Oh, look. Seattle dream-pop band Seapony have released a new video for their song Be Alone.
Seapony brightened the morning back on September 3, the most awesome day of Bumbershoot 2012, the same day M83 performed, among many others. Seapony performed a set at 12 noon, just as the sunny Seattle sky was starting to warming up, the Labor Day crowd was arriving, and the realization of what a terrific day was ahead was just starting to dawn on your humble narrator.
Formed in Ohio in 2010, Seapony is longtime couple and songwriting duo Jen Weidl (guitars, vocals, lyrics) and Danny Rowland (guitar, lyrics, and Jason Schwartzman impersonations). In Seattle, they teamed up with bassist Ian Brewer, Rowland's childhood friend and former bandmate, and drummer Aaron.
Their LP Falling was released September 11, and is available here.
You really have to hand it to the French electro-pop band M83 - a full year after their album Hurry Up, We're Dreaming comes out, they finally get around to releasing the video to what I consider to be the most beautiful song on the album, the lovely and understated Wait. I don't understand a thing that's going on in the video, but it's still fun to watch.
Here are some more pictures of M83 performing in Seattle at Bumbershoot 2012, where a riot almost broke out when the audience overran the security guards and bum rushed the open floor of Key Arena during M83's performance,
Okay, maybe this post isn't about music, but it is about pop culture, so deal with it. The point of this post is that I own a television primarily for the Sunday evening premium channel series, and as of this week, they're all on hiatus.
Last Sunday was the finale for the first half of this season of AMC's The Walking Dead; the second half of the season doesn't begin until February 10, begging the distinction between a "season break" and a "new season." Whatevs.
Two weeks ago was the season finale of HBO's Treme, a show I've come to like once I realized that it's about the only series on television about both the lives of musicians and the music that they make. Can you imagine if they came up with a similar premise, but set in the indie rock world of, say, Brooklyn or Portland, and featuring many of the actual musicians in supporting roles, like Treme does? Now there would be an interesting show. It actually wouldn't be too far of a stretch for HBO's How To Make It In America (also between seasons right now) to do this, basically just change the central industry from the fashion designer profession to the music profession. I'd watch it, and I bet many other people would, too.
Boardwalk Empire aired it's season finale last Sunday, the same night as the last Walking Dead. Except for the Richard Harrow character, the series hasn't really lived up to its potential in my humble opinion, but it does have the Richard Harrow character and that's more than enough to keep me watching and bemoaning it's current hiatus.
Sons of Anarchy, a Tuesday night outlaw-biker series on FX, also wrapped up for the season last week, concluding with a run of 90-minute episodes.
Meanwhile, HBO's Game of Thrones doesn't start its third season until March 31. True Blood is between seasons. The HBO comedies Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls, and Real Time with Bill Maher are all off the air right now. Even the difficult to love The Newsroom is off until next June.
And why the hell didn't FX ever bring back its show Terriers after its initial season?
Note that if any of these shows were on the air right now, I would be watching them and not writing whiny posts like this.
Somehow, between the technical problems over at the LiveJournal site and the crash of my computer, I forgot to post the pictures of Lost In The Trees performance at The Earl back on November 3 - which is a shame, because it was a really terrific show. It wasn't until I stumbled across their Morning Becomes Eclectic set over at KCRW that I remembered that I had forgotten.
The opening act was Atlanta's Oryx and Crake, a fine orchestral pop outfit worthy of wider attention.
Touring with Lost In The Trees were North Carolina's Midtown Dickens, who played a spirited set of Appalachia-influenced Americana.
Headliners Lost In The Trees played a magnificent set, mainly performing songs from their latest album A Church To Fit Our Needs, a cycle of songs frontman Ari Picker wrote about the passing away of his mother, but also including some older songs, such as Walk Around The Lake.
In addition to violin, cello, and even french horn accompaniment, Picker had Midtown Dickens join them on stage late in the set to provide even more strings and, yes, that's a bowed saw being played behind him.
For the end-of-the-set finale, Picker and company left the stage to perform an acoustic and unamplified version of Song for the Painter, one of my favorite of their songs. An encore after that touching and intimate performance would have been superfluous.
I'm just now realizing that I haven't been to The Earl since that November 3 set - maybe not a record for me, but certainly an exception to my usual behavior.
Innovative jazzman Dave Brubeck passed today at the age of 91, just one day short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.
During a period of the 1970s, between, say, the demise of "progressive rock" and the advent of punk, when disco, mellow California pop, and Stevie Nicks ruled the airwaves, I very nearly stopped listening to rock music altogether and retreated into a world of jazz. I was amazed at the richness and variety of this American art form that was largely ignored by the American public. Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk became my new John, George, Paul, and Ringo, and as I went further down the rabbit hole of the avant garde, Shepp, Pharoah, Braxton, and Sun Ra became my new Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Speaking of Monk, though, there's a link to a great, nearly half-hour performance by Monk in all of his eccentric genius at the end of the Brubeck clip above.
Somewhere in the background of all this great music, though, there was always the Dave Brubeck Quartet. They weren't my favorites, and I don't think I ever owned an album of theirs, although I had managed to accumulate a fairly prodigious collection of vinyl. They were cool and cerebral, and my interests in jazz leaned more toward the visceral and the emotive. No disrespect toward the departed today or the living back then, but it simply wasn't my thing.
I always did have an appreciation, though, for the playing of Brubeck's alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond. In 1977, at the height of my jazz enthusiasm, Desmond died of lung cancer, the result of chronic chain smoking. He was 52 when he passed, and I remember thinking that he was an old man then, even though I'm older than that now.
In any event, at some point around the rise of late 70s punk and the emergence of New Wave, rock music got interesting again. At the same time, the number of musicians playing music that could legitimately be called jazz had already started to diminish due to sickness, old age, and death, as well as to the economics of the music industry. I still appreciate jazz and my musical tastes today are informed and influenced by the freedom and creativity I encountered in jazz, but rather than listen and re-listen to the same old recordings over and over, I continue to explore the new and the different, just like Brubeck had during his lifetime.
