Spoon

Spoon at Hopscotch Festival, Raleigh, 2014

Dream bookings:  If you find yourself in Morrison, Colorado on or about May 27 and want something to do, Spoon will be performing with The Decemberists at Red Rocks.  Courtney Barnett opens.

Hopscotch - Day Two

The hotel's internet upload speed (or lack thereof) is preventing me form uploading yesterday's pictures to Flickr, but they will get up there eventually.  Meanwhile, here are a few of the highlights from Day 2 of Hopscotch.

JENKS MILLER & ROSE CROSS NC

An improvisational set of experimental music to kick off (at least for me) the Three-Lobed Recordings day party.

LITTLE BLACK EGG BIG BAND

As you can see, the "Little Black Egg Big Band" is really Yo La Tengo with guest guitarists.  Below is NPR's picture of the event, with your humble narrator in the lower left.

SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN

Psychedelic improv from a North Carolina band.   

MV & EE

The first band of the day to feature bona-fide song structure, Vermont's MV & EE still elft a lot of room to jam out on their compositions.

THURSTON MOORE & MARY LATTIMORE

Thurston Moore improvisational guitar noise and feedback, this time accompanied by a harp for some reason.

LONNIE WALKER

On the main stage, a local band got a big break opening for the next two acts.

ST. VINCENT

Basically, the same show that she did at The Tabernacle in Atlanta earlier this year, which is not a bad thing at all.

SPOON

A very different set than their retrospective of past hits at the Shaky Knees Festival last May, since a new album has come out since then, and they played a nice mix of the old and the new.

LOAMLANDS

Truth in advertising:  the festival description said Loamlands feature "crackling, serpentine electric guitaar leads, spiritual and emotional wondering, country twang, folk rollick, and rock volume," and that is exactly what Loamlands delivered.

MARK McGUIRE

Overlooped compositions straddling the boundary between new age and alt rock.

 SUN KIL MOON

Did not want to be photographed, and there was a lot of drama and tension at the beginning of the set which shall be discussed at a later date, but the set ultimately developed into a fine performance of his moving, self-confessional, narrative songs.

Gotta get going - missing sets now even as I type.  More to follow.

Spoon

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.

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:

Dude, I Was There

It appears that I've make my photo debut at web site Consequence of Sound while attending the Spoon set at Shaky Knees.

Shaky Knees, Day One

Okay, first things first, yes, it did rain, quite hard for a while, but only between about 5:30 and 7:30.  I had my raincoat with me and fared fine through the precip, although some others were soaking wet the rest of the night.

I'm off to Day Two and will post a complete picture set and recap of the festival later, but here are some pics of the bands that I caught at Day One.  Meanwhile, you can always check out my Flickr page if you want to see the complete shots. 

MUTUAL BENEFIT

The day - and the festival - started with Mutual Benefit, one of the bands that I most wanted to see.  They played a lovely but quiet set, and ended far too soon - the shortest set of the day.  

SLEEPER AGENT

I hadn't heard of them, but they played a high-energy set of r&b-influenced rock, fronted by a powerhouse vocalist.

WILD BELLE





Interesting set of indie folk rock with world, afro-pop and reggae touches. 

WHITE DENIM

I couldn't get anywhere even close to the stage for White Denim, but enjoyed their set of psych rock jams from afar, and was even able to hear them while I wandered off to get a bite to eat.

CHARLES BRADLEY



Old-school, James Brown-style r&b from "The Screaming Eagle of Soul."

MAN MAN

When you're in Man Man, everyday is Halloween.  Odd, interesting electro-pop from an odd, interesting band.  The rain began during their set, and I had to leave to go back to my car and get my raincoat.

FOALS

The rain continued throughout the excellent set of reverb-drenched psychedelic instrumentals and songs by Britain's Foals, but their music was so good, one hardy cared.  "This is what every day's like in England," their frontman said about the weather.

SPOON

Even the rain had to stop to listen to Spoon.  I hadn't seen them perform since 2010, and they played a terrific set list of songs from throughout their career.  I kept thinking, "Oh, this is my favorite Spoon song," until they played the next, and I'd think, "No, this is my favorite," and so on throughout their entire set.  Bonus points:  I somehow got the rail for their set.

THE NATIONAL

After Spoon, there  was no way I would get even close to The Nationals' stage for their set, but oddly, as it turned out, the front of Spoon's stage was not really a bad vantage point to see The National at the adjacent stage.  I even got to slap Matt Berninger's hand when he came down into the audience and wandered over to the edge of the other stage.  My first time seeing The National, and they played a triumphant set.

The festival promoters posted this recap video to their Facebook page: