Colin Meloy & Eleanor Friedberger at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, 11/8/2013

Rocktober 2013 refuses to end.  While Halloween night's double feature of The Orb at Vinyl and Chelsea Light Moving at The Earl might have seemed like a fitting finale to Rocktober, since then we've had Thee Oh Sees at Terminal West (11/2), CocoRosie at Variety Playhouse (11/5), and last night, the highly anticipated Eleanor Friedberger and Colin Meloy concert at the Playhouse.

Eleanor Friedberger started the show at 8:30 sharp, taking the stage wearing a slinky, cosmic-patterned dress with matching stockings and, as always, the coolest bangs in rock 'n' roll.  

We've seen Eleanor perform before, at MFNW 2011 when she opened for The Kills and at The Basement at Graveyard Tavern when she opened for Hospitality.  Howwever, we've not yet seen her with her main band, The Fiery Furnaces, even though, as she said on stage last night, they've played Atlanta lots of times before. 

This was quite a different performance that the previous times we've seen her, however,as she had been supported by a  band during those other sets, while last night she performed solo, sitting on a chair and playing electric guitar.  She cranked up the reverb on most of the songs, giving her set more of a rock that a folk sound, but with her interesting songs and clever lyrics, her set clearly fit into the singer/songwriter category. 

Most of her songs last night were naturally from her newest album, Personal Record, including Stare At The Sun, Other Boys, and When I Knew, but she also threw in at least one Fiery Furnaces song, and concluded her set with an old favorite, My Mistakes.   

In all, although her set went on for well over a half-hour, it seemed far too short, leaving most of the audience and I calling for more.  Of course, as the opener, she couldn't play an encore, but we got over it pretty quickly upon remembering that The Decemberists' frontman, Colin Meloy, would be taking the stage next. 

Meloy took the stage wearing a red flannel shirt, strapped on a harmonica holder, and started playing.  Even though it was just his voice and an acoustic guitar (which he changed many times during the set), the rich expressiveness of his voice and the quality of his songwriting made up for any potential limitations of the instrumentation.

He played songs from throughout the Decemberists' career, including many from their most recent record, 2011's The King Is Dead, notably that album's opener Don't Carry It All as the second song of his set. Other King Is Dead songs included Down By The Water, Dear Avery, and the apocalyptic Calamity Song (which hilariously started as something called Hank, Eat Your Oatmeal).  Speaking of Calamity Song, it got me to wondering who has produced the greatest tennis-themed video, The Decemberists, who based their video on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, or Courtney Barnett, based on her witty song Avant Gardener?

Meloy recorded a new EP of covers of Kinks songs just for this tour.  Last night, he performed Do You Remember Walter? from The Village Green Preservation Society.  Interestingly, the song seemed to fit him like a glove, one of the cleverest lyricists west of the Atlantic singing the words of one of the cleverest lyricists east of the pond.

There were more set highlights than I can even remember - in fact, it often felt that every song, even the couple of new songs thrown into the set, was a highlight - but I will single out Margaret In the Tiaga from The Hazards of Love, with Meloy singing both the male and female lines; Los Angeles I'm Yours from Her Majesty; and The Engine Driver from Picaresque, with the audience singing along the poignant refrain "And if you don't love me let me go."  In fact, there was a lot of singing along, including the wordless "A-woo" of The Calamity Song, and Meloy masterfully led the audience participation, frequently referring to the evening as a "campfire sing-along."  

For his encore, Meloy sang all three parts of The Crane Wife (Parts 1, 2, and 3).

It was a very special, joyful evening, and Meloy genuinely seems to be one of the nicest, must likable guys in indie rock (which has no shortage of nice, likable guys).  'Frinstance, during The Calamity Song singalong, after we all sang the line, "Hetty Green, queen of supply-side bonhomie bone-drab," a woman remarked, "Whatever that means," and Meloy, smiling, nodded to her while singing the next line, "You know what I mean," in a way that made it seem like a personal response to her remark.

Unfortunately, I have not yet had the opportunity to see The Decemberists perform live (despite three separate week-long trips to the Northwest for music festivals), but between last night's show by Colin Meloy and last September's set by Black Prairie, I feel like I've at least come close to the experience.

Wild Ones

Danielle Sullivan of Wild Ones at Marmoset, Sept. 5, 2013

Wild Ones, one of the many, many highlights of the now infamous Day Three of MFNW, recently posted a Soundcloud gadget for their song From Nothing on their Tumblr page.  It's definitely worth your time to take a listen to this one.

The Baseball Project at The Doug Fir (MFNW Day 3)

Back when I posted about the totally awesome and unsurpassable Day Three of MFNW, this video of the day's set by The Baseball Project at The Doug Fir had not yet been released by KEXP.  I would have included it in that post were it available then, but as it goes, it wasn't so here it is now.  KEXP really missed their timing releasing this, a full week after the end of the World Series.

Dude, I was there!  It's easy to see me silhouetted MST 3000-style in front of Scott McCaughey (the bearded dude in the red pants), ex-REM and current member of Tired Pony and Robyn Hitchcock's touring band. The set list consisted of Past Time, followed by 1976, Dock, Jackie's Lament, Ichiro, Harvey Haddix, Monument Park, and Panda and the Freak.

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.