Tuesday, December 4, 2012

A Preview


Oh, look.  Japanese violinist Kishi Bashi is coming to The Earl on March 14 (strangely, not a Monday).  I skipped Bashi's performance at the Doug Fir Lounge during MFNW, where he opened for Moonface, so this will be a chance to make up for what I missed.  

On top of the recently announced Alt-J show at the god-forsaken Masquerade (March 6) and the Thao & The Get Down Stay Down / Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside billing at Smith's Olde Bar on March 18, it looks like the annual March Madness event (the vernal equivalent to the autumnal Rocktober) is starting to take shape.

The Winter Doldrums may extend through December and January, but should end by February 9 when Jonathan Richman comes to Atlanta for a two-night stand at The Goat Farm.

I've already got my tickets for Richman, and looking further ahead, have already bought tickets for Seattle's Bumbershoot 2013 on Labor Day weekend.


Monday, December 3, 2012

Thao And the Get Down Stay Down

Thao Nguyen at Variety Playhouse, September 21, 2011

Right now, we're in the Winter Doldrums when a lot of good music generally does not pass through Atlanta.  However, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down just announced their new album, We the Common, will be released in February, and in support of the album, Thao will go on tour with Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside.  The tour comes to Atlanta's intimate Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta on March 18, for what is clearly a must-see show.



The vinyl version of the record is to include a limited edition 7” with covers of Melanie’s Brand New Key and The Troggs’ With A Girl Like You. You can download a copy of the album's first single, Holy Roller, from their Facebook page (you got to Like them first).

The bad news (at least for me) is that March 18 falls on a Monday in 2013, and what with my obligation to Monday Night Zazen, I won't be able to go.  Are you sure about that?, ask Daniel Higgs and Om.  Never say never, say I.


Pictures of Sallie Ford at Pioneer Courthouse Square during MFNW 2011, where they opened for Iron & Wine, and Thao at Variety Playhouse during Rocktober 2011, where they opened for The Head & The Heart, below.

Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside




Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down


Sunday, December 2, 2012

Taken By Trees

Taken By Trees at Variety Playhouse, October 2012

Oh, look.  Gothenberg, Sweden's Taken By Trees, fronted by the incomparable Victoria Bergsman,. performed a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, playing I Want You (not the Beatles' song) and Only You.  


Gentle, laid back and almost hypnagogic, their set opening for Jens Lekman (who also did a Tiny Desk concert) was one of the highlights of Rocktober 2012.


Saturday, December 1, 2012

Moonface


Canadian musician Moonface, aka Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and other bands, has released the video for the song Headed For The Door from his excellent album with the Finnish band Siinai, Heartbreaking Bravery.  


Unfortuantely, the rights to the video are owned by Warner Music Group, which is blocking the video from being embedded on sites such as this.  You can see the video, though, over here at YouTube, but in the meantime, here's a Soundcloud clip of the song.



I've seen Moonface perform with Sinaii at The Earl back last June, where he picked up a book and started reading aloud when he got to the letter portion of Headed For The Door.



I saw Moonface perform again last September at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge during MusicFest Northwest. Overall, I thought the Earl set was better, principally because he and Siinai played a few mind-bending, extended instrumentals during that earlier show.  As he set up at MFNW, Krug announced that the Doug Fir was concerned about time so they were going to have to “muscle through” their set.  Perhaps that's the reason they didn't perform the extended instrumentals, but coincidentally, just before the announcement was made, I had somehow gotten into a conversation with some bookish guy who was fervently scribbling in a notebook near the front of the stage.  We were discussing Zen Master Dogen's 13th Century essay titled Uji ("Existence/Time"), in which Dogen claims that all time is flexible and relative, and that time is a product of our own minds, not some fixed absolute through which we move.  Don't ask me how this got started because I don't remember, but it's the kind of thing that seems to only happen to me. Anyway, when Krug made the announcement, I couldn't resist telling him, since I was right up at the edge of the stage and it was the whole point of the conversation I was in, "You are not in time, time is in you."

"Whatever," Krug told me, and launched the band into Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips.


I didn't stay for the entire set and don't know if Krug again read from the book, as a friend I had met that week wanted to walk over to Holocene a couple of blocks away to catch the rest of the set by the band Trust.  You can say we headed for the door before Headed For The Door.  However, I never got to post any but one of the pictures from Moonface's Doug Fir set, though, so here they are:









One other thing - at both Moonface sets, both at The Earl and at Doug Fir, his audience included a large number of bros.  Among other definitions at urbandictionary.com, "bros" are:
"Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. When they aren’t making an ass of themselves they usually just stand around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying. Nearly everyone in a fraternity is a bro but there are also many bros who are not in a fraternity. They often wear a rugby shirt and a baseball cap. It is not uncommon for them to have spiked hair with frosted tips. 
Bros actually chose this name for themselves as they often refer to each other as "bro" even though they are not related. 
I couldn't go to sleep last night because some bros at the party next door kept screaming, "Whoooooo!!! YEAAHHHHH! Whooooooo!" 
It might be something about the epic quality of Moonface songs or Siinai's surging, anthemic sweep of sound,   but I saw more bros at the Moonface show at The Earl than I've ever seen at The Earl before or since, and I saw more bros at Moonface's Doug Fir show than at any other MFNW event in the two years I've been going.  This is not a negative reflection on Moonface in any way, but the question that I can't answer is how did both Southeastern and Northwestern bros ever get to hear of Moonface in the first place?

Friday, November 30, 2012

Of Monsters And Men, The Tabernacle, Atlanta, Nov. 29, 2012


Icelandic folk-pop band Of Monsters And Men played last evening at The Tabernacle in Atlanta.  Even though I had tickets, I almost didn't go, forcing me to consider my ambivalent attitudes toward music, popularity, and success.

Please let me explain.  I first heard the band Of Monsters And Men in October 2011, when KEXP Seattle covered the Icelandic Airwaves festival in Reykjavik and posted several videos of emerging Icelandic bands.  Iceland has a surprisingly vibrant and diverse music scene, that goes well beyond Bjork - in fact, the current scene there has absolutely nothing to do with Bjork at all.  I enjoyed a lot of what I heard coming from the small island nation, and my mind was truly blown to learn that even Greenland now has its own music scene.



I think I fell in love with Greenland's charming Nive Nielsen during her giggle at the 2:41 mark.  But already I'm off track.  See how easily I go off track?  All it takes in an Inuk giggle.

During this discovery of Icelandic and Greenlandic bands, one group clearly stood out from the rest due to their songwriting and sound, their harmonies, and their professionalism.  It was clear to me then that Of Monsters And Men could  make it big in the U.S. someday, and share billings with bands like Blind Pilot, The Head And The Heart, and Milo Greene.  I could even imagine them opening for Arcade Fire.  I looked forward to seeing them tour the States some day, and thought there were big things in store for this little band.



It turns out that I was more right than I knew.  The band did come to the U.S. early this year,  where they played on the spring festival circuit (Coachella, SXSW, Sasquatch, etc.) to rave reviews.  Videos got posted, music blogs praised their sound, and they rode the inexplicable Mumford and Sons wave to great popularity.  When their album My Head Is An Animal was released in April 2012, it shot up to the Number 6 spot on the Billboard Charts, and the Edward Sharpe-like single Little Talks reached Number One on the Alternative Music Chart.

But it seems we indie music lovers have a complex relationship with success.  The more other people start to listen to our favorite bands, the more suspicious we become of those bands.  Part of the snob appeal of listening to these emerging artists is hearing their brilliance before the rest of the world and enjoying our little secrets, but once a song reaches Number One and is used for automobile commercials, soundtracks to Katherine Heigl films, and karaoke, we tend to deny we ever liked it that much in the first place.


One way to avoid this hypocricy is to claim you don't like anything at all and to criticize everything, as is done  by cynical anonymous commenters on many a music blog.  But that strikes me as a particularly joyless solution to this dilemma.

Hipster snobbishness aside, my major complaint with new-found popularity is the crowds.  Instead of playing a little club like The Earl to an over-21 audience, or even a relatively intimate all-ages show at the Variety Playhous, Of Monsters And Men's first appearance in Atlanta was to a capacity crowd of high-schoolers at the cavernous Tabernacle.  I would much rather see a band up close and personal at some little club than from a distance while in the middle of a crowd of teenagers.  

Was it even worth going?, I wondered last evening.  I had become sick and tired of hearing that "Hey!" from Little Talks a long time ago, that shout that they co-opted from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and which The Lumineers subsequently bludgeoned to death with their hit song "Hey, Ho."  I was watching the time slip away last night, but just before the clock passed the point where it would no longer be worthwhile even trying to go, I rallied my enthusiasm and jumped in the car.

Only to run smack into the NFL traffic of a Thursday night Falcons-Saints game.  I had forgotten that the game was last night, and as The Tabernacle isn't far at all from the Georgia Dome, I suddenly found myself in the middle of gridlocked traffic, with the police trying to direct the flow of cars, including mine, to stadium parking lots.  Streets I wanted to take were closed, two-way streets were temporarily one-way (in the opposite direction of where I wanted to head), and for a while there it looked like I wasn't going to make it to The Tabernacle after all.

Nothing makes me more determined to do something than being told that I can't.  Now, I decided when my  car hadn't advanced more that two car-lengths in the past five minutes, I'm determined to stand in the middle of a bunch of teenagers and listen to some Icelandics with guitars shout "Hey!" at me. I peeled out of the line of traffic by doing a U-turn in the middle of Marietta Street, found my way over to Tech Parkway, and eventually down to Centennial Park and then over to The Tabernacle, with time still left before the show.  There were crowds of tailgaters in all of the parking lots, and I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have found a solitary available spot in my usual lot right next to The Tabernacle (although at an exorbitant, "Special Event" rate).  I got inside The Tabernacle and waded into the sea of teenagers on the floor just as the show was scheduled to start.

The scheduled opener was Elle King, who for some reason wasn't able to make it to the show (traffic?).  But rather than start with the next act, Iceland's Sóley Stefánsdóttir, a member of the indie collective Seabear and another one of those Icelandic Airwaves discoveries, we were allowed to stand around and wait 40 minutes, the approximate length of a warm-up act, before Sóley finally took the stage. I spent the time watching the score of the Falcon's game on my Droid and wondering if I shouldn't just head back home and cut my losses.



I liked Sóley's set and she has an appealing stage presence, but her intricate and intimate music isn't really suited to large venues and the crowd of teenagers was there to hear Of Monsters And Men perform songs from My Head Is An Animal, not to hear someone named Sóley.  Much talking and socializing during her set by the audience distracted one from more fully appreciating her set, which included her song I'll Drown.  I think she's a performer who would absolutely captivate a Terminal West crowd, but unfortunately not that crowd at that place at that time.






Of Monsters And Men took that stage at 9:45 and played a really terrific set for the next hour, followed by a two-song encore. For those of you who somehow have escaped them to date, the band is fronted by two singers,the adorable Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and the rotund Ragnar "Raggi" Þórhallsson.



As oddly matched as they may appear, their voices harmonize perfectly, and their warm harmonies account for much of the appeal of listening to Of Monsters And Men.  Their singing and playing are supported by guitarist Brynjar Leifsson, whose Nordic look alone would probably have made him a rock star regardless of OMAM.


The rhythm section consists of bow-tied bassist Kristján Páll Kristjánsson and drummer/cheerleader Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson.   



Finally, the sound is rounded out with a pair of multi-instrumentalists, namely keyboardist/accordion player Árni Guðjónsson and keyboardist/accordion player/trumpeter Ragnhildur Gunnarsdóttir.


As the band played, whatever snobbish disdain I had for their success quickly melted away and I found myself really enjoying their set.  They have everything that I like in this genre of music.  Good harmonies?  Check.  Interesting instrumentation? Check.  Performers who occasionally switch roles and instruments? Check.  A floor tom on which performers can occasionally bang away? Check.  They've got it all.

It was inevitable that one of these large, folk-rock collectives was going to eventually make it big.  The genre is growing and  seems surprisingly popular with teens and young adults.  I've rarely seen more affection from an audience for a band than I have at some of these shows, particularly for The Head And The Heart and for Blind Pilot, and if any of these bands were finally going to make it big, it might as well be those sincere young men and women from Iceland.

While I found some of their audience participation a little forced - it seems like every song in the first half of their set required us to clap, sing a particular passage, wave our arms, or do something - they settled down in the second half, letting the music speak for itself and allowing the audience to participate in its own manner.  By the time they got to their hit Little Talks toward the end of the set, the whole audience sang along to every word, Head-And-The-Heart-style.
   






Their set even included a cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' moody Skeletons.









During their encore, Brynjar Leifsson played some sort of guitar made from an old gas can, Nanna and Raggi harmonized as beautifully as ever, and Nanna even took a turn wailing away on the floor tom for a while.











I left the show with a big smile on my face and beat the traffic home before the football game got out.  By the way, the Falcons won the game 23-13, improving their record to 11-1.

The lesson in all of this is not to begrudge the success of others.