"Sparrow Aviation Administration Blames Collision On Failure To Detect Pane Of Glass." I can't think of any better way to bring out the undercurrent of redonkulousness inherent to the months I spent getting up before dawn last fall to monitor with the CBCM than with this article from The Onion (via). Classic. The graphics are outstanding.
That's Dyer pride, bitches. Get shot at, shrug it off, continue on your drive to Michigan. Hometown, represent!
Steely Dan's "Peg" has to be one of the most perfect songs I can think of, so I was pleased as punch when Stereogum pointed me in the direction of this short making-of video. Minute after minute of brilliance, from Rick Marotta discussing how he got that spine-tinglingly perfect cymbal sound to Becker and Fagen openly sneering at guitar solo outtakes. Also, be sure to head over to Steely's web headquarters and read their bloody brilliantly funny open letter (also via the 'Gum) to Luke Wilson, asking him to convince Owen to publicly apologize at one of their concerts for stealing the plot idea for You, Me, and Dupree (serial comma, bitches) from their song "Cousin Dupree." If you don't immediately start giggling at the opening (all caps) salvo, "OPEN LETTER TO THE GREAT COMIC ACTOR, LUKE WILSON," you might be a little bit dead inside.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Wolverine vs. Shark
What's that you say? You haven't had enough Hugh Jackman in your life lately? Well, check the previews for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (via) and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (via). Now I know why I'd been getting those films confused every time I read about them for the past year or so. I hate, hate, hated Requiem for a Dream, but thought Pi was kind of nifty, and, though I haven't seen it in years, I'm still fairly confident that Nolan's Insomnia is not just criminally underrated and under-seen but also much better than Memento. I'll be eager to see what these young turks have got up their sleeves this time around. The IMDB says we're looking at October release dates for both.
Also, this is going haunt my nightmares for weeks to come:
Also, this is going haunt my nightmares for weeks to come:
Thursday, July 20, 2006
One, Two. One, Two, Three, Four!
OMG, boner alert: Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman are doing a movie together. And not just any movie, but a bona-fee-day high-class period pitcha for the Beeb, based on CRP go-to foreword-writer Philippa Gregory's novel The Other Boleyn Girl. Natalie will play Anne, and Scarlett will play her sister Mary. Get yr kleenex boxes ready! (I was talking to the historical romance fans who, y'know, get emotional about all the torrid romance and tragedy and such. Ahem.)
Fred Armisen, thank you for taking to task the annoying douchebags who rock out to their music, oblivious to their surroundings, on the bus or train or in other public spaces. "I can't deal with other people making their musical tastes known to everybody else. I don't like people bobbing their heads or getting into stuff at all. It should be private....I don't even tap my feet. I hate that." This has long been a pet peeve of mine in the city. I couldn't agree more.
Can anyone confirm for me that Danger Mouse really is only 28, as this New York Times Magazine profile claims? I can't find a birth year listed on either allmusic or Wikipedia. I guess it really doesn't matter; I just find the realization that he's, like, my age kind of remarkable. Also, I can't stand Chuck Klosterman. That line "There were no throngs of pretty girls, although there were several girls dressed as if they thought they were pretty" is just beyond offensive.
S/FJ's "oily pec-off" turn-of-phrase made me laugh out loud here.
Space + ancient Egypt = GeekOverload.com. Loves it.
"Slap Your Knee and Say Ouch" is sososo funny. Bonus points, too, for some Ben Kweller love. (Stereogum has a new Kwellah MP3, "Penny on the Train Track," from his forthcoming self-titled disk.)
I'm obsessed this week with that new Girl Talk album Night Ripper. Listening to it feels like compressing a cross-country road trip down into 42 frenzied minutes, that feeling of speeding, exhausted but wired on caffeine, down unfamiliar highways, cramped but kind of giddy, switching radio stations as you drift in and out of reception, wondering if driving over the next state line is going to bring oldies, hip-hop, or the best indie rock programming you never would have expected to find just outside Tulsa city limits. Your favorite tracks will largely be determined by how many of the samples you recognize and how much you're amused by their juxtaposition; right now I'm all about "Minute by Minute," which, as the Pitchfork reviewer mentions, samples Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945," but also sneaks Sophie B. Hawkins and Steely Dan in there, among many (many, many) others.
Fred Armisen, thank you for taking to task the annoying douchebags who rock out to their music, oblivious to their surroundings, on the bus or train or in other public spaces. "I can't deal with other people making their musical tastes known to everybody else. I don't like people bobbing their heads or getting into stuff at all. It should be private....I don't even tap my feet. I hate that." This has long been a pet peeve of mine in the city. I couldn't agree more.
Can anyone confirm for me that Danger Mouse really is only 28, as this New York Times Magazine profile claims? I can't find a birth year listed on either allmusic or Wikipedia. I guess it really doesn't matter; I just find the realization that he's, like, my age kind of remarkable. Also, I can't stand Chuck Klosterman. That line "There were no throngs of pretty girls, although there were several girls dressed as if they thought they were pretty" is just beyond offensive.
S/FJ's "oily pec-off" turn-of-phrase made me laugh out loud here.
Space + ancient Egypt = GeekOverload.com. Loves it.
"Slap Your Knee and Say Ouch" is sososo funny. Bonus points, too, for some Ben Kweller love. (Stereogum has a new Kwellah MP3, "Penny on the Train Track," from his forthcoming self-titled disk.)
I'm obsessed this week with that new Girl Talk album Night Ripper. Listening to it feels like compressing a cross-country road trip down into 42 frenzied minutes, that feeling of speeding, exhausted but wired on caffeine, down unfamiliar highways, cramped but kind of giddy, switching radio stations as you drift in and out of reception, wondering if driving over the next state line is going to bring oldies, hip-hop, or the best indie rock programming you never would have expected to find just outside Tulsa city limits. Your favorite tracks will largely be determined by how many of the samples you recognize and how much you're amused by their juxtaposition; right now I'm all about "Minute by Minute," which, as the Pitchfork reviewer mentions, samples Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945," but also sneaks Sophie B. Hawkins and Steely Dan in there, among many (many, many) others.
Monday, July 17, 2006
RIP, Mickey Spillane
If you've seen Kiss Me Deadly, then you know what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. RIP, Mickey Spillane, you crazy old bastard.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(Over a month ago, I was contacted by a representative from M80, a company that provides "online grassroots marketing" services for big companies like the Gap, Miramax, Comedy Central, House of Blues, and Interscope Records who are trying to figure out how to harness the power of blog-buzz for their products. Based on my mention of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in my dual write-up on The Proposition and Lady Vengeance, they asked if they could send me a gratis copy of the recently released two-disc Collector's Edition DVD of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to review here. I said yes.)
I find myself growing bored with collectors' editions and endless amounts of special features on DVDs. My ever-decreasing attention span to one side, I think a large part of it is nothing more than the fact that the novelty of having easy access to all that behind-the-scenes footage is just wearing off. (Whither the heady excitement of the early days of building my DVD collection?) Not to mention that, as pointless and predictable EPK interviews become ubiquitous on DVDs, online, and in multiplexes, the quality-to-quantity ratio is discouraging enough that I simply don't have the patience anymore to slog through it all at home on my relatively crappy TV for one interesting observation from the fight choreographer. The amount of the drug I have to consume to get that same old high just isn't worth it for me anymore.
All that being said, it's curious to spend time with two discs' worth of special features for a movie I don't really care about one way or the other. I think I'd only seen it once before, a couple years ago when I was at the height of my irrational hatred for Robert Redford (I've subsequently crested that wave and seem to be settling down into a kind of bemused annoyance), and pretty much felt the same about it then as I feel about it now. I respect its popularity and influence on cheekily self-aware deconstructions of genre flicks, but, for whatever reason, it just doesn't touch or resonate with me at all.
So, perhaps the most valuable thing I got out of the whole experience was some satisfaction for my curiosity about director George Roy Hill. Butch Cassidy is the only film on his resume that I've seen, but unlike, say, Sam Peckinpah or Peter Bogdanovich, whose work I am similarly ill-versed in, I had gleaned essentially no generalized, even stereotypical, sense of his auteur's fingerprint from the pop-culture ether over my years of watching movies. On the first page of my notes from the day I started watching one of the supplemental documentaries, I even wrote, "who is George Roy Hill? I know he's the director, but what else has he done?"
I think part of the reason my ignorance about Hill, and perhaps also my ambivalence toward the film as a whole, bothered me as much as it did was because of my knee-jerk assumption that since this movie came out in 1969, in the early days of the American New Wave, I should have been able to identify it in terms of its director's authorial voice, yet couldn't. And the more I mulled it over, the more I began to realize that my tendency would be to identify this movie as anybody's but the director's. It's easy to credit the film to Newman and Redford, whose sexy, insouciant acting style set the bar for four subsequent decades of similar performances that often nail the sex and insouciance without the actual acting chops to back it up. (I mean, for only one example, Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11 are pretty much direct descendants of this exact buddy movie energy.) It's equally easy to call the film Goldman's, still one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood who we can identify by name and general style, or Bacharach's, whose minimal yet insidiously memorable score defines a huge part of the feel of the film. In my geekier moments, I would even venture to claim that the film actually belongs to Conrad Hall, one of the all-time great cinematographers who helped us as an audience become aware of what the camera was doing, who recognized that beautiful shooting wasn't always flawless shooting and made it safe for us to relish lens flares, sudden in-camera zooms, and other idiosyncracies that would have been unthinkable in the classical Hollywood style. But never would I have said, "oh yes, this film's got George Roy Hill written all over it."
Yet, as soon as I started watching the special features, I found a deluge of anecdotes and testimonials to Hill's strong personality and artistic vision. Just remark after remark about how instrumental he was in the construction of the final project, how he creatively and respectfully sparred with the actors over their choices and opinions, how he orchestrated a two-month-long practical joke on Redford, how his commitment and energy held the entire shoot together even after his back went out and he spent a good portion of it directing laid out on a pallet, and how he went to the mat defending the more iconoclastic, and now iconic, aspects of the film (casting a then relatively unknown Redford opposite Newman at the height of his popularity, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" musical sequence, the tweaking of traditional Western conventions by showing Butch and Sundance running away from the law rather than standing firm and fighting, the tonal mingling of comedy and tragedy throughout).
And this impression doesn't just come from others' accounts. There's a wonderfully retro-feeling making-of documentary from 1994 included on one of the two discs that illustrates, in his own words, the gruff veteran's demeanor everyone else kept going on about. It gives a great sense of Hill's gloves-off approach (complete with f-bombs flying). And it makes his deceptive invisibility even more puzzling. Is that his actual innovation here, the actual proof of a true auteur's hand--that he exerted control so assured that it gave a strong and unselfish frame that would allow ample space for the other contributors' work to be actively noticed and appreciated? If so, that's some amazing fucking ninja stealth, that kind of ability to lead from behind, to make it look like everyone else is doing the work when it's only through his (luckily, benevolent) master plan to grant them the latitude to labor under that perception. Of course, I'm not ruling out the possibility that I might be reading all this through my own ignorance and lack of context for his body of work; he did win the Best Director Academy Award for The Sting just a few years later, beating out--get this--Bergman, Bertolucci, a young George Lucas, and William Friedkin. Perhaps I'll feel differently if I ever get around to seeing The Sting or Slap Shot or The World According to Garp. (See, though, did any of you know he directed those movies? Or did you just mentally categorize them as that other Newman/Redford movie, that Newman hockey movie, and that Robin Williams/John Irving movie with John Lithgow in drag?) I dunno; I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument. At any rate, it's a neat little mystery to puzzle out, reconstituting the boundaries of an unfashionable American movie master.
And, of course, as often happens to me when I spend some considerable time with a movie I may have been ambivalent about before, I've developed a begrudging affection for Butch Cassidy. Paul Newman is a nearly perfect human; anything I have to say on the matter is going to pale in comparison to watching his movies or doing a Google image search and drinking in the dreaminess. (I know it's all about the baby blues, but has anybody taken a look at this man's nose recently? Just beautiful.) You can see Redford working really hard to be worthy of this career-making role, but I can forgive him almost anything in this movie for the sake of the moment when, before the ball-kicking knife fight, Butch tells Sundance, "Listen, I don't mean to be a sore loser, but when it's done, if I'm dead, kill him," and Sundance drawls in response, "Love to," then looks up with that little wave and slowly breaking homicidal smile. I could just watch that exchange on repeat for hours. And, unlike the bon mot from my hypothetical fight choreographer, I'm totally willing to watch, and rewatch, a demonstrably well-made movie I may not happen to like for the sake of coming across a gem like that.
I find myself growing bored with collectors' editions and endless amounts of special features on DVDs. My ever-decreasing attention span to one side, I think a large part of it is nothing more than the fact that the novelty of having easy access to all that behind-the-scenes footage is just wearing off. (Whither the heady excitement of the early days of building my DVD collection?) Not to mention that, as pointless and predictable EPK interviews become ubiquitous on DVDs, online, and in multiplexes, the quality-to-quantity ratio is discouraging enough that I simply don't have the patience anymore to slog through it all at home on my relatively crappy TV for one interesting observation from the fight choreographer. The amount of the drug I have to consume to get that same old high just isn't worth it for me anymore.
All that being said, it's curious to spend time with two discs' worth of special features for a movie I don't really care about one way or the other. I think I'd only seen it once before, a couple years ago when I was at the height of my irrational hatred for Robert Redford (I've subsequently crested that wave and seem to be settling down into a kind of bemused annoyance), and pretty much felt the same about it then as I feel about it now. I respect its popularity and influence on cheekily self-aware deconstructions of genre flicks, but, for whatever reason, it just doesn't touch or resonate with me at all.
So, perhaps the most valuable thing I got out of the whole experience was some satisfaction for my curiosity about director George Roy Hill. Butch Cassidy is the only film on his resume that I've seen, but unlike, say, Sam Peckinpah or Peter Bogdanovich, whose work I am similarly ill-versed in, I had gleaned essentially no generalized, even stereotypical, sense of his auteur's fingerprint from the pop-culture ether over my years of watching movies. On the first page of my notes from the day I started watching one of the supplemental documentaries, I even wrote, "who is George Roy Hill? I know he's the director, but what else has he done?"
I think part of the reason my ignorance about Hill, and perhaps also my ambivalence toward the film as a whole, bothered me as much as it did was because of my knee-jerk assumption that since this movie came out in 1969, in the early days of the American New Wave, I should have been able to identify it in terms of its director's authorial voice, yet couldn't. And the more I mulled it over, the more I began to realize that my tendency would be to identify this movie as anybody's but the director's. It's easy to credit the film to Newman and Redford, whose sexy, insouciant acting style set the bar for four subsequent decades of similar performances that often nail the sex and insouciance without the actual acting chops to back it up. (I mean, for only one example, Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11 are pretty much direct descendants of this exact buddy movie energy.) It's equally easy to call the film Goldman's, still one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood who we can identify by name and general style, or Bacharach's, whose minimal yet insidiously memorable score defines a huge part of the feel of the film. In my geekier moments, I would even venture to claim that the film actually belongs to Conrad Hall, one of the all-time great cinematographers who helped us as an audience become aware of what the camera was doing, who recognized that beautiful shooting wasn't always flawless shooting and made it safe for us to relish lens flares, sudden in-camera zooms, and other idiosyncracies that would have been unthinkable in the classical Hollywood style. But never would I have said, "oh yes, this film's got George Roy Hill written all over it."
Yet, as soon as I started watching the special features, I found a deluge of anecdotes and testimonials to Hill's strong personality and artistic vision. Just remark after remark about how instrumental he was in the construction of the final project, how he creatively and respectfully sparred with the actors over their choices and opinions, how he orchestrated a two-month-long practical joke on Redford, how his commitment and energy held the entire shoot together even after his back went out and he spent a good portion of it directing laid out on a pallet, and how he went to the mat defending the more iconoclastic, and now iconic, aspects of the film (casting a then relatively unknown Redford opposite Newman at the height of his popularity, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" musical sequence, the tweaking of traditional Western conventions by showing Butch and Sundance running away from the law rather than standing firm and fighting, the tonal mingling of comedy and tragedy throughout).
And this impression doesn't just come from others' accounts. There's a wonderfully retro-feeling making-of documentary from 1994 included on one of the two discs that illustrates, in his own words, the gruff veteran's demeanor everyone else kept going on about. It gives a great sense of Hill's gloves-off approach (complete with f-bombs flying). And it makes his deceptive invisibility even more puzzling. Is that his actual innovation here, the actual proof of a true auteur's hand--that he exerted control so assured that it gave a strong and unselfish frame that would allow ample space for the other contributors' work to be actively noticed and appreciated? If so, that's some amazing fucking ninja stealth, that kind of ability to lead from behind, to make it look like everyone else is doing the work when it's only through his (luckily, benevolent) master plan to grant them the latitude to labor under that perception. Of course, I'm not ruling out the possibility that I might be reading all this through my own ignorance and lack of context for his body of work; he did win the Best Director Academy Award for The Sting just a few years later, beating out--get this--Bergman, Bertolucci, a young George Lucas, and William Friedkin. Perhaps I'll feel differently if I ever get around to seeing The Sting or Slap Shot or The World According to Garp. (See, though, did any of you know he directed those movies? Or did you just mentally categorize them as that other Newman/Redford movie, that Newman hockey movie, and that Robin Williams/John Irving movie with John Lithgow in drag?) I dunno; I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument. At any rate, it's a neat little mystery to puzzle out, reconstituting the boundaries of an unfashionable American movie master.
And, of course, as often happens to me when I spend some considerable time with a movie I may have been ambivalent about before, I've developed a begrudging affection for Butch Cassidy. Paul Newman is a nearly perfect human; anything I have to say on the matter is going to pale in comparison to watching his movies or doing a Google image search and drinking in the dreaminess. (I know it's all about the baby blues, but has anybody taken a look at this man's nose recently? Just beautiful.) You can see Redford working really hard to be worthy of this career-making role, but I can forgive him almost anything in this movie for the sake of the moment when, before the ball-kicking knife fight, Butch tells Sundance, "Listen, I don't mean to be a sore loser, but when it's done, if I'm dead, kill him," and Sundance drawls in response, "Love to," then looks up with that little wave and slowly breaking homicidal smile. I could just watch that exchange on repeat for hours. And, unlike the bon mot from my hypothetical fight choreographer, I'm totally willing to watch, and rewatch, a demonstrably well-made movie I may not happen to like for the sake of coming across a gem like that.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Coming Soon
Snakes on a Plane
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.
"Get these mothafuckin' snakes offa this mothafuckin' building!"
This is the first billboard ad I've seen for Snakes on a Plane, and it's conveniently located in the 'hood, just off the Western brown line stop. This makes me so happy.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
I Can't Believe You Care
Oh, fuck me in the ear and call me Sally: the Guillemots performing "Made Up Love Song #43" on Top of the Pops (via Stylus). Just an unbelievably great performance. Their new full-length Through the Windowpane is out now in the UK and will be released in the US on July 20.
Dear Brown Line: what is the deal with the morning delays? Seriously. I left early today and was still only just barely on time. Get yr act together, bitches.
Pitchfork reviews Victory for the Comic Muse in its entirety today. It's a decent write-up; I can't really complain.
RIP, Syd Barrett.
Dear Brown Line: what is the deal with the morning delays? Seriously. I left early today and was still only just barely on time. Get yr act together, bitches.
Pitchfork reviews Victory for the Comic Muse in its entirety today. It's a decent write-up; I can't really complain.
RIP, Syd Barrett.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Kottke, Gondry, Grizzly, Comedy
Jason Kottke helps spread the word that the trailer for the new Michel Gondry film The Science of Sleep is bopping around online now. Too much hype, too much anticipation, and too much familiarity with a director's previous work can be a dangerous thing (and I am nothing if not if not overly familiar with Eternal Sunshine), but damn if I'm not already guessing that it's going to end up on my top ten movie list at the end of the year. According to the IMDB, we're looking at a late September release date. Get excited.
Via Stereogum, check out La Blogotheque's videos of the Grizzly Bear boys singing two of their songs in Paris on the street and in the bathroom. The band is new to me, but I really like the sound of what they've got going on here. Bonus points for their apparently close musical friendship with Owen Pallett, who remixed their song "Don't Ask" for last year's rerelease of debut full-length Horn of Plenty and arranged some strings for their upcoming album Yellow House.
Pitchfork gives an almost-perfect 4.5 star score to The Divine Comedy's "A Lady of a Certain Age" (off recently released ninth album Victory for the Comic Muse) in one of the worst descriptive write-ups of a song I've ever read on the site. The Scott Walker comparisions are apt (even though, ahem, "Mathilde" is technically a Jacques Brel composition), but the writer ends up with a mouthful of mush as he (perhaps?) tries to reflect the richness of Hannon's best work by turning his prose-hose on full gush and then manages to flatten the poignancy of the thrice repeated "no, you couldn't be" line by overexplaining it. I know I probably sound like a jet black pot criticizing the Fork's kettle over here, as my own piled on superlatives have occasionally been known to crumble under the weight of their own floridity when I get excited about something, but I just want the music bloggers to do right by Neil, especially now that he seems to be getting more attention than ever on this side of the pond. Whatevs. At least it was the last track they reviewed at the end of the day on Friday, so Neil's pensive, black and white visage has been left up on the front page of the site all weekend (right underneath Sufjan!), which hopefully has led the indie kids over to The Hype Machine or elbo.ws looking for some downloady goodness. I hope they like what they find.
Apropos of the new DC album, I finally had a chance to listen to it in its entirety a few times over the course of this past week, and I'm absolutely tickled with it so far. It feels the closest of any of his recent work to merging the epic sweep of the big orchestra albums like Fin de Siecle and A Short Album About Love with the fanciful eccentricity of early classics Liberation and Promenade. "The Light of Day" is a sappy, adult-contemporary snoozer and album-closer "Snowball in Negative" succumbs to the dreaded musician-singing-about-the-process-of-
recording-the-song-you're-listening-to faux pas with the line "smoking my six-hundredth last cigarette out of the studio skylight," but those are relatively minor quibbles. Neil's growing into the lusciousness of his voice with sure, steady grace, the wit is as sharp and subtle as ever (the "oh, did I tell you I love you?" in "To Die a Virgin" never fails to kill me), and he's grown bolder with the funkiness of his grooves (again, "To Die a Virgin" stands out with that leisure-suit lecherous bass, and the oh-oh-oh bongo/bell interludes in "Diva Lady" just make me grin). Old fans will also love the reemergence of familiar DC tropes like the horse's gallop rhythm in his cover of the Associates' "Party Fears Two" (on the special edition DVD that came with the version of the album I purchased, Neil sheepishly suggests that that rhythmic pattern should be carved on his gravestone) and the overlapping voices playing cat and mouse as they narrate and sing the same lines in personal favorite "Count Grassi's Passage Over Piedmont." I love that Neil still has the ability to make records under the Divine Comedy moniker and that they're still artistically sophisticated endeavors. I could get quite sappy now about how much this band and its body of work means to me, but if that's not already abundantly clear, anything else I might attempt to say at this point would probably sound disingenous.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Final Fantasy at the Lakeshore Theater
A regular diet of mid-tempo, mid-range, guitar-based indie rock can only sustain a person for so long until she starts to feel glutted with whimsy and melancholy, so I think I've been somewhat intentionally trying to balance myself out with a little more active hip-hop consumption recently. Bass feels good. In-your-face rhythmic intensity feels good. However, as the old adage goes, you can take the indie rock out of the girl's iPod, but you can't take the indie rock out of the girl, which is how I found myself irresistibly drawn to the Lakeshore Theater on Friday night to take in Final Fantasy's last show in the U.S. before returning home to his native Canada. I've been keeping a cautious eye on young Mr. Pallett, mostly thanks to the thoughtful rantings at Zoilus and Said the Gramophone and gushing show reviews like the ones excerpted at Brooklyn Vegan (and, of course, also thanks to that Bloc Party cover I keep going on about), and I knew I'd kick myself if I didn't catch him while he was in town. Owen--who, violin and bow in hand, surrounded like Gulliver by an army of Lilliputian looping pedals, started his set with the droll pronouncement "thanks for coming to the Final Fantasy rock 'n' roll show. I am Final"--certainly didn't disappoint, but his performance was almost more satisfying thanks to the way the night's three acts operated as counterpoints to each other and the way the venue itself contributed to the overall pacing and atmosphere.
I love Chicago, and I love visiting venues in the city I've never been to before. From what I gather, the Lakeshore Theater usually hosts live theater of the Defending the Caveman variety, but it seems that the Empty Bottle has started scheduling acts there, too. (Em-effing Jello Biafra in the hizzouse today.) Kittens, it's amazing what actually sitting down in an actual theater can do for your interaction with and appreciation of a show. Maybe it was also because I'd just read the interview with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) in the June/July Believer earlier that morning, but I felt like I was more sensitive to the music as music and was listening more actively to it than I have at a show in longer than I'd realized. Chalk it up to feeling feeling lovingly enveloped by the decent sound system or not needing to bob and weave to see the performers around the slopes of other people's shoulders or not having to will my ears not to be distracted by the banal, beer-fueled, self-important scenesters' conversations that are usually a consequence of attending buzzworthy shows or whatever, but it was a refreshing change of pace and perfect for the kind of music we were there to hear.
Alex Lukashevsky was billed as Final Fantasy's touring partner and opener, but before he came on, we were treated to unbilled local boys Baby and Hide. (The few times they announced their name from stage, I kept thinking they were saying "Baby in Hide," which I didn't understand and thought was weird and kind of stupid, but when I got home later that night and tried to Google them, I realized it was in fact "Baby and Hide," which immediately made me think, "oh my God, what a fucking great name!") They came off like Yo La Tengo's dorky younger brothers, these three terribly dressed, pasty looking white dudes with their guitars and keyboard and drum set containing nothing more than two toms and a sizzle cymbal, and at first I couldn't tell if they were truly awful or if they just might be diamonds in the rough. The group's mastermind Jeremy Keller especially seemed like the painfully shy, crippingly socially awkward kid who lived down the dorm hall from you during your freshman year in college, that kid who never seemed to worry too much about his neuroscience or astrophysics classes, that kid who you discovered much later spent most of his time that year secretly building robots that could compose their own symphonies, that kid who you discovered even later than that had been dating an unstoppably hot biochem/performance studies double major that whole time because she recognized his true inner beauty and unlimited potential. Anyway, all this sort of made me not want to look at them while they were playing. I fought myself for being shallow and judgmental for a while, but eventually just gave up and sat through about the last third of their songs with my eyes closed. Which is when I was finally able to give in to what they were trying to accomplish with dynamics and noise and subtle sonic shifts. They were teasing some really gorgeous stuff out of droney keyboard bits and minimal yet apocalyptic drumming and earnest, high-pitched, slightly nasal vocals like the unholy spawn of Neil Young and Ben Gibbard. I ended up being really impressed. Their recent full-length Normal People is available to download for free at their website, and, though the MP3s might not do to you what seeing them live live did to me, it's deffo worth checking out. (Try either "Black Delicatessen" or "In Sails.")
Alex Lukashevsky is one of those old-soul acoustic guitar players with a whisky stained oak barrel of a voice and conversational, rather than confessional, lyrics. (Some of my favorite lines--such as "gonna get me a girlfriend and do whatever she says" and "even if she's an alcoholic, an impossible genius like Jackson Pollock"--come from "Nun or a Bawd," which can be found on his band Deep Dark United's album Ancient and can be downloaded here.) Though not as ostentatiously exuberant as Jonathan Richman, there was something in his approach that reminded me of everyone's favorite Modern Lover, a similar kind of gentle, highly literate playfulness and the beautiful, quietly powerful stage presence of a performer who's completely comfortable in his own skin. The way his music and persona seamlessly supported and fed into each other provided the perfect bridge between the avert-your-eyes quality of Baby and Hide and Final Fantasy's aesthetic magnetism.
And, oh yes, aesthetic magnetism is the term for what Owen Pallett has going on in spades. With that beautiful profile of his--which should be chiseled out of marble or etched on a vase in a museum somewhere--a voice almost too pure for mass consumption, musical chops that go on for miles, and an intimacy with his instrument that I think I've only ever seen between Ben Folds and his piano, it was all I could do to give myself permission to even blink while he was on stage, lest I miss an ounce of the magic he was conjuring out of thin air. But even for all of that, it was his proficiency with the looping pedals that put the performance over the top. He cocked up the loops in one song toward the middle of the set ("I don't usually mess up," he apologized. "It sounds like boasting, but...but, it feels great!"; the sarcasm could have flattened the skyline), but his virtuosity with the technology really gave us way more than our money's worth. I'm completely won over. (Buy He Poos Clouds or explore some choice MP3s here.)
(Also, for those of you who aren't busy enterting my name and URL into Technorati every few days, you may have missed my shout-out on Green Pea-ness last week. Thx, James.)
I love Chicago, and I love visiting venues in the city I've never been to before. From what I gather, the Lakeshore Theater usually hosts live theater of the Defending the Caveman variety, but it seems that the Empty Bottle has started scheduling acts there, too. (Em-effing Jello Biafra in the hizzouse today.) Kittens, it's amazing what actually sitting down in an actual theater can do for your interaction with and appreciation of a show. Maybe it was also because I'd just read the interview with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) in the June/July Believer earlier that morning, but I felt like I was more sensitive to the music as music and was listening more actively to it than I have at a show in longer than I'd realized. Chalk it up to feeling feeling lovingly enveloped by the decent sound system or not needing to bob and weave to see the performers around the slopes of other people's shoulders or not having to will my ears not to be distracted by the banal, beer-fueled, self-important scenesters' conversations that are usually a consequence of attending buzzworthy shows or whatever, but it was a refreshing change of pace and perfect for the kind of music we were there to hear.
Alex Lukashevsky was billed as Final Fantasy's touring partner and opener, but before he came on, we were treated to unbilled local boys Baby and Hide. (The few times they announced their name from stage, I kept thinking they were saying "Baby in Hide," which I didn't understand and thought was weird and kind of stupid, but when I got home later that night and tried to Google them, I realized it was in fact "Baby and Hide," which immediately made me think, "oh my God, what a fucking great name!") They came off like Yo La Tengo's dorky younger brothers, these three terribly dressed, pasty looking white dudes with their guitars and keyboard and drum set containing nothing more than two toms and a sizzle cymbal, and at first I couldn't tell if they were truly awful or if they just might be diamonds in the rough. The group's mastermind Jeremy Keller especially seemed like the painfully shy, crippingly socially awkward kid who lived down the dorm hall from you during your freshman year in college, that kid who never seemed to worry too much about his neuroscience or astrophysics classes, that kid who you discovered much later spent most of his time that year secretly building robots that could compose their own symphonies, that kid who you discovered even later than that had been dating an unstoppably hot biochem/performance studies double major that whole time because she recognized his true inner beauty and unlimited potential. Anyway, all this sort of made me not want to look at them while they were playing. I fought myself for being shallow and judgmental for a while, but eventually just gave up and sat through about the last third of their songs with my eyes closed. Which is when I was finally able to give in to what they were trying to accomplish with dynamics and noise and subtle sonic shifts. They were teasing some really gorgeous stuff out of droney keyboard bits and minimal yet apocalyptic drumming and earnest, high-pitched, slightly nasal vocals like the unholy spawn of Neil Young and Ben Gibbard. I ended up being really impressed. Their recent full-length Normal People is available to download for free at their website, and, though the MP3s might not do to you what seeing them live live did to me, it's deffo worth checking out. (Try either "Black Delicatessen" or "In Sails.")
Alex Lukashevsky is one of those old-soul acoustic guitar players with a whisky stained oak barrel of a voice and conversational, rather than confessional, lyrics. (Some of my favorite lines--such as "gonna get me a girlfriend and do whatever she says" and "even if she's an alcoholic, an impossible genius like Jackson Pollock"--come from "Nun or a Bawd," which can be found on his band Deep Dark United's album Ancient and can be downloaded here.) Though not as ostentatiously exuberant as Jonathan Richman, there was something in his approach that reminded me of everyone's favorite Modern Lover, a similar kind of gentle, highly literate playfulness and the beautiful, quietly powerful stage presence of a performer who's completely comfortable in his own skin. The way his music and persona seamlessly supported and fed into each other provided the perfect bridge between the avert-your-eyes quality of Baby and Hide and Final Fantasy's aesthetic magnetism.
And, oh yes, aesthetic magnetism is the term for what Owen Pallett has going on in spades. With that beautiful profile of his--which should be chiseled out of marble or etched on a vase in a museum somewhere--a voice almost too pure for mass consumption, musical chops that go on for miles, and an intimacy with his instrument that I think I've only ever seen between Ben Folds and his piano, it was all I could do to give myself permission to even blink while he was on stage, lest I miss an ounce of the magic he was conjuring out of thin air. But even for all of that, it was his proficiency with the looping pedals that put the performance over the top. He cocked up the loops in one song toward the middle of the set ("I don't usually mess up," he apologized. "It sounds like boasting, but...but, it feels great!"; the sarcasm could have flattened the skyline), but his virtuosity with the technology really gave us way more than our money's worth. I'm completely won over. (Buy He Poos Clouds or explore some choice MP3s here.)
(Also, for those of you who aren't busy enterting my name and URL into Technorati every few days, you may have missed my shout-out on Green Pea-ness last week. Thx, James.)
Pitchfork Music Festival 2006
It came and it went, kittens, and now we're left to contend with the sunburn, dehydration, and exhaustion that the Pitchfork Music Festival has left us with--not to mention the digital pictures, posters from Flatstock, calluses on our thumbs from refreshing our favorite music blogs this morning to see when and how they'll weigh in on the weekend, and a hankering to dust off our copies of Alligator, Destroyer's Rubies, and The Tyranny of Distance.
Sure, this fest was more hot, more crowded, and had more stuff to be taken in than Intonation last month, but the sheer scale of it all pretty much forced me to focus my attention on the acts that I was really and truly psyched in advance to see. You just can't fake that shit in 90+ degree heat.
We arrived on Saturday to the stompy, circusy sounds of Man Man. I had hoped to catch some of their set based on Pitchfork's insanely glowing concert review from last week, but from many accounts, their live show is better served by a more intimate club setting than an outdoor fest anyway.
Band of Horses was up next, and after three different people have made a specific point to tell me that I'd really dig them, I had no choice but to catch up with the end portion of their set, after bearings (and snackables and beer) were gotten.
Bed Bridwell's vocals made more sense to me live than they ever have on the few MP3s (incl. "The Funeral") I've downloaded, and the band's stonerish good nature was just as appealing as their meaty guitar sound. I'm looking forward to checking out the album.
I've been surprised by the handful of negative remarks about the Mountain Goats' set that I've read on the interweb, as I've recently landed like an anorexic Ukrainian gymnast firmly and triumphantly on the John-Darnielle-can-do-no-wrong side of the mat.
I can understand how some might have thought his banter went on a little long for an outdoor show, but dude is so witty, what with his self-flagellation about the stupidity of writing up a set list that included a brand new song in the second slot and rants about enduring a '70s Californian upbringing that brought endless rounds of singalongs with fuckin' guys in the fuckin' park with fuckin' acoustic guitars and his jokey fake-out that we were all going to join together to sing "Imagine" (we sang "No Children" and "Terror Song" instead), I don't know how anyone could not have been won over, even if his music wasn't someone's usual cup of tea.
Destroyer was the band I was most excited to see on day one. (Also, Dan Bejar is the indie rock musician I would most like to hug. I'm pretty sure this is not the normal reaction elicited by such an intensely cerebral songwriter, but, gah, brutha just seems to me like he could use a friendly squeeze around the ol' midsection.)
A propos of Zoilus's quoted observation that Bejar is the "hardest working music critic today," even the bloody stage banter during his set was meta. I was warning my companions not to expect pretty much any talking at all, based on his comment in this June interview in Pitchfork that "I don't banter with the audience, cause I don't have anything to say to them," but when he eventually approached the microphone, with air-quotes nearly visible around his head, and asked "is this thing on?" I felt like I was watching some Andy Kaufman-level performance art. He later went on to introduce a new song by proclaiming, then trailing off, "this song is about...ahhhh...", summarized another with "one quarter of that song was a protest song" (one of his band members--I couldn't see which--waited a beat before sallying, "protesting what? The other three-quarters of the song?"), and he bid farewell to the crowd before finishing up with "Looters' Follies" by mock-apologizing, "I know we've taken up a shitload of time with witty stage banter." But because he wasn't sneering behind any of those bons mots, the intellectual pleasures yielded by this acknowledgment that he was self-consciously Performing the Act of Playing an Outdoor Summer Concert merged with and buoyed the sumptuousness of his melodies and arrangements. (Though, I do have to wonder how it feels to be a grown man in his band belting out an alternating series of "la-di-das" and falsetto "wah-wah-wahs." That shit is funny, and intentionally so.) They went heavy on material from Destroyer's Rubies, which suited me just fine, but the few he played from earlier albums (the set list on Fluxblog cites "Crystal Country," "Modern Painters," and "It's Gonna Take an Airplane") only served to confirm that I need to start delving into his back catalog.
Because Ted Leo is so consistently solid, and because I'd already seen him play live twice before, I made the foolish, foolish mistake of stepping away from the stage about halfway through his set.
Yes, which means I heard "Biomusicology" from inside a porta-potty and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" with a palmful of the interesting paste created when baseball diamond dust and hand sanitizer meet. Damn, damn, damn.
There has been so much hating on the Walkmen recently that seems so excessive and so, well, wrong, that I thought surely their tight set here would serve to bring some back into the fold. Nope.
I honestly don't get it. They seem a little less manic than they used to, but isn't that a good thing? A sign of becoming more assured, more mature musicians? Which is not to say that their songs lacked immediacy or energy or whatever. Matt Barrick was missing in action due to the impending arrival of his firstborn child (congrats!), but the secret of their success certainly can't be tied that directly to his propulsive drumming. I was nothing but impressed with what I heard on Saturday. Paul Maroon's confident guitar work especially stood out for me.
I'm a newcomer to the Silver Jews' output and only know Tanglewood Numbers, but I was certainly excited to see the notoriously reclusive David Berman live.
He was marvelously smart and droll, bidding us to mind our manners as the crowd started getting squirrely during emcee Tim Tuten's overly long intro, and confessing that he doesn't really like Brian Wilson at all. But, he also ended up, probably unintentionally, depressing the hell out of us with some of the song selections (closing with "There Is a Place"? Yowch), with his story about playing a gig in Tel Aviv a few days before things got really scary there, and, well, just with the weight of what it means for him to be here playing for us at all. I was especially taken with Cassie's presence on stage there with him. She was an amazing sight to behold with her short dress, wild hair, and enormous bass guitar, and her musicianship certainly was not to be denied, but I can't imagine the emotional gymnastics she must have to go through to be able to make it through all those songs, standing right there next to him every night. A formidable woman, indeed. The rest of the band was ace; I couldn't help commenting later in the car on the way home that it's so great to see slightly older musicians playing so well, with such ease in their stage presence.
I had every intention of making it back down to the park to see, if not Tapes 'n Tapes, then at least Danielson to kick off day two, but I was so unexpectedly wrecked the next morning that it was all I could do to arrive about halfway through Jens Lekman's set.
We heard him playing "Black Cab" as we walked over from the El, which felt like such a good omen for the rest of the day. The crowd was loving him (and, assuredly, his foxy all-girl horn section) and you could hear him sending the love right back out with his strong, smooth vocals. I'll be interested to see what he ends up doing with his next full-length.
The National. Holy fuck. That is what I came to this festival for. Without a doubt my favorite act of the whole weekend.
I was distraught over missing them at the Double Door earlier this year but consoled myself with knowing I'd see them this weekend. But, as my summertime music selections have taken a turn for the breezy and sun-soaked, I'd forgotten how much the brooding, wintry songs from Alligator mean to me until I started hearing them pour out of the speakers: "Abel," "Lit Up," "Looking for Astronauts," "Mr. November," and, holy Christ, "All the Wine." This was the only band that brought me near to tears all weekend. And not just misty eyelash blinky tears either; I had to choke back a few full-throated sobs heating up the inside of my face. Absolutely beautiful stuff. Matt Berninger looks variously like a Southern Californian movie star, an Austrian Olympic athlete, and a French thug, and sings like he's dealing with some genuine mental illness (in, y'know, the best and sexiest way possible). I saw him later walking around the Flatstock tent but was way, way, way too nervous to even risk talking to him. I cannot overstate how much I loved their set and can't wait to see them live again.
I don't know how I scraped myself together afterward, but LK and I headed over to the Biz 3 tent, with a few hundred of our closest friends, to catch the waning minutes of CSS's set. It's worth exploring the cansei de ser sexy tag at Flickr or heading over to Gorilla vs. Bear to see some pictures because they were every bit as wild and fun as they're supposed to be. We were standing outside the tent, behind the stage, on the righthand side, so our view wasn't the greatest (and, personally, I had to rely on LK to narrate most of what was happening for me anyway, as I really couldn't see much over the heads of the assembled crowd), but we could definitely feel the love. It was also nice to hear the songs fleshed out with the full band and a little less in-your-face with the slickly produced bleepy-bloopiness.
My curiosity about Devendra Banhart has only increased since last fall, especially after downloading "Hey Mama Wolf" and "Quedate Luna" from Cripple Crow.
I can hardly believe it myself, but I think after taking in his set this weekend, I've pretty much been won over. He does what he does with such sincerity, and he and his band carry it off with some impressive musicianship that I wouldn't have expected from my impression of the lo-fi, we're-recording-inside-a-rusted-meat-locker wankiness of his earlier albums. As is his custom of late, he brought a kid up on stage to play a song near the end of the set, and I was just so touched by the selflessness of it all. He (Devendra) described being able to do that as an honor and one of the best things that comes out of his life as a touring musician, and I didn't doubt it for a moment. There was such an incredible beauty in the way he embraced the kid after he was done playing and held on to him like they were brothers reuniting after a long separation. Save yr e-mails, I know, I know: I'm such a hippie.
I listened to Yo La Tengo from across the lawn, as I wanted to stay put to be sure to get a good spot along the barricade for Spoon. From what little I know of YLT's stuff, they sounded pretty solid.
Spoon's roadies started trickling out onto the stage while YLT was wailing away, tuning and plugging stuff in, and eventually were joined by Jim Eno and the boys and later Britt himself. We cheered when Britt walked out, and he held a finger to his lips, politely shushing us so we wouldn't disturb the other show in progress. He assessed the crowd with a pleased look on his face, and I'm about 85% sure that he smiled at me. I was standing against the railing, facing the stage and beaming, not like a freak, but just like a perfectly content person who was looking forward to seeing one of her favorite bands for the first time. I'd like to think that that was his small way of greeting and acknowledging my happiness.
There was, perhaps predictably, a lot of material from Gimme Fiction, which, hey, I'm not going to complain about, and they also got some great stuff from Kill the Moonlight in there, including "Someone Something," "Stay Don't Go" (no beatboxing, unforch), and--wowza!--"Paper Tiger." (I love it when musicians subtly make fun of their own songs by slipping funny different lyrics in there, and Britt got away with a good one here by singing "I will no longer do the devil's dishes.") They closed with "My Mathematical Mind," and Britt absolutely played the fucking shit out of his guitar. Down on the knees, feedback shrieking into the night air, the whole bit. It was a rousing end to a set that, while solid and satisfying, didn't exactly reach transcendent heights for me. And, music aside, I salute Britt's decision to go with green pants. Come on, guys: green pants!! I don't know why I was so taken with them, but I just couldn't stop thinking, "holy shit, he's wearing green pants." And, even better, he managed to pull them off without seeming self-consciously hip or even, horror of horrors, overtly metrosexual. I mean, I suppose this shouldn't be surprising coming from a guy who wrote a song called "The Fitted Shirt," but I gotta give credit where credit is due. Green pants, man. Green pants.
I didn't have the energy left in me to push toward the front of the crowd to get a good position (or, ahem, good pictures) for Os Mutantes, so I took advantage of the pleasures that can be had from standing in the middle of a field, listening to some supremely groovy music, not elbow-to-elbow (or, in my case, elbow-to-hipbone) with a bunch of other sweaty, exhausted concertgoers: exchanged my last beer ticket for a heavenly cup of 312, chatted with my pals, danced all my kinks out, and watched people unself-consciously dancing their own kinks out as well. The bears, the seemingly out of place shirtless frat boys, the lovey-dovey couple out with their awkward single friend, the college-age kid who looked like he's probably a computer science major doing a modified poopy-pants dance--it was a joy to see them all feeling the music and having fun. The band was bright, happy, and overflowing with goodwill. They sent us out into the night in style.
Big love to LK for tolerating and even indulging my fanaticism, KP for the ride, and DS, JZ, and Nora Rocket for the laughs and the good company.
Sure, this fest was more hot, more crowded, and had more stuff to be taken in than Intonation last month, but the sheer scale of it all pretty much forced me to focus my attention on the acts that I was really and truly psyched in advance to see. You just can't fake that shit in 90+ degree heat.
We arrived on Saturday to the stompy, circusy sounds of Man Man. I had hoped to catch some of their set based on Pitchfork's insanely glowing concert review from last week, but from many accounts, their live show is better served by a more intimate club setting than an outdoor fest anyway.
Band of Horses was up next, and after three different people have made a specific point to tell me that I'd really dig them, I had no choice but to catch up with the end portion of their set, after bearings (and snackables and beer) were gotten.
Bed Bridwell's vocals made more sense to me live than they ever have on the few MP3s (incl. "The Funeral") I've downloaded, and the band's stonerish good nature was just as appealing as their meaty guitar sound. I'm looking forward to checking out the album.
I've been surprised by the handful of negative remarks about the Mountain Goats' set that I've read on the interweb, as I've recently landed like an anorexic Ukrainian gymnast firmly and triumphantly on the John-Darnielle-can-do-no-wrong side of the mat.
I can understand how some might have thought his banter went on a little long for an outdoor show, but dude is so witty, what with his self-flagellation about the stupidity of writing up a set list that included a brand new song in the second slot and rants about enduring a '70s Californian upbringing that brought endless rounds of singalongs with fuckin' guys in the fuckin' park with fuckin' acoustic guitars and his jokey fake-out that we were all going to join together to sing "Imagine" (we sang "No Children" and "Terror Song" instead), I don't know how anyone could not have been won over, even if his music wasn't someone's usual cup of tea.
Destroyer was the band I was most excited to see on day one. (Also, Dan Bejar is the indie rock musician I would most like to hug. I'm pretty sure this is not the normal reaction elicited by such an intensely cerebral songwriter, but, gah, brutha just seems to me like he could use a friendly squeeze around the ol' midsection.)
A propos of Zoilus's quoted observation that Bejar is the "hardest working music critic today," even the bloody stage banter during his set was meta. I was warning my companions not to expect pretty much any talking at all, based on his comment in this June interview in Pitchfork that "I don't banter with the audience, cause I don't have anything to say to them," but when he eventually approached the microphone, with air-quotes nearly visible around his head, and asked "is this thing on?" I felt like I was watching some Andy Kaufman-level performance art. He later went on to introduce a new song by proclaiming, then trailing off, "this song is about...ahhhh...", summarized another with "one quarter of that song was a protest song" (one of his band members--I couldn't see which--waited a beat before sallying, "protesting what? The other three-quarters of the song?"), and he bid farewell to the crowd before finishing up with "Looters' Follies" by mock-apologizing, "I know we've taken up a shitload of time with witty stage banter." But because he wasn't sneering behind any of those bons mots, the intellectual pleasures yielded by this acknowledgment that he was self-consciously Performing the Act of Playing an Outdoor Summer Concert merged with and buoyed the sumptuousness of his melodies and arrangements. (Though, I do have to wonder how it feels to be a grown man in his band belting out an alternating series of "la-di-das" and falsetto "wah-wah-wahs." That shit is funny, and intentionally so.) They went heavy on material from Destroyer's Rubies, which suited me just fine, but the few he played from earlier albums (the set list on Fluxblog cites "Crystal Country," "Modern Painters," and "It's Gonna Take an Airplane") only served to confirm that I need to start delving into his back catalog.
Because Ted Leo is so consistently solid, and because I'd already seen him play live twice before, I made the foolish, foolish mistake of stepping away from the stage about halfway through his set.
Yes, which means I heard "Biomusicology" from inside a porta-potty and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" with a palmful of the interesting paste created when baseball diamond dust and hand sanitizer meet. Damn, damn, damn.
There has been so much hating on the Walkmen recently that seems so excessive and so, well, wrong, that I thought surely their tight set here would serve to bring some back into the fold. Nope.
I honestly don't get it. They seem a little less manic than they used to, but isn't that a good thing? A sign of becoming more assured, more mature musicians? Which is not to say that their songs lacked immediacy or energy or whatever. Matt Barrick was missing in action due to the impending arrival of his firstborn child (congrats!), but the secret of their success certainly can't be tied that directly to his propulsive drumming. I was nothing but impressed with what I heard on Saturday. Paul Maroon's confident guitar work especially stood out for me.
I'm a newcomer to the Silver Jews' output and only know Tanglewood Numbers, but I was certainly excited to see the notoriously reclusive David Berman live.
He was marvelously smart and droll, bidding us to mind our manners as the crowd started getting squirrely during emcee Tim Tuten's overly long intro, and confessing that he doesn't really like Brian Wilson at all. But, he also ended up, probably unintentionally, depressing the hell out of us with some of the song selections (closing with "There Is a Place"? Yowch), with his story about playing a gig in Tel Aviv a few days before things got really scary there, and, well, just with the weight of what it means for him to be here playing for us at all. I was especially taken with Cassie's presence on stage there with him. She was an amazing sight to behold with her short dress, wild hair, and enormous bass guitar, and her musicianship certainly was not to be denied, but I can't imagine the emotional gymnastics she must have to go through to be able to make it through all those songs, standing right there next to him every night. A formidable woman, indeed. The rest of the band was ace; I couldn't help commenting later in the car on the way home that it's so great to see slightly older musicians playing so well, with such ease in their stage presence.
I had every intention of making it back down to the park to see, if not Tapes 'n Tapes, then at least Danielson to kick off day two, but I was so unexpectedly wrecked the next morning that it was all I could do to arrive about halfway through Jens Lekman's set.
We heard him playing "Black Cab" as we walked over from the El, which felt like such a good omen for the rest of the day. The crowd was loving him (and, assuredly, his foxy all-girl horn section) and you could hear him sending the love right back out with his strong, smooth vocals. I'll be interested to see what he ends up doing with his next full-length.
The National. Holy fuck. That is what I came to this festival for. Without a doubt my favorite act of the whole weekend.
I was distraught over missing them at the Double Door earlier this year but consoled myself with knowing I'd see them this weekend. But, as my summertime music selections have taken a turn for the breezy and sun-soaked, I'd forgotten how much the brooding, wintry songs from Alligator mean to me until I started hearing them pour out of the speakers: "Abel," "Lit Up," "Looking for Astronauts," "Mr. November," and, holy Christ, "All the Wine." This was the only band that brought me near to tears all weekend. And not just misty eyelash blinky tears either; I had to choke back a few full-throated sobs heating up the inside of my face. Absolutely beautiful stuff. Matt Berninger looks variously like a Southern Californian movie star, an Austrian Olympic athlete, and a French thug, and sings like he's dealing with some genuine mental illness (in, y'know, the best and sexiest way possible). I saw him later walking around the Flatstock tent but was way, way, way too nervous to even risk talking to him. I cannot overstate how much I loved their set and can't wait to see them live again.
I don't know how I scraped myself together afterward, but LK and I headed over to the Biz 3 tent, with a few hundred of our closest friends, to catch the waning minutes of CSS's set. It's worth exploring the cansei de ser sexy tag at Flickr or heading over to Gorilla vs. Bear to see some pictures because they were every bit as wild and fun as they're supposed to be. We were standing outside the tent, behind the stage, on the righthand side, so our view wasn't the greatest (and, personally, I had to rely on LK to narrate most of what was happening for me anyway, as I really couldn't see much over the heads of the assembled crowd), but we could definitely feel the love. It was also nice to hear the songs fleshed out with the full band and a little less in-your-face with the slickly produced bleepy-bloopiness.
My curiosity about Devendra Banhart has only increased since last fall, especially after downloading "Hey Mama Wolf" and "Quedate Luna" from Cripple Crow.
I can hardly believe it myself, but I think after taking in his set this weekend, I've pretty much been won over. He does what he does with such sincerity, and he and his band carry it off with some impressive musicianship that I wouldn't have expected from my impression of the lo-fi, we're-recording-inside-a-rusted-meat-locker wankiness of his earlier albums. As is his custom of late, he brought a kid up on stage to play a song near the end of the set, and I was just so touched by the selflessness of it all. He (Devendra) described being able to do that as an honor and one of the best things that comes out of his life as a touring musician, and I didn't doubt it for a moment. There was such an incredible beauty in the way he embraced the kid after he was done playing and held on to him like they were brothers reuniting after a long separation. Save yr e-mails, I know, I know: I'm such a hippie.
I listened to Yo La Tengo from across the lawn, as I wanted to stay put to be sure to get a good spot along the barricade for Spoon. From what little I know of YLT's stuff, they sounded pretty solid.
Spoon's roadies started trickling out onto the stage while YLT was wailing away, tuning and plugging stuff in, and eventually were joined by Jim Eno and the boys and later Britt himself. We cheered when Britt walked out, and he held a finger to his lips, politely shushing us so we wouldn't disturb the other show in progress. He assessed the crowd with a pleased look on his face, and I'm about 85% sure that he smiled at me. I was standing against the railing, facing the stage and beaming, not like a freak, but just like a perfectly content person who was looking forward to seeing one of her favorite bands for the first time. I'd like to think that that was his small way of greeting and acknowledging my happiness.
There was, perhaps predictably, a lot of material from Gimme Fiction, which, hey, I'm not going to complain about, and they also got some great stuff from Kill the Moonlight in there, including "Someone Something," "Stay Don't Go" (no beatboxing, unforch), and--wowza!--"Paper Tiger." (I love it when musicians subtly make fun of their own songs by slipping funny different lyrics in there, and Britt got away with a good one here by singing "I will no longer do the devil's dishes.") They closed with "My Mathematical Mind," and Britt absolutely played the fucking shit out of his guitar. Down on the knees, feedback shrieking into the night air, the whole bit. It was a rousing end to a set that, while solid and satisfying, didn't exactly reach transcendent heights for me. And, music aside, I salute Britt's decision to go with green pants. Come on, guys: green pants!! I don't know why I was so taken with them, but I just couldn't stop thinking, "holy shit, he's wearing green pants." And, even better, he managed to pull them off without seeming self-consciously hip or even, horror of horrors, overtly metrosexual. I mean, I suppose this shouldn't be surprising coming from a guy who wrote a song called "The Fitted Shirt," but I gotta give credit where credit is due. Green pants, man. Green pants.
I didn't have the energy left in me to push toward the front of the crowd to get a good position (or, ahem, good pictures) for Os Mutantes, so I took advantage of the pleasures that can be had from standing in the middle of a field, listening to some supremely groovy music, not elbow-to-elbow (or, in my case, elbow-to-hipbone) with a bunch of other sweaty, exhausted concertgoers: exchanged my last beer ticket for a heavenly cup of 312, chatted with my pals, danced all my kinks out, and watched people unself-consciously dancing their own kinks out as well. The bears, the seemingly out of place shirtless frat boys, the lovey-dovey couple out with their awkward single friend, the college-age kid who looked like he's probably a computer science major doing a modified poopy-pants dance--it was a joy to see them all feeling the music and having fun. The band was bright, happy, and overflowing with goodwill. They sent us out into the night in style.
Big love to LK for tolerating and even indulging my fanaticism, KP for the ride, and DS, JZ, and Nora Rocket for the laughs and the good company.
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