The Fillmore Theater was filled with yarmulkes and heart-pumping beats last Thursday as Matisyahu, a Hasidic Jewish reggae singer, bounced
his way across the stage. The eclectic crowd at the sold-out show seemed to represent everyone, from religious diehards to So-Cal blonds in high heels. Matisyahu's lyrics convey his strong religious beliefs, but somehow he's able to reach a broad and diverse crowd. With his long payots swaying to each reggae beat, one might imagine they were dreads and this was a Rasta show straight from Jamaica. But isn't that what makes going to see music so great? There are no rules, just pure creativity and a smorgasbord of cultures and ideas around every bend.
Live Review: Echo and the Bunnymen, Fox Theatre, 10/22/09
Photos by David Schnur, text by Marke B.
Ian McCullough, dark and lovely
Somewhat surprisingly sprinkled with young fans, a rapturous crowd received '80s guitar-pop heroes -Echo and the Bunnymen with open arms and singalong voices at the Fox on Thursday. The two remaining Bunnymen, singer Ian McCullough and guitarist Will Sergeant, definitely still had it, recreating with ease the big sound and goth-romantic poetry that positioned the Bunnymen in a direct line from Joy Division to U2 -- even wearing more of their original influences on their sleeves, with covers of the Doors and Lou Reed and new material that reflected their admiration for Oasis.
The main attraction for this overdue valedictory tour was the inclusion of a 10+ member orchestra to recreate in full the Bunnymen's most ambitious album, 1984's Ocean Rain, which was just lovely, if the sound was a bit muddy at times. No one can resist the beauty of such tunes as "Killing Moon" -- if you were a kid when it came out, the spooky and then-unique juxtaposition of bunny drum machines, lunar jewels, strummed steel strings, and cosmic murder was mindblowing, and those shivers returned in ample waves here.
He was “the Lone Cat,” for sure. Bay Area blues-folk 12-string guitarist and vocalist Jesse Fuller went by that moniker back in the day -- he died in 1976 at 80 -- when he plied his one-man band (including his fotdella, a foot-operated hammer-and-pedal string bass of his own invention, and harmonica-kazoo-cymbals-washboard setup) on the streets of San Francisco.
The self-described “folk songster” spent years riding the rails after leaving his native Georgia, arrived in SF to work its shipyards as a wartime welder, and later opened an Oakland shoeshine parlor. He also penned blues-folk standard “San Francisco Bay Blues,” which went on to be covered by everyone from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney. Fuller certainly displays an inviting feline ease on the original version of that number on the lovingly assembled Move on Down the Line, supplemented by notes by music maven Joe Boyd and filled out with a number of tracks that aren’t on other Fuller discs in print. The songwriter’s version is the definitive ode to the city: brisk, breezy, driven by his evocative, supple drawl and bring-it-all-home kazoo solo. It’s the finale to a quirky, compelling, and essential document of a now-less-than-recognized piece of SF music history -- a part of the Southern blues tradition that carved out his own place by the Bay.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Library Catalog Music, Volumes 1-3
(Asthmatic Kitty)
By Kimberly Chun
Remember the to-do concerning the Shins’ “New Slang” on a McDonald’s commercial? Those days of outrage seem so far away now, in the throes of the continuing recession and ever-deepening music-biz woes. Licensing your sonic slang out to TV, film, and commercial endeavors has become a way of life -- and a genuine ticket to recognition for many: Chairlift, whose “Bruises” popped up on an iPod commercial, is just the latest beneficiary of that success narrative.
So perhaps one of the oddest little musical artifacts to emerge amid those fading cries of “sell-out!” is this three-part series produced by Asthmatic Kitty. Library Catalog Music looks the phenom squarely in the eye, as its promo literature queries, “Are you a major multi-national corporate conglomerate looking for quickly recognizable audio branding?” I wish. Actually, I don’t wish. But like so many others, I can use the cash, and apparently Asthmatic Kitty can, too -- though not without a certain level of integrity. These overt entries into the marketplace wouldn’t be too out of place among some of your more enticing Euro-ambient discs. Vol. 1, Music for Lubbock, 1980, dares to tug on the tails of Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas, while Vol. 2, Music for Measurements, brings the funk to imagined buddy cop flicks, and Vol. 3’s Music for Drums yearns to set the beat to sci-fi fantasies. Who dreamed these ready-made scores up? Bellevue, Wash., band Law of the Least Effort takes the credit -- led by sometime Pedro the Lion and Seldom member Casey Foubert. Quality aural wallpaper -- coming right up.
A lost gem of Atlantic, saved by the boys of Water in Oakland. The clarity and purity of Lynn's voice are rare — and don't let those adjectives fool you into thinking she's a frail flower. Here, the left-handed guitarist makes wise ballads she wrote as a teen burn as strong and steady as anything by Irma Thomas. It's all in the voice.
An amazing amount of hype and chatter accompanied Brooklyn band (and Wesleyan Mafia contingent) Amazing Baby’s first MySpace musical postings. Time to judge for yourself. I traded e-mails with Will Roan before the group's Bottom of the Hill show on Sept. 19.
SFBG: How did your new album, Rewild [(Shangrila)], come to pass?
Amazing Baby: I think that we approached the recording with equal parts professional and amateur goals. We are always learning more about ourselves, and to be honest, it's hard to really know what our intentions were at the time. I think we wanted to express aural love, beauty, heartbreak, and humor. There are people that we love, there are people that have died, and all of the emotions that fall in between. I think next time we may focus more on rhythms and melody. But for Rewild, it was mostly emotive.
SFBG: There's a very glammy/glitter rock feel to the record? Is David Bowie an influence?
AB: Well, I've always been very drawn to Bowie and his effortless power over a song. However, I also feel that his other styles, more than glam, have probably had a larger effect on our songwriting and recording. You can't deny your first loves. And I think, as a music fan, I continuously find myself going back to his music. It's really strong stuff, isn't it?
EMITTRHODES The Emmit Rhodes Recordings (1969-1973)
(Hip-O-Select)
Oh, Emitt. At your peak you were picture-perfect: thick brown hair parted down the middle, angelic face with a doll's complexion. The music business' merry-go-round has been cruel to you, but what glorious pop songs you've given us: "Live Till You Die" has been holding me together the last week or two, and it's just one of many beauties from your self-titled 1970 LP.
After 2006's somewhat tepid though promising True Magic (Geffen), Mos drops the best hip-hop album of 2009 thus far. Named after Victor Lavalle's novel, with cover art from Charles Burnett's Killer Of Sheep, this is a gem that I just can't stop playing — especially "Priority" and "No Hay Nada Mas"
Outside Lands: another take -- Pearl Jam, Tom Jones, Lucinda Williams, and more
Sean McCourt reflects on Outside Lands. For Kimberly Chun's takes, click here and here. You can find pics of the festival here and here.
Oustide Lands windmills
Midway through Pearl Jam’s headlining set on the opening night of Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, Eddie Vedder apologized for his voice not being in tip top shape, due to the strain of his band being on the road for several months. He invited the audience to help him out on several tunes, which they enthusiastically did, but that feeling of not quite firing on all cylinders set the tone for much of the rest of the festival; though many of bands on this year’s lineup were quite good, only a few really gave the impression of belonging on the large stages they were given. The crowds didn’t act like they minded all that much, however, seeming to be fine with wandering the wide expanse of the park and festival grounds, checking out various acts and sampling the wide variety of food and drink that organizers provided for this year’s outing.
Autolux kicked off the festivities on Friday, and though they were good, they didn’t seem to possess either the stage presence or the discography to perform on the main “Lands End” stage. There were probably a few thousand people there to watch the set, but on the immense landscape of the Polo Fields, it appeared to be a sparse gathering at best. Built To Spill and Silversun Pickups garnered larger audiences, generating the first tinges of genuine electricity that a festival of this stature should produce.
Gooferman
In between several of the larger acts’ sets, a small outdoor stage and a tent structure near the back end of the Polo Fields nicknamed “The Barbary” featured a variety of entertainment such as self-proclaimed “micro circus and band” Gooferman, whose bizarre clown and kabuki influenced make up and outfits perfectly matched their unique sound, a cross of rock, funk, electronic, and a host of other influences. Several women members of the troupe danced around the band on stage, and even climbed above them on the curved metal scaffolding crisscrossing overhead.
While much has been made of the Sebastien Grainger-sung, electro-disco tracks "One In A Million" and "Rapture," "Skywriter" is full of that classic, synth-slathered French house sound that so many fell in love with when they first heard Daft Punk. Some hooks here will stay lodged in your head for weeks.
You don’t get quite what you expect from the aptly titled electronic duo, PANTyRAiD. A side project of forward thinking producers Martin Folb (Marty Party -- he'll be performing this Fri/11 at 103 Harriet) and Josh Mayer (Ooah of the Glitch Mob), PANTyRAiD delves into the rich cross-sections of hip-hop, dubstep, and ambient. Although the duo was previously best known for heavy hitting remixes like “Do You” and powerhouse party mixes -- e.g. for XLR8R and Mary Anne Hobbs -- of synth knocking beats flipped over modulated crunk lyricism, their latest effort The Sauce (Marine, Ingrooves) salvages their place as solid beat conductors on the quest.
PANTyRAID, "Get the Money"
PANTyRAiD most impressively experiment with multi-tiered arrangements, changing tempo and bass tonality by way of a jazz inspired fluidity. In “Worship The Sun”, dissonant synth vamps grace chilling tribal drums and chants, building into a wobbling bass riding “hot sex on a platter” bars from Silk E. Fyne’s one hit wonder, and reemerging once more with a graceful intensity.
Sista spits some of the tightest shit over jagged hard beats with clarity, wit and grace for two minutes and forty seconds with no punches — or punches pulled. I wake up in the morning sometimes with her voice in my head and it feels good! Still dope? Yeah.
Some albums escape criticism...they just sound good. And as much as I try to pick apart Bibio's surprising breakthrough — from its heavy allegiance to Boards of Canada, J Dilla and other beat icons to its catalog of hip indie styles — I can't stop listening to it. I've played it on long drives to L.A., and I've fast-forwarded through it on quick trips to the supermarket. Perhaps what moves me about it is its humanness. When he begins to croon as "Lovers' Carvings" builds into a bright, sprightly square dance, it usually leaves a smile on my face. I'm a sucker for melody.
The title here rings all too true: 24-Carat Black is a memento of all that soul music could have been, had economic woes not killed its most ambitious tendrils. This dozen-plus ensemble's unfinished sequel to 1975's oft-sampled Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth (Stax) is just as conceptual, but more downtempo. "The Best of Good Love Gone" is Dusty in the ghetto instead of a satin Memphis boudoir. "I Want to Make Up" does a slow burn then floats off in the nighttime breeze.
With the Honeydrips, Tough Alliance, jj, and this group, the Sincerely Yours label has established itself as Sweden's chief castle of indie pop. "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" and "No Excuses" could be outtakes from Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha (Heavenly, 1991), and ain't nothing wrong with that.
Tweaker pop from Denver's Travis Egedy, this crystal cathedral of sound will have you trying out '80s new romantic dances in its prismatic mirrors. Industrial-tinged but quite melodic, it creates panicky backing vox from split-second samples of girl pop — Kylie Minogue, is that you, ABBA, and Stevie Nicks trapped Poltergeist-like in "Goth Star"'s spectral tunnel? — while invoking boys in makeup.
A sublime entanglement of negative space, lithesome riffs, and raw sentiment delivered by mush-mouthed lead vocalists Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sims, this xx-cellent debut by the young rock quartet gleams the post-everything cube. Tracks "Basic Space," "Islands," and "Crystallized" could be the anthems of a less-virtual, more physical generation of emotional wonderers -- even as the instrumentation and weird engagement-through-detachment mood hearkens back to the early New Order. (Justin Timberlake and Tracy and the Plastics are listed as influences).
Outside Lands: Mighty M.I.A., pale Dead Weather, peppy Matt and Kim, and more
M.I.A. All photos by Kimberly Chun.
By Kimberly Chun
Outside Lands -- here and now gone. A final dispatch from the dusty, green groves.
Sunday, Aug. 30
Keeping your expectations low is key to smorgasbord fests. Still, I expected a sparser crowd today, the day of the canceled Beastie Boys appearance due to Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis, and those expectations were fulfilled. There was definitely less of a mob today: not quite as many specially propped-up cleavages and fewer well-heeled, supertanned oldsters (acolytes of George Hamilton?) than yesterday. What can you say? Dave Matthews definitely skewed the demographic toward the middle-aged, if not outright white-haired.
I don’t know how gramps and grammy would have felt about the fence-jumpers, but they were definitely hopping today as well: I spied about a dozen crash over the fence en masse near the Presidio stage mid-afternoon to the sound of congratulatory whoops from bystanders on the inside. Outside a few agile types peered in at the Sutro stage from the trees on the other side of the barrier. Low-key in comparison to last year’s gang fence-vaulting.
Outside Lands: Inside with Deerhunter, Street Sweeper Social Club, Mastodon, and more
Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder. All photos, except where noted, by el fotografo clandestino.
By Kimberly Chun
O Outside Lands - how sprawling thou art. So many acts in the dusty, leafy grounds of Golden Gate Park, so many goings-on at night at the Independent and Rickshaw Stop. A few dispatches, then, from the periphery and about.
Who likes to mix Captain Beefheart blues-skronk cacophony and ADD-driven, jazzy razzle-dazzle, with a strong dollop of Deerhoofian experimentation on the side? Chicago’s Bird Names, that’s who -- say their name. Rag-tag and rough-edged, this crazy quilt of a quartet swaps instruments live and in the studio -- and swaps musical ideas in and out just as confidently and punkily. It's as if the members of Bird Names all busily moonlight as carnies at madcap dadaist carnival, and their night job has merrily bled over into their music. Teetering guitar lines tumble against manic tambourine, fading into a dazed middle distance, on “Scandinavia,” and out-folk woodwinds peal against a backdrop of forest-critter chimes and child-like rhymes on “Natural Weeks,” both off the band’s fifth full-length, Sings the Browns. England’s Upset the Rhythm, a big supporter of Bay Area underground combos, got behind the group’s Brown album. And with such cock-eyed yet dulcet paeans to altered states as “Oh, Narcotopic Fantasy,” Bird Names manage to maintain a level of pleasing, if swampily documented, subversion.
Too eclectic for its own good? Not Faust. The combo fully deserves that wretchedly overused “legendary” label: its relatively new full-length, C’est Com… Com… Complique -- is all that and then some, meaning complicated in the most meatily excellent, endearingly awkward way. The band has been around almost four decades, but original members Jean-Herve Peron and Werner Diermaier -- working with Amaury Cambuzat of French post-rockers Ulan Bator -- still put together sounds with a child’s mind, as if they were starting all over from scratch. Never mind that Faust sold 100,000 copies of their third album, The Faust Tapes (Virgin), way back in the day.
This latest Dadaist document starts with the heavy breathing and shattered guitar of “Kundalini Tremolos” and then stops, starts, pauses for a pastoral reverie or two (with and without throat singing), and then squeaks and squeals with bugle peals to an inspired, absurdist close. The strategy, or lack thereof, runs counter to the more popular/familiar beatific motorik musings of, say, Neu!, and even diehard Faust heads are likely to shrug at the group’s attempt at throwaway, goofball dub, mixed up with “derrieres” cries (“En Veux-Tu Des Effets, En Voila”). But otherwise, Complique bears repeated listens -- ‘cause it’s devilish fun.
Live Shots: Indigo Girls connect at the Fillmore 7/21
Text and photos by Ariel Soto
There something incredibly nostalgic about the Indigo Girls. When I hear them I'm transported straight back to the freshman dorm room that I shared with my roomie Melbell, which was affectionately called the hippie-love room by the rest of our floor. There was a constant soundtrack of Indigo Girls and Joni Mitchell blasting from our speakers, and when we finally got to see the Indigo Girls live on campus, my girlfriends and I all braided our hair and donned colorful floral scarves around our waists.
I’m bumping the Latin Project’s second full length record, Musica De La Noche, in my headphones right now. The signature Latin-Electronica blended sound is the brainchild of British producers, Jez Colin and Matt Cooper, who now call Los Angeles home. Listening to the music transports me to the surreal place of one of those Hollywood film sequences where the slick talker dude walks into the smoky (not cigarette smokey, but fog-machine smokey) disco ball club where epileptic lights flash all over the sweaty dance floor. All of a sudden, a sultry red light shines on a sexy maroon lipped lady, and the eyes of our two protagonists lock in a moment of tidal crashing bass. Magnetism.
For this release, the Latin Project produce a finely polished fusion of house, broken beat, Afro-beat inspired polyrhythms, Latin grooves and vibes, with an occasional sprinkle of buttered hip-hop lyricism. The bass hits hard in that clean type of way and the jazzy horn sections uplift the mood, crafting easy going, dance friendly grooves. Some of the remixes venture into more experimental electronic territory, hinting towards a fresh Latin sound with coarser curves and layered intricacy. But most of the night music lives comfortably in a world without ghosts or werewolves or any other eerie spirits lurking around the corner, where your problems disappear in the heat of dance floor and your feet take you away.
Fresh for the heat of the summer, Brooklyn based beatsmith Nickodemus -- seasoned selector for the acclaimed Turntables on the Hudson party -- drops a gem on us. In his inspired sophomore effort, Sun People (ESL Music), Nickodemus delivers a groove pummeling sound collage that expands on the cosmopolitan spirit fundamental to the Afrobeat tradition. He manages to inform Afrobeat’s free-formed jazz sensibility and funkified polyrhythmic arrangements with raw elements of celebratory music from around the world. Swaying jazz horns give way to uplifting blasts of air from Latin American and Balkan brass sections that loosen up the heavy hitting, grounding percussion. This strategy allows the drums to thrust in endless hypnotics without feeling too claustrophobic, a subtle formula for creating holistically sanguine dance grooves. And the fusion feels organic, perhaps due to the lively multinational character and experimental ethos at the very heart of Afrobeat, allowing the music's dynamic nature to morph, mutate, and evolve in provocative directions.
Collaborations bless nearly every track on the record, giving Sun People an organic, outernational party flavor. Quantic helps to arrange the infectious Latin number , “La Lluvia”, where Richard Shepherd croons joyful bars over congas and drums, wistful vibes, and swaying horn riffs. On “Brookarest”, the name tells it all; New York’s multicultural sound, armed with a drum machine and transformer effects, meets Romania’s hypnotic vocals and boastful, wedding brass band. All the influences converge in “N’Dini”, a monster jam bookending the album (“Sun People” on the jump), simultaneously taking on the cyclic role as closing and opening. The joint is impressively crafted out of, well, the nearly infinite histories bounded within the album; Afro-latin rhythms, dub percussion, blaring Gypsy horns, and electronic inspired bass. Such cross sectioned travels across the globe from Columbia to Guinea to Hungary and everywhere in-between might seem crass in the hands of a less skilled producer, but Nickodemus effortlessly pulls all the pieces together in a simple, innocent cry of joy. The coherent element might just have something to do with the sun, that giant ball of heat and energy, that ultimate source of life, shining above every single one of us on terre nostre. This ain’t world music anymore. Time to get down to sun music my people!
Show Diary: Neko Case/Jason Lytle, Peaches, Juan McLean/the Field, Telepathe, Handsome Furs, Au Revoir Simone
Juan, two, three: the Juan Maclean. Photo by Troy Bayless.
By Kimberly Chun
Impressionistic sketches, hazy watercolor memories of the way I listened last week, before the veil of forgetfulness falls.
Dang, I wish I had a proper camera in hand to get my shutterbug on at Peaches. The lady wasn't going to let a little vault fire get in the way of her Grand Ballroom performance on June 5: she remains one of the most riveting performers to come out of electroclash on a sheer show-womanship level, and now that she has her live band, the Herms, complete with a leggy, black corseted blond guitar player who obligingly shimmies along to the boss lady's "Shake your tits, shake your dick," she's pretty unstoppable. Essentially - no lie - everyone in the room could not tear their eyes away from Peaches' ever-shifting spectacle, even if Vault Fire II broke out in the next room.
One-man UK opener Drums of Death made me consider suicide, but Peaches made up for it with a bout of crowd-surfing, a romp at the outer edge of the balcony, a slew of impressive costume changes (she poked fun at herself by coming out onstage in a robe at one point), and plenty of brain-teasing visuals, including a video-projected duet with Shunda K of Yo Majesty for "Billionaire" and a dance with super-shaggy Cousin-Its to the tune of "Talk to Me."
The next night, June 6, saw Stockholm's Axel Willner, otherwise known as the Field, hunkered down behind the decks at Mezzanine, opening for the Juan Maclean. Love the dreamy new long-player, though the show drew more from a minimalist techno vein, with assists from Dan Enqvist and Andreas Soderstrom. Still, it was mesmerizing - especially accompanied by video art that spliced images of shipping containers stacks with book piles. I stayed for just a dab of the Juan Maclean, who rocked the Human League-y robotic-pop vibe with mucho energy. Kudos to those who can pull off a nice, big Romulan shoulder pad - I'm scouring the thrift stores for mine soon. The kids were dancing as I departed amid complaints of pop monotony from companion Prof. Fluffy.
You may be worn out by indie dance acts that have "glass" in their name -- as well as those with "crystal," "soundsystem," and any kind of cute furry animal -- but the UK's The Glass have just released a summer anthem, about dancing outside in summer, that deserves to be as big as I hope it will be. The video is bananas good as well.
The Glass, "Wanna Be Dancin'"
Could that buried "It Takes Two" sample in the chorus be any more delicious? There's a killer mix of this track by one of my favorite, unfortunately overlooked, bands of 2k8, Clubfeet -- available at Beatport. I recommend downloading it and blissing out in the park, toute suite
Big Business: an irresistible concoction of infectious, heavy, and bizarre. Drummer Coady Willis and bassist/singer Jared Warren are joined by guitarist Toshi Kasai. The band tempers its sludgier excesses with dynamic and compositional progress, plus plenty of weirdo headbanger hooks.
Trent and co. rock Shoreline with a pared-down, slightly steampunk light show.
It's been several days since the phenomenal Nine Inch Nails/Jane's Addiction (NINJA! How clever!) show at Shoreline, and I've been meditating on how to write about it. As I've scoured the interwebs in the days before and after the show, I've been struck by the conflicting reviews of this and previous shows. Well, actually, as far as I can tell, the reviews go like this: Nine Inch Nails should've headlined; or Jane's Addiction should've headlined; orthe whole show was perfect and frikkin' awesome. The first two come from reviewers; the last from every single one of my Facebook friends who saw the show, either in L.A. or Mountain View. As for me, I was impressed with Nine Inch Nails, but blown away by Jane's Addiction. My roommate, on the other hand, felt the exact opposite. I began to wonder, what makes all this difference? My conclusion? Context.
I first started listening to Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction during the delicate period between junior high and high school. I was in transition from A-student/perfectionist/goodie-two-shoes to angsty, cigarette-smoking school skipper, and still several years away from a (very helpful) prescription for anti-depressants. The bands appealed to me in different ways: Nine Inch Nails for its dark power, driving, almost danceable beats, and obvious pain; Jane's Addiction for its alternating melodic melancholy and ethereal whimsy. But both became musical totems of that time in my life - and both followed me through first love and heartbreak, first sex and first orgasm (which, of course, happened separately), losing my dad, leaving for college, more love, more heartbreak. When I entered an eating disorder hospital at age 22 (okay, so the anti-depressants didn't work that well), I sometimes sang lyrics from Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile in the shower. As I grew and changed, so did my relationship with NIN and JA, but both remained powerfully important parts of my personal soundtrack. Through the years, I've seen Nine Inch Nails perform several times: with my friend Kris during the Downward Spiral tour, when NIN opened for David Bowie; with a friend in Portland and then, the next night, with a recently ex-ed boyfriend, on The Fragile tour; with a soon-to-be ex at Coachella. As for Jane's Addiction, the closest I'd gotten to seeing them (having missed their Lollapalooza tour with Nine Inch Nails by about a year) was a short Porno for Pyros set at a radio station-sponsored multi-concert and a brief experience watching Perry Farrell as a DJ.
When someone is a master of their art, it means they can make the simplest things genius. Think of Alice Waters: she's one of the most famous chefs in the world and her dishes are based on totally minimal ingredients. B.B. King (http://www.bbking.com/) is the master of blues guitar. On May 21, King played to an ecstatic audience at the Fillmore Theater. King plays like no other musician I've ever seen, lingering on the silences, or playing only one exquisite note that lasts for over a minute and sounds like an orchestra of complexity. King is also an incredible storyteller, relating tales about his life as an 83 year old guitarist traveling the world to play music and even about discovering Viagra, with constant accompaniment from his band to gives his stories even more umph. He also has quite an appreciation for all the ladies and had everyone sing "You are my sunshine" followed by a required kiss between any lovers in the audience. The artist made sure the house lights were raised ... he just loved watching the ladies get smooched! King is beyond comfortable and charismatic on stage, and with over 15,000 concerts under his belt, I'm sure this master has quite a few more tunes to share with many more audiences around the world.
The U.S. expat Mr. Jones sews up album of the year honors by track one, after jogging barefoot through hell to conclude "Stains are my nationality." As kickoffs go, it's as dramatic as the The Queen is Dead's title track — apt, since he name-checks Morrissey. From there, Chatterton traverses Cure-like goth, Marley Marl-ready rap, contemporary Euro techno ... and Fleetwood Mac? "The Cockpit" is a Cabaret Voltaire-meets-Giorgio Moroder minimal epic from the perspective of a plane crash's ungrateful sole survivor. The final lines of "Pompadour" are genius.
My favorite Jan Jelinek endeavor since 2005's Kosmischer Pitch (~scape), which inspired this 200 GB "live" collaboration. It all grows wonderfully spooky with "Great Art Where You Least Expect It" and "Anyone Care for a Drink?" Yes, Groupshow has a way with a song title. The overall conceit's as strong as Jelinek's discovery of Ursula Bogner, though not as labored.
Live Shots: Boy in Static celebrates sweet suspicion
Text and photos by Ariel Soto. Read Marke B.'s take on Boy in Static's single "Young San Francisco" here
Alexander Chen
Newish to the San Francisco music scene, Boy in Static already has a fledgling following. Only one of the duo could make it, but Bottom of the Hill on Wednesday, May 6, Alexander Chen used everything from a violin, ankle bells and a toy piano to play pieces that expressed both joy and melancholy.
Live review: Kreator and Exodus deliver the quality bangover
By LC Mason
Kreator at a German fest earlier this year
Quality bangover: the gloriously painful aftermath that results after a night of heavy headbanging to brutal bass drum runs and diabolic guitar solos, characterized by roaring tinnitus, aching neck muscles, bruises and scrapes from slamming and stomping into others, as well as stiff hands from gratuitous handing and devil horn-throwing.
This was my condition when I woke up the next morning, ringing ears and all, after witnessing the merciless onslaught of the Kreator and Exodus show at Slim’s on Tuesday, April 28. Except I wasn’t brave enough to enter the roiling whirlpool of 200-pound man-bodies, because a lot more than bruises and scrapes would have gone down, especially as Kreator vocalist-guitarist Mille Petrozza repeatedly and ravenously commanded the audience to “kill each other in the mosh pit.”
In a rhapsodic homecoming performance that surely sated the entire pantheon of thrash metal gods, San Francisco’s legendary sons Exodus played faster and harder than any band half their age and challenged their fans, both young and old, to act accordingly.
"The music on this CD is fully 100 percent Analog — NO COMPUTER BULLSHIT PROGRAMS." With this liner note proclamation, Detroit's Omar S makes a strong case that, here in the 21st century, analog is the new acoustic when it comes to authenticity. His contribution to the Fabric mix series is all-original, just like Ricardo Villalobos'. Would it be sacrilege to say that, save for a wack vocal two, it smokes the Villalobos? Motor City techno still rolls.
The debut full-length from the Portland, Ore., ear-splitters is at least 80 percent familiar to 'Fang fiends who own the band's EPs. No matter: tracks like "Bird on Fire" and "Prehistoric Dog" are blistering rock 'n' metal jams that never get old.
"Fuck macarena, we sun dance on that ass." Absolutely digging the breezy flow, witty U-turns, and stellar executive production by Big Dan on the Oakland rap quartet's new release (pronounced "brown buffalo" if you didn't know). The Jay-Z-like undertow brings some lush instrumentation and vibrant, retro-feel samplescapes into the mix, but these Latin lowdowners aren't afraid to screw around with some electro-wacky nintendo samples ("Big Sir") and even some Swisher-tips to hyphy. Best of all, though they ride hard on Chicano culture props and a dash of welcome positivity and humor, the exhilaratingly versatile skills of Giant, Jacinto, Somos One, and Big Dan launch this one out of the identity-rap rut into the "that shit's smokin'" stratosphere. The disc is plainly a labor of love; live they should be something else. The new album officially drops on 5/5 (Cinco de Mayo, natch) -- details about this weekend's big release party below.
BRWN BFLO, "The Reappearance" sampler
BRWN BFLO
Album release party
Sat/2, 9pm, $8/$13
The Uptown
1928 Telegraph Ave www.uptownnightclub.com
The Norway-to-our-Bay connection is strong in this group, which bridges Bergen and San Francisco. No cosmic disco, though: Simone Rubi plays chanteuse over pop arrangements. The result never reaches the Cardigans' sublimity, but it matches the warmth of Lois and Marine Girls.
Throbbing Gristle blur the lines at the Regency Ballroom, 4/23. Photos by Morlock E.
It’s a veritable rogue’s gallery at the Regency Ballroom on April 23, every single statesperson of the Bay Area underground having emerged from their respective lairs for Throbbing Gristle, the first, the foremost industrial noise band come back to destroy the universe, one eardrum at a time. The last time I saw such a profusion of familiar faces was, well, last week at Leonard Cohen. And just like at Leonard Cohen, the faces around me bear expressions that are expectant, electric, slightly starstruck. Unlike Leonard Cohen though, the band launches first into a sweet little ditty penned in tribute to the Moors Murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, “Very Friendly”.
Genesis P-Orridge, hand out
“Could you imagine what might have happened if Myra Hindley and Ian Brady had met me and Cosey back than?” quips Genesis P-orridge, who wears the role of flamboyant frontperson like a comfortable pair of bright pink polka-dotted stockings. An array of “greatest hits” follows: “Persuasion”, “Something Came Over Me”, the infinitely creepy “Hamburger Lady”. The set may verge on this side of predictable, but honestly, these are the songs we all want to hear.
The venue lights stay on, loud; the sound system cranked, loud; Genesis P-orridge channeling Marianne Faithfull in a bright orange Stevie Nicks tunic, loud. More “disciplined” than dangerous, the evenly rhythmic computer-generated beats smack just as much of Coil as chaos unleashed. Still, at certain points in the evening, the relentless throb threatens to dislodge both my intestines and my equilibrium. “If I stand with my legs apart I get an erection,” I hear someone mutter. And ultimately, that’s the crux of this whole experience, this sonic onslaught. Industrial at its hard core is precisely the music of solitary erections, the music of intestinal distress, the music of bondage games, vertigo, and boots of shiny leather (just like Cosey’s). That said, all those iMacs onstage? Neither sexy nor disturbed. The blue-screened sea of iPhone photogs below me? Ditto. The price of progress, I suppose, disturbance demystified.
The Balky Mule rides to brilliance on rickety romance
By Todd Lavoie
THE BALKY MULE
The Length Of The Rail
(Fat Cat)
Stubborn? Who's stubborn? Don't be thrown by the Balky Mule name -- Sam Jones might have selected his pseudonym in honor of an unyielding beast of burden, but his newest release is quite an amiable fellow, actually. The formerly Bristol, England-based musician (known for his stints in Flying Saucer Attack, The Third Eye Foundation, Movietone, and Crescent) relocated to Melbourne, Australia and focused on crafting wobbly-footed D.I.Y. pop and alluring folk/electronica collisions. In spite of a resume flush with hazy spin-drifts of guitar feedback and creeping atmosphere, Jones' Balky Mule project is a considerably more playful affair; The Length Of The Rail is a bubbling, bleeping romp of toy-shop psychedelia and likable shy-boy vocals. On this sophomore release -- though best of luck to you in finding its predecessor, as it appears to have been a limited-run and self-issued -- the English ex-pat clearly seems to be having a grand ol' time, picking up every instrument in sight and banging upon every available surface in pursuit of finding the right combination of curious ping-pings and plunkety-plunks.
Still, the disc is very much a bedroom creation, and one can almost imagine Jones skipping and grinning from behind the safety of his teetering piles of instruments; behind that wall is a bashful, boyish warble, pitched somewhere between Robert Wyatt and a more lucid version of Syd Barrett. It's a thin, sweet, incredibly vulnerable tenor -- perhaps not always perfectly-pitched, but channeled wisely for tremendous emotional impact. Set against sputtering electronics and delicate guitar textures, Jones' innocent rambles trigger both the sad sighs of nostalgia and the cheerier heart-flutters of childhood memories.
I've been living with SF dub stalwart Kush Arora's new release Dread Bass Chronicles in my headphones for a week now -- partly out of addiction to its golden production and throbbing bass (this shit will truly bang the dancefloor), but also because it's given me a lot to think about. Kush is part of the Surya Dub collective, which has become a Bay classic by melding bhangra raveups with dupstep wigouts at its monthly parties at Club Six. A couple years ago, Surya started throwing around the phrase "dread bass" to describe its direction -- more aggressive, more dancehall-oriented, less electronically psychedelic than other "worldly dubstep" nights -- and here we have the most definitive statement of dread bass to date. (OK, OK, dread bass was also a miniature jungle movement in the early '90s, but nevermind that.)
Suitably, that statement comes from Surya's most audio-aggressive member, who claims death metal and punk among his early influences, and who told the Guardian's Tomas Palermo last year that he believes his family's roots in the often-volatile Punjab region between India and Pakistan breathe through his music. "That's why I like bhangra. It has an element of aggression and sadness," he said.
In this, Kush's seventh release, however, most bhangra references are almost completely subsumed into ornate background decorations to the 11 tracks' insistently energetic thudding and boasting. Yes, there are some bubbling tablas and burbling, looped flutes -- but it's Kush's other Bay nightlife association, with Sunday night dub and dancehall mainstay Dub Mission, that's more telling here.
Morrissey may have crapped out of his stint at the Paramount, Belle and Sebastian are probably off looking for 20 more band members -- and whither the classic Bluebells, I ask you?
But at least on this overcast break from yesterday's heatwave we have the 13-year-old and much overlooked Scottish popsters Camera Obscura -- no, not this camera obscura, although the music has the same ethereal shimmer -- to keep us melancholically sunny with their new, lushly orchestrated My Maudlin Career (4AD). Somehow the 11 slightly countrified gems on this release seem like the ones that got away from both Neko Case and Rough Trade ...
Camera Obscura, "French Navy"
Bonus! Bluebells (Hey, I'm in the mood for jangly Scottish maudlin today)
The Bluebells, "I'm Falling" (much better sound quality here)
What do you know? The singers look quite a bit alike ....
Two recent releases, both based on the Bay by Bay favorites. The first, "Young San Francisco" by SF's Boy in Static, aka Alexander Chen and Kenji Ross, from their new album, Candy Cigarette (Fake Four Inc & Circle Into Square) is way too cute -- check out their new "East Bay to Back Bay" XLR8R podcast mix for a great listen to some more new, slightly twee West Coast indie pop (loving "To the Sea" by Portland's Mint Julep).
Boy in Static, "Young San Francisco"
The second recent track focusing on the Bay is by SF hip-hop stalwart Kero One, "Welcome to the Bay," off his sophomore disc, Early Believers (Plug Label). I really wanted to like this one more -- I've been a fan for a while, and Kero's def got the chops, working with everyone from Talib Kweli to Mark Farina -- but it seemed a tad too polished for me, despite the nice groove. Still, it's a breezy listen for a steamy day. From what I've heard of Early Believers it'll be a perfect summer BBQ collection.
Kero One, "Welcome to the Bay"
Something both of these songs have in common is a young Asian American perspective on the homebase. Kero's is especially poignant, talking about why his parents came here at a time when "words like 'chink' were teachable." Really feeling the latitude of historical perceptions coming forth in two distinct tunes.
Who cares about cherries in the snow — Cherry is in the air. I'm talking Don Cherry, whose spirit is casting new spells via mysterious vinyl reissues, renewed interest in Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 Holy Mountain — check Matt Borruso's new art show at [2nd floor projects] — and this proto-world music collabo, a reissue from 1982 taken from a one-day recording session in 1978, with tablas great Khan.
Handsome Furs find a chilled passion amid airports, hotel rooms in 'Face Control'
HANDSOME FURS
Face Control
(Sub Pop)
By Kimberly Chun
Suicide-al synths haunt Handsome Furs’ Face Control like a spectral presence, humming almost inaudibly in the background of empty airport lounges, digital fingerprints barely visible in the tour snaps of cigarette burn holes and morning-afters. That sound is one way to map the sleek surfaces of this recording by Dan Boeckner, who also runs with the Wolf Parade pack, and wife Alexei Perry -- the inevitable sophomore disc derived from band-related travels judging from song titles like “Passport Kontrol” and “Legal Tender.”
Is the New Order-inspired “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” about Handsome Furs’ rider? Does an album about touring indicate a bankruptsy of ideas? Perhaps, but Handsome Furs make the best of it, like smart gypsies rolling with each throw of the dice. Swiftly forged and just as quickly dissembled alliances, jet-lagged confusion, overly chilled rooms and relations, and that ever-motoring-forth motorik beat are the duo’s currency here. Cynicism and paranoia -- and the idea of face control among certain strangers amid possible danger, as well as the different faces one presents onstage, on blog, on Facebook -- pervade the not-so-light-hearted Bo Diddley bop of “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” Matters veer toward the Kills’ side of the torrid-twosome equation on, for instance, the muddily electric “Evangeline.”
Text and photos by Ariel Soto. Devendra Banhart performs again Thu/16 at Yoshi's SF
"You're a sexy beast!" someone shouted from the crowd, as Devendra Banhart made his way onto the stage of the Independent to a sold out show, Tuesday, April 14th. After the openers, The Healing Curse, left the stage, Devendra started with an acoustic set and then later was joined by his band, serenading his fans with songs of about sweet little birds, wild wolves, and Latin love.
Two quick takes on Junior Boys, who perform tomorrow with Max Tundra at Bimbo's (Thu/16, 7 p.m., $18. Bimbo's 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. www.bimbos365club.com)
Junior Boys
Begone Dull Care
(Domino)
Johnny Ray Huston:
The knives are out at least a little for the critics' darling duo, and to be fair, this third full-length falters a bit in following the breakthrough of 2007's So This is Goodbye. But "Work" might be Junior Boys' best composition, and "Sneak a Picture" is simply sweet. A reward for those who care enough to dig: the title and lyrics braid through the life and work of Canadian animator Norman McLaren.
Live Shots: Yonder Mountain String Band at the Fillmore, 4/10
Text and photos by Ariel Soto
Yonder Mountain String Band has serious groupies. I mean really hardcore groupies. I talked to several String Band fans in the audience before the show. For one person it was his 36th time seeing Yonder Mountain and he has plans to follow the band through California and then up to Oregon for their tour. There was another woman in the audience who said she saw them at least 70 times ... how is that even possible? By then I was excited for the show to get started -- who were these string strummers? Once the band made its way to the stage the Fillmore was thoroughly saturated with sweet smelling smoke, feet were stomping, and hippy skirts were twirling as the folksy, bluegrass notes weaved their way between the band's eager, dare I say, obsessed, devotees.
It took me too long to realize all my favorite tracks on 1972's classic Clube de Esquina are written by Lô. The cover of Lô's debut album is perfection, and I am completely in love with Nuvem Cigana's "A força do vento," "Uma canção," "Viver viver," and O vento não me levou."
What do you know about Lô? I'd love to read more perspectives about him and his music. He releases recordings at roughly the same pace as Scott Walker. That alone is enough to intrigue me in an era of talking loud and saying nothing, but the tunes are terrific and his voice has a true sweetness to it.
Bosque Brown rides a haunting river through 'Baby'
By Todd Lavoie
BOSQUE BROWN
Baby
(Burnt Toast Vinyl)
One should be easily forgiven for thinking that Bosque Brown is the effort of one person, recorded under a group-name alias, a la Cat Power/Chan Marshall -- vocalist/songwriter Mara Lee Miller is such a dynamic presence on its just-released disc Baby that it isn't too tough to imagine everything coming from a single creative force. In reality, the Denton, Texas spinetinglers are a sextet, named for the Bosque River which runs through town; not sure about the “Brown” part, other than the color choice connotes an earthiness reflective of their rustic Americana bent. Miller's haunting visions -- funneled through an alluringly dusty twang and slow-drawled delivery -- are singular enough to separate the band from the ever-swelling masses of No Depression devotees, but her partners' careful construction of sighing backdrops and moody undercurrents not only testifies to their strength as an ensemble, but also adds more than a few exclamation points to their must-hear status.
There is something in the tense hushes and quiet understatement creaking away in the background which brings to mind a more melancholic Hem, or perhaps even a nervier Cowboy Junkies, circa The Trinity Session (1988, RCA). It also wouldn't take too much of a leap in imagination to consider Baby a spiritual cousin to Cat Power's immaculately restrained Moon Pix (1998, Matador). As you might have figured from the aforementioned reference points, there are shiver-inducing moments a-plenty here.
Call it no wave, noise, avant-skrock, or simply the harsh, grinding sound of the daughters of Mars and DNA writhing on their guitar necks and drum sticks beneath the light of a fiercely perturbed Venus. Though it might be less than visible on club bills of late, the underground of women testing the limits of dissonance never quite died, especially in the Bay where 16 Bitch Pileup, T.I.T.S., and Zeek Sheck have staked their ear-wrenching claim in a scene that can be as boy-heavy as any Mastodon show. Though the field has always been varied in its aural strategies, more contemplative, though no less challenging, music-makers like Grouper and Inca Ore - both with ties to these shores - have risen to the fore these days, thanks to last year’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (Type) and Birthday of Bless You (Not Not Fun). Perhaps everyone - iconoclasts included - has toned themselves down for hard times, reserving judgement and preserving rage in anticipation of big-time change.
Brooklyn twosome drummer-vocalist Andrya Ambro and guitarist-vocalist Sarah Register, otherwise known as Talk Normal, do have their meditative moments, bent beneath Buddha Machine-y piano notes and sawed-at strings on the Secret Cog EP’s last track, “Rest With Me” until the drone dissolves into fragments of melody then miniature surges of glittered noise. But otherwise Ambro and Register embrace an aggro approach, issuing high-pitched squeals, horn peals, and lumbering counter rhythms on “Grinnin’ in Your Face,” which evoke not only Teenage Jesus and the Jerks but Pussy Galore and later NYC noise-mongers as well as Amphetamine Reptile rageaholics. Talk Normal, what’s normal?
Don't fear Bonnie "Prince" Billy - 'Beware' marks his most accessible effort to date
BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY
Beware
(Drag City)
After multiple career tangents, name changes, and rambles hither and yon, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, ne Will Oldham, appears to have finally arrived. The accolades are pouring in from NPR to small-town daily newspapers -- a marvel when one considers the fact that the Louisville, Ky., post-punk scene that Oldham sprang from was so roundly ignored during its most vital years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when Squirrel Bait, Slint, and later Oldham and brothers Ned and Paul performed as Palace (Brothers/Songs/Music).
The most accessible, clean, and least eccentric recording to date from Oldham, Beware might be considered the recording in which the songwriter assumes his rightful place in the current rock canon as the music-maker who prefigured the so-called freak/out-folk scene and the enabler and encourager of such talents as Joanna Newsom and Dawn McCarthy.
This time, his roving sensibility finds its soothingly smooth fit with help from Josh Abrams of Town and Country, Emmett Kelly of Cairo Gang, Akita Youssefi, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Rob Mazurek of Isotope 217, and renowned pedal steel session player Greg Leisz, among others - likely his most accomplished set of contributors to date. Still, despite Beware’s full-bodied, country-soul sound, I feel almost nostalgic for the humanizing glitchy folk Palace and early Bonnie “Prince” Billy was known for - perhaps that’s just my indie rock values rearing their scruffy heads.
Well, great gosh-a-goddamn, what a sweet surprise: two weeks ago, I'd never even heard of Austin-based soul-whuppers Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, and now here I am, once again, swervin' and stompin' away to their major-label debut for the millionth time. As far as brassy, blazing tear-'em-up and tear-'em-on-down soulful sonic bad-assery is concerned, this high-octane octet has the genuine know-how: gritty and greasy garage rock meets old-school Wilson Pickett/Otis Redding-style vein-popping r&b, packed into a lean and hungry thirty-minute roar.
With its quick-and-to-the-point playing time and unfussy, straight-to-tape production (courtesy of Spoon's Jim Eno), Tell 'Em What Your Name Is! could probably be easily mistaken for a lost treasure from the late Sixties/early Seventies--- and that's exactly the whole idea, judging from Lewis' obvious adoration for the Pickett/Redding era. Still, with the band frequently playing like their hair's on fire -- charging and crashing and running gleefully into the red -- these folks at times remind me of Texan spiritual cousins to The Dirtbombs and The Bellrays, two contemporaries also serving up swaggering minglings of soul and garage sounds. Live, I imagine they must be riveting--- we'll get a chance to catch them in the Bay Area at Slim's on May 16.
Black Joe Lewis, "Sugarfoot"
A look-see of the band's MySpace will steer you right to the sources of the disc's raw-and-ready firepower. The members cite James Brown, Hound Dog Taylor, and Rocket From The Tombs as influences, for example. They all make sense, too: Lewis' full-throated shout definitely hoots a potent analog to Brown's get-on-the-good-foot, and his formidable backing band the Honeybears are deserving of all the JB's comparisons they get.
SXSW: Petering out with PJ Harvey, AIDS Wolf, Moriarty, Sons of Albion, and more
By the light of the moon: PJ Harvey and John Parrish at Stubb's.
South by Southwest peters out with... Peter, Bjorn and John. Actually, not really - I dig those Scandinavian whistle-bait popsters and they were playing multiple shows - but there were other less familiar artists and rare diversions to seek out on Saturday, March 21, in Austin, Texas.
The sweet 'n' sunny Saturday morn started with slowly with some quality, low-price thrifting at Texas Thrift Store (Joanna Newsom and folk-psych gals would have appreciated the dusty rose, homemade patchwork vest and nautilus-shell purse) and a visit to western wear superstore Shepler's, both off I-35. Then off to the Convention Center - which, by the end of the week during each SXSW, starts to seem a little like home (that is, if home was strewn with fat bundles of The Austin Chronicle and free bottles of Fuze green tea). There, Neil Young's famed manager Elliott Roberts and his documentarian Larry Johnson talked up Young's forthcoming series of box sets, starting with Neil Young Archives Volume 1 (1963-1972), on BluRay, DVD, and CD. Pretty amazing stuff - the BluRay edition will offer interactive components that will allow Young and company to offer up new photos, music, and film when they become available (one example, Robert said, are the Mynah Birds recordings made by Young and Rick James, which aren't the now-locked box set - they just managed to license the tracks from Motown so when they're available the BluRay owners will be notified and can likely download them directly).
SXSW: Quick fixes with Flower Travellin' Band, Fleet Foxes' J. Tillman, Garotas Suecas, and more
Funky love: Brazil's Garotas Suecas seduces at Emo's.
SXSW memories - fading now, but hey, it's only Friday. Among the highlights yesterday, March 18: Brazil's Garotas Suecas - the bright-eyed, fun 'n' funky heirs to Booker T. or at least Sharon Jones. My Portuguese is a bit nonexistent, but we got the picture loud and clear, thanks to the ensemble's hyper-expressive vocalist.
Even more mind-blowing: Flower Travellin' Band at Smokin' Music. The band sometimes best known for its nekkid, motorcycle-riding album shot finally made it to the states for the last of five shows on its first U.S. tour. Previous sojourns have been scuttled for various reasons, but wow! Deeply eccentric power-centered psych-stoner rock - Hideki Ishima's huge sitarla is only part of the story, generating resonant, almost boomingly bass-like sounds. Have to see more of them if/when they get to SF.
Massive massive: Hideki Ishima wields his mighty sitarla.
SXSW: Q queue, Devo, Dirty Projectors, Girls, and more
Chapel of the chiming guitar: SF's Girls fill the Central Presbyterian Church March 19.
Impressions - watercolor, guyliner-streaked, skinny jeans-clad impressions - of SXSW. Here are a few from the frontlines on what turned out to be a stellar Thursday, March 19: I may have missed the Jane's Addition reunion with Eric Avery at the Rock the Bunny after-hours bash at an old Safeway, but who needs the LA grunge-era implants when there's so much happening elsewhere?
Rumor has it that Kanye West will be headlining the last Fader Fort show Saturday - a sweltering mecca of lines and bees drawn by the spilled fruity cocktails, out on the other side of I-35 - and that Neil Young is in town. Otherwise the vague official word round the Austin Convention Center is that attendance is down about 10 percent, though artist attendance is up. "Not bad, considering" - the new buzz words?
Charm (in)offensive: Quincy Jones gives the SXSW keynote.
Last Days climbs "North" into shimmering electronic shoegaze
By Todd Lavoie
LAST DAYS
The Safety Of The North
(n5MD)
Keep your best headphones handy -- you're going to want them for spins of The Safety Of The North, the third and most recent full-length release from Edinburgh, Scotland-based Graham Richardson and his ambient/electro-folk Last Days project. As ominous as the artist's AKA might be, the disc is nowhere near as fearful or nightmarish as one might expect. Rather, the music found here is intimate and ruminative, frequently glowing from ripples of electronics and shoegaze-y guitar textures. Delicate acoustic finger-picking and understated piano meditations add further flair to these largely-instrumental womblike pieces, and the occasional insertion of the human voice into the mix helps immensely in making this a thoughtful, emotional listen.
And while the proceedings sometimes veer towards melancholia, it's a strangely comforting, sit-around-and-ponder-on-a-grey-day stripe of melancholia we're talking about here -- a little maudlin and wistful, yes, but ultimately cathartic in the end. Even the cold chills which bluster forth from the disc's lower register from time to time offer their own curiously cocooning sensations to the listener -- especially with the help of a good pair of headphones. The Safety Of the North is something worthy of surrender -- of succumbing to its many hums and whirrs and whipping auroras of shimmering light.
There's a back story to the album, though it isn't required knowledge for appreciating its many charms: Richardson composed these 15 songs around the themes of of change, struggle, and hope. Specifically, it concerns a young girl, Alice, and her family. Disenchanted with city living, they decide to “move north” (the Arctic Circle, judging from a couple of contextual clues provided along the way) to find a simpler, quieter day-to-day life. Such major upheavals usually don't come about without their share of challenges, however. Thus Richardson has constructed a story-arc which from sadness to hope to struggle to sadness to hope once again. More or less so, anyway. Again, since this is mostly an instrumental recording, the itinerary on this emotional journey is up to the listener, I suppose. Still, the prevailing themes of The Safety Of The North -- change, struggle, hope -- remain palpable, even without too much assistance from lyrics. Forgive me for trotting out the “cinematic” tag (I know that the label gets used quite regularly for any sort of wordless music which manages to create vivid, stirring images) but it honestly does apply to Richardson's music. Even if concrete images fail to come to mind, the creation of particular moods is tough to miss.
Southeast Engine quivers and lopes toward the deluge
By Todd Lavoie
SOUTHEAST ENGINE
From The Forest To The Sea
(Misra)
It's all right there in the title: From The Forest To The Sea, the fourth, just-released full-length from Athens, Ohio-based Southeast Engine, is the chronicle of a journey. Literal, figurative, geographical, spiritual... it's all of the above, rendered in nervy poetry, Biblical allusions, and volatile collisions of twisted Americana and restless indie-rock. Sure, the disc's characters begin in the forest and end up at the edge of the sea --- and in some cases, quite literally in the sea --- but ultimately their movement is focused around much more than mere topography. Vocalist/guitarist Adam Remnant is not only a compelling singer -- his quivering Appalachian yelp is perhaps the midpoint between Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and Jason Molina (Songs:Ohia, Magnolia Electric Co.) -- but also a perceptive, precise storyteller, equally confident in clipped speech and extended, flowing narrative.
His subjects tend to be good people at their core, but not without their share of weaknesses, foibles, and lack of direction. Sin and salvation, along with all of the roaming which tends to go on between the two extremes, form the central themes of the disc, and they are presented without judgment and in clear, matter-of-fact detail. And just in case the potent storytelling here isn't enough: these guys furnish a rather resplendently rustic sonic backdrop for Remnant's redemption-seeking rambles. For all of its occasional echoes of other lonesome-howl enthusiasts -- the aforementioned Oldham and Molina ventures, as well as Phosphorescent and maybe Castanets -- From The Forest To The Sea offers up a distinct essence of its own. Distinctive enough, I should add, that I can't wait to dive into their back-catalog....
Southeast Engine, "Black Gold"
Southeast Engine recorded the disc in a creaky, abandoned middle-school auditorium, built in the 1800s, in the hills of rural Ohio -- a fitting choice, given that these songs appear to be populated by ghosts as well. Listen closely, and the odd atmospheric hum slides into perception, only to drift away as soon as the ears are pricked; once the moment is almost forgotten, a disembodied echo or a floorboard-sigh is just as likely to emerge. As much as these production touches give a nice chill, it's in the voices that the true goosebump potential resides. Remnant is quite adept at conjuring ghosts with his taut, choked waver, and the haunted backup supplied by the rest of the band does a convincing job of highlighting the restlessness which permeates these dozen songs.
Noise Pop: A look back II, starring Deerhunter, Clues, No Age
You choose: Clues.
By Kristy Geschwandtner
I had the opportunity to check out some shows during the Noise Pop festival, starting with the opening-night performance by Deerhunter at Mezzanine on Feb. 25.
Deerhunter didn’t let anyone down. It played a majestic set that created feelings of isolation and reflection. The bright back-lighting and smoke machine setup helped create the mood. The music and performance made me feel as though I left the building and was somewhere alone. Not many performers can bring you into their realm.
Feel spiffy: the country slicks of Fancy Dan Band apply tongue to cheek
FANCY DAN BAND
Born Fancy
(self-released)
By Andre Torrez
"I bet you clean up real nice, fancy as can be, but I'm sorry to say, you'll never be as fancy as me." Ouch! Mr. Fancy Pants. With such confident lyrics set to a boom-chic-a-boom rockabilly beat, the Fancy Dan Band's debut, Born Fancy, is a winner. Frontman Fancy Dan is a Midwest-meets-West transplant, and his Bay Area band plays with enough barn-burning energy to make grandpa wanna hoe-down. No, really. The lyric is a throwback to the style of country pioneer Hank Williams, with the musicianship of Junior Brown and the flavor of Chuck Berry.
After realizing his dream was to be a country-folk vocalist, Dan decided to pack his bags and head out to the coast. Along the way, he made this album - the fruit of a three-day whirlwind Nashville pilgrimage last summer, boasting first-rate musicians on drums, upright bass, and electric guitar.
Sounds pretty traditional, I know, but in the realm of country, stars often take themselves far too seriously. It’s refreshing to hear these guys employ a bit of playfulness and what I hope is a pseudo-cockiness. For instance, the song “Wake Up Fancy” hinges on a wonderfully silly, self-referential double entendre concerning Dan's greatness. I imagine him pulling away the sheets in the morning, already wearing a pristine pressed white suit and cocking his feathered hat just so in the mirror. Much like the picture on the album cover. Fancy.
FANCY DAN BAND
March 21, call for time and price.
Café International
508 Haight, SF
(415) 552-7390
For a minute there I became enraged at the thought I was missing out on the latest drink sensation. Everyone had these shiny cartons in their hands as my mind raced, fantasizing about all the possibilities. What could that be? Oddly, my head had me convinced it was some sort of coconut concoction. No, wait, what’s that trendy fruit right now? Acai berry! That had to be it.
After all, wine in a box had long since become passe. My jealousy abated only when I realized it was merely a carton of Plant it Water. Those things were everywhere. Still, the evening wasn’t about sponsorship. No, this festival was about the music. Now just a blur of a memory, bars, clubs, and venues alike opened their doors last week to welcome musicians (and music types who like to live vicariously through them) for Noise Pop’s 17th showcase in weirdo San Francisco and beyond. Here’s my personal account:
Bathed in reds, pinks, and yellows evocative of the breezy, sun-and-sand-filled love romps his music brings to mind, Dent May and his band of jaunty, falsetto-wielding cohorts took the audience to a place far from their hardened city lives. Seamless harmonies, maraca shakes, and gentle ukulele strums dovetailed at the warm, bursting heart of the Mississippi native’s throwback sound.
Are you Loney Dear? The Swedish band takes a ride into the darkness
LONEY DEAR
Dear John
(Polyvinyl)
By Todd Lavoie
Can a simple punctuation change make such a big difference? Serious business for the wordsmiths and grammarians of the world, but I'd reckon maybe also for Emil Svanängen, the sweet falsetto behind the Loney Dear moniker. Up until recently, the Swedish vocalist had been known for two things in particular: sunshine-kissed happy-pop and a clunky ol' comma dropped thud-like in the middle of his alias.
Alas, Loney, Dear is no more - having bid b-bye to that pesky punctuation mark, he also seems to have reined in the giddiness quite a bit, as documented on his latest, Dear John. Intended as “the final piece in a five-album puzzle,” the disc offers considerably more melancholia than before, along with a cleaner, more intimate production.
Psyched-ya mysticism: the Lovetones hit the spit with 'Dimensions'
By Danica Li
For the past decade and a half, Matthew J. Tow has had a slew of musical projects bubbling on the back burner. Aussie rock outfit Drop City, formed by Tow in 1993, is probably the band for which Tow is most widely known for fronting. A series of solo forays followed. Under the moniker Colorsound, Tow produced a half dozen albums over a decade before the psychedelic rockers of the Brian Jonestown Massacre co-opted Tow for the better part of a three-month tour.
When Tow formed the Lovetones in 2002, and released its debut, Be What You Want (Bomp!), he was immediately - and perhaps hyperbolically - hailed an apostle of David Bowie, Ray Davies, and Lennon and McCartney by bigwig media outlets like Rolling Stone. Originally described as a side project, but now presumed to be Tow's primary occupation, the Lovetones return in style with Dimensions, a medley of hypnotic pscyh rock, byzantine instrumental detours, and '60s-era balladry.
You know that mindspace between the blissed-out haze of a daydream and the rush of reality’s iron grip - that sense of profound escapism that has its claws sunk deep into both truth and fantasy? Getting there takes just the right musical ingredients - and the sky-scraping psych-blues reveries of San Francisco’s Sleepy Sun were last night’s one-way ticket to that destination.
The sextet exploded like a supernova onstage at Bottom of the Hill Feb. 25, leaving no room for dissenters. Sleepy Sun wove the edges of darkness with revelatory rays of light by mixing brain-sizzling guitar solos and leaden grooves with fistfuls of soaring vocals like nouveaux flower children carrying the torch for their blissed-out hippie predecessors.
Red Hot and getting brighter: 'Dark Was the Night' AIDS/HIV benefit comp stirs the fire
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Dark Was the Night: A Red Hot Compilation
(4AD)
By Todd Lavoie
Benefit albums have always been a noble but iffy prospect for the music buyer. Unfortunately, too many well-meaning compilations have seen their intentions unfairly matched with either a glaring lack of cohesion or a failure to procure decent songs from the artists involved. More often than not, charity discs tend to come across as sonically and/or thematically disjointed, thanks to the piecemeal fashion with which they're frequently put together - with each artist contributing without any sort of direction or instructions, the resulting collection runs the risk of ending up a jumbled, unfocused mess and an awkward start-to-finish listen.
Worse yet, many of these benefits seem to be cobbled together with whatever scraps have been previously tossed aside by the artists involved: lesser B-sides, uninspired live tracks, or sonic afterthoughts that never received a full fleshing-out for one reason or another. Considering the labor of love that goes on behind the scenes in assembling such a disc - contacting musicians and agents and record labels to convince them to join the cause, for example - it's a shame that the end product often fails to project an equivalent amount of passion and fire. Scan the bargain bins at any CD shop, and you'll see what I mean.
Not so for the Red Hot Organization, however - the culture-savvy international charity has spent the past 20 years fighting AIDS and raising HIV awareness through releasing countless inspired compilations. Unlike many other heart-of-gold organizations, Red Hot tends to do much more than merely compile a bunch of donated tracks to disc.
The Black Godfather is in the house: Andre Williams at Slim's
By Andre Torrez
There wasn’t much love for the Flash Express when a boisterous dude in the audience shouted, “We don’t care about you! We care about him!" He was referring to Andre Williams, the headliner that night, Feb. 20, at Slim's.
Sadly, I got the feeling most of the audience agreed - the Los Angeles rock and soul outfit overstayed their welcome. Performing what seemed like an eternally lengthy set before returning to the stage as the Black Godfather’s backing band, Williams, in a show of solidarity to his support, coolly retorted to any stray hecklers, “Man, you paid too much money to fuck this up!” Laughter ensued and any bit of hostility was quelled by Mr. Rhythm.
LATE OF THE PIER
Fantasy Black Channel
(Astralwerks)
By Todd Lavoie
Given the manic pulsations emanating from this English indie-electro quartet, I suppose it's only appropriate that Late of the Pier's ascent from teenage obscurity to darlings of the British music press would be swift and twitching with drama. Formed in 2004, when all four members were only 16 or 17 years of age, the group released its first single on an independent label in March 2007 - the hype machine began tossing superlatives almost immediately thereafter. From there, a couple of additional singles followed - and the accompanying hyperbole from the press seemed to compound exponentially.
By the autumn of last year, their debut, Fantasy Black Channel - which includes some of their previously issued singles - found a major-label release in Britain (on Parlophone/EMI), preceded of course by a level of advance buzz that almost always dooms the poor coveted object to eventual disappointment. Now, several months later, the disc has finally seen a domestic release; only time will tell whether the famously excitable Brit press will stick with these guys long enough to respond to their next move, but in the meantime, a valid question persists - was the hype merited?
Not just about talent: Nels Cline turns in a mercurial 'Coward'
NELS CLINE
Coward
(Cryptogramophone)
By Brandon Bussolini
By the third track of his new solo LP, Coward, Nels Cline has already limned sruti box-assisted drone (opener "Epiphyllum"), applied John Fahey's fingerpicking style to British folk revival harmonies ("Prayer Wheel"), and, with the aptly titled "Thurston Country," written what could pass as an outtake from the Sonic Youth guitarist's solo outing Trees Outside the Academy (Ecstatic Peace!, 2007).
It's tempting to describe the album as an identity crisis commited to tape, but that would involve delving into the fact that I've never quite understood what Cline was doing playing guitar for Wilco in the first place, even though the choice also seems perversely satisfying. Coward feels less like the jazz-reared guitarist is blowing off steam from his day job and recalibrating his personal goals, and more like he's picking back up on a solo and collaborative career that has precious little commercial potential and an embarrassment of merit.
That voice: Bay bluesman John Németh entreats 'Love Me Tonight'
JOHN NÉMETH
Love Me Tonight
(Blind Pig)
By Todd Lavoie
Given the frugality of the blues as an art form, it seems only fair that I introduce Bay Area harmonica-slinging bluesman John Németh without a single wasted word: the man can sing. Sure, he breathes plenty of soul and fire into that harp of his, but ultimately it's his voice which makes the most indelible impact - moving nimbly from growl to howl to full-bellied hoot 'n' holler, sometimes within the same bar, it's a tremendous instrument.
Even more impressive: the vocalist, only in his early 30s, delivers with a level of authority expected from someone much older. Considering that the blues places such a deep emphasis on breadth of life experience, Németh's ability to sound older than his actual age is a valuable asset. That being said, it's his extensive vocal range which gets noticed first; coming across as a young scrapper in one moment and a wizened front-stoop sage in the next, he certainly can surprise.
'Clear': Falling in with Juan Atkins, Dam Funk, and HOTTUB at Paradise Lounge
By Andre Torrez
I entered SoMa’s Paradise Lounge for the first time this past Valentine’s Day, startled by an unexpected fashion show - it was scheduled, I just didn’t know about it - oddly set to the music of the Jackson 5. And it wasn’t your typical “ABC," or “I Want You Back." No, that wouldn’t have fit the atmosphere at all. It was one of their less obvious '70s grooves, something a little grittier and less innocent, so props to the DJ who demonstrated the intuition to foreshadow an evening of freaks on the floor.
The brief parade of design provided a blur of a background as we settled into the club. With drinks in tow, my friends and I made our way upstairs to get a better view above the stage. Before we knew it, HOTTUB, Oakland’s answer to queercore, was shakin’ its shit all over the place. If memory serves me right, the group has referred to a few of its tracks as real “pussy bangers." Perhaps that’s a suggestion for what to do while listening to their music. I’m not really sure.
It's one of the more compelling debuts I've come across recently: New York quartet Gold & Gunmetal arrives a-brimming with ideas and full of promise on their recently issued self-titled full-length, fusing elements of prog and art rock with classic Dischord Records crunch, along with surprising forays into folk and jazz composition.
I suppose for ease of categorizing I'd consider these guys indie rock, but ultimately what makes the disc such a refreshing standout is its resistance to tidy pigeonholing, and its willingness to throw so many seemingly divergent components into the mix.
Feeling the chill: Hauschka's 'Snowflakes' tugs and putters
HAUSCHKA
Snowflakes and Carwrecks
(Fat Cat)
By Brandon Bussolini
Sometimes, a listener can correctly infer a lot from an album’s artwork. The cover of Snowflakes and Carwrecks, the follow-up EP to last year’s full-length Ferndorf (130701), maintains a Bauhaus-meets-art deco style, but substitutes a winter scene for the sunset and bather that graced the LP. Taking descriptions of Ferndorf at face value risked overheated nostalgia - the album’s inspiration was, after all, composer Volker Bertelmann’s upbringing in rural Germany.
Actually listening to it was something else altogether: these compositions for prepared piano and chamber orchestra ride the minimalist pulse of non-suck Philip Glass minimalism with worthy little melodies that aspire to the repetitive potency of Erik Satie’s Vexations or the Buddha Machine. Neither snobby or pandering, the album was the sort that’s easy to imagine, but hard to find.
Accordingly, it’s the sort of album that’s easier to praise than make time for. I play it during shifts at a café, and as noncontroversial background music I can say it’s nonpareil, but also the sort of music that feels vulgar next to a decent amount of movement and exertion. “Heimat,” the full-length's high point of contemplativeness, sounds best suited for playing at extremely low volume in a sad but dignified brasserie.
Peerless pop: Social Studies at Hemlock Tavern. All photos by Jen Snyder.
By Jen Snyder
I used to have this ridiculous tendency to annually denounce everything I was into and hurl myself into a new persona. This resulted in a confusing metamorphosis from punk to hippie to goth to indie rocker to grunge fan to glam kid. It was entirely exhausting - what with all the costume changes and makeovers to my album collection. It takes a bit of growing up - and a touch of laziness - to realize that it's really those standby good friends and classic tunes that really get your heart pumping. Like Social Studies.
On Saturday, Jan. 31, I found myself praising Social Studies once again for its commitment to just plain excellent pop music. During its set at the Hemlock Tavern, the outfit revitalized my love for its 2006 release, This Is the World's Biggest Hammer, drumming out the songs perfectly. The show included all your old favorites, including the epic "Sparrow," which twists and turns for minutes without losing any of its innovation and heat.
Valerie's live end: Love's Baby Soft breezes of imagined youth
By Juliette Tang
Listening to College and Anoraak, two talented DJs involved with the French collective Valerie, is like driving back to the balmy summer of 1981 in a white Camaro convertible with the top down, a cold Tab in your hand, and a tiny silver disco ball hanging from your rearview mirror. Valerie, a group of musicians from Nantes whose dramatis personae includes acts like Russ Chimes, Minitel Rose, and The Outrunners, among others, uses retrofuturistic synthpop to evoke the magical '80s teenage years they were too young to experience.
Valerie has a very specific fantasy of the '80s, informed vaguely by John Hughes movies and V. C. Andrews novels, by images of roller rinks, drive-thru diners, Orange Juliuses, and Love's Baby Soft perfume. But rest assured that their sound isn't trying to enshrine those bygone days. Rather, by traveling back in time to the '80s [Ed Note: Or rather, back to '80s nostalgia for '70s nostalgia for the '50s], Valerie reinvents a future that was dreamed back then but which never happened, a past-modern interpretation of utopia that creates an alternative to the present -- with dancing.
In conjunction with making me want to dance like a teenager, College and Anoraak made me want to drink Malibu and pineapple like a teenager, which was the only lamentable incident that occurred last Friday at Mezzanine, where Valerie ended their US tour. The show itself was exactly what I thought it would be: lively but controlled, suffused with an easy, dance-y energy that never quite reached the point of unbridled release.
College played a wonderfully non-trancey, entirely instrumental synth set that left me wishing I was Sarah Jessica Parker in Girls Just Want To Have Fun.
'Hold On': Marianne Faithfull's most recent cover comp is worth the dig
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Easy Come, Easy Go
(Naïve/ Love Da)
By Todd Lavoie
As gifted a songwriter as she has proven herself over the years, Marianne Faithfull has always been a flawless interpreter of other people's compositions. Singing cover material, after all, was how the pop icon started out, upon being prodded into a musical career in 1964 by Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham.
Her first single, "As Tears Go By" was a Jagger/Richards composition - the equally famous Rolling Stones version wouldn't appear for another year. Back then, Faithfull had a delicate, songbird-like voice, and much of her mid-'60s material consisted of lilting, swaying string-laden treatments of other songwriters' material: Jackie DeShannon's "Come and Stay With Me," The Beatles' "Yesterday," Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "If I Never Get to Love You," for example.
By the time of the release of her 1969 single "Sister Morphine" - co-written with Jagger and Richards, and once again preceding the Rolling Stones version - she had begun to show the depths of her songwriting abilities, but ultimately most listeners would probably consider her first and foremost as an unimpeachable interpreter, a modern equivalent of the jazz singers of the '30s and '40s who would tackle whatever songs caught their ear.
Jewish vinyl: co-author Josh Kun's book inspires new exhibit at Contemporary Jewish Museum
By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
The records highlighted in Roger Bennett and former Guardian music columnist Josh Kun's 2008 book, And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl (Crown, 240 pages), are delectable nuggets and kernels of history that, chronologically compiled together, tell the story of five generations of Jews in America. And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl - the inspiration for a new exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco - anecdotally informs the reader of a massive and swift movement from tradition to modernity, city to suburb, and poverty to affluence, through the music and album art of 12-inches rediscovered in the basement bins of thrift stores in Boca - as Bennett puts it, "the place Jewish vinyl goes to die" - and other parts of the U.S.A.
The text reflects what one might expect from a coffee-table book yet contains a wealth of information dealing with important shifts in Jewish American history, complemented by the ridiculous to awe-inspiring images that adorn more than 400 LP covers: cantorial images of beards and flowing robes of yore morph into visions of Israeli disco fever and mambo interludes at Bar Mitzvahs. Pointing to the permeability of communities and the fluidity of identity, the authors look to, for instance, a Jewish Latin craze with such gems as Bagels and Bongos (Decca, 1959) and Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos (Riverside, 1961).
Both menacing and beautiful at the same time, the lush strings and the precision piano and harpischord on the Music Lovers' new album, Masculine Feminine (Le Grand Magistery), make to a sound that's rich and full enough to make Phil Spector cream his trousers.
The San Fran band definitely set a melodic mood on their latest release on the Detroit label. British-born Bay Area transplant Matthew Edwards’ haunting vocals evoke comparisons to early to mid-'70s-era Bowie with a hint of Morrissey. Musically the strings display a depth, darkness, and emotional power reminiscent of SoCal countercultural touchstone, Love. Lyrically, the songwriter and lead vocalist recalls past loved ones even giving a nod to the future with “A Girl from Space." The solidly arranged long-player doesn't disappoint.
THE TWILIGHT SAD
Killed My Parents and Hit the Road
(Fat Cat)
By Todd Lavoie
Get it while you still can: Scottish snarlers the Twilight Sad recently released their limited-edition odds-and-sods gather-up Killed My Parents and Hit the Road, and as it turns out, this is much more than just a stopgap until the next album.
Rather, the EP is a fine showcase for the band's formidable abilities in interpreting the work of others, as well as their impressive know-how in ramping up the drama onstage. There are also a couple of previously unreleased tracks that have left fans a-foaming in speculation over whether or not the songs are sneak-previews of what's next for the group. Originally available only at stops on the combo's autumn tour last year, it is now for sale on the label's Web site, www.fat-cat.co.uk. Better snag one soon - or else your only option might be eBay.
Sunday Bloody Sunday? Jay Reatard's Blood Visions (In the Red, 2006).
By Andre Torrez
Jay Reatard used a tiny hipster girl as a lawn dart, hurling her into the crowd, not even paying attention to whether anyone was there to catch her.
It was a brutal act of pure unadulterated rock 'n' roll antics. Jaws dropped Sunday night, Jan. 25, when it all went down at the Independent. The wind of sound coming out of his Flying V guitar was disorienting and all, especially from my front and center stage vantage point, but I know what I saw, and believe you me, it wasn’t pretty.
I heard the opening drums of “Going to a Go-Go” as I entered Oakland’s ornate Paramount Theatre. My friend and I arrived just a few minutes tardy, and I was agitated as she decided to go to the bathroom at the last minute. The girl lines always take longer.
So I waited in the lobby and I listened to Smokey Robinson’s opening number for what would be an iron-man two-hour performance with no support from any other acts. I paced in the hallway impatiently, eager to peer at the legendary voice of Motown from behind the velvety curtain. A calm came over me once my friend resurfaced, and we were ready to find our seats.
Thankfully the Paramount is a classy joint and they have ushers that guide you. No time wasted, we were in and I had a panoramic view from the cheap seats in the balcony of golden walls and fellow fans of Detroit soul. Down at the center of it all, there he was. A man well into his late 60s, soaking in the spotlight, wearing a white satin suit and diamond earrings that glowed even from the my vantage point. I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything less - after all, he is an icon.
It’s a good thing so many of the gents are equipped with vintage aviator goggles this year, since otherwise it would seem they’d run the risk of getting their eyes poked out—whether by parasol, peacock feather, or plunging décolletage. It’s the ninth annual Edwardian Ball -- a two-day affair that took place this past weekend -- and like most excuses to get all gussied up in San Francisco, the masses have appointed themselves with gusto. Though most of the costumes here are decidedly more Deadwood than dead and gone, more sumptuous than spooky, the spirit of patron saint Edward Gorey still wafts faintly through the proceedings like a clammy graveyard breeze. Black-and-white cutouts of Gashlycrumb Tinies adorn the walls along with cunning Paxton Gate-style dioramas of dressed-up rodent skeletons, while the Jules Verne-like “Goreyscope” offers microscopic evidence of the haunting qualities of Gorey’s curious bibliography.
A Jill Tracy accompanist
Friday Night at the Edwardian World Faire, headlining act geek-girl cello combo Rasputina sets toes to tapping with such “classics” as “Hunter’s Kiss”, “Watch TV”, and “Saline the Salt Lake Queen”, while upstairs in the fine arts gallery, fairies are being robotically squeezed to make libations (at least that’s what the sign says. Too bad January is my libation-free month, no freshly-squeezed fairy for me).
Jill Tracy (at keyboard)
Downstairs at the “fair”, much steam engine activity is on display thanks to the Kinetic Steam Works, and fabulous trinkets are for sale, mainly in the “jewelry made from sprung watch cogs, and studded leather utility belts” five-and-diamond vein.
At last - an American breakthrough. English soul vocalist Alice Russell has been belting it out for quite some time now: her first solo full-length, after several initial inspired collaborations, was 2004's Under the Munka Moon (Tru Thoughts) - but somehow, scandalously, she never had an American label. Her trio of releases - the aforementioned Moon, along with 2005's My Favourite Letters and 2006's hodgepodge compilation Under the Munka Moon II (also on the British Tru Thoughts label) - weren't exactly impossible to track down stateside, but they didn't receive nearly as much attention as they perhaps would have with the support of a company on these shores.
Luckily for all concerned, this is about to change: San Francisco tastemakers Six Degrees Records recently unleashed Russell's latest, the aptly monikered Pot of Gold. And yep, all of you groove pirates, there are riches aplenty here.
July Skies evokes lazy days, 'fractured memories of the 1970s'
JULY SKIES
The Weather Clock
(Make Mine Music)
By Todd Lavoie
Oh, 2008 - you've been too kind! Well, musically speaking, anyhow - the year left a bit to be desired in some other regards, I suppose, but it certainly did its best to compensate by unleashing a wild torrent of CD releases ready to scratch away at all of our musical itches.
Now that we're pinning up the new calendar and reflecting on the past year, I thought this might be the perfect moment to throw some superlatives behind one 2008 release in particular, which, sadly, remained largely off the collective radar of the American listening public: July Skies' sumptuously iridescent ambient-pop stunner The Weather Clock.
Released this past summer in Britain, the disc never received a thorough distribution stateside. It might require a little work to track this one down, but such efforts will be greatly rewarded. Wistfully melancholic and dreamy, it's tailor-made for a cup of tea, a ruminating mood, and your best pair of headphones.
Amp Fiddler lays down the 'inspiration' with Sly and Robbie
AMP FIDDLER WITH SLY & ROBBIE
Inspiration Information
(Strut)
By Todd Lavoie
It's a meet-up that, admittedly, came as a bit of a surprise, but ultimately makes a world of sense: Detroit retro-futurist funkmeister Joseph "Amp" Fiddler has joined forces with collaboration-loving riddim-machine Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare (better known as Sly and Robbie) for an album's worth of smooth, spaced-out soul and gravy-thick reggae rhythms.
Bestowed with the quite-appropriate moniker Inspiration Information - the title surely a nod to the great fellow traveler of righteous grooves, Shuggie Otis, whose 1974 album of the same name has seen its influence extended further with every passing year - the disc is the first in what is slated to be a series of releases from the consummate tastemakers at Strut Records built around an intriguing concept.
The idea? Take a few musicians who have never worked together before, stick them in the studio on a tight schedule, and see what happens - it's a strategy that yielded fascinating results for the Dutch label Konkurrent, whose "In The Fishtank" series drummed up tasty pairings from Tortoise/the Ex and Low/Dirty Three, for example. I'm dead curious to hear what Strut comes up with next - how about a Tussle/ESG tête-à-tête, folks? - but for now, I'm more than content to float and bob along with the rumbling, churning head-music of this first installment.
Hardly art, hardly garbage: Fall Out Boy at Great American Music Hall
By Michael Harkin
"Why'd they have to do the concert on this day, when they knew it'd be rainin'?" You posed a good question, Mr. Passerby. I arrived at Great American Music Hall at 11:45 a.m. on this damp, overcast Sunday morning, Dec. 22, and 150 people were already lined up around the corner from the club. Mostly teenage girls around, but lots of parents toted umbrellas and blankets - what good sports! - knowing full well that they'd be out there another seven hours with their kids before doors.
My neighbors in line had variously traveled from Stockton, Mountain View, and San Jose, willing to pay far more than the $20 door price to see Fall Out Boy that night. Their health 'neath those Decaydance hoodies wasn't quite as important as the close proximity the venue would afford them.
I can't readily provide a sufficient rationale for standing out in the rain this long, especially when the band in question is the embodiment of commercial rock's absurdity - they headlined the Honda Civic Tour last year, for heaven's sake - and regularly employ such overwrought, cumbersome song titles as "I'm Like a Lawyer with the Way I'm Always Trying to Get You Off (Me and You)." That said, I like 'em anyway - hard to say why. And this beats paying 60 bucks to see them with some terrible bands at the HP Pavilion next summer, right?
Please keep Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan in mind, sweetheart
ISOBEL CAMPBELL AND MARK LANEGAN
Sunday at Devil Dirt
(Fontana International)
By Todd Lavoie
In this week's new pop canon spread, I got a chance to hail hosannas upon the late great Lee Hazlewood, whose presence has been quite deeply felt in some of the finest music of 2008. Perhaps the stamp of influence was most deeply inked, however, with Sunday at Devil Dirt, the second collaboration between wispy-piped ingénue Isobel Campbell and croak-baritoned brooder Mark Lanegan.
Here, sad-eyed orchestral pop meets dusty country blues, frequently with dreamlike results - much like Hazlewood's signature showdowns with duet-partner Nancy Sinatra. Pitching Lanegan's growls and grumbles against Campbell's decidedly sweeter murmurs makes for a fascinating update of the Lee 'n' Nancy blueprint, but there's a twist.
Whereas Hazlewood played the Svengali to Sinatra - writing the songs and arrangements and often taking the second seat, vocally speaking, to his partner - here the roles are switched, with Campbell at the helm musically but sticking largely to the second mic in deference to Lanegan's bellowing lead. Having written almost the entirety of the disc, as well as handling all arrangement and production duties, Campbell has worked some spine-tingling trickery from her place in the shadows: Lanegan gets the bigger boom in the mix, yes, but behind the whisper-thin sighs and coos, it is Campbell who is in control.
Ponderosa stomp: James Johnson of Wilderness. All photos by Lisa Weiss.
By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
Up above the still of a serene California night, a dry thunderstorm is brewing. Like the tom-heavy drum patterns of Wilderness’ William Goode and the angular guitar lines of Colin McCann, the dry lightning splits from the sky striking down on Earth, igniting wildfires. The blaze destroys in a gradual and shapeless but fierce trail that builds as James Johnson’s howls brew from the bottom of his belly, filling his throat before rising and bursting forth like a clairvoyant issuing forth the voices of the dead, while Brian Gossman sustains the flames with long-held bass notes.
Or at least that's what I imagined as I watched Wilderness perform at Bottom of the Hill on Thursday, Dec. 11. Their distinct post-punk sound builds on echoes that resound throughout the space, stirring the vibrations until trance-like they seep into your pores and take over, completely hypnotizing you. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the audience began speaking in tongues.
Last Saturday, Dec. 8, at El Rio marked the cementing of yet another dirty brick in the growing wall of West Coast punk. I could talk about the amazing performances by the Traditional Fools, who thankfully seem to be playing shows again after a short hiatus. Or I could talk about Hank IV, who were bad as hell - by which I mean good - but I’d much rather talk about the gnarliest show ever performed by the Mayyors hailing from our state capital of Sacramento.
The Mayyors certainly proved that Sacramento is a crazy, corrupt place. From the moment they played their first song, the entire room trembled with angst and energy. Vocalist John Pritchard pummeled through the crowd thrashing and screaming, stoking the fire in the crowd. Pritchard salivated endlessly while he sang, barking and demonically whipping around as strings of spit flew everywhere. It was undeniably awesome. All of my disdain for mosh pits and people knocking into me kind of melted away into a nostalgic appreciation for a reckless youth.
Calling all lovers of the heavy 'n' the hazy: Virginia-farmboy stoner-rock band Pontiak will be treating the Bay Area to two doses of riffing and roughing up cochleas. First off, the Blue Ridge Mountain brothers storm the Stork Club in Oakland on Tuesday, Dec. 9. Don't feel like trekkin' on over to the East Bay on a school night? The trio will also be playing here in SF, on Sunday, Dec. 14, at the Hemlock Tavern. Two choices, so really there's no excuse.
Hailing from small-town farmlands north of Charlottesville, Pontiak is composed of three brothers: Van (guitar, lead vocals), Lain (drums, vocals), and Jennings Carney (bass, organ, vocals). I don't think anyone in the band would necessarily flinch at the mention of the phrase "power trio": for all of their affinity for murky, sludgy sounds, Pontiak roars away with remarkable precision, pulling off that men-as-machine ethos quite convincingly. Maybe it's a sibling thing?
There is a level of familial intuition that's quite palpable on the recent re-release of their second full-length, Sun on Sun (Thrill Jockey), after all - and while I hardly would expect first-time listeners to mistake any of the disc for Rush, the sheer force with which the threepiece locks into a groove could warrant the comparisons. Instead of touching upon "Tom Sawyer" or "The Temples of Syrinx," however, the disc taps into the doomscapes of Black Sabbath as well as the psychedelia of the Doors.
I find myself flirting with hyperbole when I ponder the preening, careening chaos that is Limbo, Panto, the debut from Leeds, England's elegantly lurid Wild Beasts - and I fear I may give in.
Hearing the disc for the first time was a bit of a blindsiding experience, and successive listens have confirmed for me what I'd felt on that initial spin: these guys are clearly out on their own, hurling every idea in their lusty little hearts up against the wall, eager to see which ones stick. Mercifully, nearly every one of the quartet's fits of whimsy does stick - many of them, in fact, do so with spectacular results.
So many things in this world are disgusting yet delightful at the same time. For some that may be sniffing the smell of gasoline, hearing the sound of a squeaky chair, or watching someone undergo intensive surgery. Such is the case with rap artist Mickey Avalon, whose creepy look - which combines Marilyn Manson, Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, and a character from a John Waters film - is simultaneously repellent and adorable.
I caught Avalon's Nov. 20 show at Slim's, the second show of a two-night stand, and got a taste of his lyrical genius as well as his performance style. The stage was set up to look like a sketchy dark alley with a wire fence, parking meters, a trash receptacle, and a bench tagged with the words "Mickey Avalon" and fit well with Avalon's rhymes about friends who’ve died from lead poisoning and how the performer himself must "spend another day waiting to die.”
Minus the Bear's masterful musicianship, angular riffs impress
By Daniel N. Alvarez
It’s ironic that an old jazz club is one of the best places to hear rock in San Francisco. The first time that I saw a show at Bimbo’s 365 Club, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. The venue’s plush furnishings, swanky tables, and clean, classy vibe didn’t seem to mesh well with the youngish, generally scruffy jackanapes who seemed belong at the slightly dingier confines of Thee Parkside or Annie’s Social Club.
Then Jens Lekman took the stage, and it all made sense. Bimbo’s is a great rock club, because the sound is absolutely excellent. For that reason, I was over the moon to learn that indie rock’s most fun, musically progressive band, Minus the Bear, would be gracing the stage. When a band has as many intersecting, versatile melodies as they do, sound quality is paramount.
Sounding out on the Silent Comedy's backwoods indie rock
By Todd Lavoie
Bowler hats, banjos, backwoods hollers, and burlesque hawkers - sounds like old-timey goodness to me. San Diego's mountain music-loving vaudeville-revivalists the Silent Comedy will be dishing out sepia-toned balladry and carny-shouted hootenannies to the Café du Nord crowd Friday, Nov. 21.
It should be one hell of a rompin'-stompin', suspender-slappin' shindig. Whether or not the band will share their homebrewed bathtub-gin onstage remains to be seen, but they're certain to be generous with everything else you might need for a round or two of Prohibition-era revelry. OK, the bathtub-gin thing is pure speculation on my part; what else could possibly be fueling their deliciously unbridled rip-ups?
The quintet, formed in 2005 by brothers J. John and J. Benjamin from the remnants of their San Diego post-punk band Dehra Dun, is rooted in acoustic-based roots music - banjo, mandolin, and violin figure prominently - but indie rock has clearly played a significant role in shaping how they approach country and folk idioms.
Dead Man conjure the sounds and scents of your burnout uncle's LP collection
Dead Man
Euphoria
(Crusher)
By Will York
The second album by Swedish quartet Dead Man, **Euphoria,** is an unapologetic throwback to the turn of the 1970s - specifically, the transition from ‘60s folk- and psyche-rock to the more sinister hard-rock and proto-metal sounds that would follow. Most of the album is poised right on that brink, and its 11 songs bring to mind everything from early Pink Floyd and Donovan (in his more tolerable moments) to Peter Frampton-era Humble Pie to the softer side of Led Zep or Black Sabbath (think “Planet Caravan”). Impressively, they do so without making me feel like I need to check myself into rehab.
Yes, you can almost smell your burnout uncle’s musty LP collection while listening to this disc, but the songwriting and arrangements are really well done, and the headphone-ready production captures it all with a warmth that’s increasingly rare in this era of Pro Tools.
I've never been to Overton, Nevada - the tiny desert nowhere situated about an hour's drive northeast of Las Vegas - and frankly, I doubt I ever will. It sounds like a blink-and-you'd-miss-it sort of place. Unincorporated and without a single stoplight, Overton probably doesn't want any visitors, anyway.
Still, despite the town's lack of obvious welcome signs along the road, Castanets mastermind Ray Raposa decided that this was the perfect spot to plunk down his roots for a few weeks to record his fourth album, City of Refuge. While driving through town, he must have felt the tug of silence, of complete isolation, and found it too tough to resist - thus temporarily placing his road trip on hiatus, Raposa holed up in a room in a mom-and-pop motel and set out to capture the unforgiving Southwestern landscape in song.
It was an idea which he had been tossing around prior to encountering Overton, but everything began to gel once he'd set up camp in this scrap-of-humanity no one ever visits. He'd found his muse, as unlikely and foreboding as it might be to the rest of us. Having listened rather intently to the latest Castanets offering, I would venture to say that Raposa didn't merely capture the desert - the desert seems to have captured him as well. Stark, bleak, and jittering from a hushed, teeth-clenched tension from start to finish, City of Refuge is a gripping dispatch from the wobbling point between solitude and madness.
Dance, dance, dance with Lykke Li - and mixed emotions
By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
Watching Lykke Li bounce her nimble, lithe body, holding her hand to her head, as she warms up before screaming into a megaphone in the “Breaking It Up (Alternate Take)” video reminds me of a simple fact: sex sells. Better yet, cute Swedish girls who exude sexuality sell.
A standard formula we all know, but these days it has got a twist: GAWS majors and hipster boys wearing their sister’s pants reflect a shift in the standard norms of sex stars from the typical Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera wannabes, and the spectrum has been widened to less conventional icons like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Swedish pop sensation Lykke Li.
Lykke Li dances with a lot of hopping and arm flinging, which makes her resemble a sexier, less crazed, but still spastic Ian Curtis. She stares into the camera as if she’s looking at you, drops her eyes, and even though she’s breaking up with you, you’re already addicted by the time the catchy hook comes.
Axton Kincaid gets close to the source with their new release
AXTON KINCAID
Silver Dollars
(Free Dirt/ Trade Root Music Group) By Todd Lavoie
Bay Area three-part-harmony whizzes Axton Kincaid might no longer remain as geographically close to each other - three-fifths of the band recently relocated to Portland, Ore. - but their musical kinship appears as mighty as ever with their latest release, Silver Dollars.
Dishing out 11 barnburners, honky-tonk stompers, and beer-sobbers over the course of 35 minutes, these folks are the real deal: genuine, heartfelt, and pleasantly irony-free. While some of the younger, urban exponents of rootsy sounds tend to approach country, folk, and bluegrass idioms with a bit of emotional distance, Axton Kincaid feel closer to the source - not to mention more reverential to the material which inspired them in the first place.
Many months ago, I’d described the band as an updated Carter Family. The assessment still rings true, but I’d also stick them in the same class as the Be Good Tanyas, Freakwater, or the Walkabouts, all of whom display an obvious love for classic twang while still bringing a little contemporary attitude along the way.
Mount Eerie's homebrew black metal and flaming home
By Brandon Bussolini
There’s an ebb and flow to Phil Elverum’s career that runs counter to the prevailing logic of indie-rock success. After the critical acclaim of The Glow Pt. 2 (K, 2001) threatened to pin him and his Microphones moniker to the wall, Elverum took up the name Mount Eerie and took refuge in Anacortes, Wash., his hometown. If that album was the culmination of a half-decade’s worth of tape recording experiments and carefully honing his songwriting - Elverum started as folk art musique concrète and ended up heir apparent to the Brian Wilson/Jeff Mangum throne - Mount Eerie is a post-Glow ramble in the woods, far from comfort or rest, teetering on collapse.
Mount Eerie’s two most recent releases are less ramshackle than earlier material, but the project remains tricky to pin down: this year's Black Wooden Ceiling Opening 10-inch and quickly cranked-out Lost Wisdom LP (both P.W. Elverum and Sun, Ltd.) - a collabo with former Eric’s Trip-per Julie Doiron - oscillate between punky thrust ‘n’ crunch on the former and introverted duets on the latter. Elverum’s probably never played the kind of guitar leads he does on Ceiling Opening before, probably never raked his pick over the strings like that or asked the drummer for a blast beat. Lost Wisdom’s homey feel is more familiar, and Doiron’s wimpy voice is a natural complement to Elverum’s earnest worry.
There have been times when Oakland quartet the Mass have worn their Mike Patton and John Zorn influences a bit too visibly. Those inspirations are still present here, among others, but this four-song EP shows that the band has developed them into its own sound, one that deftly balances experimental quirks with quality metal riffage and sturdy songwriting.
The opener here, "Trbovlje," starts off as a Sabbath-meets-Melvins workout before veering into a 3/4 instrumental breakdown with layered saxophones on top. The highlight, though, is the 11-minute finale, "Ilirska Bistrica," a slow, lurching number that sounds a bit like the Melvins covering Meshuggah. At just over 20 minutes, this disc is concise and to-the-point. Well done.
Sweet beat: Primal Scream packs its latest grooves with tasty melodies, duets
PRIMAL SCREAM
Beautiful Future
(B-Unique)
By Todd Lavoie
There's a standard snappy comeback which seems to inevitably follow the announcement of a new Primal Scream release. If you spend much time in the music-nerd universe, you've probably heard it somewhere. Hell, maybe you've even uttered the words yourself. It goes something like this:
"So, which Primal Scream will we be hearing from this time?"
I suppose it's all in good snark, given that the Glasgow, Scotland, institution has thrown itself into frequent sonic overhauls and switcheroos over the years. Starting off in the mid-'80s as Byrds-y jangle-pop devotees, they'd adopted a harder, MC5/Stooges bluster by the end of the decade. In 1991 they had morphed into flower-hugging, Ecstasy-dispensing groove-lovers with the thoroughly zeitgeist-defining indie/dance crossover Screamadelica (Sire), an album which slipped acid house, dub, and even the odd diva anthem into the British guitar-pop charts and helped convince an entire generation that rock-culture and dance-culture need not be mutually exclusive.
Pop Montreal part three: Ratatat, Beach House, Wire, and more
Rah-rah: Ratatat.
By Laura Mojonnier
A snapshot of the Pop Montreal festival, Oct. 3, 4, and 5.
Day 3
Ratatat and Panther at Club Soda, 10:30 p.m.
I began Friday night, Oct. 3, with the second most-hyped show of the festival: Ratatat. (First place goes to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who played Metropolis on Thursday night - not even my press pass could get me in.) It was sold out weeks before Pop began, but somehow Club Soda managed to not feel like the inside of a wet diaper in mid-July. So props to whoever was in charge of air circulation.
I saw opening act Panther over the summer with maybe 30 people in the room at an Oakland gallery smaller than my apartment, so naturally I assumed that seeing them six rows deep in a huge downtown venue was bound to disappoint. But the Portland, Ore., art-rock duo, composed of multi-instrumentalist Charlie Salas-Humara and drummer Joe Kelly, actually managed to pull it off, oozing enough delirious energy to fill the 800-person room.
The night started off with a bike ride up north into Montreal's Mile End area to catch Irma Thomas and a full backing band play the Ukrainian Federation.
I'd only been to this venue once before, to see Patti Smith play a secret show at last year's festival, and the place certainly seems made for that kind of gig. The venue feels like a cross between a middle school auditorium and a Protestant church, rows of 40-year-old theater seating on the first floor and a pewed balcony for the choir. In conclusion, Ukranian Federation is not great for rocking out, but it's just perfect when watching Thomas belt torch songs for middle-aged Quebecers.
Pop Montreal, part one: Hot Chip heats up, Sic Alps smashes, Woodhands sweats
Great Northern: Mixylodian.
By Laura Mojonnier
Montreal is the kind of city you only appreciate once you leave for an extended period of time, as I did when I relocated to the Bay Area for a few months this past summer. Living here spoils you - it makes you think that all cities have vibrant art and music communities and cheap rent, that all cities serve poutine (fries, gravy, and cheese curds) at every 24-hour corner food joint for your drunken feasting.
Sure, there are drawbacks: the five-month winters, the unchallenged hegemony of skinny jeans, the fact that the gravely pit in front of my stairwell probably won't return to its former state as a sidewalk until early 2009. But, at its core, this city has a fiercely independent nature that makes festivals like Pop Montreal possible.
What began in 2002 as a series of shows all booked in the same weekend has exploded into a five-day extravaganza that takes over every venue in the city every year in early October. The core of the festival remains the music, but now there's Film Pop, Art Pop, Puces Pop (a craft fair/exhibition), Pop Symposium (panels, discussions, lectures), and Kids Pop. And though a small corporate presence has arisen - rumor has it that all staffers received a fresh pair of Converse this year - Pop is still run mostly by hip 20-somethings and a hoard of volunteers jockeying for five-day wristbands. As a result, the festival has a refreshingly laid-back, organic vibe, even if the published set times are occasionally unreliable.
Imagine Zeus and Ares, up on Mount Olympus sipping cocktails when suddenly they start arguing about Ares’ old-news fling with Aphrodite. What ensues is more then expected, with lightning bolts flying into trees, morphing them into vertical charcoal, and spears being sent high into the sky as vultures descend upon the slain. The members of Genghis Tron brought a little of that mythical drama when they took the stage at Bottom of the Hill on Oct. 6. The band churns out cacophonous metal that waxes and wanes between caliginous grindcore and mellow yet still moody electronica.
Openers Religious Girls from the East Bay stepped in for Yip-Yip, which couldn’t perform due to a member's illness. The group mirrors the point in which Zeus and Ares are still just sipping cocktails: it’s a good moment because you’re drinking, but it’s not unusual enough to order anything less original then a gin and tonic. They played with passion, pounding beats ferociously on multiple drums, with war chants and shrieks that sounded somewhere along the lines of Animal Collective’s “Native Belle” and “The Purple Bottle.” Not to say that I don’t love Animal Collective, but Religious Girls' sound didn’t come off as entirely original.
Clipd Beaks, the onetime Oakland combo, was the lull while you’re trying to get the attention of the bartender to order another drink - hopefully the one that’ll push you from tipsy to drunk. Their sound was simple and synthy. Nic Barbein vocals were filtered with noise as he sang undecipherable lyrics into two mics, once even sticking one into his mouth. Overall, it was like being ignored by the bartender for more than 15 minutes because that more aggressive patron distracts him or her and takes all the attention.
ballboy
I Worked on the Ships
(Pony Proof)
By Todd Lavoie
I've never kept this a secret, but here goes: I'm a lyrics guy. Little surprise, I suppose, given my stats. I work in a bookstore. I'm a voracious reader. I've been known to throw words upon the page from time to time. I geek out over silly things like etymology and colloquialisms. Not only do I own several dictionaries, but I also have a shelf full of books of slang, quotations, and various other word-nerd delights.
Not to sound all Hallmark card about the whole thing, but words - well, they mean a lot to me. I am, after all, one of those saps who immediately yanks open the liner notes upon getting a new CD, scanning to see if the artist included the lyrics in the pages. As much as I love to lose myself in dense guitar washes or crunching synth riffs or blaring trumpet fanfares, ultimately I'd be lying if I didn't say that the thrust of whatever is leaving the vocalist's lips didn't matter the most to me. As a lover of books who admittedly doesn't read too much verse, I'm a sucker for lyrics probably because they're the closest thing to poetry in my life. Hell, some might even argue that certain songwriters out there - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, maybe even Joni Mitchell at times - are bona fide poets as well.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily say that ballboy's Gordon McIntyre is a poet, but he does have a knack for penning engaging, lexicon-loving lyrics. Ever since arriving in a shower of wordplay in 2001 with their EP-collecting, snarkily-titled full-length Club Anthems (SL/Manifesto), the vocalist has pulled listeners close to their speakers with absorbing tales of love, sex, and the burning desire for something bigger and better.
The dobro mastery of Jerry Douglas in all its glory on 'Glide,' at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass
JERRY DOUGLAS
Glide
(Koch)
By Todd Lavoie
Universally regarded as the finest dobro player in contemporary music, Jerry Douglas has long been the go-to source for the most evocative of resonator-guitar textures.
Starting off as a session musician back in the '70s and '80s - and having worked along the way with everyone from bluegrass pioneers David Grisman and Ricky Skaggs to country artists as varied as Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Trisha Yearwood - Douglas eventually launched a solo career which established him as one of the forerunners of the burgeoning "newgrass" movement. Proponents of the newgrass sound wanted to expand the boundaries of bluegrass by drawing from other traditional acoustic-based styles - particularly jazz - and the drive to rescue the dobro from pigeonholing was certainly understandable, given the perceived limitations many folks had up until that point.
The instrument has been frequently, almost predictably, used in film and television scores to introduce a Southern setting - often rural and run-down in nature - thanks to its ability to fashion moods from its lazy slides between notes. Sure, its "we'll-get-there-when-we-do" slides and slow finger-pickings easily summon up images of sweltering afternoons under a merciless sun. But the dobro can do so much more - and Douglas has made it his mission to prove exactly that.
The subtle ebb of Beach House at Swedish American Hall
By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
Beach House’s slow melodies and ethereal lyrics are filled with mysterious, "Holy Moments," captured in simple couplets, like “Pick apart the past, you’re not going back / So don’t you waste your time," surrounded by atmospheric, somber, lightly strung-together pearly words that create a tone reminiscent of a short I saw on Friday, Footnotes to a House of Love, directed by Laida Lertxundi, at Artists’ Television Access.
Set in the desert of Southern California, the 16-mm color film is a collection of collaged cuts of empty dilapidated wooden rooms, loosely hanging screen doors, and parallel views of lovers caressing. The chopped scenes fuse together to create a sense of place that is more fulfilling than any individual shot, much like the sentiment that Beach House captures.
This mood is similar to the manner in which Beach House’s meditative melodies wash over their audience, as they did Sunday, Sept. 28, at the Swedish American Music Hall. If you’ve ever felt heartbroken, or any moderate pain at all, you can interpret Beach House’s abstract lyrics filled with mild images - “I’ll pour some tea for us” ("Astronaut") - stuck somewhere in nostalgia (or maybe in the imagined future), and suit them to fit your own emotional state at the time.
ATP Day Three: My Bloody Valentine rips, Dinosaur Jr. rages, Bob Mould sweetens up, Yo La Tengo be jamming
Shoegazer love-a-gore-gore: My Bloody Valentine at ATP NY. All photos by Jessica Reeves.
By Todd Lavoie
"Nobody puts Baby in a corner!"
Walking around Kutsher's Hotel in Monticello, NY, knee-deep and beyond in Catskills swank-gone-asunder, oohing and aahing and occasionally cackling in shuddered horror upon stumbling across yet another shining example of '50s-era Borscht Belt décor in steady decline, I couldn't help but evoke that priceless line from what is possibly the cringiest of '80s cringefest flicks, Dirty Dancing, as I kicked off day three, Sept. 21, of All Tomorrow's Parties NY.
As it turns out, Kutsher's - the epicenter for all things indie for that weekend - was also apparently the inspiration for the set of Dirty Dancing. Wikipedia away - you'll see. Everything began to make sense. Here we were, on our third day of the festival, and the talk of the town wasn't Saturday night's Les Savy Fav and Shellac double-whammy, or the astounding seven-places-at-once ubiquity of Kevin Shields, who seemed to pop up from every corner - someone has to be in the corner, obviously, since Baby can't - but instead it was the irrefutable suspicion that this place held a singular role in so-bad-it's-good moviemaking history. We indie kids love our irony, after all - and we'd all been thrust upon the motherlode.
ATP NY Day Two: Les Savy Fav, Shellac, Fuck Buttons, Harmonia, Om, and - what? - more
Prickly, angular goodness: Shellac at ATP NY. All photos by Jessica Reeves.
By Todd Lavoie
Ah, the weekend was in need of a good easing-in period - nothing too strenuous, see, considering the epic scale of the Saturday night to come. So, on Sept. 20, we settled into our day by catching a couple of films at the Criterion Screening Room: Albert and David Maysles’ Gimme Shelter and David Markey’s 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The former - a chronicle of how it all went wrong at the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway, was absolutely riveting - while the latter was a bit more hit-or-miss, thanks to a nerve-grating focus on Thurston Moore as the documentary’s free-styling, wisecracking prankster. Having thoroughly relished the considerably mellower, less chatty Moore of the night before, I couldn’t cotton to the younger, ever-vibrating version I was witnessing onscreen. Still, the Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. performances in the film made it all worthwhile.
Next it was rush, rush, rush to the main stage: Fuck Buttons were about to bring the noise! We arrived just in time, and the Bristol, England, duo had just finished sound-check. Focusing largely on their March-released slab of epic gorgeousness, Street Horrrsing (ATP), the set was flush with all of the touchstones of the Fuck Buttons sound: steady electro-drone, pulsating sheets-of-static majesty, and floor-thumping noise-house.
A glistening sheen seemed to have been applied to the entire proceedings, thanks to scatters of night sky-seeking synth sparkles. Dance, drone out, raise arms to the heavens - the choice was ours, and the crowd was evenly split between the three activities.
Go directly to jail: Les Savy Fav vocalist Tim Harrington in prisoner getup.
ATP NY Day One: Built to Spill, Meat Puppets, and 'Shining' glam
Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington rises above. All photos by Jessica Reeves.
By Todd Lavoie
I just flew in from New York, and boy, are my arms tired! Ba-dum-bum.
A corny opener to this humble journal of my All Tomorrow’s Parties NY experience, but entirely too apropos for my weekend of serious ear-grinning up in the Catskills. Consider the venue choice: Kutsher’s Hotel, one of the few resorts from the “Oy vey!” heyday - Oy veyday? - of the Borscht Belt still in operation.
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