Saturday, March 16, 2013

Caveman



Another great new song from the great Brooklyn band, Caveman, who will be performing at The Drunken Unicorn on Saturday, April 6.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Kishi Bashi at The Earl, March 14, 2013


Kishi Bashi played to a packed, sold-out Earl last night.  He played 529 last summer, but on a Monday (so I missed him), and he played MFNW 2012 at the Doug Fir, but I got talked into going out to Troutdale, Oregon to see My Morning Jacket at McMenninin's at Edgefield.  As it turns out, the third time was the charm.  

But before he performed, the set was opened by the charming Elizabeth and the Catapult.


The Catapult is actually just Elizabeth Ziman, but that's all that's needed, as she sings beautifully and selects her songs carefully, including last night's cover of Dawes' When My Time Comes.  She was fighting off a cold but still both played and sang remarkably well between her sniffles, and used her not inconsiderable personal charm to totally win over the audience.




Elizabeth eventually invited Tall Tall Trees (Mike Savino) to come on stage and join her for a few songs.  The two are actually Kishi Bashi's tour band, so it was basically just Kishi without the Bashi (Bashi without the Kishi?)





There was only a short break between sets before Kishi Bashi took the stage, performing solo at first before being joined on stage by Elizabeth and the Catapult and Tall Tall Trees.


Mr. Bashi is known primarily for playing bright, cheery pop, most notably the song Bright Whites which you've probably heard by now in a Windows 8 commercial.  What surprised me during his over-60-minute set was the variety of musics he played, ranging from his signature pop to a fiddle-and-banjo bluegrass showdown with Tall Tall Trees, to some Bela Fleck-style jazz, hip-hop beat boxing, and even some noise rock and looped feedback freak outs.  In fact, he kicked into the instantly recognizable opening lines of Bright Whites after an extended jam with Tall Tall Trees, creating a perfect collision of the sequential and  the purely veridical.




Use of a repeater pedal to create on-stage loops is common by now, and I've seen plenty of artists create sonic textures and complex backing sounds to accompany their own playing (e.g., Owen Pallet, Dustin Wong, etc.).  But no one is the maestro of the technique that Kishi Bashi is, and beyond just having an interesting technical approach, he creates music that is fun, joyous, and consistently interesting to listen to.




The bow tie came off midway through the set for what he jokingly called Kishi Bashi After Dark.  






Overall, this might have been the most fun set since David Byrne and Annie Clark brought Love This Giant to the Cobb Energy Center, and the most musically satisfying since Calexico and Yo La Tengo at the Buckhead Theater.





Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Postal Service Auditions



Funny Or Die does it again, getting some terrific rock musicians to perform lacerating parodies of themselves, although Moby takes it to a whole other level.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

SXSW Webcast Schedule



It may be too late by the time you read this, but NPR will be webcasting their SXSW showcase live from Stubb's in Austin, Texas.  What's more, SXSW themselves will also be streaming a Latin rock showcase tonight live from The North Door in Austin.  

Here's the schedule, as best as I can determine:

08:45 pm Eastern/07:45 pm Texas Time:  Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (NPR)
09:00 pm Eastern/08:00 pm Texas Time:  Tan Frío el Verano (SXSW)
10:00 pm Eastern/09:00 pm Texas Time:  The Crookes (SXSW)
10:10 pm Eastern/09:10 pm Texas Time:  Waxahatchee (NPR)
11:00 pm Eastern/10:00 pm Texas Time:  Allah-Las (SXSW)
11:00 pm Eastern/10:00 pm Texas Time:  Cafe Tecvba (NPR)
11:45 pm Eastern/10:40 pm Texas Time:  Youth Lagoon (NPR)
12:00 am Eastern/11:00 pm Texas Time:  Band of Bitches  (SXSW)
12:00 am Eastern/11:00 pm Texas Time:  Yeah Yeah Yeahs (NPR)
01:00 am Eastern/12:00 am Texas Time:  Yokozuna (SXSW)
01:00 am Eastern/12:00 am Texas Time:  Le1f (NPR)
01:30 am Eastern/12:30 am Texas Time:  Alt-J (NPR)
02:00 am Eastern/01:00 am Texas Time:  Molotov (SXSW)



Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Mohan Veena



Here's a little diversion away from all of the recent concert posts (I'm finally caught up on March Madness, at least for now).  Harry Manx is a musician who blends blues, folk, and Hindustani classical music. He was born on the Isle of Man where he spent his childhood and now lives on Saltspring Island, in British Columbia.  He plays a mohan veena, which according to Wikipedia is is a modified Archtop guitar held in the lap like a slide guitar.  It consists of 20 strings (three melody strings, five drone strings strung to the peghead, and twelve sympathetic strings strung to tuners mounted on the side of the neck).  A gourd (or the tumba) is screwed into the back of the neck for improved sound quality and vibration. 

A friend of mine, another Canadian as it turns out, attempted to build his own mohan veena by adding three drone strings below the E string on a "beat up old guitar" and sticking an old speaker into the sound hole. He sent me a picture of the result.



So that I can hear the sound produced by his homemade adaptation, he recorded the sample below using a dollar-store microphone, but I don't think the result turned out too bad, considering the DIY nature of the whole experiment.



You gotta love that drone . . . 

Monday, March 11, 2013

Ducktails, Alex Bleeker, Chris Cohen & Weyes Blood at The Earl, March 9, 2013


Still playing catch-up on recent March Madness shows . . .

The fine band Real Estate, which has produced at least two near-perfect albums, are currently taking a break from recording and touring, but the individual members are still on the road with their various side projects.  Saturday night's show at The Earl showcased two of those side projects, Ducktails and Alex Bleeker & The Freaks.

Before getting to that though, a month or so ago, I noted that there are reportedly two separate systems in the brain that respond to music. The first one is veridical and responds to the pleasant sounds of the songs we already know. The other is sequential and anticipates the next note or harmonic move in an unfamiliar phrase of music. The sequential system is stimulated when music follows the logic of the notes or surprises us in some way that isn't merely arbitrary.  Not to be unnecessarily academic about these things, but recognition of these two systems assists in understanding the pleasures of Saturday night's Real Estate revue. 

Case in point: at first, I didn't much care for the opening act, Weyes Blood (pronounced "Wise Blood," like the Flannery O'Connor novel), as the music was unfamiliar to me and I initially didn't understand what it was they were doing.  Weyes Blood is Natalie Mering, ex-bassist of the band Jackie-O Motherfucker and the sister of Zak Mering of Raw Thrills and Greatest Hits. Weyes Blood started out as a conventional, unamplified folk singer but eventually began experimenting with electronic sounds, and after a relocation to Baltimore she started playing the darkly haunted narcotic drifter ballads that she brought to The Earl Saturday night.  


She sang on stage accompanied only by an electronic keyboardist (who also played bass with Alex Bleeker later that evening, so there's a two-degrees-of-separation connection with Real Estate there) and on some songs with her own acoustic guitar while the keyboards provided dark shadows of oddly creaking sounds.  It sounded strange and somehow "wrong" to me at first - cold, distant and somehow off-putting - and since I hadn't heard of her or her music before Saturday's performance, there was no veridical system response in my brain to her music.  I couldn't quite put it all together at first, so my sequential system wasn't firing either, but as she continued to sing her dark, neo-Nico, death-folk laments in her eerily beautiful, quasi-Teutonic voice, it suddenly all started to come together for me and the neurons of my sequential system started firing.  Suddenly, as soon as I "got it," the music became, instead of off-putting, interesting and absorbing, if still somewhat cold and distant.  Although Natalie's vocals are swooning and sweeping, and she often seemed caught up in her own on-stage rapture as she sang swaying from side to side while clutching the microphone in both hands, the overall sound is still a cold and haunting folk, as can be heard in  her song Romneydale



It was about 9:45 pm.  The Earl audience was still relatively small and subdued, although they still applauded with enthusiasm to each of Weyes Blood's songs.

The next act, Chris Cohen, was much more readily accessible.  A 37-year-old native of Los Angeles currently residing in the farmlands of Vermont, Cohen is a singing drummer who records all of the instruments on his albums and writes slightly psychedelic pop music, and has played and toured with a number of notable indie acts, including Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Deerhoof, and Cass McCombs, whom he most resembles musically in his laid-back approach.  


Cohen's songs follow their own idiosyncratic forms, but are still melodic in a homegrown and conventional sense.  He bends the reality of his pop-culture references so that it is unclear where and when they're from.  Some 1970s singer-songwriter? Some lost psychedelic-era curiosity?  Village Green-era Kinks?  A forgotten 1980s jangle-rock band?  As with some of the best songs of Josh Rouse or Meyer Hawthorne, when you hear Cohen songs like Optimist High, you feel like you’re rediscovering an old forgotten favorite. 


His gentle songs are pastoral and serene, glowing with easy comfort as he builds a soothing space away from the world.  The snare drum doesn't receive a lot of attention, and is tapped rather than struck when it does, and the pace never ventures beyond mid tempo. His music is composed entirely of comforting sounds: cracked, spidery guitars, grand pianos, reverb haze, and Cohen's Ray Davies croon.  This is music to get lost to, and the time-warp in his music is just his way of covering his tracks.

These songs sound almost designed to bring the mind's veridical and sequential systems together into their own harmony.  The apparent familiarity of the music soothes the veridical system, while the conventions of his references make easy work for the sequential system.  The two are at peace with one another, which makes listening to his music feel like wearing a comfortable pair of favorite jeans.

Since he records all of the parts on his album, he brought along three fine musicians (guitar, bass, and keys) for the tour.


By now, it was 10:30 pm, and the audience had grown considerably and seemed quite appreciative of Cohen's music.

The next band to take the stage was led by Real Estate bass player Alex Bleeker, now playing guitar and singing.  Alex Bleeker & the Freaks pretty much stole the evening, winning the evening's Battle of the Bands.  Their music melded roadhouse rock, pop, blues, country, and soul in a way that was instantly recognizable to the mind's sequential system, but Bleeker triggered a virtual veridical orgasm during one extended jam of blistering guitar.  While the sequential mind was easily putting together all of the pieces of the instrumental,  Mr. Bleeker approached the microphone singing, "I used to think maybe you loved me now baby I'm sure."  It was instantly recognizable, but out of context I couldn't nail down the song.  What was it?  "And I just can't wait till the day when you knock on my door," he continued.  This was like veridical foreplay, teasing us along in a state of aroused half-recognition.  "Now everytime I go for the mailbox, gotta hold myself down. 'Cos I just wait till you write me you're coming around." 

"I'm walking on sunshine," he sang, and instantly it became crystal clear - Katrina & the Waves, 1985.  "And don't it feel good?" and it did, the entire audience erupting into a spontaneous singalong.  The veridical moment was resolved, and the band and the whole audience reveled in a long extended cover of Walking On Sunshine.


But this was just one moment out of an extraordinary set.  The audience was clearly loving it, several young men at the front of the stage high-fiving the band members and each other as often as they could.  The band was clearly loving it as well, and kept lifting things up another level.  Mr. Bleeker told the audience in all sincerity that Saturday night was easily the best so far of the entire tour.  



Although Mr. Bleeker is ordinarily the bassist for Real Estate, with The Freaks he plays guitar and sings, handing the bass duties off to the same musician was played keyboards for Weyes Blood earlier (and bears a striking resemblance to Lancel Lannister).  Mr. Bleeker handles occasional vocals for Real Estate, and has a fine voice not unlike J Mascis' whine.



The audience, which had been growing all evening, was energized by the set, and Mr. Bleeker and the Freaks did a perfect job of warming up the audience for the evening's headliners, Ducktails, the reverb-heavy side project of Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanile, who didn't take the stage until nearly 12:30.

The bar had been set pretty high for the evening, and Ducktails didn't really stand a chance.  But they put on a great set which showcased Mr. Mondanile's shimmering guitar work, and the revved up crowd was along for the ride. 


Ducktails relied more on the sequential than the veridical, and part of the pleasure of the experience was hearing the ways the band explored pop territory behind Mondanile's guitar and singing.


Like the music of Real Estate, Ducktails' music has a dreamy, laid-back sound to it, more akin to the music of Chris Cohen than to Alex Bleeker's roadhouse rowdiness.  It was a bit of a transition, but Mr. Mondanile helped by meeting the audience halfway, putting more of a bite and a kick into the Ducktail songs than is heard on record.




Ducktails played a full 60-minute set, lasting until half past one.  I was tired and kept waiting to see if Matt Mondanile was going to bring Alex Bleeker out on stage with him (which didn't happen), and kept getting lost in the dreamy textures of Ducktails music.

Ducktails' latest album, The Flower Lane, is currently at the number 9 spot on CMJ's Top 20 list (see nifty sidebar feature to the right), so it was appropriate for them to headline, but based on the similarities of their music to the laid-back tempo of Chris Cohen's, and the climactic rowdiness of Alex Bleeker's, it would have been a better show if Ducktails had followed Cohen, and Bleeker and his Freaks headlined.  No disrespect, just sayin'.




All in all, it was a great night of music.  Going in, I had thought that four bands were at least one too many, but each artist had something original and different to say, and each was worth listening to.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Chelsea Light Moving, Talk Normal, and Merchandise at The Earl, March 8, 2013


I'm falling slightly behind in my concert posts, so I'll just keep things going until I catch back up.

Last Friday night, Thurston Moore brought his Chelsea Light Moving project to The Earl while on his way to Austin for SXSW, with Merchandise and Talk Normal in tow.  Once again, I had to drive from Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta to see the show, but this time without the specter of having to drive back the next morning.  I'm back home now, at least for the time being.

The opening band, Tampa's Merchandise, kicked the evening off in a muscular fashion, playing an energetic post-punk/punk-pop hybrid, with elements of Echo-and-the-Bunnymen New Wave goth thrown into the mix for good measure.  Or something like that.  Here's a sample for you to be the judge.







For the last couple songs of their set, they brought an alto sax player on stage with them, lending a James White/Contortions-like bite to their sound.


Talk Normal were up next, introducing themselves with the line, "We're a Brooklyn band."  Guitarist/bassist Sarah Register and drummer/vocalist Andrya Ambro play a unique blend of driving noise rock, with feedback-drenched guitar tones and jarring rhythms.  To give you some idea of their performance, on the second or third song of their set, Ms. Ambro placed a guitar over her floor tom and played it by beating the strings with her drumsticks.  Their songs at times sounded tribal, other times primal, and always interesting.  Due more to the compatability of their sound than due to the similarities of their names, they should consider touring sometime with Portland's Talkdemonic.



The stage was lit with two red spotlights placed on the floor, rendering photography nearly impossible, so apologies in advance for the quality of these pictures.





Here's a picture from their Facebook page of all of their equipment "politely ejected out the back door" of The Earl after their set.



Headliners, of course, were Thurston Moore and Chelsea Light Moving.  Commenting on their March 2 set in Hoboken, NJ, NYC Taper noted ,
"I had to remind myself at several points during this show that the exuberant, youthful guitarist and vocalist on the cozy Maxwell’s stage in his band’s own t-shirt was a 54-year-old member of rock royalty who I had seen perform in front of crowds hundreds of times this size. Sonic Youth may be on hiatus or it may be gone, but Thurston will keep playing – and keep playing well – for as long as he’s breathing. Chelsea Light Moving, as a band, isn’t Sonic Youth, but it isn’t just a dim facsimile of it, either. With Samara Lubelski (a well-known solo artist and member of Thurston’s solo band) on bass, John Moloney (Sunburned Hand of the Man) on drums and Keith Wood (Hush Arbors, Wooden Wand) on guitar, Chelsea Light Moving has an accomplished cast and its own personality. In some ways, CLM feels more like SST-era Sonic Youth – younger, hungrier, rawer. It seems fun to be in this band, in a way that’s almost impossible in a more established one."
Chelsea Light Moving is more a real band with real songs than a Thurston Moore & Friends jam session.  As a bandleader, Thurston Moore was calm, engaging, relaxed, and free of expectations. Chelsea Light Moving stands as a great band in its own right, and as a second act, it’s a more than worthy one.  By their own description, "the band is ready to detonate any birthday party, wedding or hullaboo in any country, planet or stratosphere that doesn’t support right wing extremist NRA sucking bozo-ology."  Keeping true to their word, and prompted by a Brooklyn Vegan comments thread, the band recently played a birthday party in a basement at a house in Northhampton, Massachusetts (video below). 



Chelsea Light Moving delivered a great set at The Earl, opening with Burroughs (one of the first songs ever posted to this blog) and including all the songs from their debut album that I know, including Groovy and Linda, Lip, and Alighted, as well as Empires of Time (dedicated to Roky Erickson), some new material, and my personal favorite, Frank O'Hara Hit.

On a personal note, I have to point out that somehow I managed to wind up standing at the best possible spot in the whole club, right at the stage and directly in front of Mr. Moore.  Two feet from a modern rock legend.  The pictures below weren't shot with a telephoto lens - I had to go wide-angle on Mr. Moore's face to avoid documenting his dental work.