CocoRosie at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, November 5, 2013

Republicans have shown a distinct discomfort concerning women and especially their bodies.  If they're not trying to pass legislation to control a woman's reproductive options, they're trying to restrict their access to contraceptives or health care altogether.  Nine out of ten times, they're the ones behind laws trying to regulate sexual behavior or leading crusades on censorship (Tipper Gore might be the lone non-Republican exception), and are usually the first to object to cutting edge fashion, tattoos, and body modification. While Republicans might at times have persuasive arguments supporting their positions (usually persuasive only to their own kind, however), the real reason for their crusades may simply be a fundamental discomfort with women and with women's bodies.  

If so, Republicans would have found last night's concert at Variety Playhouse a particularly uncomfortable event.  While to the rest of us, it might have been an enchanting expression of artistic and creative licence, to some others, it might have forced them to confront a lot of suppressed emotions.    

Take the opener Kenbra Pfahler.  She took the stage wearing a huge, teased-out wig, bowling balls taped to her feet, bikini briefs, and a small bib top, and nothing else, except for a lot of eye makeup.  She could barely stand on the bowling balls and needed two poles to support her, and had to crawl on stage on her hands and knees as walking on those balls would have been impossible.  As she sang to pre-recorded music about her fondness for the film Blade Runner, of all things, it was impossible to ignore her near-nudity.   

Kembra is best known as the singer and leader of the band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, but for some reason she is doing this tour solo.  It worked, as she's really more of a performance artist than a recording artist anyway, and she frequently improvised, changing her act in response to audience comments and engaging them in direct dialog.  During her second song, as she was trying to casually untape her feet from the bowling balls, she worked the request "Will someone please help me taking these off?" into her song. Several people at the front of the stage obliged her.

Eventually, even the little bib was gone, although she did pull on a pair of thigh-high leather boots.  Like with her band, Kembra's performance combined in-your-face sexuality, gothic horror, satire, and improvisation. It was at time hilarious and not infrequently bewildering, yet despite the fright wig and horror-show make-up, you could sense her vulnerability as she performed on stage alone and very nearly naked, improvising her way through a set that would have collapsed the very instant she stopped being interesting or creative.  It was that vulnerability that bonded her to the audience, and probably led CocoRosie to select her to open their show on this leg of their tour.  However, I'm sure that any Republicans present were probably squirming in discomfort.

For some reason, after her set, I was reminded of Method Man's line in the movie Garden State:  "Who just saw some titties?  Everyone raise your hand if you just saw some titties!"

A vanity mirror and bureau had been prominently placed center stage before CocoRose, or Kembra for that matter, started performing.  During the long (a little too long in my opinion) delay between dimming the house lights and the band taking the stage, smoke was pumped out of the open bureau drawers as a hum droned from the amplifiers.  This went on for nearly 10 minutes, and the audience started chanting "Coco! Rosie! Coco! Rosie!" until they got bored of that and stopped, but the intro still dragged on, far past the point of suspense and into exasperation territory.  

But of all the uses that CocoRosie might have had for the on-stage vanity that I could imagine during the long pre-set tease, actually using it to apply makeup and adjust their ever-changing outfits was not one of them. But that's exactly what they did.

CocoRosie's feminist statement wasn't as confrontational as Kembra's and didn't involve nudity, but instead they created an ultra-feminine fantasy world of vanities and dressing-room mirrors, playing dress-up and make-up like little prepubescent girls might, all while singing their quirky songs.  If you're uncomfortable around tutus, hair rollers, ballet outfits, and brassieres, this wasn't going to be a show for you.  If you could enter their hyper-feminine fantasy world, it was a spell-binding trip.  

CocoRosie is the duo of sisters Bianca "Coco" and Sierra "Rosie" Casady.  Both sisters sing, but with markedly different voices and styles, and Rosie plays harp, piano, and pads, while Coco occasionally plays various flutes and toy instruments.   For this tour, they were backed by a keyboard multi-instrumentalist and a beat-boxer who provided the percussion (and an extraordinary mid-set intermission during which he did an extended solo).  The beat-boxing and keyboards emphasized the hip-hop and electronica aspects of their music and provided a nice counter-point to the freak folk and operatic elements of their sound.  

Rosie's operatic voice (she had formally trained at one point in her life) was ethereally beautiful and she totally captivated the audience with her singing and harp playing.

Coco's voice is, well, strange, which makes it totally cool.  There's no mistaking which of the two of them are singing, and their songs are based around the give-and-take of the two different vocal styles.  

The performed most of the songs off of their most recent album, Tales of a Glass Widow, including Tears for Animals followed by Afterlife early in the set.  They also performed many of their older songs as well, but see my sole complaint down at the bottom of this post.  

They constantly changed outfits, often on-stage, sometimes demurely at the back of the stage, taking items off of a clothesline strung up back there. Their wardrobe and makeup hardly conformed to contemporary ideas of glamour, but adhered more to dreamlike, childhood dress-up fantasies, with bizarre, often random, combinations of men's and women's apparel.  After the beat-box intermission, Coco took the stage with one breast stuffed to absurd proportions and a hunchback's hump on her back. Fortunately, as with most outfits last night, it only lasted one song.

Here's Coco singing while holding Kembra's Future Feminism sign, wearing an open nightgown, men's long-john pants, suspenders, and a bra, and this wasn't even one of the more bizarre outfits.

This was.

I have many more pictures of this strange and beautiful set posted over on my Flick page for those interested in seeing more.

The stagecraft and settings were exquisitely choreographed, and even included some dancing, especially by Rosie near the end of the set, when she put on a surprisingly energetic, cheerleader-like performance in front of a hand-held, undulating sheet. In many ways, it was the most theatrical concert I've been to since David Byrne and St. Vincent's Love This Giant tour, although both shows were completely different in so many other aspects and ways.

Their set lasted nearly 75 minutes and they still gave two separate encores.  All told, the performance lasted nearly two hours, if you include the 10-minute tease before they took the stage.

Superb.  Bravo Coco, bravo Rosie.  Now, my only complaint: they never performed Lemonade, the stand-out song from their previous album, 2010's Grey Gardens (with over 5 million YouTube views, it's arguably their most popular song).  I hope that CocoRosie doesn't become one of those bands that refuse to play the songs their audience most wants to hear, like Animal Collective and My Girls at one point in their career. 

However, it might have been for the best that they never did perform Lemonade, as the song has such a strong emotional impact on me that I cry almost every time I hear it, and might have started bawling out loud at Variety Playhouse.  I got choked up just now posting the song below. But especially toward the end of last night's set, I kept thinking that each next song was going to be it, and then I thought surely during the first encore, and then, how could it not be the second encore?  But it was never performed, and I walked out feeling thoroughly entertained, enchanted, and exhilarated, but also feeling like I had been denied something.

  

Noveller

Even though we haven't seen Noveller in these parts since she opened for Xiu Xiu back in March 2010, we've still been fans and were glad to hear that she's releasing a new album, No Dreams, of her treated guitar compositions.   Here's the video of the title track.

Fanfarlo

The new video from London indie band Fanfarlo for A Distance was reportedly inspired by Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch's Twin Peaks, although I'm equally reminded of Lynch's Elephant Man.

Thee Oh Sees, Terminal West, Atlanta, November 2, 2013

In  my humble opinion, anything more than three bands in one night's show is at least one band too many (even though I reserve the right to attend multiple shows in one evening and see as many bands as I want).  Last night's punk-rock showcase at Terminal West featured four bands, but I honestly can't say which, if any, I would have cut from the lineup. 

For instance, the openers were Amsterdam's zZz (pronounced "zzzzz"), not to be confused with Japan's all-female post-punk/no wave band ZZZ.  Last night's zZz were a duo, just an organist and a drummer/vocalist. Fresh off a tour with Quintron & Miss Pussycat that ended Friday night in Mobile, Alabama, their version of punk leaned more to the psych-rock side, and Björn Ottenheim's baritone vocals gave the songs an almost goth edge.   The audience was still pretty sparse for the openers, and one guy pretty much had the floor to himself for dancing.

Next up were Minneapolis' The Blind Shake, with one more musician than zZz for a total of three (drums and two guitars).  The Blind Shake play pounding, high-energy, uber-punk, and about a dozen or so guys formed a mosh circle, running counter-clockwise in a cleared area of the floor slamming into each other and those on the perimeter of the clearing.      

The third band of the evening was Austin's OBN IIIs, named for their singer and frontman Orville Bateman Neeley III. OBN is a wild man, bellowing out the vocals, striking macho rock-star poses, and menacing the front row of the audience, which is where I had managed to make it to at that point of the evening.

Pacing the edge of the stage, he would kick out his foot as if were going to kick a spectator in the head, although he never actually made contact or hurt anybody.  He rubbed some people's heads and poured beer on another (after he had given him a full shot glass of liquor).  Overall, it was pretty entertaining, and kept the audience engaged and alert - you had to keep an eye on this guy, because you never knew what he'd do next.

When he was on stage away from the crowd, OBN would swing his microphone stand around, or tangle himself up in the cord, or fall on the floor and continue singing laying down.  He'd hump the monitors, grind the mic stand with his crotch, and generally act like a punk-rock maniac.

Given the intensity of the music and OBN's antics, the mosh circle got bigger and more intense, and at one point OBN jumped off stage and joined in, taking the associated shoves, punches, and headbutts in stride as he continued to sing.  He had to have been in there a good, solid two minutes or more, and he took some serious hits without losing his cool.  

At another point in the show, he disappeared behind an amp, and emerged a few seconds later with a Halloween wolf mask over his head.  He sang masked for only a minute or so before tossing the mask into the mosh circle where the participants dove for it, elbowing each other out of the way for the souvenir. He ended the set by dropping his trousers, mooning the audience, and finished the song in his boxer shorts, waddling around the stage with his pants down around his ankles.

San Francisco's Thee Oh Sees are arguably one of the few bands who could have followed that.  We last saw Thee Oh Sees at The Goat Farm, where I had managed to get a spot right at the stage before the surging, shoving, diving audience finally drove me away.  I got to the security rail at the front of the stage again last night, and as Thee Oh Sees took the stage, frontman John Dwyer unpacked his guitar case and set up right in front of where I was standing 

Before saying anything else, let me point out that Thee Oh Sees put on a terrific show and are one of the most exciting bands to see live touring right now. They played well over an hour and covered much of their latest album, Floating Coffin, but also included plenty of old favorites.

When the band started playing, the audience pressed forward and the mosh circle collapsed, but instead of moshing, the crowd would surge forward and those of us in the front would push back, all while crowd surfers were passed overhead.  Many young men tried to displace me from my spot in front of Dwyer by aggressively attempting to cut in between me and the rail, but I hung on and defended my spot and lasted the entire set, at times against overwhelming forces I should add.  But this was all a part of the fun, and I employed my patented Charles Barkley maneuver, bending over slightly and sticking my butt as far out as I could to take up as much space as possible so that when crushed, I had some room to give before pushing back.

I didn't mind the surging, the shoving, and the crunching so much, and knew that's what I was in for at an Oh Sees show when I got to the front of the stage.  Taking pictures was a challenge though, as you never knew when you'd need your hands and arms free to block off an interloper.  

But the real fun of being up front was to get to watch Dwyer up close.  He's a hilarious performer, often making funny faces, sticking out his tongue, or rolling his eyes to match the funny voices he sometimes uses (check out his vocals at about the 2:55 mark on Block of Ice, below, from an October 27 gig in Brooklyn captured by  NYC Taper).  Sometimes, he reminds me at times of an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth cartoon character, or how the MAD Magazine of the 1960s might have parodied a garage rock band.  It was wonderful to get to watch him perform, and I think that most of the audience missed it for all the pushing and shoving and diving going on.  

In addition to Block of Ice, set highlights, and there were many, included Contraption/Soul Desert and The Dream from the Carrion Crawler/The Dream LP. Impressively, they played without a set list, even though the sequence of songs was very different from the set of just a few nights ago in New York, based on the NYC Taper archive.  They closed their set with Minotaur, a slower song to chill the crowd out a little, although Dwyer worked his observation into the lyrics that "someone's still crowd surfing to a slow song."

Thee Oh Sees finished around 12:30, and the PA and house lights came on immediately after their set; no encore would be had that evening.

Overall, then, and as alluded to earlier, the set was a veritable showcase of different styles of modern punk rock, starting with zZz's psych-punk, followed by The Blind Shake's guitar punk, followed by OBN III's in-your-face punk, and capped off by Thee Oh Sees mutant psychedelic freak-folk punk.

Twenty-four hours later, my hearing has returned to near normal.

MFNW Day Four Retrospective

It would be unfair to compare Friday, Day 4 of MFNW, to the epic dimensions of Day 3, but that would be true of almost any day of your life.  In the scale of days of your life, there's the largely forgotten day of your birth, the unforgettable first time making love, the miraculous birth of your first child, and the totally awesome Day 3 of MFNW, in about that order of specialness.  Day 4 of MFNW wasn't at the same level as Day 3, but how can any day with performances by Animal Collective, Washed Out, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Ty Segall be considered anything less than awesome?

For starters, the rain of the day before had stopped. The sun still hadn't come out, however, resulting in a rather cool and cloudy, although not at all unpleasant, day. 

The music started with a 10:30 am set by The Shivas for KEXP at the Doug Fir.  Exhausted from the day before, I almost didn't go ("Who are The Shivas again?"), but at the last moment I found my energy, rallied, and made it across town in time to catch an energetic and enjoyable set from the young band, who played surf-tinged garage rock reminiscent of Austin's The Strange Boys.  

The KEXP photo nazi was still patrolling the audience forbidding people from taking any pictures at all with any type of camera, so these pictures are from www.kexp.org.

Speaking of which, KEXP also posted the entire Shivas performance on line ("Dude, I was there!"). 

I skipped breakfast to make it to the Fir by 10:30, so as soon as The Shivas set was over, I went upstairs to the Doug Fir's diner and ate some vegetarian chili and black coffee, the breakfast of champions.  The people at the next table looked familiar, and I quickly realized it was The Shiva's drummer with what I assume were her parents, and they were soon joined by the rest of the band.

After breakfast, the next band up was Georgia's own Washed Out.  Not seeing any sign of the KEXP photo nazi around, I resumed taking my own pictures (without flash, of course, in accordance with the sign by the entrance).

We previously saw Washed Out just the weekend before at Bumbershoot, but that in no way diminished the enjoyment of seeing them again a week later.  In fact, in ways, it enhanced the enjoyment.

KEXP also posted a video of the entire Washed Out set for our second "Dude-I-Was-There" moment.

The third band of the day at The Doug Fir was Seattle's Beat Connection at 2:30 pm.

We also saw Beat Connection at Bumbershoot, coincidentally on the same day as Washed Out, but that in no way etc.

Beat Connection were kind enough to again bring along their three-piece Butternut Horns section.

After Beat Connection, North Carolina's The Love Language were scheduled to play at 4:30 pm.  However, since I had just seen The Love Language the day before at the totally awesome Day 3 Marmoset party, and since there would be a 90-minute wait until their set, and since I was still dragging butt not only from Day 3 but from the entire previous week of Bumbershoot and MFNW, I left the Doug Fir to eat a more substantial meal than chili and coffee, wash up, and get ready for the evening's performances at the Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland's "Living Room."

I had missed the Pioneer Courthouse Square sets the day before, being as I was at the totally awesome Marmoset Party, which was probably just as well, as it rained and rained hard during that time.  Day 4, however, was getting noticably cooler, and, for the only day of the entire week up in the Pacific Northwest, I had to break out the hoodie that I had packed.

So as it turns out, the first Pioneer Courthouse Square performance of MFNW 2013 for me was a band, Haerts, of whom I had never heard.

They weren't bad at all but somehow never quite clicked with me.  I couldn't quite figure out what they were doing, or where their music was supposed to be taking us.  I subsequently came to realize that part of the reason for my lack of involvement was that I was watching the show from a comfortable but distant position on the steps way toward the back of the Square, back by the food and beer vendors and the more talkative element of the audience.  My sight line was unimpeded, but that distance tends to let one be easily distracted from the music, and without a familiar song or sound to hook me in and hold my attention, it wandered and I became disaffected.  So what I'm trying to say here, Haerts, is that it wasn't you, it was me.

About those "Long Live Oregonians" signs around the stage.  At first, I thought it was just some sort of provincialism ("Hurray for us!) but I later came to learn it was the slogan for Cover Oregon, which is the state-run health insurance exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare).  Cover Oregon were one of the co-sponsors of the festivities to encourage young people to sign up for health insurance.  None of the well documented problems in accessing the federal insurance exchange web site affected Oregon, as they were among the handful of states with the wisdom to take the initiative and set up their own exchange, as encouraged by the ACA. In fact, I've read that a full 10% of the Oregonian uninsured got coverage on the first day of eligibility.  But I digress and don't want to bother the gentle reader with reminders of political realities (meaning, that's exactly what I'm trying to do).  

After Heaerts, the next band up was Baltimore's Dan Deacon.

How to describe Dan Deacon?  His set was as much audience participation as it was artistic performance, and he encouraged the crowd to engage in barrier-breaking activities like turning around and waving at all of those people, like me, sitting on the steps toward the back of the Square.

Deacon himself performed not on the stage but down in the audience, removing yet another barrier, this time between performer and participant.

One fun feature of the set was an ersatz dance contest, wherein the dancers would randomly tag a spectator to indicate it was their turn to get up and dance to Deacon's zany electronic beats in the middle of the crowd. This meant that individuals had to spontaneously get up and do something, anything, creative and entertaining for the rest of the audience, often with very humorous results. 

I think the facial expressions of the two young women in the upper right of the picture below aptly capture the reaction of much of the audience.

After the dance contest, inhibitions were sufficiently broken down to allow just a general dance party.

After Dan Deacon, Animal Collective, another Baltimore band, headlined the Pioneer Courthouse Square set. 

We last saw Animal Collective at Atlanta's Tabernacle almost a year ago, although much of their set, including the stage design, were similar to that show last year.  That's nor a bad thing - Animal Collective put on a great show, and that night at Pioneer Courthouse Square was no exception.

However, due my distance from the stage and all of the distractions around me, it still wound up taking me nearly half of their set to finally get engaged and really appreciate their performance.  At the time, I blamed it on the sound system or on the band themselves, but I now realize it was all on me.

MFNW captured a scene from the Animal Collective set with the courthouse itself in the background, and used it as their "thank-you-and-farewell" message for the 2013 festival.  

That was the end of the Pioneer Courthouse Square sets, but that wasn't the end of the day.  After Animal Collective, I was hoping to make it across town to the club Branx to hear Wooden Indian Burial Ground, but I got there in time to hear only the last couple notes of the very last song of their set.  

No problem, because the main reason I wanted to go to Branx was to see the headliner, Portland's own Unknown Mortal Orchestra. 

Even though it was pretty chilly outside, it felt about 90 degrees inside Branx, a dark club that appeared to be illuminated by no more than two or three red, 40-watt light bulbs.  But regardless, UMO put on the best set I've heard from them, with guitarist Ruban Neilson unleashing some furious and intense guitar leads. The set felt like more of a statement about Neilson's place in the guitar-god pantheon than just another home-town concert.  Just incredible, incendiary stuff.

It's a long walk back from Branx to my hotel in NW Portland, but fortunately, Dante's, the club where I ended Day 1 (Redd Kross) and Day 2 (Murder By Death), was almost at the half-way point. Better still, as I passed, Ty Segall was playing, and I was able to flash my VIP wristband to the bouncer and walk right in past the people waiting outside in the "one leaves, one enters" stand-by line. 

An unexpected treat:  I had no idea that I was going to be able to fit this set into the day's schedule.

And that, after I walked the remaining distance back to my hotel after Segall's set, was Day 4.  Eight bands, including one of my favorites (Animal Collective), two Bumbershoot stand-outs revisited (Washed Out and Beat Connection), two new discoveries (The Shivas and Haerts), the inspired lunacy of Dan Deacon, a major statement from Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and a "surprise" (at least to me) set by Ty Segall.

Not a bad day at all.  And the rain had quit for the rest of the week.