Joanna Newsom at The Buckhead Theater, Atlanta, September 11, 2016

Yesterday, Monday, was officially Day Five of our five-day show marathon, but the killer combo of a day job and a show that night by The Album Leaf meant we didn't have time to say much about Sunday night's Joanna Newsom show, other than to share a few pics and post the obligatory video.  

Let us make our amends.  We arrived at The Buckhead Theater a full 15 minutes before the doors opened, but the line to get in already snaked way down Roswell Road to near it's intersection with Peachtree. When we finally got inside, we walked straight passed the bar to the stage (no time for beer), but were still three standing rows back from the stage.  Fortunately, our sight-lines were still pretty good.

The show started with a set by husky-voiced, Portland-based singer-songwriter Alela Diane, who we've seen before at The Crystal Ballroom in Portland during MFNW (RIP) in 2011 and in Seattle at Bumbershoot in 2012.   We don't think too many other people in the room that night had seen Alela twice before.

Lynn Jacobson covered the Bumbershoot set for The Seattle Times, noting, "Alone with her guitar, she stood stock-still in a spotlight, singing (and occasionally whistling) melancholy tunes rife with romantic images of roses and thorns, darkness and wine. She introduced a new song, About Farewell, which she called 'pretty [expletive] sad.' And it was."  She delivered about the same on Sunday night, too (which is a good thing).

There was about a 40-, 45-minute break between sets, and the crowded stagefront got even more crowded still with people pushing to get closer.  That usual circumference around ourselves that most people consider "personal space" was reduced to mere centimeters, and every time we tried to move our arms to check our phone or whatever, we wound up rubbing against the person or persons next to us, as they were also doing to us.  Several young women around us had a hand on their opposite shoulder so that their arm protected their breasts from brushing up against strangers.  I think we all felt a sense of relief when the house lights finally dimmed and Joanna Newsom took the stage.

Joanna Newson "only" has four albums out, but each one is so long and complex, and each song so intricate and involved, that her body of work seems of staggering volume.  Which is to say, to be honest, I only know a few of her songs, but she played everything that I know, including Sapokanikan and Divers, from the new album, Divers.

Newsom sang using a portable microphone, freeing her up to frequently move back and forth from her trademark harp to piano, sometimes while still singing during the same song.  She was back by a drummer and three multi-instrumentalists, who played a wide variety of stringed instruments and recorders, switching frequently during the course of a song.

So what else happened?  She covered a Judy Collins song (Albatross), Alela Diane came on stage and accompanied her with backing vocals on the last couple of songs, members of the audience yelled "I love you" during each and every break between songs and tried to engage her in one-on-one conversations from the orchestra pit, someone told her "I like turtles," and someone else threw her a rose (which she impressively caught one-handed). 

Newsom performed the first song of her encore alone and accompanied (the aforementioned Albatross) and the rest of the band joined her for the second song.  Even though the evening felt like a marathon of selections from her impressive oeuvre, the show started early enough that we were back home by 11:00 pm, which is nice on a Sunday night.

One more night to go for our our five-night run.  The end is in sight. 

Animal Collective at Buckhead Theater, Atlanta, May 7, 2016

Last Saturday night, Baltimore's Animal Collective played the Buckhead Theater.  First, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith opened with some psychedelic ambient electronic music.

Apparently, Smith's formative years were spent communing with nature on Orcas Island in the northwest region of Washington state, a place she describes as "one of the most magical and peaceful places I have ever been."  Smith left the island to attend Berklee College of Music, where she studied composition and sound engineering, initially focusing on her voice as her primary instrument, before switching to classical guitar and piano. However, after a neighbor lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer, she soon began sculpting lush and exciting worlds of sound.

It's logical that her sound would be appreciated by Animal Collective fans, and she didn't hurt her chances of being accepted by the audience when she opened her set with a synth line that sounded a lot like the opening of AnCo's My Girls.

Not that Animal Collective themselves bothered to play My Girls.  They're touring behind their new Painting With LP and mostly played songs from that album.  The only thing they played off of their wildly successful and popular 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion was the largely overlooked song Daily Routine, which is not even one of the stand-out songs from that recording.

Animal Collective are touring as a trio while Deakin is sitting this one out after his terrific Sleep Cycle EP.  In addition to Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist, the band is touring with guest drummer Jeremy Hyman of Ponytail and Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks.  Saturday night, the band opened their set with Painting With's Natural Selection, followed by a cover of Martha Reeve & The Vandella's Jimmy Mack (of all things).  They followed that with a couple more songs from Painting With (On Delay and Lying In The Grass), and before they lost the audience with the largely unfamiliar new material, launched into the eminently danceable single, FloriDada, from that same LP.  Painting With's Vertical followed FloriDada before the first "classic" AnCo song of the night, the aforementioned Daily Routine. 

It's not just the veridical pleasure of hearing the familiar sounds that made Daily Routine such a welcome addition to the set - the new songs are by and large so much less compositionally complex and texturally interesting than older AnCo material that it often sounds like a waste of the musician's talents to spend so much time with them.  So after the band returned to Painting With with Summing The Wrench following Daily Routine, it was a real pleasure to enjoy an extended version of Loch Raven from 2005's Feels, followed by Alvin Row from 2000's Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, a song they haven't performed live before this tour.

That was pretty much the way the evening went: the new material did sound better live than the recorded versions, but the audience largely waited through the new stuff until the band offered another gem from their impressive back catalog.  Disappointingly, the set ended with another Painting With song, The Burglars.  

Before it sounds like I'm too disenchanted with the new material, I'll point out that I did appreciate the clever vocal interplay between Avey and Panda on many of the songs, sometimes alternating syllables in different keys on the same chorus, almost like the hocketing technique employed by Dirty Projectors.  So that was cool.  The new songs were fun and entertaining while they lasted, but like eating candy, once over, there was nothing left to digest.  And as always with an Animal Collective show, both the stage setting, the lighting, and the projections were interesting and innovative.

As you can imagine, I was not disappointed when AnCo returned to Feels to start their encore with a long version of Bees. 

One thing I really love about Animal Collective is that when they play a song, they really commit to it.  There's no raised-eyebrow irony from anybody in the band when they play, and everybody seems to throw their whole selves into each song, rolling their heads, closing their eyes, and seemingly letting the music they're creating transport them away to some other dimension.  Bees is a relatively slow song, especially for one of that length, but everyone on stage seemed to be completely in the moment of that song for it's entire duration, implicitly inviting the audience to join them on their journey.

Painting With's Recycling followed Bees, and the night ended with Golden Gals, another upbeat if forgettable single from Painting With.  Painting With is not going to be remembered as one of Animal Collective's seminal works, and while it's understandable that the band is concentrating on their new material on this tour, both to promote album sales and also to explore ways of breathing new life into the songs for later years, it's worth noting that the show didn't include any songs from their last studio LP, 2012's Centipede Hz, another of their lesser efforts. However, the set didn't include any of their most popular songs, like My Girls, Peacebone, and Brothersport, either, or anything else from Merriweather Post Pavillion other than Daily Routine, or anything from Strawberry Jam or from their classic Sung Tongs LP.   

Perhaps the best Animal Collective show I've been to was at The Tabernacle during a tour between LPs, after the Centipede Hz tour but before recording had started on Painting With.  They chose freely from all of their albums and played the songs they and the audience enjoyed.  Now, supporting the disappointing Painting With, they're playing the songs the audience endures in order to get to the "good stuff."

You could say that's an artist's prerogative,  but you could also say it's self-indulgent.  Or out-of-touch.

Beirut At The Buckhead Theater, Atlanta, April 6, 2016

It's an encouraging sign of the growth and development of Zach Condon and his band Beirut as both artists and as musicians that last night's performance at Atlanta's Buckhead Theater seemed less about playing the individual songs as creating and maintaining a certain sound.  Sure, they played their hit songs (see set list at bottom), but the emphasis seemed to be not on the recognition of familiar tunes but on the individual playing and virtuosity of the various band members. The effect was less of a pop show than a bona fide concert, closer to the experience of listening to jazz than to rock. 

It was lovely.

For the record, there was no opener, just Beirut.  A lengthy, pre-show set of recorded Afro-Pop and Brazilian rock before the show was credited to a DJ T1, but to those of us waiting for the show to start, just sounded like more PA music before the set began.

Fact Checking the Animal Collective Rumors

The rumors are true - Animal Collective are playing Alvin Row during their current tour - a song from their very first album Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, released back in 2000 and that they've never performed live before.

Here's Loch Raven from Feels at the same show:

Animal Collective will perform at the Buckhead Theater on May 7.

Purity Ring at Buckhead Theater, Atlanta, May 27, 2015

"Who's kids are these?" I wondered at one point during last night's show at the Buckhead Theater.  I could have been asking about the young audience at the all-ages show, but in fact I was wondering about the opener, Alberta's Born Gold.  

I did not care for their set.  The sound was all muddled together with the bass way too loud, the synthesized rhythm sounded like a pair of sneakers in a clothes dryer, and the band seemed more interested in choreographed dance moves than playing music.  Worse, they played most of their set on a dark stage except for the lights from their keyboards, with occasional bursts of light (I caught one for the picture below), usually to capture their dance moves.  They weren't hurt-your-ears bad or I'll-never-unhear-this bad, just these-guys-need-to-practice-playing-their-instruments-more bad.  It was hard for me to understand how a band of that caliber could have earned the a spot on a national tour with Braids and Purity Ring, and I figured that they must have been somebody's kids - thus, "Who's kids are these?"

I learned the answer today - Born Gold is the band that used to go by the name Gobble Gobble and used to contain Corin Roddick, now of Purity Ring.  They're the guys he left behind, so in a sense, they got the gig because they're Purity Rings's kids.  Anyway, their set was a mercifully short 30 minutes, so enough about them - I don't like being negative and subscribe to the "if you don't have anything nice to say" philosophy of blogging, but this was just too much to not comment on.

  

Next up were Montreal's Braids, who were absolutely fantastic.  We saw Braids once before when they opened for Wye Oak, and we were totally blown away then.  Oddly, that performance brought Purity Ring to mind, and now, almost exactly a year later, here that are again, now opening for Purity Ring themselves.

Still, we weren't prepared for how great Braids were.  Front-woman Raphaelle Standell-Preston's vocals soared at times, startled at others, and had my complete attention throughout.   They have a new album, Deep In The Iris. out, but even the outstanding cuts from the record don't match the immediacy and range of Raphaelle's live vocals.  By all means, if you have a chance to catch this band, do.

I don't know if the show had sold out or not, but the Buckhead Theater was packed.  I got there a few minutes after the doors had opened, but there were already at least ten rows of people at the front of the stage.  I fell back a little and watched the show from the front row of the elevated portion of the floor, still close enough to see well, but also high enough to see over the heads of the crowd. Unfortunately, the young audience around me were not talking to one another throughout the set, they were shouting at one another throughout the set.  Totally oblivious to the great music on the stage, they were both preventing others from hearing it and also interfering with the atmosphere the band was attempting to create.  "Who's kids are these?"

They finally did shut up for Purity Ring, or Purity Ring managed to drown them out, but after all, Purity Ring was the band they had come to see, not some band called "Braids."

We've seen Purity Ring twice before, first during MFNW (RIP) 2012 and then again at Variety Playhouse.  Since those performances, Purity Ring's stagecraft has gotten even more visually compelling, even if their songs have not changed much.  Their latest album, Another Eternity, has a glossier, more commercial sound than their debut, but live the songs sound more evenly matched.

Singer Megan James has a limited range, and after a while, she sounds like she's squeaking her way through every one of the songs, while instrumentalist Corin Roddick, formerly of Gobble Gobble, keeps the booming, bass-heavy beats going behind the vocals.  It's a formula that works, and the audience reacted favorably throughout the set, arm-pumping and phone-waving the whole time.

Megan announced near the end of Purity Ring's set that for some reason there would be no encore, and true to her words, as soon as the last song was over right at 11:00 pm, the lights came on and the house music started.  A few people called for "One more!," but no one ever came back on stage.

I don't know if I need to go to another Purity Ring show again unless they start to come up with something new, but the evening was still totally worth it for Braids' fine performance, even if it did mean enduring Born Gold's set.  

Yo La Tengo

For no other reason than I spent much of this morning listening to songs from Yo La Tengo's 30-year history, here's Night Falls On Hoboken and some pictures from their recent shows,  

Yo La Tengo at Buckhead Theater, January 25, 2013

Yo La Tengo at Variety Playhouse, March 29, 2013

Yo La Tengo (as "Little Black Egg Big Band") at Hopscotch Festival, Sept. 5, 2014 

Little Black Egg Big Band at Hopscotch Festival, photograph from NYC Taper

The New Pornographers at Buckhead Theater, Atlanta, November 7, 2014

Last night in Buckhead, Canadians The New Pornographers performed a nearly 90-minute, late Rocktober show.

Brooklyn's The Pains of Being Pure at Heart opened.

We last saw The Pains of Being Pure at Heart at Bumbershoot 2012 on a sunny Seattle afternoon after a day spent mostly inside the Key Arena watching Best Coast and M83.

This is a new lineup for the band.  Most notably gone is keyboardist/singer Peggy Wang, and in her place is new vocalist, who's name I did not catch, but frontman Kip Berman keeps the band still more than recognizable as The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.  

The New Pornographers were upbeat and poppy.  A.C. Newman is the defacto leader of the supergroup, which last night included Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, and Destroyer's Dan Bejar.

Bejar played his role as the resident genius well, only appearing on the stage when he had a song to sing, and then disappearing offstage during the other songs.  Case played the diva, at one point insisting that someone in the audience leave the venue "right now" for some offense that eluded most of the audience.  Calder was fairly low-key, mostly singing backup behind Newman, who did most of the heavy lifting. 

In short, all eight musicians played their roles well, making it an interesting show.

Here they are on Letterman, with Neko wearing the same King Tut leggings she wore on stage last night.

New Pornographers

The New Pornographers will be playing Atlanta's Buckhead Theater on November 6.

A Children's Treasury of The Head & The Heart Pictures, Buckhead Theater, Atlanta, 11-12-13

The current Head & The Heart tour with Thao & The Get Down Stay Down reached Atlanta's Buckhead Theater last night.  Quiet Life opened.

Not to imply any disrespect, but I don't have much time to comment on the show in any great detail today. So instead, here are some pictures and I'll just shut my mouth for once.

QUIET LIFE

THAO & THE GET DOWN STAY DOWN

THE HEAD & THE HEART

The Head and the Heart Cover Iron Maiden In the Desert

This looks like some crazed, Carlos Castanada-influenced experiment in the desert, but its probably just one of the reasons that Seattle boys should be wary of getting too much sun when in the Southwest.

This September, I'll be seeing The Head and the Heart perform in Portland's beautiful Pioneer Courthouse Square during MFNW, and then again in November at the relatively near-by Buckhead Theater.  Thao and the Get Down Stay Down will be opening for them on both dates.  

But between now and then, or at least between now and Bumbershoot on Labor Day weekend, there really isn't much on the musical horizon.  This may not be a drought year, at least for weather (far from it!), but it's close to a summer-long drought in musical terms, with only a few, scattered oases of sound (Cayucas, Kisses).  Maybe its the incentive I need to save my pennies for the Northwest and for Rocktober after that.

Calexico y Yo La Tengo at Buckhead Theater, January 25, 2013

So, yeah, last night was Yo La Tengo with Calexico opening at The Buckhead Theater.  Apologies for not posting more yesterday, but when I left for the copy shop at 4:30 to make four copies of a report for my job, I had no idea that it would take me three hours to complete.  As it was, I ran directly from the copiers to The Buckhead Theater, stopping home only to pick up my Will Call printout, and got to the show at about 8:00, a half hour before Calexico started the evening.

It was my first time at The Buckhead Theater.  The BT is actually the restored former Roxy, which I hadn't been to either, even though it's a mere three miles from my home.  Go figure.  Anyway, it's a nice venue and like Terminal West still has that "new car smell."  It has a large stage, a balcony, and really spacious rooms up front for drinks, the merch table, and coat check.  

Back in 1984, when Yo La Tengo first formed, Buckhead was a very different place than it is now, and I had spent many an evening socializing and partying in the old neighborhood at bars, restaurants, and nightclubs like Good Old Days, Carlos McGee's, Aunt Charlie's, Peachtree Cafe,  the Five Paces Inn, Texas State Line Barbecue, and the Steamhouse Lounge, among others.  Now, it's all boutiques and shops for the One Percenters or One Percent wannabes, and it actually now feels a little incongruous to be listening to live music, much less good live music, in the area.

But enough nostalgia. "The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime," Pink Floyd once sang  (or as the Gang of Four put it, "Nostalgia, it's no good").  Last night was an evening of good live music, stating with the opening set by Calexico.

Calexico formed from members of The Friends of Dean Martinez, one of my favorite instrumental, post-rock bands of the '90s.  Led by guitarist and singer Joey Burns, the band merges indie rock with mariachi and Tejano music styles.  The band is currently touring as a septet with many of the members playing multiple instruments, including two trumpeters, accordion, pedal steel, and vibes.  Their sound is exciting and uplifting, and as soon as the music began, I forgot all of my troubles back at the copy shop.

The group includes everything I like in an indie band. Upright bass?  Check.

Horns? Check.

Vibes? Check.

Accordion playing multi-instrumentalists? Check.

More guitars?  Check.

When they weren't playing together mariachi-style, trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela also contributed several terrific vocals in Spanish, while trumpeter Martin Wenk occasionally filled in on accordion.  All in all, it was a wonderful set of great music, with just the right amount of jalapenos to spice up the night.

Here Calexico play one of its singles, Maybe on Monday, in a Lower Manhattan studio.

But as good as Calexico was, it was Yo La Tengo who ruled the night.  Although they're been around for some 30 years now, this was actually my first time seeing them, and I'm already kicking myself for all of the missed opportunities - I've seen them billed so many times, yet never found it in me to make a it a set before.  

The band formed as the husband/wife duo of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley in 1984, with bassist James McNew joining the band around 1990.  The band can make a reasonable claim at being the original indie rock outfit, and their musical styles encompass punk, post-punk, folk rock, noise pop, dream pop, ambient, and jangle rock.  In other words, they're all over the map and are happy to explore and stretch themselves, while never content in being stuck in just one place.

The band is famous for its large back catalog and impressive selection of covers, as well as their annual Eight Nights of Hanukkah shows at their native Hoboken's Maxwell's.  I understand that some of their cover songs at last year's Maxwell's event included The Fugs' Frenzy, The Beatles' Eight Days a Week, Dylan's You Ain't Going Nowhere, Adam & the Ants' Antmusic, The Velvet Underground's Heroin and Sister Ray, Blue Oyster Cult's Burnin' For You, Neil Young's Time Fades Away, and Sun Ra's Nuclear War (which was actually their best-selling single), the latter performed with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Their 2012 Hanukkah show also included this feedback-drenched guitar orgy, which should give you a pretty good idea of how they sounded much of last night:

The Soundcloud gadget above is from the exemplary NYC Taper, which has most of the 2012 Yo La Tengo Hannukah shows available for free download.  

Last night's set started out loud and electric, with lots of post-punk songs and compositions and members  of the band exchanging roles and instruments.  Mr. McNew even took over on the drums from Ms. Hubley during the middle of a song without either missing so much as a single beat.    

Midway through the set, Mr. Kaplan switched to acoustic guitar and led the band through several quiet songs from their new album, Fade, with Ms. Hubley on vocals.  Although slower than the previous songs, the band still managed to keep the audience spellbound and quiet, and after a couple of those quiet, acoustic songs, Mr. Kaplan joked, "Now, we're going to slow things down a little."

Sometimes they were Sonic Youth and sometimes they were Low.  Sometimes they were the Velvet Underground and sometimes they were REM.  And sometimes they were Calexico, inviting the twin trumpeters on stage with them on one song.  

The highlight of the evening, though, was the closer to their set, a long instrumental jam which built up and up as one member after another of Calexico came on stage and joined in, and slowly wound back down again as the members left the stage one by one to rapturous applause from the audience.  The piece lasted for what felt like a blissful eternity, and even though it was all built around one very simple chord progression, I don't think anyone in the audience wanted to hear it end.

For their encore, the band went back to quiet, acoustic mode, ending the night with Ms. Hubley singing a lovely cover of a Johnny Cash song, with vibes by Calexico's John Convertino.

I don't mean it ironically when I sat that last night's show was the best concert of the year.  If and when I look back on 2013 and try to select a "Best Of" show, last night's performance will have to be given serious consideration.