Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Foxygen, and Wampire at 529 Atlanta, 2/23/13

Last night's show at The 529 was sold out and the club was packed.  The performance-room wall on the far side from the bar, which had been torn down when I went to see Om and Daniel Higgs there last November but had mysteriously reappeared for Lonesome Leash and Iron Jayne in January, was once again gone, effectively doubling the size of the tiny club but still offering no more room in front of the narrow stage.  Only about five or six people at a time can stand in front of the stage and everyone else has to stand behind them, and since the stage is elevated by only about six inches, if some tall people are at the front, the rest of the audience's view is blocked.  As a result, the extra room due to the absent wall offered more elbow room but no more sight lines, and a group of bros had clustered at the front of the stage.  

But one of the odd things about 529's layout is that the entrance to the performance room is near the stage, so that latecomers, instead of approaching from the back and having to worm their way through the crowd up to the front like at most clubs, actually squeeze into the room at the front of the crowd.  

Portland's Wampire were already on stage when I arrived uncharacteristically late last night (it seems that I usually can't help myself and typically arrive for a show in time to be the first and only person at the club).  But I still managed to squeeze into the performance room only about two or three rows back from the stage due to the club's odd entrance. However, during the course of the evening, as more and more people squeezed in after me, I found myself further and further back, although the bros tenaciously held their position  at the front of the stage.

Anyhow, although Wampire sounded crisp and good and satisfyingly loud, I really don't have much to say about them as I had barely got settled in before their set was over.  My loss.

Until I saw them perform last night, I've really had a hard time getting a handle on Los Angeles-based Foxygen.  The band is primarily the songwriting duo of 22-year-olds Sam France (vocals, Olympia, Washington) and Jonathan Rado (guitar/keyboards, NYC), and their touring band includes a backup vocalist, a bassist, and a drummer.  But what is that music they're playing? Glam-folk?  Psych-pop?  Sixties cabaret on acid?

They sound all over the place on records, but now I understand that's the point.  Seeing them perform and clown around on stage (Sam France must have declared "I don't care" at least a half dozen times to as many situations), I get it now - they're simultaneously musical archivists and ironists - archironists, if you will.  They reverently channel 60s-era flower-power folk-pop while skewering the genre at the same time, as you can hear on their song San Francisco, which is actually one of their more cohesive songs - most other songs turn and bend at unexpected moments, frequently morphing into something altogether unexpected.

San Francisco is from their recent album, the aptly named We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, which was produced by Richard Swift (Damien Jurado, The Mynabirds) and is currently tracking at Number 3 on the College Radio Top 10 Albums list.

Wearing a black-and-red velvet cape on stage, Sam France was the very personification of the rock star.  Depending on how he wore his shades, he was able to channel Joey Ramone, Mick Jagger, Robert Smith, or Ray Davies, all of whom also have had obvious influences on Foxygen's music.

The crowd of bros at the front of the stage enthusiastically greeted each song with fist pumping, pogo dancing and sing-alongs.  In all, it looked like everybody, band and audience alike, had a lot of fun.

Headliners were Portland's Unknown Mortal Orchestra. We last saw UMO perform at the Doug Fir during  MFNW 2011 

Unknown Mortal Orchestra at MFNW, September  8, 2011

Since that time, the band got a new drummer and released a fine new album with the sequel-y title, II.  The epic cover photo from II hung as a backdrop behind the bands during last night's show.

UMO's music has been described as "funky psych-pop future-breakbeats that sound like the product of a group that ate a bunch of acid, turned on the four-track and tried to copy a Meters record" (Willamette Weekly).  Led by the extraordinary guitarist and New Zealand ex-pat Ruban Nielson, UMO are riding the current popular wave of psych-rock enthusiasm, a wave they started in part with songs like Thought Balune, Ffunny Ffrends, and How Can U Luv Me.

The band lists Syd Barrett, Love, Wu Tang Clan, Captain Beefheart, the Mothers of Invention, Soft Machine, Jimi Hendrix, Ariel Pink, Os Mutantes, J Dilla, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Al Green, The Zombies, King Tubby, and Prince among their influences, and their current sound includes even more doses of soul than before, as evident in So Good At Being in Trouble from the new album, II.



The set was terrific, covering songs both new and old, with lots of guitar exploration and feedback thrown in for good measure.  The band of bros lapped it all up with every bit as much enthusiasm as they had for Foxygen.  They even hung in for one of the longest encore calls I can remember in a long time.

I don't know of any of these bands ever playing Atlanta before, but I find it encouraging to see such enthusiastic reception here for them.  Their sound may be slightly or majorly on the fringe of popular taste,  but Unknown Mortal Orchestra will be on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tomorrow (Monday, February 25, 2013).

Iron Jayne, Lonesome Leash, Spirit Temple at 529, January 9, 2013

The Winter Doldrums have finally passed and the 2013 concert season has kicked off with as fine a show as one could hope for a season opener.  The show was held in East Atlanta Village's 529, which for some reason has replaced the wall that had been torn down during the Om/Daniel Higgs show.  I was anxious to see how the club would expand into the new space, but was surprised to instead see the old wall back up.

The evening's headliner was new Atlanta band Iron Jayne, but the star of the evening was Lonesome Leash, the solo project of Dark Dark Dark's Walt McClements.  Spirit Temple opened with a revelatory set, and Atlanta's Cousin Dan provided retro DJ sets as "Moreland Brando" between each act (I hadn't heard Patty Smith's Gloria in years, and I especially enjoyed his segue from Bowie's Fame to Destroyer's Kaputt).

The opener was Atlanta's Spirit Temple, Walter Fox's very enjoyable and interesting one-man band.  Performing in silhouette behind a screen, he looped guitar, recorder, and percussion to build beautiful sonic soundscapes.  

While he played, various abstract video images were projected onto the screen, apparently by members of Atlanta electronic duo Featureless Ghost.  That's Emily Kempf (see below) in front of the screen in the picture above.  

Spirit Temple sounded at times like Frippertronic-period Robert Fripp, and at other times a little like Owen Pallett.  Near the end of the set, when he overlayed bells, drums, and flute over a bass-like guitar line, he  even evoked the spirit of Pharaoh Sander's Upper Egypt.

Walt McClements' Lonesome Leash is another, slightly more traditional, one-man band. Walt primarily sings and plays accordion, while simultaneously playing a small drum kit and occasionally adding flourishes of trumpet.  The resulting output has a somewhat gypsy-flavored, Slavic sound, and Walt's songs generally build up in intensity to an emotional climax before cooling back off to the conclusion, much like a jazz soloist. A native of New Orleans, McClements brings some of the Crescent City's eclecticism to Lonesome Leash's music.

 

His set included the rousing Feeding Frenzy as the second song in his set, and closed with Ghosts, played without the drum machine he usually uses for the song, as it reportedly broke during his recent performance with Franz Nicolay at Brooklyn's The Sycamore.  Undaunted, he still managed a terrific and emotive performance which was well received by the appreciative audience.

Lonesome Leash was the reason I came to this show (that and nearly two months of Winter Doldrums), but the evening had still more in store for us. The evening's headliner was Emily Kempf's new band, Iron Jayne. Kempf, formerly of Atlanta's The Back Pockets, has stripped away not only the theatrics and audience participation of The Back Pockets, but also turned away from the freak-folk sound that characterized the former art-damaged band for a more straight-forward pop rock. Gone are the violins and horns and other odd instruments, and in their place the band consists of Kempf on keyboards, Garrett Goss on drums, Ryan Odom on guitar, and Chad  LeBlanc on bass.  Kempf's vocals are still simultaneously quirky and appealing, especially when she came out from behind the keyboards and sang at the front of the stage.

The band has gone through a few personnel changes since forming last August, and this was the first performance by this line-up of Iron Jayne. At one point near the end of the set, Kempf declared, "Alright, now we're really a band."  The set was surprisingly short, probably because they don't have all that many songs yet, but still conveyed a sense of potential greatness for this new band.  

Iron Jayne's next performance will be back at 529 on February 7, when they will be opening for U.S. Girls.  

This was my first show since the Of Monsters and Men concert at The Tabernacle back on November 29.  The Winter Doldrums were cold and long, and I'm glad they seem to finally be over. On the other hand, between the lush ambiance of Spirit Temple, the rousing folk polka of Lonesome Leash, the assertive rock of Iron Jayne, and Cousin Dan's nostalgic DJ set, I couldn't ask for a better return to the Atlanta music scene.

Om, Daniel Higgs at 529, Atlanta

On Monday night, the 26th of November, the band Om played at the 529 club in Atlanta, Georgia.  Daniel Higgs opened.  The warm-up act was Atlanta band High Bias, but unfortunately I arrived too late to catch them, which is really saying something given the late hours of the 529.  I usually don't go out to hear music on Mondays due to my obligations to Monday Night Zazen, but when the truly worthwhile band comes through, like YACHT for example, one just has to make exceptions. The price one pays, however, is a late arrival and the probability of missing the warm-up act.

How can one describe a Daniel Higgs performance?  I thought a solo acoustic musician was an odd choice for a drone-metal band like Om; actually I still do, even though it clearly worked.  Higgs, probably best known as the singer for Lungfish, played alone, accompanied only by his banjo, on which he played hypnotic arabesque runs and almost flamenco-like passages, while occasionally singing what sounded like improvised lines ("I work on the Sabbath every day of the week").  The spell-bound crowd, and it was probably the most crowded I've seen 529, was hear-a-pin-drop quiet as Higgs descended further and further down a rabbit hole of his own imagination.  The applause on the rare occasions that Higgs paused to calibrate his trajectory was warm and sincere.

Om's set was plagued by some manner of technical problems that I didn't quite understand, but it took them a long time and many stage visits by their roadies to get started, and even then microphones dropped out during vocal performances and the band seemed pretty ticked off at times.  Not that it got in the way of an excellent performance, however.  

Om recently expanded from a duo to a trio, and in concert it's hard to imagine how they could ever have been anything but the lineup on the stage.   Their music is every bit as hypnotic as Higgs', although they employ different techniques to achieve that state.  Their usual method of attack was to layer Eastern-sounding synth lines and samples over a throbbing, fuzzed-out bass pattern, and then pin the listener to the floor with an unexpected drum attack.  But they had many variations on this theme, which kept the whole show very interesting.

Photography was near impossible during the show for several reasons, chief among them being the fact that I forget my camera, without which it's hard to take anything more than a mental impression.  But I did have the camera app in my little Droid, but the next challenges was the crowd of tall young men pressed toward the front of the stage, between and above whom one had to jockey for position in order to take any kind of picture.  Then there were several "Absolutely No Flash Photography" signs taped to the walls around the stage, further limiting one's options.  So crappy as these pictures are, it's actually amazing that I got anything at all.

The exceptionally attentive and quiet audience remained exceptionally attentive and quiet during Om's set.  During one long drone composition at the end of the set, as keyboardist and effects man Emil Amos was wailing some sort of Arabic-sounding chant, several people toward the rear of the club began hooting and hollering along, until someone near the front of the club turned around and shouted "Shut up!"  Surprisingly and  somewhat uncharacteristically, they did.

One other note:  it must be mentioned at some point that the side wall in the tiny performance space at 529 had apparently been demolished, and the club has expanded to two or even three times its former size, which was tiny so even with the wall gone it's still a small club.  But this expansion would still be a major improvement, and if they reconfigure the stage so that more than five people can stand abreast in front it, it will be a much needed and much appreciated improvement of a club that increasingly is getting some of the best bookings in town, even giving the nearby and redoubtable Earl a run for its money.