The Clientele (Live at the Abbey)

Pictures from the Clientele's show at the Abbey last night are now posted to my Flickr photostream.

It wasn't the best show I've ever been to, but enjoyable enough. The audience was really squirrely, and, apparently, the Clientele shot their wad the night before in Minneapolis, so the whole atmosphere felt kind of low-energy and listless. Or maybe that was just me. But the band still sounded pretty great, and it turns out that that woozy intimacy in Alasdair Maclean's voice isn't, in fact, a studio effect; he really does sing like that. Their new gelfling violin, keyboard, and misc. percussion player Mel Draisey is so dewily pretty and appropriately ethereal, I wish she could stand behind me in my cubicle at work and gently waggle a tambourine whenever I do something really kickass in Excel.

First openers and local kids Canasta won me over in spite of myself. They were kind of like that goofy uncle or older cousin who always managed to make you smile when you were a little kid, even when you were trying really, really hard to be pissed off about falling off your bike or not being allowed to eat another cookie or something. I was kind of whatevs about their songwriting and general indie cuddliness at first, but as their set started drawing to a close, they launched themselves headlong into a series of particularly rousing crescendos--the first peaked with all six members of the band belting out a simple yet enormously effective two-part harmony line and the second found them exuberantly shouting "no! no! no!" in perfect, percussive unison--that warmed my jaded little heart. Second openers Great Lakes could not have been more boring. They seemed like a really competent college town bar band, no more, no less. I think the most distinctive thing about them was probably their drummer, and not because he was playing anything particularly interesting, but because he played with a kind of precision that hinted at (perhaps?) some extensive musical training in his background. Sorry, guys. Better luck next time.

No Hardball Playing

No Hardball Playing
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

(Bitches.)

Puppet Bike!!!

Chicagoans, all your base are belong to Puppet Bike (don't forget to check out the blog, too [via]). I'm obsessed. This, in fact, may be a more potent mood-lifter than even the sublime genius that is Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey. Spread the love, kittens; I know we could all use a little bit extra today.

Aloha (Live at Schubas)

The Aloha show at Schubas on Sunday felt like a night full of misfits. Which is kind of perfect because Aloha has always struck me as sort of an oddball band, in the best way possible, and this apparently doesn't bother them in the least, as they continue to rock the fuck out, not giving a goddamn if people can't figure out if the band is about the marimba or the jazz fusion meets prog polyrhythms or Tony Cavallario's mild lisp or whatever.



So, so what if first act openers Rahim were plagued by feedback and other sound problems that always seem to haunt the venue? They were super-cute skinny boys in tight pants, and who's going to complain about that? Pas moi. And, does it ultimately matter if second openers The Eternals, with their slippity-slappity electro-funk grooves, assaultive keyboard screeches, and I'll-see-you-in-hell vocoder chorus effects, were the last thing I was prepared to stand through when I arrived in Aloha-mode? They had great energy, lead singer Damon Locks has immediately commanding stage presence, and I enjoyed their depth of commitment to their material.



And, even my seasonal old-lady disorder couldn't really get the best of me. I mean, oy vey already, you Sunday-night concertgoing kids, with the not being able to stand in one specific bit of floor space and the turning your back to the stage so you can scream along with the music to your group of friends and the endless reconsiderations with the waitress about whether you do or do not want another PBR. Because--you guys like Aloha? Wow. I just have to give up trying to second-guess a band's fan base. Just goes to show that if you're great musicians with great spirit and a willingness to flaunt what makes you unique instead of steamrollering over it, you too can win the affection of bitchy gays in black tank tops and loud, pretty drunk girls reeking of entitlement.



I've heard tell that Some Echoes is "the Alligator of 2006," and, whereas I would counter that Alligator is doing perfectly fine as the Alligator of 2006 (and possibly 2007), the point is well taken. Some Echoes isn't so much a grower or a slow-burner as it's a "never mind us, we'll just be patiently waiting over here for you to appreciate our awesomeness, and, no hard feelings if you find you don't fancy us after all"-er. It's quietly masterful without being overly mannered. It's one of those albums full of songs you can never remember specifically until some twisty lyric or delightful melody line breezes by and you go, "oh yeeeaah...! That song. I love that song!" I don't think I'd ever go out of my way to recommend this album to anyone, but that also means I can conceivably recommend it to everyone. It's not a grab-you-by-the-throat kind of thing; it's never going to get repeated obsessively on your iPod. (Well, except for maybe "Ice Storming." I've begun to realize that I would be perfectly capable of listening to that one on repeat for an hour or two.) But, rest assured, it will sneak up on you one day, after several months, and you will realize what you've got on your hands here, and the cumulative effect may very well leave you in tears.



Live, you have to take everything that makes them weird and unexpected sonically, and then add in the fact that you're looking at these sensitive, delicate-looking indie kids making all this noise, blowing the roof off the place. You've got this incredibly brilliant, creative drummer Cale Parks in a fucking teddy bear t-shirt, pounding the drums with the most unbelievably beautiful combination of passion and precision, and then also smiling beatifically when he sits down for a few minutes at the keyboard. Relatively new marimba player and multi-instrumentalist T.J. Lipple plays all those furious mallet lines without breaking a sweat. Bassist Matt Gengler mouths all the words to the largest, most anthemic songs, clearly still in love with what Cavallario is writing. And then Tony, wonderful and strange and as unselfish as frontmen get, caroms his way through these candied ginger melodies, vocal lines that burn and soothe simultaneously like scalded milk. These guys are improbable, to say the least. But, their musical mutations have fused together so elegantly, this hybrid beast has turned into something irreducible and capable of swallowing you whole. Politely, gently, but whole.

Right Back Up the Arsehole

"I pay tribute to John Peel. It is to John Peel that I pay tribute. The guy that kicked shit. And not only did he kick shit, but he kicked it right back up the arsehole, where it fucking belonged . . . and he made sure it fucking stayed there." —Harold Pinter

The Week's Movies in Review

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Serving up Southern fried homophobia to NASCAR fans and Will Ferrell acolytes to the tune of a $47 million opening weekend! America, I hang my head and shake my fist at you. That being said, however, I absolutely cannot get enough of Sacha Baron Cohen right now. Comedy seeps out of that man's pores. Despite the way his character was used as a grotesque prop to make the audience groan and shudder at the idea of two men kissing, the over-the-top, red-state-baiting ridiculousness of a Camus-reading, gay French Formula 1 champ driving a car sponsored by Perrier is enough to make me erupt in peals of laughter. Cohen somehow manages to nail, with every performance of his I've seen to date, no matter the character or situation, the perfect balance of broad slapstick and subtle, behavioral comedy. I've got the lurve.

Lady in the Water
I fancy myself one of Shyamalan's few remaining defenders, but he's gone too far for even me to follow with this one. Lady in the Water is a mess of self-serious self-awareness and is way more about the "subtext" than about the story it purports to be telling. That way lies death. And perhaps the plot, such as it is, was doomed from the start, as it shows a laughable sense of disconnect from the way that people actually live and behave. There's no truth in any of it, even emotional truth, which should be Shyamalan's stock-in-trade. People always rush to compare him to Spielberg, but this trafficking in stereotypes that are not just flat but also as ripe-smelling as unrefrigerated pork products is uncomfortably Woody Allenesque. Night is beginning to adopt Allen's head-in-the-ground egotism that squelches the life and creativity out of a movie under the guise of hewing to a singularity of vision. (I find this observation from Jonathan Rosenbaum's now-ancient review of Allen's Everyone Says I Love You continually instructive on matters of this nature: "[I]f you take a look at the remarkable elevator sequence in Jerry Lewis's The Errand Boy it's immediately apparent that Lewis can't enter an elevator without becoming stimulated, and the same thing obviously applies to Albert Brooks when he walks through a grocery store or mall and to Jacques Tati when he simply walks down the street. But Woody Allen walking down the street desperately needs a topic to blot out whatever he might see or hear, and his practice as a filmmaker repeatedly proves it.") The caricature of a book and film critic played by an ill-served Bob Balaban is easy to spot and sneer at from a mile away, but there's also me-love-you-long-time Korean student Young Soon (Ms. Cheung should have gone for the big paycheck, at least, and signed on to play ambiguously Japanese in The Last Samurai's Vagina instead of this dreck), the "guild" of young male smokers who seem roughly contemporaneous with Maynard G. Krebs, and--oh, it pains me to say this--the reclusive, compulsive news-watching character played by the normally peerless Bill Irwin, who is forced to deliver the line, "I wanted to believe! I wanted to feel like a child again!" Even Paul Giamatti, who is to me what Steve Buscemi was to many women in the late '90s (that is, dead fucking sexy in a non-obvious, non-ClooneyPitt way), didn't get touched by any of the magic that Shyamalan has always taken pains to lavish on his leading men. There's always the chance that I'll find new life or significance in the film after I have a chance to see it again, as happened with my revisiting of The Village last year, but unlike Giamatti's character, I'm not going to be able to hold my breath (while swimming! and prying open rusted-shut doors! under water!) for much more than, say, fifteen minutes.

Little Miss Sunshine
Quite possibly the movie of the summer. Do not miss this one. Pure delight from beginning to end. I can't rememeber the last time I laughed as hard and as genuinely in a movie theater.

Cold War Kids (Again)

Because I am a slave to the groove, I went drinking at Tuman's after work, happily chilled with some friends I haven't chilled with for a while, then took in the Cold War Kids show at the Abbey (they were opening for Mates of State and are in town to play Lollapalooza on Saturday). You know you read the internet too much when you leave after the opening act because they're all you wanted to see anyway. Please listen to their EPs. Up in Rags is prolly the best overall, but With Our Wallets Full is rangy and excellent and hints at great things to come on their first full-length. I shook bassist Matt Maust's hand at the merch table and told him they were amazing. They were.

Or Is It, "These Other Cats Is Just Pluto"?

I've been obsessed for a little while now with the Kut Masta Kurt remix of Diverse and Mos Def's "Wylin Out" available on the free, downloadable Chocolate Swim EP here. I love, love, love that line in the chorus that goes, "I'm Diverse / these other cats is just Whole Foods." I feel like it's the perfect way to kind of affectionately poke fun at the Adult Swim demographic of now-responsible early-thirtysomethings who own condos and hold down steady, interesting jobs and are politically liberal and like to buy organic food whenever possible but still jones for some funny, subversive cartoons at night. And, that would all be true except for the fact that, you guessed it, they're not actually rapping about Whole Foods. The line, rather, is "these other cats is just hopefuls." I only just realized this a few days ago and was so disappointed, and a little bit embarrassed, when it finally clicked, but, holy shit, what a fucking funny way to mishear the line, huh? Seriously, John Darnielle, will you just HAVE MY BABIES ALREADY??? This week on Salon he discusses (brilliantly, strangely, hilariously) television and boxing and how bright Sebastian Bach would be "if he could just stay focused." (OMG, does this betray a Gilmore Girls habit as well?) I couldn't even bring myself to read the rest of the contributions because I knew I'd just be disappointed that he didn't write them. There's also, of course, the new album, which, yes, is very, very sad, but, at first blush, nowhere near as emotionally impenetrable as all the "I'm still processing [it]" comments might lead one to believe. It's beautiful and cold and feels kind of perfectly breathless, like all the air has been crushed out of it, with a few trinkets and other bits of discarded, gilded dross left rattling around inside. I feared that his falsetto work would tip the whole boat into dirge overload, but it doesn't at all. I can't remember which blog I found it on originally, but here's a link to the music video for "Woke Up New," directed by Rian Johnson, the guy who did Brick. (Seriously, if his spine-tinglingly perfect choice to run "Sister Ray" over the closing credits is any indication, this guy knows good music.) Gorilla vs. Bear points us in the direction of the Cold War Kids' free Daytrotter session MP3s and the wonderfully juicy corresponding interview. The band sounds just as exhausted as the write-up claims they were after the drive back out to Iowa, but that battle fatigue brings something really beautiful out of "Hospital Beds" that I'd never quite heard in the song before. I don't know if I'm posting this for anyone other than myself at this point, but, if you have any interest in these cats at all, don't miss these links. Good Hodgkins links to a great interview with Chicago oddball Devin Davis. I laughed out loud at his perfect encapsulation of what it means for him to have reached a certain level of success as an indie musician: "People now introduce me to friends as 'Devin Davis' instead of 'Devin' which is kind of funny, but flattering." The best thing, in my mind, about the whole Pluto demotion thing is that people are talking about and thinking about space, about our solar system. As funny as I find stuff like Kottke's mnemonic contest and Colbert talking planetary smack, I'm firmly in support of the scientists trying to figure out just what the fuck a planet is. It seems to me the height of respectable, forward-thinking science that they aren't afraid to make these intense pronouncements that are forcing us to redefine what we had previously held as "true" about our little corner of the cosmos. I'm not discounting the fact that this decision was probably fraught with dissention and contention and debate and that the new "dwarf planet" classification might not satisfy all the voters from the International Astronomical Union, but still, if we can no longer expect our politicians to have the courage to say, "you know what, upon further evidence, I need to reconsider my position," we need to support and encourage astronomers, biologists, mathematicians, and the like when they're doing their damnedest to help us understand the amazing, confounding, continually unfolding nuances of our known universe.