Song of the Day

Black Prairie

Black Prairie at Eddie's Attic, 9-17-2013

Black Prairie will be returning to Eddie's Attic on September 22, 2014.

Dude, I Was There!

Jungol, at the April 3, 2014 Atlanta Film Festival Sound + Vision event at The Goat Farm.

Ages & Ages at Bumbershoot, 2011

Fresh & Onlys at 529 Atlanta, July 26, 2014

So on a hot summer night with nothing else to do, why not crowd into the sweaty confines of the 529 in East Atlanta Village for a set by The Fresh & Onlys and their supporting bands?

The opener was a new band called Landline, performing only their second set together as a band.  However, the band features Philip Frobos of Carnivores and Frankie Broyles of Balkans and Deerhunter, so they're not exactly strangers to the 529 stage.  There was a fairly large crowd for their opening set, many of whom seemed to be there just for Landline. 

Touring with The Fresh & Only's are the Vancouver quartet, The Shilohs.  As would be expected, their live sound is a lot more aggressive than the laid-back music on their albums, which only serves to enhance the jangle-pop, classic rock sound of their songs.

The audience, perhaps a little addled by the heat, were lackluster in their response, which visibly annoyed the band ("Hey, c'mon guys, it's Saturday night!"), which only alienated the audience that much more.  An early reference from the stage to "Hotlanta" didn't help win the audience over, either.  By the end of their set, the lone call for one more song was greeted with a "you-got-to-be-kidding" stare from the band.

All was forgiven by the time San Francisco's The Fresh & Only's took the stage.  Like the members of Lineline before them, The Fresh & Onlys are no strangers to the 529 stage, having played there before in 2010 and 2012.  

They got the audience moving almost immediately, playing their stand-out Waterfall as the second song in their set.  Then after Waterfall, singer Tim Cohen announced that they were going to play their entire new album, House of Spirits, all the way through, which they proceeded to do to spirited effect.

In addition to the music, I was fascinated by guitarist Wymond Myles' gravity-defying pompadour, while my companion for the show was mesmerized by something about Cohen's "most ill-fitting pants in the history of rock and roll." 

The music straddled the line between garage psych-rock and lo-fi shoegaze.  According to Pitchfork, "House of Spirits finds the Fresh & Onlys in a gloomy place. It’s a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil. 'The point of forgetting is so you can live,' despairs Cohen on the chilly Animal of One. 'The purpose of living is harder to find.' The Fresh & Onlys’ music has touched on downcast themes before, but in the past, these bummin’ sentiments were often tempered a touch of self-effacing humor. Here, Cohen’s gonzo imagery and weirdo-narratives feel more earnest in their evocation of hard times."

Their songs included plenty of noisy passages and opportunities for some friendly pushing and shoving in the audience, and even one lone crowd surfer toward the end of the set.

For those of you keeping score at home, last night's show was the first of my seventh decade of existence.

Rebirth

r

2014

"As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." 

- Steven Pinker, "How the Mind Works"

2013

“The world used to be silent. Now it has too many voices, and the noise is a constant distraction.  They multiply, intensify, they would divert your attention to what's convenient and forget to tell you about yourself. 

We live in an age of many stimulations. If you are focused, you are harder to reach. If you are distracted, you are available. You are distracted. You are available. 

You want flattery, always looking to where it's at. You want to take part in everything and everything to be a part of you.  Your head is spinning fast at the end of your spine until you have no face at all. 

And yet, if the world would shut up, even for a while, perhaps we would start hearing the distant rhythm of an angry young tune, and re-compose ourselves. 

Perhaps, having deconstructed everything, we should be thinking about putting everything back together. 

Silence yourself.”

Silence is a rhythm, too.

In Atlanta

Despite no longer having a real job and being self-employed, he went back to the Pacific Northwest for Bumbershoot and MFNW in 2012 (you have to have your priorities).  He didn't go to Music Midtown due to its boring and lackluster line up that year (you have to have your priorities), but he was otherwise committed to living his life in Atlanta.   

By a rough count, he probably went to about 60 shows that year, not including festivals, or at an average rate of about one per week (you have to have your priorities).  If each show averaged three bands, he probably saw about 150 bands that year, and when you add in the festival performances, the band tally was probably closer to 200.  He was making up for all that time spent being dead, spent feeling too old to go to clubs, spent being away from things.

But it's quality, not quantity, that matters, and he heard some terrific performances that year, including a set by Akron/Family at the Drunken Unicorn that was later released as a CD; a couple of sets by Shearwater, Passion Pit, Sharon Van Etten, and Damien Jurado; St. Vincent both solo and with David Byrne;  as well as his old Digable Planets friend Ishmael Butler, now with Shabazz Palaces.  He saw the late Benjamin Curtis and School of Seven Bells, Fanfarlo, Animal Collective, Hundred Waters, Father John Misty, Of Monsters & Men, Thee Oh Sees, Om, The Mynabirds, Moonface, Seapony, Gold Leaves, M83, Ana Tijoux, Low, and Dirty Projectors, and an epic set by My Morning Jacket out in the Oregon countryside.

And even though he hadn't seen her since Rocktober 2011, one of his favorite albums that year was Grimes' Visions.

Definitely getting close to the end of this 35-year retrospective.  According to Google Stats, I've lost most of this blog's readers and daily page views have dropped from about 20 per day to less than 5.  Regular posting will resume eventually.

Every Night His Teeth Were Falling Out

His renewed concert-going not only continued in 2011, but picked up considerable steam.  On Memorial Day weekend, he was watching live webcasts of Washington State's Sasquatch Music Festival as a surrogate experience for being at the event, and he quickly came down with a case of what he described as "Sasquatch Envy." If only he had been able to move to the Pacific Northwest back when he received the job offer in 2007 and not been another victim of the collapse of the housing market (he couldn't sell his house and had to turn down the offer), he would have been there, he reasoned, among all that great scenery, enjoying all that great music, a part of that happy crowd.  If he could only have been there, he thought, then everything would be perfect. If only . . .

Of course, the lesson learned from having previously moved from Atlanta to Albany to Pittsburgh and back to Atlanta again was that if he had sold the house, taken the job, and moved to Portland, chances are things would have been no more or no less perfect than they were right then.  Everywhere you go, there you are - you can't run away from yourself.  He probably wouldn't even have gone to Sasquatch had he moved.  After all, he's never gone to Tennessee's Bonnaroo Festival, which is just a couple of hours away from his unsold home, but he didn't want to be confused with facts - he was practicing self pity.

If he was truthful with himself, he was the only thing holding him back from attending Sasquatch.  It would have been just as easy for him to jump on a plane and fly up to Washington as it would have been to drive from Portland to the remote festival site, and if he didn't want to self-identify as a "victim" of not being able to move, perhaps he should just pack up and travel there at his leisure.

On the other hand, maybe the festival wasn't as great as he'd imagined.  According to one on-line review, the average Sasquatch attendee appeared young enough to have just crawled out of their mother's womb, "clutching glow sticks and with belly rings already attached." The reviewer went on that he'd come to realize that he had no idea how to even communicate with people that young - they might as well be another species. "So to live among somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 of these. . . things. . .  for four days, crammed together in an isolated section of central Washington, is not my idea of a vacation." The reviewer was 26 years old, more than half his age. He also saw an article about Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival that stated:

"When the producers of Seattle's annual Bumbershoot Festival released the lineup for this year's Labor Day weekend run, there was widespread disappointment among many music fans. The biggest complaint - no big names as in years past, like Bob Dylan or the Black Eyed Peas."

 "There's not a single band I want to see, and I haven't heard of most them," sniffed Sharon Esperanza, a 19-year-old Penn State University student.  Another person commented, "When Broken Social Scene is the headliner for a major festival, that spells FAIL."

So let me get this straight, he thought - a three-day music festival guaranteed not to be attended by plaintive 19-year-old college girls or by anonymous commenters who don't like Broken Social Scene, who were one of his favorite bands.  What's more, since it was an in-town festival, he could stay in the comfort of a hotel and not have to camp out among 50,000 "things" for the three days. It sounded perfect, and at $75 for a full, three-day pass, it was a bargain.

As he was booking his tickets for Bumbershoot, he looked around for something else to do up while up in the Pacific Northwest. He checked the schedules for Portland's Dharma Rain Zen Center and the Oregon Zen Center to see if they had any retreats scheduled, but neither one had any offerings that matched up with his travel plans.  But then he saw that Music Fest Northwest (MFNW) in Portland was scheduled to occur the week after Labor Day. That sounded ideal - another in-town festival, and in a town that he knew his way around pretty well.  Once again, he could stay in the comfort of a hotel, take things at his own pace, and not have to camp out among the 50,000 things.  So he bought a full VIP pass for MFNW as well.

His Bumbershoot and MFNW experiences are pretty well documented over at the other site - just do a word search for "Bumbershoot" or "MFNW."  He got to see The Kills twice, once at each festival, caught Blind Pilot's debut album release party in their home town of Portland, was at the front of the stage for Warpaint and for Sharon Van Etten at Bumbershoot, and discovered a host of new northwest bands, including Pickwick, Ages and Ages, and Typhoon.  One of the highlights of the festivals was seeing Brooklyn's The Antlers perform in Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland's Living Room.  The Decemberists' The King Is Dead might have been his pick for 2011's album of the year, but The Antler's Burst Apart, and especially its song Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out, are what he most vividly remembers from 2011.

As a fitting post-script both to this post and to his adventures in the Northwest, on the day he returned from Bumbershoot and MFNW, he got laid off from his job.

Uprising

2010:  we're finally getting to the modern era.  Also, he needs to start thinking about how he's going to wrap up and conclude this 35-year autobiographical retrospective of the years 1979 to 2014.  With all the talk of incarnations and the living dead, an appropriate climax might be to end all this by ending all this, a live webcast of his own suicide, but that ain't going to happen.  No way, so don't count on it.

He didn't get west of the Mississippi once in 2010, and he wound up leaving the company that had sent him to Portland in the first place and began working for a local, Atlanta firm.

He was finally listening to modern music again in 2010 and not to the nostalgic or obscure recordings of the past available for free downloading on the Internet.  He even took the next logical step and attended his first concert since that banal Norah Jones set in the bourgeois confines of Chastain Park back in 2003.  It had been seven years and he was 56 years old.

Baby steps:  the first concert attended after that long, long hiatus was not what he would have picked for his return, but one selected by a woman he had been dating.  That brief relationship ended sometime between the purchase of the tickets and the show itself (in fact, the total relationship didn't last too much longer).  In any event, he wound up going alone out to the remote Gwinnett Civic Center to see England's Muse.

To be sure, he did not consider Muse to be one of those cool, new indie bands that he had been discovering, but he did have to say this for Muse - they put on a pretty spectacular show.  He was as indifferent to their songs then as he is now, but their light show and stagecraft were pretty amazing, with just about every special effect in the book thrown out there at one point or another.  Lasers, video projections, stages rising on scissor scaffolds, eyeball balloons falling from the ceiling - Muse didn't miss a trick.  LA shoegazers Silversun Pickups opened, so that was cool.

He'd love to report that the first band he saw was somebody like Animal Collective or The Decemberists, but oh, sweet irony of life, things don't always play out that way.  Given the sheer spectacle of the Muse show, however, it was a pretty fantastic welcome back.

A few weeks later, he saw Noveller, Girl In A Coma, and Xiu Xiu at The Drunken Unicorn.  Then Spoon and Deerhunter at The Tabernacle, followed by Owen Pallet at The Earl.  The Morning Benders (before they became Pop, Etc.) and Broken Bells at Center Stage.  Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at Variety Playhouse.  The Watson Twins at Smith's Olde Bar.  Then came the first Rocktober - Black Mountain at The Earl, Menomena at Variety Playhouse, Metric at The Tabernacle, Thievery Corporation and Massive Attack at The Fox, and Vetiver and Dawes at Smith's Olde Bar, all in one month.  

When he had turned 40 back in the 90s, he felt a little awkward going to shows.  He didn't fit in with the young kids at the alternative music venues, but he was still young enough that it looked like he was trying, albeit unsuccessfully.  In the 2000s, as he turned 50, he thought that he would look downright strange among the teens and 20-somethings in the clubs, and maybe even like some sort of dirty old man preying, or trying to prey, on the young women.  Or young men.  But by 2010, at the age of 56, he didn't care anymore what others thought and besides, he looked so much older and out of place, it never even crossed anyone's mind that he would be there for any purpose other than listening to the bands, if he was even noticed at all.  Mostly, it was like he was invisible, and he could pass right through the audience without even registering on anyone's radar screen.

By the end of the year, he was hooked on hearing live music again.  2010 was the year he finally returned to his self.

2009

In 2009, he found only one excuse to take a business trip out to his beloved Oregon.  His visit included a treacherous drive over the Cascades range in a developing blizzard that even had most seasoned Oregonians staying in the safety of their homes.

He survived.  By the end of that year, his ears were wide open and he was discovering dozens of new bands.  He came to realize that he was lucky enough to recognize that he was living in the middle of one of those revolutions in popular music not unlike the rock explosion of the 60s, and that the 2000's, and especially the late 2000s, were one of the most creative and extraordinary periods in modern musical history.

Not only was there great new music from the bands that he had discovered mid-decade - The Decemberists, Spoon, Metric, and Black Mountain - but newer bands (at least to him) like Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, and Animal Collective.  Their music wasn't being played on the radio, his old reliable source of new music, but spread word of mouth on music blogs, web sites, and Usenet message boards.

He had various theories as to why so much good music was being produced at that time.  One held that with the collapse of the record industry and the mega-profits that hit bands could expect, the businessmen had all left the music industry leaving only the true artists behind.  Another held that with the advent of low cost to free MP3, more kinds of music were getting in more ears, and bands were informed by any and everything from ambient to zydeco, from folk to classical to metal to psych to pop to electronica and on and on, all getting melded together in new and surprising ways.  Another theory held that with the rise of rap and EDM, rock music was no longer burdened with being the preferred means for young people to shock and drive the adults away, leaving it free for a purer artistic expression unimpeded by the need to repel a segment of the audience.  

Maybe it was all of these things, or none of these things, or some ersatz combination of parts of these things, but in any event, it all sounded good to him, and 2009 marks the year he finally started listening to new and interesting music again.

His Year In Lists

He spent most of the first half of 2008 in Portland living in the corporate condo while his house was on the market back in Atlanta.  But the real estate market was so bad, that not only could he not sell the house, he couldn't get anybody to come by and even look at the place, despite the best efforts of one of the top realtors in town.  He couldn't afford to keep a house in Atlanta and live in Portland, and he soon realized that his long-sought-after relocation to the Pacific Northwest wasn't going to happen and he had to turn down the offer to move to Portland, another victim, he felt, of the Bush Administration.

To say he was disappointed was an understatement, but he chose to not play the victim and consider himself to be "trapped" in Atlanta, but instead to make the best of his life there and appreciate what he had, not pine for what he didn't.

Vancouver's Black Mountain released In the Future that year, their follow-up to 2005's self-titled debut, and it was one his favorite records of that year.

But that's not all that he listened to in 2008 - it was a transitional year for him musically.  Earlier in the decade, he tried to act his age and listen to so-called "adult contemporary," even going to a Norah Jones concert and buying Jill Scott and Anita Baker CDs, but it didn't really work for him.  It was not what he liked or what he wanted to listen to.  

He was still downloading and listening to a lot of electronic music from the 90s and early 2000s, particularly The Orb and Pete Namlook, but he was aware there was a lot of new music being released in 2008.  He felt like there was something great out there but he just hadn't found it yet, or maybe it hadn't yet been recorded, but in either event he knew that something big was on the verge of breaking.

Doing research for this post (yes, I do research these things), I came across some CDs that he burned that year, including a two-disk set titled Best of 2008.  Most of the songs are hook-filled pop-rock and shoegaze, and music downloaded from Sirius XMU playlists, but while it all still sounds vaguely familiar to me today, I honestly don't recognize the names of three quarters of the bands.  But there was some Radiohead in there from 2007's In Rainbows, a little Feist, Scars on Broadway, and various, assorted late 2000s alt-rock bands.

Here are the three songs from those disks that resonate the most with me now, that most make me recall the year 2008:

1.  Silversun Pickups' Lazy Eye, which actually came out in 2006, but which he only discovered in 2008:

2.  There were a lot of songs on the disks by The Ting Tings, but this is the one that stands out:

3.  The wit and energy of the Wales' Los Campesinos! made a big impression on him that year as well.

Another transitional year, and even though he ultimately wound up not moving to Portland, he was changed by his experience there and was not going to be the same again.  Yet another new incarnation, and this time without all that boring being dead in between.

Portland

As previously foreshadowed, the idea was placed in his head back in the 90s to eventually move to the Pacific Northwest.  Inception.  But he never pursued that impulse and instead remained settled in the Southeast, first buying a condo and then later a house in Atlanta, and settling into a career serving clients along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.

He had started working for a new firm at the beginning of 2007, and one day toward the middle of the year, the owner of the company walked into his office unannounced and made him an offer: they had a large project that needed his help over in Portland, Oregon, and would he be willing to go out there for a couple of months and help out?  He was told that his skill set, such as it was, would make a good addition to the Portland office, and if it all worked out and everyone in the office got along, there was even the potential to permanently relocate out to Portland.

Even though the original vision was to move to somewhere near the Puget Sound in Washington State, in a startlingly short amount of time he found himself over in Portland, living in a Pearl District corporate condominium, working on the large Oregon project, meeting the office's Northwestern clients, and getting along quite well with the staff in Portland.  By the end of the year, an offer was made to relocate to Oregon, and they even offered to let him move to the Seattle office instead, if that was his preference. But by that time, he had already tasted enough of the Portland experience to choose Oregon over Washington.   All he had to do was sell the house in Atlanta.  

All this was just before the 2008 collapse of the real estate market.

In other news, the Toronto band Metric finally released the album Grow Up and Blow Away in 2007  Even though the album had originally been recorded in 2001, it was still one of his favorites of that year.

Streets of Laredo at 529, Atlanta, July 5, 2014

Last night, the Fifth of July, New-Zealand-by-way-of-Brooklyn's Streets of Laredo played at 529.  In what may become an annual tradition, Atlanta's Book of Colors opened.

Book of Colors is the project of vocalist/guitarist André Paraguassu.  It was exactly one year ago last night - July 5, 2013, to be exact - that we last heard Book of Colors, coincidentally, in the very same room. Members of Little Tybee, including Brock Scott and Nirvana Kelly, were in the audience for last year's performance, but they're now on tour now somewhere out west.  

Photo by Alex Weiss

Last year, Book of Colors had a violin and lap steel to flesh out their songs, and flautist Teresa Lemaire was off somewhere in Brazil. Last night, she was back with the band, but this time the violin was absent and the band was supported by lap steel and flute.  The set was good, but the volume was higher than it needed to be for a folk-rock set, and André's vocals and guitar drowned out most of the rest of the band, muffling the textures and flavors that the other instruments brought to the songs. 

Chesapeake, Virginia's The Hunts were up next.  The Hunts are a family band consisting of seven siblings, Jennifer, Jessica, Joshua, Jonathan, Jordan, Justin, and Jamison, and play folk rock in the style of Freelance Whales and The Lumineers.

They all appeared to be about the same general age (young), and it was a little hard for me to reconcile how they all could be siblings.  However, according to a 2013 profile, the oldest are twins, the two girls, Jenni and Jessi, and are now 24.  They're followed chronologically by brothers Joshua, 22, Jonathan, 21, Jordan, 19, Justin, 17, and Jamison, 16, so I guess it's possible for one mother to have birthed so many children.

I was surprised by how much I liked them. When it comes to folk rock, one of the things that I like is diverse instrumentation, and The Hunts played guitars, banjos, violins, mandolins, and a few stringed instruments I didn't even recognize.  I like harmony and when you have a seven-member family band, harmony pretty much goes with the territory.  I like good songwriting, and despite their tender age, they've written some pretty good songs.  One of their songs, Make This Leap, has even been picked up for a Milk Bone commercial.

They have a certain youthful wholesomeness that I thought might be disguising some sort of evangelical bent, and my radar started to go off when they announced that one song was based on a Bible story, but it turns out that the story was just The Prodigal Son and their take on it was that as a sibling band, they're always ready to take back an errant brother or sister.  So that was okay and they didn't start passing out copies of The Watchtower or the Book of Mormon or anything, and didn't sing about Jesus, so everything was cool.

The Hunts are currently touring with Streets of Laredo and after their set, they took a group picture of the two bands on the tiny 529 stage.

  

Frankly, I thought the youngsters stole the show from Streets of Laredo, who are also a seven-piece band fronted by family members, a husband and wife, and the brother of the husband.  The Streets play a more rock-influenced brand of folk rock, accentuated with electric guitars and drum pads rather than Appalachian string instruments, but the inventiveness of The Hunts' instrumentation and songwriting and harmonies had me won over. 

For what it's worth, the audience seemed to prefer Streets of Laredo, and were whooping and hollering and dancing along from the very first song.  "You're the flint that started the fire," percussionist Dave Gibson declared, but apparently they say that at all their gigs. 

It didn't take too long for me to get caught up in the audience's enthusiasm, and during one song, members of The Hunts came bursting out of the dressing room and danced along with the Streets' music at the front of the stage.  They disappeared soon after into the warm Atlanta night, but the audience kept the energy level up, dancing and buying shots for keyboardist Sarahjane Gibson (it was her birthday) and surprising the band with a two-beat clap-along to close out their set.

2006 (Singles)

Spooning

Let's see now, what happened in 2005?  He visited his sister in San Francisco and came down with a case of the flu that he thought was going to kill him (it didn't).  He led several hikes up to the North Georgia mountains for the Zen Center and he spent a lot of that summer working at a large petroleum refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi until Hurricane Katrina came along and pretty much shut that whole project down. 

He finally ended - for good this time - the on-again, off-again relationship with the girlfriend he had traveled with and feuded with back in 2003 and 2004, and by that point he had came to consider his lovers not as life partners or potential life partners but more as pleasant companions for whatever particular incarnation he was experiencing at that time.

He had spent a lot of 2005 downloading box sets of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He had amassed the complete discographies of The Orb, Orbital, and Underworld, as well as the bizarre avant-garde music of The Residents. He was collecting electronica by prolific German composer Pete Namlook and the numerous Buddha Bar chill-out CDs by French producer Claude Challe.

The most significant musical event of 2005 happened for him late in the year. One winter morning, he saw an on-line post titled "Best Albums of 1995" and to his surprise realized that he didn't recognize the names of any of the bands. Spoon? Bloc Party? Black Mountain? Metric? Who were these guys? He hadn't heard of any of them, and yet the poster was saying these were the best albums of the year.

Caught up in downloading all of that increasingly obscure or vintage music from the internet and listening to whatever KCRW happened to be playing that week, had he really fallen so out of touch with current music that he had zero name recognition with the best new bands of the year?

It was a wake-up call, what an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity.  He downloaded all four albums and found that he really liked them all, a lot, but especially Spoon, who's Gimme Fiction stands out to to him now as the best of that bunch of the best.

But more importantly, he realized that even though it was readily available for free downloading on the internet, he needed to stop focusing so much on obscure, collector's item records, and start listening to contemporary music again.  There was a lot going on, and it was sounding pretty good.

He got busy looking for earlier recordings by those particular bands and simultaneously started seeking out new sources of new music.  It didn't take him long to rediscover his old forgotten friend, WRAS Album 88, who were playing this new indie rock on a regular basis. 

Speaking of Spoon, here's their latest song, from their forthcoming They Want My Soul:

Golden

In 2004, he bought the house that he's living in now and also stated the Water Dissolves Water blog.  It was 10 years ago, and he turned 50 that year.

Despite the constant tension in Corsica and Florence the year before, they traveled together again the next year (2004), this time to Budapest, where they missed the Beastie Boys by a week, but apparently managed to catch some busking violinist instead.

He was still listening to KCRW in 2004, who were playing a seemingly endless series of remixes of Jill Scott's neo-soul hit, Golden, that year.  So for lack of anything else that he can recall, the song for 2004, the Golden Anniversary of his life, is Jill Scott's Golden. 

Hundred Waters and GEMS at The Earl, Atlanta, July 1, 2014

Before fully returning back to the here and now from our nostalgic look back at the 2000s, let's reflect for a moment on last March's incredible show by St. Vincent at The Tabernacle.  After that show, I declared in a Facebook post that "If I'm lucky enough to see another show this good this year, the year will be a very good year indeed!"  After last night's Hundred Waters and GEMS show at The Earl, I can say that this is, in fact, a very good year indeed.

Opener was Atlanta's Suno Deko, a one-man experimental rock band employing lots of loops and overdubs, and a good start to an evening of electronic pop. 

D.C.'s GEMS are touring with Hundred Waters, and performed an excellent set of dream pop in front of a screen showing videos of roses with subliminal skulls spliced in. 

GEMS are the attractive duo of Lindsay Pitts (vocals, keyboards) and Clifford Usher (guitar, vocals).  

For just a duo, they produce a lot of sound, and play an ethereal, richly textured brand of dream pop.  At times, they sounded a little like Zola Jesus, at others, a little like Purity Ring, and at others like nobody else. You can hear traces of Beach House in their song Pegasus, but the recorded version doesn't do justice to the intensity of the live version of the song.

GEMS' set was great, and they won't be playing the opener much longer.  I thought that they had stolen the show for the night, and even though I've seen Hundred Waters twice before, once at 529 and again opening for Alt-J, and am a big fan (a recent post about them has garnered more hits this month than any other post on this blog) and came to last night's show specifically to see them, I didn't think they could do anything that could top GEMS' marvelous set.  

They proved me wrong.  Hundred Waters played a mind-blowing set of wonderfully psychedelic electronic ambient folk rock with neo-classical and prog rock overtones, with so many shifting sounds and changing textures that you never felt quite sure from moment to moment what you had just heard or what you'd hear next.

They played what was clearly the most full-bodied, most fully-realized version of their music I've heard yet, and last night was by far the best Hundred Waters set I've heard.  I'd have to go back to Junip at Terminal West to recall an equally mesmerizing set, or maybe Julianna Barwick at The Goat Farm.  At one point, the thought occurred to me that they sounded like what Animal Collective must hear in their heads.

Part of the magic was due to their incredible lighting.  Using only two projectors mounted on the stage with them, they created effects ranging from shimmering sheets of light floating across the stage and audience to 2001 Space Odyssey-like twin walls of light, to atmospheric cones or tunnels of light.  It was all very simple and not at all distracting, but definitely added to the experience.

Well done, Hundred Waters!  I look forward to seeing you again.

Come Away With Me

This one's kind of embarrassing to admit, but he promised himself that he would go through this whole retrospective as truthfully and honestly as possible.  Having said that, the song he most remembers from 2003, and which brings the year back to him the most when he hears it, is Norah Jones' saccharine pop ballad Don't Know Why.

By no means was that all he listened to that year.  He was still downloading fast and furiously off of the internet, and he was still listening to Santa Monica's KCRW.  He attended some music event in what looks like Piedmont Park in April - possibly a 420 Fest - and took pictures of these performers, although he doesn't recognize any of them now:

The Music Midtown lineup for 2003 included Medeski, Martin, & Wood, Aimee Mann, Bob Dylan, Ben Harper, Buddy Guy, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Def Leppard, Godsmack, India.Arie, LL Cool J, Sheryl Crow, Tony Bennett, Ashanti, The B-52s, Drivin N Cryin, Edgar Winter, Everclear, G. Love & Special Sauce, the Isley Brothers, Jack Johnson, Les Claypool's Frog Brigade, Sixpence None The Richer, Steve Winwood, and Cracker (who he saw at the inaugural, 1994 festival), but once again, he didn't go, for all the same reasons that he didn't go in 2002.  Besides, he was busy having fun elsewhere doing other things that year.

He started dating a woman he had met tht year at the Zen Center, and they began an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted for the next couple of years.  One of her favorite CDs was Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, which she frequently played when he came over to visit and that record, and the song Don't Know Why in particular, became their sort of unofficial make-out music.  They even went and saw Jones perform in Atlanta's Chastain Park and even though they left early due to the monotonous nature of her set list, he was still aware of how far his musical tastes had transmorgified in the 15 years since he was listening to Ministry and Nine Inch Nails back in 1988 and '89.  Little did he know at the time, but the Norah Jones concert in Chastain Park would be the last live show he would go to for nearly six years.

In other news, he finally quit working for the environmental engineering company he had worked for since 1984, the firm that had taught him how to consult for a living, had moved him to upstate New York and to Pittsburgh and eventually back to Atlanta again.  Both he and the company had changed quite a bit over the decades since he had first joined, and by 2003 they were no longer a firm he would have joined - or who would have hired him for that matter.  

He took a new job that year opening an Atlanta office for a competitor at a substantial increase in pay, and to celebrate he and the new girlfriend took what turned out to be a disastrous trip to Corsica and Florence that only wound up leading to yet another one of their many breakups.  Despite the art and beauty and history all around them, instead of bonding them closer together, the challenges and tedium of international travel only wound up driving them further apart.  Instead of taking refuge in each others' company, they took their frustration and stress out on each other, and the experience only magnified and emphasized the differences in their personalities. 

But anyway, the point of all this is that while he's sure that there were a lot of interesting musical things going on back in 2003, he was more or less oblivious to most of them, and while in all honesty what he does remember is Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, it's not something he still listens to today and not because of its association with that ill-fated romance, but because laid-back, radio-friendly pop music wasn't really his thing back then and generally speaking still isn't now.