MFNW Day Five Retrospective

Perhaps my only regret about Saturday, Day 5 of MFNW, was that while dressing in the morning I decided for some reason to wear the "I Smell Hippies" t-shirt that I had bought at a T. Hardy Morris concert at The Earl. The sun had finally come out, the first sunny day since I had left Seattle, warming the day up to the point where one could wear a simple t-shirt all day and still be comfortable, and I thought it would be fun to wear a "I Smell Hippies" t-shirt in Portland.  However, the statement was largely misunderstood by the good Portlanders - I got stares of disapproval from a lot of older, presumably former hippies, curious looks from a lot of young people, and hearty approval from Republican creeps and frat boys I didn't want to have anything to do with.  I wound up having to explain myself a lot that day, and worked out a standard reply to the question I kept getting, "So what do hippies smell like?" that went "Oh, you know, bodies, patchouli, and, um, weed - all the things I like."  That seemed to throw people off the trail enough for me to get on with my day.

Anyway, like the previous several days, Day 5, Saturday, started at The Doug Fir, this time with a noon-time set by New Jersey's Titus Andronicus.  Wearing his own band's t-shirt, frontman Patrick Stickles had perhaps the best line of the day, "I didn't start a punk-rock band because I wanted to have places to be at 11:00 in the morning."  It was perhaps fortunate for him (or maybe for us) that the 10:30 am sessions of the previous days weren't held Saturday morning.

KEXP had several other good sets scheduled for the day (The Dodos, The Thermals, and Sonny & The Sunsets), but I skipped those and went to the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) party at Mississippi Studios in NE Portland instead.  Like the totally awesome Marmoset party of Day 3, free beer and music were provided to the attendees, this time by OPB as their way of saying "thank you" to their supporters.  

When I got there, Portland's The Parson Redheads were playing out on the patio.   We've seen The Parson Parson Redheads before, opening at The Earl for Viva Voce, and as I hadn't heard anything from them since, it was nice to be reminded that they were still around.

The next band up was Portland's soul-punk outfit Magic Mouth, playing inside Mississippi Studios and fronted by singer Chanticleer Tru.  I didn't get any good pictures of the set, but found this one by the magic of Google's image search.  I posted an OPB video of the Magic Mouth set here on this blog last September; a sample song is posted below.

Tru is a pretty interesting dude.  In addition to fronting Magic Mouth, during Portland's Time-Based Art festival he was also co-host of a "post-realness drag ball" called Critical Mascara, part drag ball and competition, part dance party and performance spectacle. "Want to flaunt your highest glamour?" the web site asks, "Turn tragic into magic? Celebrate the evolution of queer consciousness? Are you hungry to prance, vogue, dance and shimmer? Wanna chance at a cash prize? Win spectacular gifts made by local artists? Want to step into the spotlight at an international arts festival and SHINE?"

"Be you boy, girl, queen, princess, nancy, goblin, unicorn, femme, butch, dandy, fae or the hottest slice of tail since the fall of the Roman Empire YOU ARE INVITED!"

Alas, I was already back home when Critical Mascara was held, so that's why you didn't hear about me winning.

Anyway, after Magic Mouth, the band Tiburones featuring Luz Elena Mendoza of Y La Bamba took over the patio.

At the OPB party, I ran into some of the people that I had met at the Marmoset party, including an older couple who had invited me to their home for dinner, wine, and music at Marmoset but seemed very disappointed by my t-shirt at OPB. I also met one half of the environmentally-conscious gay couple from Marmoset, who told me at OPB that his parents were in town meeting his fiancee.  It wasn't until several days later that I realized that doesn't necessarily mean anymore that he wasn't gay.

The main event of the OPB party was the set inside Mississippi Studios by Radiation City.  Ironically, or maybe not ironically, Radiation City was also one of the highlights of the Marmoset party.  

OPB has posted videos of the entire Radiation City set on their website.  Here's a taste (as if you needed any more incentive to go take a listen):

I love this band, even if they do still remind me of the Scooby-Doo gang.  In fact, maybe I love them because they remind me of the Scooby-Doo gang.

The OPB party wrapped up after the Radiation City set, and I went "home" (hotel) to get cleaned up and refreshed for the rest of the day.  However, a funny thing happened to me on my way to Pioneer Courthouse Square (Portland's Living Room).  I told part of this story on Facebook, but held the full story back since some of my Facebook friends wouldn't have understood.  I stopped at the Sizzle Pie next to Powell's bookstore for two slices of pizza, and the cashier looked a little skeptical and told me that the second slice was on the house because I might not like my order number.  He showed me the slip, and it said "666."  

I did the only thing I could think of, and threw my fist up, my fingers in devil horns, and said, "Hail Satan." The cashier laughed and did the same, and everyone else behind the counter thought it was so funny that when my order was ready and I came back up to the counter, everybody shouted, "Hail Satan!"

So basically, the devil got me a free slice of pizza.  Hail Satan!

Meanwhile, back at Pioneer Courthouse Square, someone was sitting in my usual spot way in the back of the square by the food and beer vendors, so instead I moseyed into the small crowd in front of the stage and wound up getting not only a much better view, but much more immersion in the experience of Deep Sea Diver, Jessica Dobson's (The Shins) solo project. 

I was only two rows of people back from the stage, and I could swear that at one point of the show, Jessica saw the "I Smell Hippies" on my t-shirt and broke into a big old grin.

Following Deep Sea Diver, we saw Thao & The Get Down Stay Down for, like, the third time in a week, but each time was just as good as the one before.  I did get to wondering, though, how many shows I'd have to attend before they took out a restraining order against me.

The headliners at Pioneer Courthouse Square that night were Seattle's The Head and The Heart.  We've seen THATH a couple times before, once with Thao at Variety Playhouse in 2011 (they seem to like to tour with Thao, or vice-versa), and again at Athens' 40-Watt Club in 2012.

THATH are touring in support of their new album, Let's Be Still, but the audience was about 10 times more responsive to the older songs from their debut, eponymous album than the new songs.  I've been listening to the new album a lot to familiarize myself with the songs (they're coming to Atlanta next week with Thao), but can't say that I don't still prefer the older songs.

From Pioneer Courthouse Square it was a short walk to The Roseland Theater for a magnificent, mind-blowing, single-song performance by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.  As spectacular as their playing was, however, it may be the black-and-white video show projected behind the band that I'll always remember, or the slow, patient build up to their composition's climactic conclusion.  

It wasn't as easy to get from The Roseland Theater to my next destination, The Bunk Bar, as it was to get to Roseland from Pioneer Courthouse Square, but I did manage to catch a bus that got me to within a half-mile of the bar, and I had to take a late night walk for the remaining distance through a desolate but spooky warehouse district.

When I got there, it was after midnight and the Brooklyn band Love as Laughter were on stage.  The place was packed (note the fans outside watching in through the windows), but I managed to find an empty barstool to watch from for at least a little while.

The problem with the barstool was that no matter how I sat, my knees stuck out into the narrow space between the bar and the crowd, in the way of everybody trying to get to and from the bathrooms. So despite the comfort of taking my weight off my feet for a while, after Love As Laughter, I found a spot to stand near the stage was watched Sonny and the Sunsets tear the place up, playing their strange garage-rock/freak-folk hybrid to the dancing audience well into Sunday morning.

After the show, as I left The Bunk Bar to head home, a young woman dressed for some reason in some sort of Little Bo Beep outfit (don't ask me why - it was well over a month until Halloween) stopped me and asked me who T Hardy Morris was and why it was that I smelled hippies (oh, right, I had almost forgot the t-shirt).  We talked for a while, and I tried to describe Morris, his band Dead Confederate, Cabbagetown, and the Atlanta music scene.  She liked the name "Cabbagetown," and when she came to realize that I wasn't a completely intolerant redneck, she let me go with a kiss on the cheek, got on her bicycle, and rode off into the Oregon night.  

It took me well over a half hour to walk back across the Willamette River and back to my hotel on the far side of town, and it wasn't until about 3 am that I was able to finally get my tired ass between some sheets and my face onto a pillow.

So that was Day 5.  I posted a review of the day the following Sunday when my recollections were still fresher than they are now, and any discrepancies between the two accounts are probably due to the fogs of time and memory.   Also, additional pictures are posted over on the Flickr site.

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.