounts of confetti, a back-lit stage that transformed the band into grooving silhouettes. But in the back of everyone's minds there was something in particular, something special that they were waiting for, and that finally arrived when Coyne said "What made Bowie great is that - well, he was great - but he was also just a man." The crowd exploded. 

Wayne Coyne within the human-sized hamster ball. Photo courtesy of San Antonio Current. 

"This is Ground Control to Major Tom!" belted Wayne Coyne from the inside of his famous human-sized hamster ball floating above the San Antonio crowd gathered in La Villita on April 9th. The San Antonio audience radiated with an energy that's only ever seen when the Spurs win the Championships. A few days prior to their performance as the finale of what could be the last Maverick Festival, the Flaming Lips hinted on Twitter that they were going to pay tribute to the late David Bowie and ever since the town was a buzz and tickets were disappearing. Well the weirdos of rock did not disappoint and Bowie was well revered. 

The crowd sang along with Coyne to their much anticipated "Do You Realize??" which closed out the very long and exciting night. If this was the final Maverick Festival then it will have been one for San Antonio to look back on and remember fondly. And if Bowie was listening, I think he would agree that the festival, the music, and the people really made the grade. 

Behind the Scenes of the KRTU Membership Drive

If you listened at KRTU during the past week, chances are you caught one of the ubiquitous Membership Drive pitches, wherein one of our hosts asked the listeners to come on board as members of KRTU 91.7FM.  No, don’t click away! This is not a blog post to convince you to become a member.

Although you definitely should, so go to join.krtu.org and become a member today!

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. But now that that’s out of the way, let me give you the behind the scenes of what happens at KRTU Christmas: the Spring Membership Drive.

The first thing that happens before the drive is that we completely relocate the KRTU broadcasting booth. That’s right. We move it all the way to (*drumroll*) upstairs, in Studio B. What this means is that the regular broadcasting desk goes offline for a week, and all the broadcasting is done from one of our other consoles, upstairs.

It might seem like a small relocation, but it’s one of the crucial elements of the drive, because it allows the hosts to broadcast mere feet away from where the staff makes and receives calls from our listeners. For a week, Studio B is transformed into a phone-a-thon station with telephones lining the walls.  

Membership Drive Volunteers circa 2005

On the other side, there’s a bunch of chairs around tables, where our community hosts sit around looking cool, while the interns try to look invisible. Allow me to clarify. The KRTU interns are talented, hardworking students, but as millennials we don’t know how to use a landline, much less speak to someone through it. However, we always show up, and we go on and call out to our current members and ask them to come on for next year. Why, you ask?

Food. Oh my god. The food.

As poorly fed, malnourished, near-starving college students (I got a little carried away there) we cannot turn away when presented with the possibility of consuming real, edible food, and one of the awesomest things about KRTU is that we are sponsored by a series of amazing community partners. And some of them happen to make foods. Every single day at the drive, we have either tacos or sandwiches or pasta or some other delicious meal from a local eatery. I wish it would never end.

But my favorite thing about the drive has to be hanging out with the staff and our community hosts. Most of the year, the staff is hard at work and the hosts are busy being on air, but during the drive, everybody gets to be in the same room, eat amazing food, and make a competition out of answering phones.

A phone is ringing across the room at KRTU circa 2007

All things considered, KRTU is a pretty great place to be, especially during the membership drive. It’s nice to work at a place that proves, year after year, that people can still come together and support a radio station that plays what nobody else plays, and in the process create a vibrant community of jazz and indie aficionados.

Become a member today at join.krtu.org

I did it again, didn’t I?

What ever Happened to The Killers?

By: Caroline Grand

Fun fact: After attending an Oasis concert at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, Brandon Flowers heard the call to become a rock star.  

While that sounds like the kind of cringe-worthy inspiration story you might hear from the drunken frontman of A Promising Local Band, Flowers actually made it happen.  After connecting with guitarist Dave Keuning and going through a series of lineup changes (including a weird but wonderful brief stint by struggling actor Owen Wilson), The Killers released their debut album Hot Fuss in 2004 to international commercial and critical acclaim.

The Killers were named The World's Best Selling New Group at the 2005 World Music Awards, the same year they won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist and were also nominated for three Grammy Awards. The band was recognized by Rolling Stone as the "best-selling new rock band of the past year" in June 2005.  “Mr. Brightside” and “Somebody Told Me” were overplayed to death while Flowers was (aptly) named both Sexiest and Best Dressed Man at the NME Awards.

So what happened?

Predictably, fame seemed to go a little to Flowers’ head. The grandiose bravado of The Killers, exemplified in the use of a gospel choir for their Coachella set, and Flowers’ widely publicized  claims of superiority in the post-punk scene set the band up for future backlash. The release of their follow-up album Sam’s Town marked the slow but steady decline of Flowers’ Oasis-fueled dream.  While Sam’s Town includes equally as over-playable hits (see: “When You Were Young”), the “gypsy-chic” album strongly divided critical opinion, earning only a scathing 2 star review in Rolling Stone magazine and selling less than one-third the amount of copies of its predecessor in the United States.  

While 2008’s Day and Age fared a little better with its introduction of New Age-y synths and feathered shoulder pads, the release of its lead single, “Human,” sparked viral confusion about the song’s lyrics (dancer or denser?) and subsequent conflicting interpretations of the song’s meaning.  In an interview with Rolling Stone, Flowers remarked in a modern feat of PR destruction that he was irritated over the confusion about the lyric and the song’s dance beat: “It's supposed to be a dance song, [the beat] goes with the chorus...If you can't put that together, you're an idiot. I just don't get why there's a confusion about it.” “Human” was so far removed from the band’s early hits that most fans had to look up whether it was really produced by the Killers, and it would later be voted “weirdest lyric of all time” in a 2014 Blinkbox survey.

On that promising note, The Killers announced that they would go on hiatus in 2010, during which Flowers released his theatrical solo album Flamingo, indicative of wunderkind persona which propelled The Killers and may have very well destroyed them.  The Killers made their formal return with the 2012 release Battle Born, but by that time, the indie/alternative scene had ceased to take notice of them, having largely moved on from The Strokes/Arctic Monkeys era, and Battle Born, like its two predecessors, failed to perform commercially and critically.  I remember briefly seeing a Battle Born poster in a Hot Topic window and shuddering.

In the classic tale of bands that peaked way too early, The Killers marked the dying gasps of its rock powerhouse with the release of a greatest hits compilation in 2013: the sure sign of a band on its sad but timely way out, to be played only during waves of extreme nostalgia.  Like all good things that refuse to die, Flowers has announced that The Killers plan on releasing new music in 2016--yet one can’t help but wonder, in the immortal words of Flowers himself:

"How did it end up like this?"

Indie Overnight and TigerTV Bring Local Bands to Live T.V.

By: Benjamin Gomez

Starting this February, KRTU and TigerTV are teaming up to bring local and regional bands to "Studio 21" - a weekly student-produced, music and pop-culture show. "Studio 21" airs on Fridays at 4 p.m. on San Antonio public access channel 98, as well as at trinity.edu/tigertv, and all shows will be available after each broadcast online at indie.krtu.org.

The collaboration aims to provide exposure to emerging acts from the San Antonio region, and produce a professional live session demo for those bands to use. The Trinity University students who produce the program will also gain real-world experience - working on one of the many aspects of production, such as mixing, producing, directing or video recording.

You can watch the very first live broadcast with The Halfways from Austin on KRTU's YouTube Channel. 

Coming Soon: KRTUesdays

This spring, KRTU Indie Overnight will be launching KRTUesdays - a new indie concert series that aims to give exposure to local and regional up-and-coming bands.

KRTUesdays is launching in partnership with The Mix, a St. Mary's institution that has recently undergone renovations.

Each concert of the series will be broadcast live on KRTU 91.7 FM, also available via the web.

Stay tuned for dates and bands!