The Orb vs Chelsea Light Moving, Halloween Night, Atlanta

By some people's reckoning, last night, Halloween, was the final evening of Rocktober, and fittingly, there was no shortage of shows to attend, not the least of which was Saratoga Springs' Phantogram at the godforsaken Masquerade.  But that wasn't all - our old friends Big Gigantic were also at The Masquerade, while The Loft had the Rev. Horton Heat and The Basement at Graveyard Tavern had Shlomo and XXYYXX.  For a certain type of music fan, there was Leftover Salmon with Col. Bruce Hampton at Variety Playhouse, while for a whole other type of music fan, there was Sevendust with Asking Alexandria at The Tabernacle.  For the sake of completeness, I'll point out that someone called Stepdad was at Smith's Olde Bar, while Eddie's Attic had someone called The Cumberland Collective.

But even with all of these choices, I didn't go to any of the above, instead taking in two other great shows also occurring on this most epic of all nights.  To begin, downstairs from The Loft and the good Reverend Horton Heat, legendary electronic artists The Orb were playing at Vinyl.

There weren't too many people there when I arrived around 8:00, but there was a great ambient DJ layering some terrific tracks over each other.     

The Orb took over the stage a little before 9:00 and played a solid two-hour set.  At this point, the Orb consists primarily of founder Alex Paterson, assisted by collaborator Thomas Fehlmann.  Toward the center of the set, Fehlmann left the stage for a while and let Paterson cover A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld solo, which he seemed more than capable of covering.  

As one would expect from The Orb, the songs weren't performed as separate entities, but just sort of rose up out of the mix from time to time before dissolving back into the beats, samples, and psychedelia of the rest of the non-stop set. They were more than capable of getting the audience dancing, which by the end of the set, nearly everyone, including your humble narrator, was doing, and then chilling them out a little with some of their trippier passages. 

As the band played, a thoroughly entertaining video display was projected on a large screen set up to the right of the band, showing album logos, dancers, space and sci-fi themed film clips, old silent movies, and various other imagery.  It being Halloween, anywhere from two-thirds to three-fourths of the audience were in costume, although I suspect that an Orb concert might attract its fair share of costumed audience regardless of the date.  By and large, it looked like much like a classic 90s rave, complete with glow sticks. Combined with the trippy ambient music of The Orb, the costumed dancers and the video projections all combined to create an extremely other-worldly atmosphere.  It should also be noted that the audience was extremely well-behaved, polite, and cool, with nearly everyone wearing a blissed-out smile and making room at the front of the stage for dancers instead of trying to crowd the stage as at most shows.   People would tap me on the shoulder and say things like, "Dude, I saw them back in '95 at a festival with Underworld!," or dance with me for a few minutes, or just stand next to one another and share in our mutual appreciation of the evening. 

The Orb's two-hour set wrapped up around 11:00, and although the house lights stayed down for a long time as the audience called for an encore, cheering and clapping and chanting "Orb! Orb! Orb!", they never returned to the stage.  Several of us wondered what the point was of leaving the lights down after the set if they had no intention of performing an encore. 

But I actually really didn't mind all that much, as I had places to be.  Before I had bought my ticket for The Orb, I had purchased tickets to see Thurston Moore and his band Chelsea Light Moving at The Earl, so as soon as The Orb wrapped up their set at around 11:00, I left Vinyl in Midtown and drove over to East Atlanta Village  and The Earl.

Everything worked in my favor.  From Vinyl, I headed first up Peachtree and then back down Spring, jumping on the Connector at 14th (pardon the ATL ITP jargon).  Although East Atlanta Village was pretty busy on Halloween night, I lucked out finding a parking space almost immediately from the one car in an otherwise full parking lot pulling out just as I was pulling in.  I made it into The Earl by 11:15.

When I walked in, Moore was on stage tuning up, but the band had not yet started.  I had enough time to get a beer and find a spot to watch, and then Chelsea Light Moving began playing.

We've seen Chelsea Light Moving here back in March, and Thurston Moore performing under his own name at The Goat Farm following the release of his underrated Demolished Thoughts LP, but it's always a treat to see Moore perform and it Halloween night isn't the time to overindulge with two shows, then when is?  

As you can imagine, the edgy, angst-ridden music of Chelsea Light Moving was quite a contrast from The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. But change is good, and Moore played a great set, concentrating on songs from their debut album, but featuring a few new numbers as well. They played several of my favorites, including Burroughs (second song of the set), Groovy and Linda, and Empires of Time, but they never did get around to my favorite, Frank O'Hara Hit.

I imagine that with all of the entertainment options available on Halloween night, not limited to all the bands playing around town, there was a lot of competition for the audience, but I was still surprised at the relatively small size of the crowd at The Earl.  It was also interesting to note that very few people in the audience at The Earl were in costume, quite the contrast with the audience at Vinyl for The Orb.  

Chelsea Light Moving wrapped up their set around midnight, and played one short encore song, with bassist Samara Lubelski on violin, before calling it a night.

Neko Case Tiny Desk Halloween Concert

Live from just a little earlier this afternoon . . .

Courtney Barnett

In a perfect world, Australia's Courtney Barnett would be touring with Eleanor Friedberger and Hospitality. 

AVANT GARDENER

I sleep in late another day
Oh what a wonder, oh what a waste
It’s a Monday, it’s so mundane
What exciting things will happen today?
The yard is full of hard rubbish it’s a mess and
I guess the neighbours must think we run a meth lab
We should amend that.  I pull the sheets back,
It’s 40 degrees and I feel like I’m dying.
Life’s getting hard in here so I do some gardening
Anything to take my mind away from where it’s 'sposed to be.
The nice lady next door talks of green beds
And all the nice things that she wants to plant in them
I wanna grow tomatoes on the front steps,
Sunflowers, bean sprouts, sweet corn and radishes.
I feel pro-active, I pull out weeds
All of a sudden I’m having trouble breathing in.

My hands are shaky, my knees are weak
I can’t seem to stand on my own two feet
I’m breathing but I’m wheezing, feel like I’m emphysem-in’
My throat feels like a funnel filled with weet bix and kerosene
And, oh no, next thing I know they call up Triple O.
I’d rather die than owe the hospital 'til I get old.
I get adrenalin straight to the heart
I feel like Uma Thurman post-overdosing kick start.
Reminds me of the time when I was really sick
And I had too much pseudoephedryn  and I couldn’t sleep at night.
Halfway down High Street, Andy looks ambivalent
He’s probably wondering what I’m doing getting in an ambulance
The paramedic thinks I’m clever cos I play guitar
I think she’s clever cos she stops people dying
Anaphylactic and super hypochondriactic
Should’ve stayed in bed today, I much prefer the mundane.
I take a hit from an asthma puffer
I do it wrong - I was never good at smoking bongs.
I’m not that good at breathing in.

The Orb

Nice. . . and makes me look forward to The Orb's set at Center Stage Vinyl on Halloween.

Dirty Projectors

Dirty Projectors at Variety Playhouse, August 9, 2012

Dirty Projectors claim that this will be the last video from 2012's Swing Lo Magellan.  I hope that this means they're back in the studio working on the next album, and that means they'll be touring again soon (too long!).

Neutral Milk Hotel at The Tabernacle, Atlanta, October 26, 2013

It's both easy and hard to call any given show "Concert of the Year."  Easy in the excitement and rapture you experience as you're leaving the venue.  Hard, as in how can you compare, say, Savages at Vinyl with Yo La Tengo at the Buckhead Theater, or Blind Pilot at Centennial Olympic Park with Foxygen at 529?  However, given all these cautions and risks, Neutral Milk Hotel presented as strong a contender for Concert of the Year last night as one could possibly hope to hear.

Half Japanese opened. 

Photography, even with cell phones, was strictly forbidden at last night's show.  Although the crowd was big enough - the show was sold out - that I could easily have snuck in a few pictures, I decided to abide by the artists' request in the spirit of cooperation.  I found the Instagram picture above of Half Japanese on someone's Facebook page and since I never agreed not to share someone else's pics, there you go.  The Neutral Milk Hotel setlist at the top of the page isn't from last night's show (or even last night's sequence of songs), but the closest thing that I could find on Google.

But I digress.  The semi-legendary band Half Japanese opened with a full, hour-long set.  They are considered a punk rock band, but listening to them now just reminds me of how broad a range of music the term "punk" was applied to back in the late 70s and early 80s (sort of like "alternative" in the 90s or "indie" today).  Their music nowadays would probably be called "garage rock" or "lo-fi" rather than "punk,"  but then, who needs categories, anyway?  

Half Japanese are led by singer and "guitarist" Jad Fair. I put "guitarist" in quotes because Jad does not play guitar in any traditional manner, once stating "the only chord I know is the one that connects the guitar to the amp."  Instead, he banged and strummed on an untuned electric guitar, eventually breaking the neck off the guitar body and still continued to bend the strings and pull sound from the instrument before abandoning it all together.  

Half Japanese have been together for over 30 years now, although I vaguely recall seeing Fair perform solo once back in the late 80s in Albany, New York, of all places, but don't hold me to that - the memory's pretty vague. In any event, last night the band included longtime members, John Sluggett, Gilles Rieder, Mick Hobbs, and Jason Willett.  Highlights included no less than two separate songs about Frankenstein, a cover of Daniel Johnson's King Kong, and Fair's presence and sly sense of play throughout the set.

After a fairly long break between sets, Jeff Magnum took the stage solo, looking almost like the Unabomber with his long beard and hair.  His first words were to request that everybody put their cell phones away ("We want to play for you"), and then he launched into Oh Comely.  The audience was delirious - no one can cover Jeff Magnum like Jeff Magnum - and when the trumpeter came on stage for the horn portion of the song, they exploded in approval.

The band pulled out all the stops for this performance. For King of Carrot Flowers, the second song of the set, they had a three-member horn section, and at other times during the performance they had a s many as eight people on stage with them.  Band member Julien Koster (The Music Tapes) was as eclectic as ever, bowing a carpenter's saw, playing accordion, bass, a small Moog, or whatever the song required. 

It may not be possible at this point in time to define an "indie" sound, but whatever that sound may be, a strong argument can be made that Neutral Milk Hotel was the first to achieve it. One hallmark of what I consider the indie sound is the use of traditional acoustic instruments such as banjo and accordion, instruments usually associated with Amerciana music, but used in a non-traditional way to fill out the band's sound.  Neutral Milk Hotel have long been innovators in this, as well as the way that they use horns. You can still hear their influence today in the music of bands such as Arcade Fire, Beirut, and The Decemberists.

What was remarkable was how faithfully they captured the sound of the revered recorded versions of their songs, especially considering the 15 years that have passed since the release of In An Aeroplane Over the Sea.  Magnum's voice seems not to have aged at all, and not only did they have the rest of the original Aeroplane band members back together (Mangum, Koster, Scott Spillane, and Jeremy Barnes), but they apparently used the same expressive individual instruments as on the recordings (french and english horns, saws, bowed banjo, and so on).

The result was an entertaining, uplifting, and musically adventurous evening (as if we expected anything less).  The band played a full hour and then returned for a three-song encore.  After King of Carrot Flowers I forgot the sequence of songs, but they included Two-Headed Boy, Holland 1945, and Everything Is, as well as unrecorded songs like Ferris Wheel On Fire (appropriate for The Tabernacle, situated as it is next to Atlanta's new ferris wheel); in short, everything one could have hoped for.

I don't think anyone left unsatisfied, and as we walked out, I heard many people wondering if they'd be able to get back in tonight (Saturday was the first of a sold-out, two-night stand).  In you were a fan of NMH, the evening was everything you could have wanted, and I'm sure that if you hadn't have heard them before, you would have left a fan last night.

It was a wonderful, perfect set, lacking nothing.  Concert of the Year.     

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