Saturday, January 26, 2013

Calexico y Yo La Tengo at Buckhead Theater, January 25, 2013


So, yeah, last night was Yo La Tengo with Calexico opening at The Buckhead Theater.  Apologies for not posting more yesterday, but when I left for the copy shop at 4:30 to make four copies of a report for my job, I had no idea that it would take me three hours to complete.  As it was, I ran directly from the copiers to The Buckhead Theater, stopping home only to pick up my Will Call printout, and got to the show at about 8:00, a half hour before Calexico started the evening.

It was my first time at The Buckhead Theater.  The BT is actually the restored former Roxy, which I hadn't been to either, even though it's a mere three miles from my home.  Go figure.  Anyway, it's a nice venue and like Terminal West still has that "new car smell."  It has a large stage, a balcony, and really spacious rooms up front for drinks, the merch table, and coat check.  

Back in 1984, when Yo La Tengo first formed, Buckhead was a very different place than it is now, and I had spent many an evening socializing and partying in the old neighborhood at bars, restaurants, and nightclubs like Good Old Days, Carlos McGee's, Aunt Charlie's, Peachtree Cafe,  the Five Paces Inn, Texas State Line Barbecue, and the Steamhouse Lounge, among others.  Now, it's all boutiques and shops for the One Percenters or One Percent wannabes, and it actually now feels a little incongruous to be listening to live music, much less good live music, in the area.

But enough nostalgia. "The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime," Pink Floyd once sang  (or as the Gang of Four put it, "Nostalgia, it's no good").  Last night was an evening of good live music, stating with the opening set by Calexico.


Calexico formed from members of The Friends of Dean Martinez, one of my favorite instrumental, post-rock bands of the '90s.  Led by guitarist and singer Joey Burns, the band merges indie rock with mariachi and Tejano music styles.  The band is currently touring as a septet with many of the members playing multiple instruments, including two trumpeters, accordion, pedal steel, and vibes.  Their sound is exciting and uplifting, and as soon as the music began, I forgot all of my troubles back at the copy shop.


The group includes everything I like in an indie band. Upright bass?  Check.


Horns? Check.


Vibes? Check.


Accordion playing multi-instrumentalists? Check.


More guitars?  Check.


When they weren't playing together mariachi-style, trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela also contributed several terrific vocals in Spanish, while trumpeter Martin Wenk occasionally filled in on accordion.  All in all, it was a wonderful set of great music, with just the right amount of jalapenos to spice up the night.


Here Calexico play one of its singles, Maybe on Monday, in a Lower Manhattan studio.


But as good as Calexico was, it was Yo La Tengo who ruled the night.  Although they're been around for some 30 years now, this was actually my first time seeing them, and I'm already kicking myself for all of the missed opportunities - I've seen them billed so many times, yet never found it in me to make a it a set before.  


The band formed as the husband/wife duo of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley in 1984, with bassist James McNew joining the band around 1990.  The band can make a reasonable claim at being the original indie rock outfit, and their musical styles encompass punk, post-punk, folk rock, noise pop, dream pop, ambient, and jangle rock.  In other words, they're all over the map and are happy to explore and stretch themselves, while never content in being stuck in just one place.




The band is famous for its large back catalog and impressive selection of covers, as well as their annual Eight Nights of Hanukkah shows at their native Hoboken's Maxwell's.  I understand that some of their cover songs at last year's Maxwell's event included The Fugs' Frenzy, The Beatles' Eight Days a Week, Dylan's You Ain't Going Nowhere, Adam & the Ants' Antmusic, The Velvet Underground's Heroin and Sister Ray, Blue Oyster Cult's Burnin' For You, Neil Young's Time Fades Away, and Sun Ra's Nuclear War (which was actually their best-selling single), the latter performed with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Their 2012 Hanukkah show also included this feedback-drenched guitar orgy, which should give you a pretty good idea of how they sounded much of last night:



The Soundcloud gadget above is from the exemplary NYC Taper, which has most of the 2012 Yo La Tengo Hannukah shows available for free download.  

Last night's set started out loud and electric, with lots of post-punk songs and compositions and members  of the band exchanging roles and instruments.  Mr. McNew even took over on the drums from Ms. Hubley during the middle of a song without either missing so much as a single beat.    

Midway through the set, Mr. Kaplan switched to acoustic guitar and led the band through several quiet songs from their new album, Fade, with Ms. Hubley on vocals.  Although slower than the previous songs, the band still managed to keep the audience spellbound and quiet, and after a couple of those quiet, acoustic songs, Mr. Kaplan joked, "Now, we're going to slow things down a little."

Sometimes they were Sonic Youth and sometimes they were Low.  Sometimes they were the Velvet Underground and sometimes they were REM.  And sometimes they were Calexico, inviting the twin trumpeters on stage with them on one song.  



The highlight of the evening, though, was the closer to their set, a long instrumental jam which built up and up as one member after another of Calexico came on stage and joined in, and slowly wound back down again as the members left the stage one by one to rapturous applause from the audience.  The piece lasted for what felt like a blissful eternity, and even though it was all built around one very simple chord progression, I don't think anyone in the audience wanted to hear it end.





For their encore, the band went back to quiet, acoustic mode, ending the night with Ms. Hubley singing a lovely cover of a Johnny Cash song, with vibes by Calexico's John Convertino.




I don't mean it ironically when I sat that last night's show was the best concert of the year.  If and when I look back on 2013 and try to select a "Best Of" show, last night's performance will have to be given serious consideration.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Dude, I Was There!

Sealions at The Goat Farm, March 29, 2012

Last year, Atlanta dream-pop band Sealions performed as part of the Atlanta Film Festival Music Experience at The Goat Farm.  Fittingly for a film festival, the IndieATL crew caught the whole thing on video, projecting the images in real time behind the band as they played and later posting the videos on YouTube.

Here are Sealions performing Indian Summer at the event.



Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Blues Control

Blues Control at 529, Sept. 13, 2012

The always intriguing Blues Control are back out on tour, but currently have no performances planned for the State of Georgia.  In the meantime, then, we'll just have to console ourselves with the trippy new video for their song Opium Den/Fade to Blue.


For those interested, the video was produced by performance artist Kathy Rose.


Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Youth Lagoon

Youth Lagoon at The Drunken Unicorn, March 22, 2012

Well, isn't this awesome?  Boise, Idaho's Youth Lagoon, who released The Year of Hibernation album last year, a critically acclaimed collection of self-produced "bedroom recordings," has released Dropla, a preview track from his next CD, Wondrous Bughouse, and it sounds even better than his first recording.  Instead of being a sort of indie one-hit wonder, it appears that young Trevor Powers is learning as he goes and is actually still getting better!



The song builds to an early (for a nearly six minute song) emotional climax with its "You'll never die" refrain before dissolving into a moody, repeated piano riff.  Far from being self-indulgent, the sustained length of this new piece shows Mr. Powers' trust in his songwriting skills, and confidence in his ability to hold an audiences' attention.  

Monday, January 21, 2013

First Rate People


I don't have too much to say about Toronto's First Rate People other than I like them.  I've only heard a handful of their songs so far, including You Won't Get This Joke At All, Funny Games, and Someone Else Can Make a Work of Art, and they haven't let me down yet.  

They have not announced any tour plans for 2013 so far, although they are apparently playing gigs in and around their native Toronto.  We need to get these people down south soon!




Sunday, January 20, 2013

Shabazz Palaces, The Helio Sequence at Terminal West, Atlanta - Jan. 19, 2013


Last night's performances at Terminal West had a strong yin-yang quality to them: fire and ice, or the sun and the moon.  The meeting of the three disparate bands brought to mind the 13th Hexagram of the I Ching, Thung Zăn, or "Union of Men," with its imagery of the starry but dark heavens above and bright fires or the Sun below.


The opening band, Atlanta's DeadCAT (not to be confused with Seattle's palindromic TacocaT), started things off by balancing the two forces, combining the dark and the bright.  The band features a rock solid rhythm section and vocals with the reverb so heavy that not only were the lyrics undecipherable, so was most of the stage banter.  The result was a strange and distorted (but in a good way) set of garage psych-rock.  The bass and drums moved the feet, the vocals opened the mind.











This was actually my third time seeing the next act, Seattle's Shabazz Palaces, but oddly my first time seeing them at night.  I previously saw them in a daytime performance at Bumbershoot 2011, and then again opening just before sunset for My Morning Jacket at McMenamin's Edgefield in lovely Troutdale, Oregon during MFNW 2012.  I've seen the band's Ishmael Butler perform with Thee Satisfaction at Bumbershoot 2012 (coincidentally on the same day is saw TacocaT), and going way back in the time machine, I saw Butler perform as Butterfly with the Digable Planets at Pittsburgh's Rosebud back around 1993 (sorry, no link to that pre-internet performance). Admittedly  the last two were evening performances, but then again, they weren't Sahabazz Palaces performances either.

Anyhow, last night, Shabazzz Palaces played on a nearly dark stage, with just a couple spotlights roving the perimeter of the stage and the audience, as was fitting for their artistic and avant garde take on hip hop.  A duo, the band transcends the usual hip-hop convention of one MC and one DJ, with both Butler and multi-instrumentalist Tendai 'Baba' Maraire handling vocals, electronics, and percussion, although Butler dominates the vocals and Maraire the percussion.  This is a dark, spooky form of hip hop, perfect for late night listening, the spacey, upper trigram of the Thung Zăn hexagram.

For the record, their nearly 45 minute set was the best that I've heard yet from this innovative band.











The bright, lower part of the hexagram was provided by the indie pop of Shabazz Palaces' Sub Pop label - and tour mates, Portland's The Helio Sequence.

The Helio Sequence are touring for the first time in four years behind their first album, Negotiations, in as long a time.  The band consists solely of guitarist/singer Brandon Summers and drummer Benjamin Weikel, who, it's been noted, may quite possibly be the happiest looking drummer on the face of the planet.  Taking the stage with only two guitars, a drum kit, and Weikel's laptop, it's hard to believe the amount of music they're capable of generating.  I have no quarrel with, and in fact rather enjoy, the Black Keys stripped-down rock using the same instrumentation, but The Helio Sequence produces a spacious wall of sound that someone just listening to a recording might mistake for a much fuller band.  I kept watching to see how the magic was done, but couldn't figure out how Summers got so many simultaneous lines out of his guitar.


As befitting their sunnier sound, the Terminal West stage was more fully illuminated for the Helio Sequence set, which provided a luminous counterpoint to the dark Shabazz Palaces set, the yin to the yang, the lower trigram that completed Thung Zăn.












For their encore, The Helio Sequence provided two folk-pop sounding songs, featuring Summers on harmonica.


  




I couldn't help but notice a large turnover in the audience after Shabazz Palaces' set.  At least three-quarters of the people standing around me for Shabazz Palaces left after their set, and the people surrounding me during The Helio Sequence had either been further back in the audience (I had managed to find a spot in the second row from the stage) or had just arrived.  I don't know if it's the difference between hip hop and rock, between the avant garde and the mainstream, or a racial distinction (this is, after all, still Georgia), but it's  nevertheless unfortunate that there are those who's personal feng shui is still not balanced between the light and the dark.

In his commentary on Thung Zăn ("Union of Men"), Deng Ming-Dao notes that in our present era, we isolate ourselves from one another and allow our society to stratify into different classes.  It is hard to remember that a true community, a true Union of Men, should be as easy as growing plants or sailing down a river.  As easy as enjoying music together.  In fact, a community that is hard to assemble or that must be maintained by coercion is not a true community.