Whoa, somebody let the big dogs out of the gate. Wow. I hadn't seen King Sparrow live for longer than I'd realized, and watching them grow as a band in real time has been thrilling. Where, as a young band, their show started out tight and precise then relaxed into a sense of casual mastery, now they've turned yet another corner into an explosive, physical ferocity. I don't know if it's just that they've been cooped up in the studio for the past little while and were ready to reconnect with the energy of a club crowd again or what, but last night at the Empty Bottle they seemed hungrier, and thus more energetic, than I've maybe ever seen them. Old faves from the Derailer EP were present and accounted for ("Forest" just keeps opening up with secret byways and melodic turns every time I hear it), but goosed by the addition of the new tunes they've been working up for their debut long-player, even these familiar songs seemed to vibrate with new intensity.
Eric is steadily pushing his own boundaries as a vocalist, much to the songs' benefit. A few perfectly calibrated, well-placed howls here and there provided a nice little pinch of danger to offset their immaculate chops as musicians. He and Sean (the band's secret weapon) also seemed to be interacting more on stage than I've ever seen them. Watching the way musicians watch each other while they're playing is always one of my favorite things about seeing a band in concert. Then, of course, John's drumming always seems somewhere on the verge of full-scale detonation, in the best way possible. Even though he's one of my favorite local drummers, I always forget how ferocious he can be, the way I forget what the exciting warm springtime feels like after a winter full of ice and snow.
I know I'm not going to convince anyone that already hasn't been convinced at this point that they need to pay attention to these guys. It just makes me stupidly happy to live in a city where I can take the bus a few miles south on a random Thursday night and hear some soul-explodingly good music for less than I would pay for a sushi dinner. Go find 'em on MySpace or Twitter or Facebook (or in my frustratingly blurry pics), and revel in the joy of good, local, live music.
Showing posts with label concert. Show all posts
Showing posts with label concert. Show all posts
Friday, April 02, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
W. E. Street Team Update
Kittens! Spring is springing here in Chicago and there's so much fun to be had in the next few weeks. Get out yr calendars:
King Sparrow will be playing this Thursday, April 1, at the Empty Bottle. Eric tells me there will be new songs + old faves, so basically, what more could you ask for? I'm forgoing the Spoon show at the Aragon that night to support my hometown boys, so you know that means it's gonna be epic. (No pressure, guys.) Also, if you haven't watched the video tour of the studio where they've been recording their new album yet, check it out here and get ready for LOLs.
JT and the Clouds will be celebrating the release of their new album Caledonia on Friday, April 16, also at the Bottle. I'm so excited for this I could just burst. I've basically been looking forward to this show since early December. They've been touring the East Coast and Canada the past few weeks and will soon be heading out for a lengthy jaunt through Europe, so it'll be nice to remind them how much they're loved here at home while we have the chance.
Tiny Magnets will be back at Lizard's Liquid Lounge later this month, on Thursday, April 22. Seriously, if you haven't been out to the bar yet, you must. It's the perfect combination of cozy and cool. In other Tiny Magnets news, we've been busily recording and have some nicer sounding tracks up on our MySpace page. We also have a new presence on Facebook; we'd invite you to become a fan of ours there if you're so inclined!
King Sparrow will be playing this Thursday, April 1, at the Empty Bottle. Eric tells me there will be new songs + old faves, so basically, what more could you ask for? I'm forgoing the Spoon show at the Aragon that night to support my hometown boys, so you know that means it's gonna be epic. (No pressure, guys.) Also, if you haven't watched the video tour of the studio where they've been recording their new album yet, check it out here and get ready for LOLs.
JT and the Clouds will be celebrating the release of their new album Caledonia on Friday, April 16, also at the Bottle. I'm so excited for this I could just burst. I've basically been looking forward to this show since early December. They've been touring the East Coast and Canada the past few weeks and will soon be heading out for a lengthy jaunt through Europe, so it'll be nice to remind them how much they're loved here at home while we have the chance.
Tiny Magnets will be back at Lizard's Liquid Lounge later this month, on Thursday, April 22. Seriously, if you haven't been out to the bar yet, you must. It's the perfect combination of cozy and cool. In other Tiny Magnets news, we've been busily recording and have some nicer sounding tracks up on our MySpace page. We also have a new presence on Facebook; we'd invite you to become a fan of ours there if you're so inclined!
Sunday, November 29, 2009
November Update
Hello, my kittens. Are you ready for your now-regular monthly dispatch from the land of Wrestling Entropy? In all honesty, I'm not even sure I am. I started an insane workout regimen about six weeks ago, and just about the only thing I've gotten out of it is a deeper understanding of the fact that meatheads and gym rats aren't necessarily dumb as a matter of course--they're just fucking exhausted all the time. All the blood that would normally be helping their brains compose lovely and thoughtful sentiments has been rerouted to their muscles, leaving them dim and ineloquent masses of crabbiness and fatigue. OK, well, maybe that really is just me, but man--this shit's been brutal. Anyway. To the extent that I've been able to scrape myself together enough to do anything remotely of interest this month, here's what I've been up to:
Max Tundra, Live at Schubas. I was just talking to Eric and Annie about how it's become impossible to tell what shows are going to sell out immediately and what shows you're going to be able to waltz right into at the last minute. I found out about the November 5th Max Tundra show a day or two ahead of time and utterly panicked. I figured there'd be no way I would be able to get a ticket. Well, not only was I able to buy one, I could have brought along about 50 of my closest friends. I was soooo bummed at what a small turnout there was for the show. Granted, he didn't go on until about 11 pm on a Thursday night, the Mountain Goats/Final Fantasy (bandonyms ahoy!) double-header was scheduled the same night just up the street at the Metro, and Schubas is a terrible venue for dancypants genres--but still. It's Max Tundra! I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release in late '08, but after finally grabbing it earlier this year, it's absolutely been my personal #1 album of '09. I tried to tell him as much while folks were congregating around the merch table at the end of the night, and it was a supremely, comically awkward interaction. I just kept gushing and he just kept running out of ways to say "thanks, I appreciate it," and the whole thing escalated with an embarrassing-for-us-both high five. (Initiated by him--allow me to spare myself a little dignity by making that fact perfectly clear.) Anyway, the album is still unimpeachable and you should check it out if you haven't had the pleasure yet.
After nearly a year of fits and starts, I finally finished reading American Prometheus a few weeks ago. It was astonishingly good. I have no idea how a book of this scope gets researched and written (not to mention edited), but it's seriously gorgeous. I lived with the book for so many months, and it contained so much heartwrenching emotion, I was literally in tears as I finished the last page. Highly, but not lightly, recommended.
As something of a palate cleanser (ahem), I also read Toni Bentley's butt sex book The Surrender pretty much immediately thereafter. It was really quite great. It's less prurient than it could have been and she's a surprisingly lovely writer. It was also interesting to see how structurally similar it was to Eat, Pray, Love. Is there some sort of "contemporary woman's memoir" script that necessitates a tripartite structure, a post-divorce journey of soul-searching, feats of physical endurance invented to mirror and in many ways overcome emotional blockages, culminating in greater self-awareness and inner peace? Will someone who's not been working out six days a week please write this essay for me? KTHX.
I saw more movies this month than I realized I did, mostly thanks to the time afforded me over four-day holiday weekend. In brief:
The Men Who Stare at Goats. Completely ridiculous and demonstrably not very well written, but somehow amusing in spite of itself. I'm sure this is mostly thanks to the effortless charisma of most of its cast. I just wish they weren't working so hard to save a movie that didn't necessarily deserve to be saved.
Tropic Thunder. Obvy, I'm way behind the times here, and, even after seeing the whole thing, I felt like I didn't really need to thanks to the best jokes being given away in last year's omnipresent trailer. But it was still pretty enjoyable anyway. The fake gay priest movie preview at the beginning probably got the biggest laugh out of me, but Jay Baruchel's film nerd monologue about Renny Harlin was a pretty close second. That kid prob should also have been in The Men Who Stare at Goats in re: effortless charisma.
Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, I am 100% the target demographic here, but there's no sense in tip-toeing around the fact that I loved every fucking minute of it. Seriously, it's just delight upon delight, while also remaining deeply, deeply weird. The bit with the wolf near the end? No exaggeration: I was weeping with laughter. I saw it on Thanksgiving night and the audience fucking applauded when the credits began to roll. I always love the extravagance of the gesture when that happens at the end of a movie. No one involved with its creation or performance is going to hear it; it's just a pure, spontaneous expression of happiness and fellow-feeling and aesthetic satisfaction.
Coco Before Chanel. This was a bit more of a snooze than I was hoping/expecting, but it was ultimately redeemed for me by how much of an unconventional hero Coco is presented as here. She's not particularly charming or likable, but she's still this gutsy dame who gets shit done and befriends all kinds of powerful and influential people and builds her own empire from scratch. I was glad to see a small group of young-looking girls in the theater on the afternoon I caught this; what an awesomely feminist message for them to be exposed to: it's OK to be bitchy and difficult! The world won't fall apart and you'll have more self-respect and you'll probably get a lot more things of genuine value accomplished that way!
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Holy shit. So awesome. Ridiculous and dark and hilarious and foul. I know this is a totally obnoxious thing to say, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I would have absolutely gone apeshit-level bonkers for when I was about 19. Not that I enjoyed it any less at 30, but I could just imagine adopting this as a kind of secret-handshake movie back then, my love for it becoming a place that would feel like an exclusive club inside my own brain, a place to meet up with other like-minded friends to discuss its many hideous pleasures. There's no way to overstate how fucking fantastic Nicolas Cage is here--because he's already gone ahead and embedded the overstatement in his own performance. There's also, of course, the subtextual level where the character's story becomes the story of the post-Katrina plight of the city, which realization had me racing to my bookshelf to start reading my gratis copy of Ned Sublette's The Year Before the Flood immediately after the movie to help understand contemporary New Orleans a bit better. Do not sleep on this one, fellow lovers of neo-noir and all things bat-shit insane.
I'm sure you've probably seen it already, but if you haven't, be sure to pop over to Pitchfork News and check out Elvis Costello playing "High Fidelity" with the Roots. I just...there are no words. Does shit get any cooler than this? It's inspired me to rock out to Get Happy!! the past few days. Every time I let my love for Elvis slip a little bit from my immediate consciousness, something like this comes along to remind me why dude will forever be one of my faves.
Also, hey, Animal Collective, where do you find the time/energy/creativity to fart out another superlative set of songs in the same calendar year as Merriweather Post Pavilion? The new Fall Be Kind EP is a stunner, totally worth it for the first two tracks alone, though the entire moody journey is incredibly rewarding. Embarrassing admission: when I first heard Avey Tare sing that line in "On a Highway" about "Noah's dreaming," I was totally trying to figure out the Biblical allusion until I read the Pitchfork review, which reminded me that that's Panda Bear's real name. Oh. Right. Duh.
Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend, my darlings!
Max Tundra, Live at Schubas. I was just talking to Eric and Annie about how it's become impossible to tell what shows are going to sell out immediately and what shows you're going to be able to waltz right into at the last minute. I found out about the November 5th Max Tundra show a day or two ahead of time and utterly panicked. I figured there'd be no way I would be able to get a ticket. Well, not only was I able to buy one, I could have brought along about 50 of my closest friends. I was soooo bummed at what a small turnout there was for the show. Granted, he didn't go on until about 11 pm on a Thursday night, the Mountain Goats/Final Fantasy (bandonyms ahoy!) double-header was scheduled the same night just up the street at the Metro, and Schubas is a terrible venue for dancypants genres--but still. It's Max Tundra! I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release in late '08, but after finally grabbing it earlier this year, it's absolutely been my personal #1 album of '09. I tried to tell him as much while folks were congregating around the merch table at the end of the night, and it was a supremely, comically awkward interaction. I just kept gushing and he just kept running out of ways to say "thanks, I appreciate it," and the whole thing escalated with an embarrassing-for-us-both high five. (Initiated by him--allow me to spare myself a little dignity by making that fact perfectly clear.) Anyway, the album is still unimpeachable and you should check it out if you haven't had the pleasure yet.
After nearly a year of fits and starts, I finally finished reading American Prometheus a few weeks ago. It was astonishingly good. I have no idea how a book of this scope gets researched and written (not to mention edited), but it's seriously gorgeous. I lived with the book for so many months, and it contained so much heartwrenching emotion, I was literally in tears as I finished the last page. Highly, but not lightly, recommended.
As something of a palate cleanser (ahem), I also read Toni Bentley's butt sex book The Surrender pretty much immediately thereafter. It was really quite great. It's less prurient than it could have been and she's a surprisingly lovely writer. It was also interesting to see how structurally similar it was to Eat, Pray, Love. Is there some sort of "contemporary woman's memoir" script that necessitates a tripartite structure, a post-divorce journey of soul-searching, feats of physical endurance invented to mirror and in many ways overcome emotional blockages, culminating in greater self-awareness and inner peace? Will someone who's not been working out six days a week please write this essay for me? KTHX.
I saw more movies this month than I realized I did, mostly thanks to the time afforded me over four-day holiday weekend. In brief:
The Men Who Stare at Goats. Completely ridiculous and demonstrably not very well written, but somehow amusing in spite of itself. I'm sure this is mostly thanks to the effortless charisma of most of its cast. I just wish they weren't working so hard to save a movie that didn't necessarily deserve to be saved.
Tropic Thunder. Obvy, I'm way behind the times here, and, even after seeing the whole thing, I felt like I didn't really need to thanks to the best jokes being given away in last year's omnipresent trailer. But it was still pretty enjoyable anyway. The fake gay priest movie preview at the beginning probably got the biggest laugh out of me, but Jay Baruchel's film nerd monologue about Renny Harlin was a pretty close second. That kid prob should also have been in The Men Who Stare at Goats in re: effortless charisma.
Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, I am 100% the target demographic here, but there's no sense in tip-toeing around the fact that I loved every fucking minute of it. Seriously, it's just delight upon delight, while also remaining deeply, deeply weird. The bit with the wolf near the end? No exaggeration: I was weeping with laughter. I saw it on Thanksgiving night and the audience fucking applauded when the credits began to roll. I always love the extravagance of the gesture when that happens at the end of a movie. No one involved with its creation or performance is going to hear it; it's just a pure, spontaneous expression of happiness and fellow-feeling and aesthetic satisfaction.
Coco Before Chanel. This was a bit more of a snooze than I was hoping/expecting, but it was ultimately redeemed for me by how much of an unconventional hero Coco is presented as here. She's not particularly charming or likable, but she's still this gutsy dame who gets shit done and befriends all kinds of powerful and influential people and builds her own empire from scratch. I was glad to see a small group of young-looking girls in the theater on the afternoon I caught this; what an awesomely feminist message for them to be exposed to: it's OK to be bitchy and difficult! The world won't fall apart and you'll have more self-respect and you'll probably get a lot more things of genuine value accomplished that way!
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Holy shit. So awesome. Ridiculous and dark and hilarious and foul. I know this is a totally obnoxious thing to say, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I would have absolutely gone apeshit-level bonkers for when I was about 19. Not that I enjoyed it any less at 30, but I could just imagine adopting this as a kind of secret-handshake movie back then, my love for it becoming a place that would feel like an exclusive club inside my own brain, a place to meet up with other like-minded friends to discuss its many hideous pleasures. There's no way to overstate how fucking fantastic Nicolas Cage is here--because he's already gone ahead and embedded the overstatement in his own performance. There's also, of course, the subtextual level where the character's story becomes the story of the post-Katrina plight of the city, which realization had me racing to my bookshelf to start reading my gratis copy of Ned Sublette's The Year Before the Flood immediately after the movie to help understand contemporary New Orleans a bit better. Do not sleep on this one, fellow lovers of neo-noir and all things bat-shit insane.
I'm sure you've probably seen it already, but if you haven't, be sure to pop over to Pitchfork News and check out Elvis Costello playing "High Fidelity" with the Roots. I just...there are no words. Does shit get any cooler than this? It's inspired me to rock out to Get Happy!! the past few days. Every time I let my love for Elvis slip a little bit from my immediate consciousness, something like this comes along to remind me why dude will forever be one of my faves.
Also, hey, Animal Collective, where do you find the time/energy/creativity to fart out another superlative set of songs in the same calendar year as Merriweather Post Pavilion? The new Fall Be Kind EP is a stunner, totally worth it for the first two tracks alone, though the entire moody journey is incredibly rewarding. Embarrassing admission: when I first heard Avey Tare sing that line in "On a Highway" about "Noah's dreaming," I was totally trying to figure out the Biblical allusion until I read the Pitchfork review, which reminded me that that's Panda Bear's real name. Oh. Right. Duh.
Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend, my darlings!
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
500 Days of Summer and Humpday
Well, 500 Days of Summer was pretty much a piece of crap. I am EXACTLY the target audience for this movie, and yet somehow it made me want to punch puppies the entire time I was sitting in the theater. It's clear that the writer and director have much the same taste in "anti-" romantic comedy romantic comedies that I do, but they didn't do enough to spackle over the seams where they'd stitched together the bits they'd stolen from these other (better) films. The most obvious touchstone is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--tonally, organizationally, and character-wise (diehard-romantic leading man with "issues" vs. a headstrong, ultimately unknowable female love interest with a bulldozer's worth of charm), but there were also huge lifts from High Fidelity (the notion that pop songs will corrupt your ideas about love) and even Bottle Rocket (wise-beyond-her-years sage advice from a little sister). Zooey Deschanel's shtick is starting to get grating (um, ha), and for as wonderful as he is, and for as excited as I was about the idea of Joseph Gordon-Levitt making somewhat of a rom-com debut, he was sorely miscast. The role needed much more of a sadsack, and he's just too smart and strong an actor to believably play such a lovelorn wuss. Lloyd Dobler he is not. The best moment in the whole thing comes near the beginning when Zooey's character flat-out asks him if he likes her; he pauses a beat before saying "yeah" with as many shades of meaning as that word could possibly convey--longing and anticipation and doubt and shyness and truth and bet-hedging and coolness and dorkiness and desire and relief all at once. Aside from that, though, if you value your time, your money, and YOUR SOUL, skip eet.
Humpday, on quite the other hand, is graaaaaaand. I loved it! So, so much! It is ridiculously laugh-out-loud funny but also filled with so much beautiful truth that my cheeks hurt from grinning by the end of it. And not just truth about sexuality--though it has that to the degree that one would hope/expect--but truth about relationships and aging and the ultimate tenuousness of the ways we attempt to define ourselves and our loved ones. It's also totally refreshing to watch a movie with utterly normal-looking people in it--that is, utterly normal-looking people who, much like the people you know in your own life, become more and more beautiful as you get to know them. I can't say too much more about it without starting to give stuff away--and this is a movie that deserves not to be spoiled before one sees it. If it makes its way to your city, please do consider checking it out if you have the chance.
Also, how is this movie not going to be exactly the same as As Good as It Gets (which I detest)? Oh, Lauren Graham, you deserve so much better!
Also, also, also: Chicagoans, it's never too early to start planning for the weekend.Catch King Sparrow for free (free! zero bones! just because they love you!) on Friday night at the Empty Bottle, and then be sure to rest up for the Baby Teeth album release spectacular at Schubas on Saturday. If you've not had a chance to check out Hustle Beach yet, let me assure you that it's 42 minutes of pure happiness, one of those albums that goes down so smooth, you don't even realize how quickly it's whizzing by. "Big Schools" is so smart and so sly on so many levels; "I Hope She Won't Let Me" still absolutely kills me; and "Hard to Find a Friend" is the kind of stellar Billy Joel piano ballad that Billy Joel forgot how to write about 25 years ago. See you out on the town, kittens.
[Ed. note: Ha, so I posted this on Tuesday night, then Wednesday morning there was a huge spread in Chicago's Red Eye all about Baby Teeth, and in the interview, Abraham Levitan totally calls Billy Joel a hack. "He's just a poor man's Paul McCartney. Elton John, I would say, had a distinctive artistic personality, and I don't think Billy Joel has ever been more than a tribute band." Glad to know I totally got my '70s piano men references backward!]
[UPDATE: OK, this is officially the most appended entry in the history of this blog. The 7/31 King Sparrow show at the Empty Bottle was canceled. Come see them at the Subterranean on August 7, though! I know none of you are shelling out the clams to go to Lolla or to see Arctic Monkeys at the Metro, so you officially have no excuse to miss it.]
Humpday, on quite the other hand, is graaaaaaand. I loved it! So, so much! It is ridiculously laugh-out-loud funny but also filled with so much beautiful truth that my cheeks hurt from grinning by the end of it. And not just truth about sexuality--though it has that to the degree that one would hope/expect--but truth about relationships and aging and the ultimate tenuousness of the ways we attempt to define ourselves and our loved ones. It's also totally refreshing to watch a movie with utterly normal-looking people in it--that is, utterly normal-looking people who, much like the people you know in your own life, become more and more beautiful as you get to know them. I can't say too much more about it without starting to give stuff away--and this is a movie that deserves not to be spoiled before one sees it. If it makes its way to your city, please do consider checking it out if you have the chance.
Also, how is this movie not going to be exactly the same as As Good as It Gets (which I detest)? Oh, Lauren Graham, you deserve so much better!
Also, also, also: Chicagoans, it's never too early to start planning for the weekend.
[Ed. note: Ha, so I posted this on Tuesday night, then Wednesday morning there was a huge spread in Chicago's Red Eye all about Baby Teeth, and in the interview, Abraham Levitan totally calls Billy Joel a hack. "He's just a poor man's Paul McCartney. Elton John, I would say, had a distinctive artistic personality, and I don't think Billy Joel has ever been more than a tribute band." Glad to know I totally got my '70s piano men references backward!]
[UPDATE: OK, this is officially the most appended entry in the history of this blog. The 7/31 King Sparrow show at the Empty Bottle was canceled. Come see them at the Subterranean on August 7, though! I know none of you are shelling out the clams to go to Lolla or to see Arctic Monkeys at the Metro, so you officially have no excuse to miss it.]
Friday, July 24, 2009
Pitchfork Music Festival 2009
Haters Gotta Hate Edition
It's not like I didn't have a good time last weekend. Any excuse to spend two and a half days bopping from performance to performance to performance in the company of (mostly) like-minded strangers is generally OK by me. But this was the first year that the festival struck me as straining against itself. At first, it was the little, mostly organizational things: the long line to gain entry to the park on Friday night. The fact that the porta-potties were tucked into weird locations that weren't well laid out for folks to form lines that went much deeper than about four people. The fact that the stages weren't adorned with the Jay Ryan-designed banners like in previous years. Maybe this stuff just slipped through the cracks for one reason or another? But then as the weekend hurtled headlong toward its big Flaming Lipsian climax, I realized that this is no longer the little indie festival that could. (I know, I know: I'm just realizing this now? But hear me out.) There was so much less room allowed for the pleasure of surprise this year, as they've started to recycle bands from previous years' rosters (Yo La Tengo, the National, Grizzly Bear, the Walkmen) and as they're hewing with Mafia-like protectiveness to acts they've saddled with the dubious honor of being best new music despite well-documented evidence that maybe they're not quite ready for that level of exposure yet (Wavves, Vivian Girls, etc.). There seemed to be a certain kind of vague cynicism permeating everything--a weird combination of "we're just giving the people what they want"/"we're just doing what's expected of us"--that fell way short of the former "holy crap, guys, let's organize a big old show with all our favorite musicians!" vibe that was evident in spades in previous years. Let's hope this was an anomalous year and that 2010 will find the fest back in joyous, celebratory form. But for now, a quick rundown of 2009:
It's not entirely clear to me why they chose to schedule four bands on Friday night, instead of three as in previous years, and to start at 5 pm. I'm sure there were folks who traveled in from out of town and could arrive at the festival grounds early in the afternoon if they wanted to, but the rest of us schlubs worked a full day then had to contend with public transportation and the aforementioned lines at the gate before we could commence with the rocking. Which means I totally missed Tortoise's set. It's not the end of the world, I know, since they're from here and all, but I've still never seen them live and probably wouldn't be inclined to buy a ticket for one of their regular gigs since I don't know their stuff that well to begin with. I thought this would be a good, low-pressure way to check them out. No dice.
Even though this is technically the third time I've seen Yo La Tengo live, I still wouldn't call myself much of a fan (not because I dislike them; only because I still haven't devoted the time to exploring their catalog), so I guess I wasn't too broken up about the fact that they were basically just providing the soundtrack to the beer line. They sounded pretty good, from what I could tell.
I was all kinds of meh about Jesus Lizard. With my documented lack of '90s reference points, this reunion show didn't mean anything to me, and their songs all sounded pretty samey after a while. But, I always gotta give props to old dudes who can still rock out with total fuck-you attitude.
Built to Spill, though, I was legitimately excited to see. Even though I don't have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of their stuff, there's something in me at what feels like a subatomic level that really responds to Doug Martsch's guitar playing. Their set was the first moment of the fest when everything seemed to really click for me; it became more than just standing in an open field listening to some music with hundreds of other people. It became a rock show, with its own unique language and landscape, an energetic exchange both joyously bigger than any of its disparate elements and sublimely simpler than any of its attendant hassles or limitations. They closed out with a triumphant, cascading take on "Carry the Zero," their one song that I was really, really, really hoping to hear. I left the park on a high.
I rolled in kinda late on Saturday, just as Fucked Up was finishing their much talked-about set. I kind of wish I'd caught more of it, for spectacle's sake if nothing else, but...obviously not so much that I, y'know, made the effort to arrive on time for it or anything.
The first set I caught was the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. They sounded exactly like their album--which is to say, cute but not particularly deep or memorable. It seemed like they played a few of their songs more than once, but that's just because they all sound the same. They seemed to be genuinely gracious about playing to such a large crowd, which is always nice to see, but I had my fill after about half the set.
Bowerbirds back on the smaller B stage were nearly drowned out by Pains' bass until you were pretty much right on top of them. They're still doing their smart, gentle folk, and they sound as lovely as ever. They played "In Our Talons," of course, which is, I guess, their version of a big fat crowd-pleasing jam.
Final Fantasy = the cutest. I haven't listened to He Poos Clouds in ages, and don't necessarily even have a craving to do so now (I find it's not an easy album to listen to as I'm just running errands around town), but I feel a real affinity for Pallett and his intelligent, artsy, melodramatic, super-queer sensibility. A girl in front of me gushed to her friend "this is the most impressive show I've seen so far at Pitchfork." Granted, it was still early in the weekend, but I couldn't resist somewhat snarkily scribbling in my notes that's because he's a real musician. I don't at all believe that the simple fact of being classically trained automatically makes you a superior musician--there's lots of wankery that can happen if you're too technically proficient and don't have genuinely creative instincts to supplement the skills that can more or less be beaten into your muscle memory--but in the case of someone like Pallett, the training has obviously significantly expanded the, ahem, palette he's able to put in service of his creative vision. The crowd was cheering for every flourish and epic melodic run. It was all really refreshing.
As we were all gathering across the field before Yeasayer, two dudes near me who were trying to decide how far to push toward the stage had the following conversation:
#1: Just wait til everybody mellows out.
#2: Is this going to be mellow music?
#1: It's like...intense mellow.
Awesome.
It had been threatening to rain all morning and finally started sprinkling in the middle of their set. It actually made everyone get really happy and surrender to the experience, and Yeasayer was kind of the perfect band to soundtrack the moment. That being said, they were the first of a handful of bands on the roster (more on which soon) that still kind of make me wonder, incredulously, "so...people actually like this?" Their world musicy dream-catcher aesthetic seems so deeply uncool that, were it not for Pitchfork's imprimatur, I gotta believe most folks would derisively mock it if they were given an unlabeled MP3 or CD of the stuff. Despite my incredulity, I stuck around for their whole set, and enjoyed it. Sinkane is touring with them on percussion now apparently (dude is everywhere!), so their rhythm section was especially impressive. Of course, the crowd went bonkers when they played "2080."
I have to say, the more I think about them, the more I find I can pretty confidently say that I actively dislike Beirut. I'm still not entirely sure why, but, similar to my wonder about why people like Yeasayer's brand of fusiony world beat, I'm always mildly offended by the way Beirut makes people believe they like Eastern European-style brass band music. You probably couldn't get 80% of that audience out to a neighborhood music festival to see a bunch of actual Balkan dudes play their horns and sing, and yet when Zach Condon's on stage, everybody's cheering for trumpet solos and all but throwing their arms around strangers' shoulders with this kind of false nostalgia for some vague notion of a motherland. I know that criticizing Condon for cultural appropriation is kind of a fool's errand at this point, and I know there can be a legitimate kind of beauty that can transcend notions of authenticity when it comes to these kinds of really well done, fictionalized, dream-state interpretations of a genre (sort of a la Kubrick's impulse to re-create New York on a sound stage rather than filming on location for Eyes Wide Shut), and it's not like I have any kind of chanson or Fado bonafides to defend against interlopers, and, believe it or not, I really can hear the sweetness in his melodies. But, I still found myself frowning more and more deeply as the set progressed. Part of this is probably because I get the sense that Condon is inordinately pleased with himself, yet masking it with a kind of false humility. I mean, he kept whispering "merci," all cute and knowingly, between songs, so much so that a couple girls behind me were actually discussing his "accent." Sigh. Even the horn tattoo on his wrist was bugging me. I'm surprised not to find more criticism of this nature anywhere at all online. Save for a delightfully harsh review of March of the Zapotec in Toronto's NOW magazine, everything else I was able to Google up in an admittedly quick search was mostly fawning praise. I wish I were willing to believe that this is just my issue, but somehow I think the definitive Beirut takedown has yet to be written. It's OK to come out of the closet, fellow Beirut apostates, wherever you may be!
At some point early the week before the fest, I was listening to Boxer on my iPod and then realized "holy shit, I get to see the National play live in a few days!" And then I got way excited. As with Animal Collective last year, there's really nowhere else the National would ever be considered a headlining act, which just made me so damn proud of 'em. I don't necessarily think their set would have made new fans out of anybody who didn't already dig what they're doing--I heard plenty of kvetching from various sources about how slow and dour their songs are; as if even their rabid fans would argue that fact!--but as far as I was concerned, they put on a rock solid, if not transcendent, show. Matt looked great and was flat-out funnier than I've ever seen him. He crawled off the stage and into the photo pit during the big climax of "Mr. November"--a gesture that song always calls for--but then immediately proceeded to make fun of himself as soon as the song ended: "I was gonna do something cool, but then when I got to the garbage can, I thought, 'this isn't as cool as I thought it would be.' But then I got over there and thought, 'no, this is pretty cool.'" They played a few new songs that sounded great, if predictably Nationalistic (this isn't a criticism). Looking forward to whatever their next album yields.
Rolled in on Sunday in time to catch Frightened Rabbit. It seems like every new year yields at least one token Scottish rock band that everybody's gotta lose their shit over, and as soon as they started playing, I snarked, "how are these guys not the Twilight Sad?" But then they won me over in spite of myself with their infectious energy and clear affection for the Chicago crowd: "I think we've played here more in the past 12 months than we've played in Glasgow!" Plus the lead singer has one of those great, wild, keening voices that you can really only get from Irish or Scottish rock frontmen--a little unhinged, a lot passionate, implicitly acknowledging that it's "just" rock 'n' roll while reminding us that that doesn't mean it's not the most important thing in the world at that particular moment. I'm curious to check their stuff out now.
I had sooo much fun seeing Blitzen Trapper in Austin last Thanksgiving that I couldn't wait to catch them live again, especially considering that I've been living with, and loving, Furr since then. Luckily, they were every bit as delightful as I remember them being. No lie: the title track from that album's as good a song as has been written this decade. Eric Earley was touched by something holy when he pulled that shit out of his guitar. Portland boyfriends!
After a bit of wandering, I caught a good chunk of the Thermals' set. People! I thought we had an understanding here! I thought that when it turns out I've been an ignorant moron who's slept on a band this awesome for far too long you'd have the friendly decency to publicly scold me about it or something. But noooo, I've just been going along with my daily life like it's no big deal that I've never listened to these guys. Clearly, this is a major oversight on my part. They tore the place up with a combination of ferocious punk rock energy and an extremely smart sense of fun. They covered a whole mess of classic '90s "alternative rock" bangers, which somehow, through the sheer force of their chops and goodwill, came off as a successful way to play to the crowd in this specific setting rather than cynically pandering to it. Smiles all around. I've clearly got some musical homework to do now.
Every time I get excited about seeing the Walkmen, I always kinda figure it's a nostalgia thing for me, since I so associate their music with my early days in the city: living in the apartment at 1945 W. Chicago Ave., stealing all Giddy's CDs, drinking too much, making friends with the Grinnellians. But then when I actually see them, I'm always bowled over anew with how fucking solid they are. As my life has progressed over the intervening years, theirs as a band has too--they've grown warmer and richer and deeper (pick the fine wine/Scotch whiskey metaphor of your choice). And, not to make an unfortunate pun on their most well-known song (which they did play, right near the top of the set--to get it over with, I presume), there's something almost Rat Packish about their self-presentation these days. And I mean this in a good way! The jazz inflections in the material from You & Me especially seem to come out a little more emphatically when you see them all casually dressed in nice button-down shirts and when Ham does a little chat to the audience over a song's instrumental introduction. It suits them well. Rather than becoming stale or a parody of themselves, they've truly found a way to continue growing as musicians and performers while still being instantly recognizable as the Walkmen. No small feat, that. Don't write these guys off, y'all, just because you feel like you got the hang of them in 2003. I would strongly encourage you to catch them live the next time they roll through your town.
I like dancey, rhythmic music a lot more than I typically let on, but, holy shit, was I ever unimpressed with M83. I actually laid down in the grass along the periphery of the park, staring up at the sky, too bored to even move. If you can let me know what the big deal about this group is, please do. But as far as I could tell, it wasn't much more than an endlessly recombinant collection of tacky and uninspired tropes--breathy female vocals over gated drum sounds, etc., etc.--somehow apparently legitimized/elevated in the minds of the crowd due to their French pedigree.
I started getting really squirrely at this point, out of relative boredom with the bigger acts that had been scheduled on Sunday evening to feel like some sort of culmination of awesomeness, out of physical fatigue from having been on my feet, drinking booze, and eating crap for two days, and out of emotional fatigue from navigating the sheer quantity of douchebaggery when you get that many people gathered in the same space at the same time. After a quick jaunt to get some soy ice cream (see above re: eating crap), I tried to make my way back over to see part of Grizzly Bear's set and ended up unintentionally wedging my way in front of two meatheads who were actually--I couldn't believe my ears--spitting all kinds of vitriol about the "faggots" and their autoharps on stage. Really, guys? Really? I quickly darted away into another spot but was so keyed up I couldn't soak in the band's sound at all. I suppose it didn't help my ability to pay attention that they were kind of indulging their own worst sonic tics at that moment, too, doing those trademark pummeling explorations of sustained crescendos that I find the least interesting thing about them, even when I'm feeling generous. They did segue into "While You Wait for the Others" soon thereafter, which helped redeem their excesses a bit for me, but I fear the damage had already been done.
I caught maybe two of Mew's songs back on the B stage and quipped that there was probably a high likelihood that a portion of the stoners in the crowd thought they were actually watching Passion Pit, what with the stratospheric tenor vocals and hella bass. Speaking of bass, that stage always seems to struggle with a too-muddy mix; it was actually so intense that I could only handle a few minutes before I had to wander elsewhere.
And thus began the wait for the Flaming Lips. The park was packed by that point, and I had absolutely no desire to fight forward closer to the stage. But, since so much of the effectiveness of their show relies on making the audience feel surrounded and overwhelmed--by love and joy and beauty, ostensibly; with stuff and noise and spectacle, if you're cynical about it--it ended up feeling like I was sitting on a beach, watching a storm far out at sea. It was epic and magnificent, but untouchable and unknowable, a lovely, distant curiosity. And then at a certain point after they all took to the stage, I kind of chuckled to myself as I realized, "oh wait--when you go to a Flaming Lips show to witness the circus, that means you have to listen to their music, too." Ouch. Look, I respect the hell out of Wayne Coyne, but, much like I feel about Will Sheff and Okkervil River, I'd vastly prefer to read his interviews and his wise, warm, witty quotable quotes than listen to virtually any of the songs he's ever written. The tunes simply don't do that much for me.
After standing on tippy-toes, trying to see as much as I could of what was happening on stage, I bailed out, to check in on The Very Best over at the B stage. Best decision of the weekend, by far. There wasn't much of a crowd back there, but the folks who were there were totally feeling the groove and having a balls-out fun time. My mood shifted for the better immediately and I couldn't help but start dancing. The vast difference that I felt between the two stages seemed like the most glaring example of the way that the Pitchfork fest seems to be buckling under its own weight at this point. Every inch of the Flaming Lips show felt rote and coldly calculated, despite its patina of "OMG, we're just a bunch of crazy guys who dig bright colors and wacky shit!" while everything about The Very Best felt organic and vividly human. That latter feeling is why I make the effort not just to attend the Pitchfork festival year after year, but why I go out to shows at all when I can usually think of a million other reasons--too tired, too broke, too far to travel, too late on a school night, etc.--why I should skip 'em. And, as I said above, that feeling was somewhat in limited supply this year, which made it feel all the more precious at the moment. The group left the stage, and we all cheered wildly for an encore. They came back and said, "you want one more song? Well, we're gonna play two!" the second of which was some kind of remix of Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There." Everybody took their lighters out and generally lost their shit. Since I don't really watch much TV or listen to the radio anymore, I totally missed the onslaught of MJ jams that everyone was revisiting after his death, so this was actually the first time this month that I'd even heard his voice. I got instantly choked up. The whole surprising combination of events was the festival highlight for me, for sure.
Which made going back over to the Flaming Lips for their big finish feel even more lame. After the truly moving musical embrace of that moment, hearing Wayne warbling through "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" felt really shallow...and that's one of their few songs that I actually like! I sort of tolerated the subsequent self-satisfied performances of "She Don't Use Jelly" and "Do You Realize??" and then made my escape from the park in what felt like a really anticlimactic way. In fact, Wayne was still demanding "do you realize??" as I made my way out of the gates and over to the Green Line. I do realize, Wayne, really, I do.
Big thanks to Parowpyro for being a game-for-anything festivalgoing companion for the weekend; you should check out his own entertaining take on the weekend's activities here. The rest of my pictures are posted on Flickr, but for some more professional shots, I would recommend looking through Robert Loerzel's (start here) and, as always, Kirstiecat's, which should continue rolling out over the next few days, weeks, and even months as she perfects them.
It's not like I didn't have a good time last weekend. Any excuse to spend two and a half days bopping from performance to performance to performance in the company of (mostly) like-minded strangers is generally OK by me. But this was the first year that the festival struck me as straining against itself. At first, it was the little, mostly organizational things: the long line to gain entry to the park on Friday night. The fact that the porta-potties were tucked into weird locations that weren't well laid out for folks to form lines that went much deeper than about four people. The fact that the stages weren't adorned with the Jay Ryan-designed banners like in previous years. Maybe this stuff just slipped through the cracks for one reason or another? But then as the weekend hurtled headlong toward its big Flaming Lipsian climax, I realized that this is no longer the little indie festival that could. (I know, I know: I'm just realizing this now? But hear me out.) There was so much less room allowed for the pleasure of surprise this year, as they've started to recycle bands from previous years' rosters (Yo La Tengo, the National, Grizzly Bear, the Walkmen) and as they're hewing with Mafia-like protectiveness to acts they've saddled with the dubious honor of being best new music despite well-documented evidence that maybe they're not quite ready for that level of exposure yet (Wavves, Vivian Girls, etc.). There seemed to be a certain kind of vague cynicism permeating everything--a weird combination of "we're just giving the people what they want"/"we're just doing what's expected of us"--that fell way short of the former "holy crap, guys, let's organize a big old show with all our favorite musicians!" vibe that was evident in spades in previous years. Let's hope this was an anomalous year and that 2010 will find the fest back in joyous, celebratory form. But for now, a quick rundown of 2009:
It's not entirely clear to me why they chose to schedule four bands on Friday night, instead of three as in previous years, and to start at 5 pm. I'm sure there were folks who traveled in from out of town and could arrive at the festival grounds early in the afternoon if they wanted to, but the rest of us schlubs worked a full day then had to contend with public transportation and the aforementioned lines at the gate before we could commence with the rocking. Which means I totally missed Tortoise's set. It's not the end of the world, I know, since they're from here and all, but I've still never seen them live and probably wouldn't be inclined to buy a ticket for one of their regular gigs since I don't know their stuff that well to begin with. I thought this would be a good, low-pressure way to check them out. No dice.
Even though this is technically the third time I've seen Yo La Tengo live, I still wouldn't call myself much of a fan (not because I dislike them; only because I still haven't devoted the time to exploring their catalog), so I guess I wasn't too broken up about the fact that they were basically just providing the soundtrack to the beer line. They sounded pretty good, from what I could tell.
I was all kinds of meh about Jesus Lizard. With my documented lack of '90s reference points, this reunion show didn't mean anything to me, and their songs all sounded pretty samey after a while. But, I always gotta give props to old dudes who can still rock out with total fuck-you attitude.
Built to Spill, though, I was legitimately excited to see. Even though I don't have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of their stuff, there's something in me at what feels like a subatomic level that really responds to Doug Martsch's guitar playing. Their set was the first moment of the fest when everything seemed to really click for me; it became more than just standing in an open field listening to some music with hundreds of other people. It became a rock show, with its own unique language and landscape, an energetic exchange both joyously bigger than any of its disparate elements and sublimely simpler than any of its attendant hassles or limitations. They closed out with a triumphant, cascading take on "Carry the Zero," their one song that I was really, really, really hoping to hear. I left the park on a high.
I rolled in kinda late on Saturday, just as Fucked Up was finishing their much talked-about set. I kind of wish I'd caught more of it, for spectacle's sake if nothing else, but...obviously not so much that I, y'know, made the effort to arrive on time for it or anything.
The first set I caught was the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. They sounded exactly like their album--which is to say, cute but not particularly deep or memorable. It seemed like they played a few of their songs more than once, but that's just because they all sound the same. They seemed to be genuinely gracious about playing to such a large crowd, which is always nice to see, but I had my fill after about half the set.
Bowerbirds back on the smaller B stage were nearly drowned out by Pains' bass until you were pretty much right on top of them. They're still doing their smart, gentle folk, and they sound as lovely as ever. They played "In Our Talons," of course, which is, I guess, their version of a big fat crowd-pleasing jam.
Final Fantasy = the cutest. I haven't listened to He Poos Clouds in ages, and don't necessarily even have a craving to do so now (I find it's not an easy album to listen to as I'm just running errands around town), but I feel a real affinity for Pallett and his intelligent, artsy, melodramatic, super-queer sensibility. A girl in front of me gushed to her friend "this is the most impressive show I've seen so far at Pitchfork." Granted, it was still early in the weekend, but I couldn't resist somewhat snarkily scribbling in my notes that's because he's a real musician. I don't at all believe that the simple fact of being classically trained automatically makes you a superior musician--there's lots of wankery that can happen if you're too technically proficient and don't have genuinely creative instincts to supplement the skills that can more or less be beaten into your muscle memory--but in the case of someone like Pallett, the training has obviously significantly expanded the, ahem, palette he's able to put in service of his creative vision. The crowd was cheering for every flourish and epic melodic run. It was all really refreshing.
As we were all gathering across the field before Yeasayer, two dudes near me who were trying to decide how far to push toward the stage had the following conversation:
#1: Just wait til everybody mellows out.
#2: Is this going to be mellow music?
#1: It's like...intense mellow.
Awesome.
It had been threatening to rain all morning and finally started sprinkling in the middle of their set. It actually made everyone get really happy and surrender to the experience, and Yeasayer was kind of the perfect band to soundtrack the moment. That being said, they were the first of a handful of bands on the roster (more on which soon) that still kind of make me wonder, incredulously, "so...people actually like this?" Their world musicy dream-catcher aesthetic seems so deeply uncool that, were it not for Pitchfork's imprimatur, I gotta believe most folks would derisively mock it if they were given an unlabeled MP3 or CD of the stuff. Despite my incredulity, I stuck around for their whole set, and enjoyed it. Sinkane is touring with them on percussion now apparently (dude is everywhere!), so their rhythm section was especially impressive. Of course, the crowd went bonkers when they played "2080."
I have to say, the more I think about them, the more I find I can pretty confidently say that I actively dislike Beirut. I'm still not entirely sure why, but, similar to my wonder about why people like Yeasayer's brand of fusiony world beat, I'm always mildly offended by the way Beirut makes people believe they like Eastern European-style brass band music. You probably couldn't get 80% of that audience out to a neighborhood music festival to see a bunch of actual Balkan dudes play their horns and sing, and yet when Zach Condon's on stage, everybody's cheering for trumpet solos and all but throwing their arms around strangers' shoulders with this kind of false nostalgia for some vague notion of a motherland. I know that criticizing Condon for cultural appropriation is kind of a fool's errand at this point, and I know there can be a legitimate kind of beauty that can transcend notions of authenticity when it comes to these kinds of really well done, fictionalized, dream-state interpretations of a genre (sort of a la Kubrick's impulse to re-create New York on a sound stage rather than filming on location for Eyes Wide Shut), and it's not like I have any kind of chanson or Fado bonafides to defend against interlopers, and, believe it or not, I really can hear the sweetness in his melodies. But, I still found myself frowning more and more deeply as the set progressed. Part of this is probably because I get the sense that Condon is inordinately pleased with himself, yet masking it with a kind of false humility. I mean, he kept whispering "merci," all cute and knowingly, between songs, so much so that a couple girls behind me were actually discussing his "accent." Sigh. Even the horn tattoo on his wrist was bugging me. I'm surprised not to find more criticism of this nature anywhere at all online. Save for a delightfully harsh review of March of the Zapotec in Toronto's NOW magazine, everything else I was able to Google up in an admittedly quick search was mostly fawning praise. I wish I were willing to believe that this is just my issue, but somehow I think the definitive Beirut takedown has yet to be written. It's OK to come out of the closet, fellow Beirut apostates, wherever you may be!
At some point early the week before the fest, I was listening to Boxer on my iPod and then realized "holy shit, I get to see the National play live in a few days!" And then I got way excited. As with Animal Collective last year, there's really nowhere else the National would ever be considered a headlining act, which just made me so damn proud of 'em. I don't necessarily think their set would have made new fans out of anybody who didn't already dig what they're doing--I heard plenty of kvetching from various sources about how slow and dour their songs are; as if even their rabid fans would argue that fact!--but as far as I was concerned, they put on a rock solid, if not transcendent, show. Matt looked great and was flat-out funnier than I've ever seen him. He crawled off the stage and into the photo pit during the big climax of "Mr. November"--a gesture that song always calls for--but then immediately proceeded to make fun of himself as soon as the song ended: "I was gonna do something cool, but then when I got to the garbage can, I thought, 'this isn't as cool as I thought it would be.' But then I got over there and thought, 'no, this is pretty cool.'" They played a few new songs that sounded great, if predictably Nationalistic (this isn't a criticism). Looking forward to whatever their next album yields.
Rolled in on Sunday in time to catch Frightened Rabbit. It seems like every new year yields at least one token Scottish rock band that everybody's gotta lose their shit over, and as soon as they started playing, I snarked, "how are these guys not the Twilight Sad?" But then they won me over in spite of myself with their infectious energy and clear affection for the Chicago crowd: "I think we've played here more in the past 12 months than we've played in Glasgow!" Plus the lead singer has one of those great, wild, keening voices that you can really only get from Irish or Scottish rock frontmen--a little unhinged, a lot passionate, implicitly acknowledging that it's "just" rock 'n' roll while reminding us that that doesn't mean it's not the most important thing in the world at that particular moment. I'm curious to check their stuff out now.
I had sooo much fun seeing Blitzen Trapper in Austin last Thanksgiving that I couldn't wait to catch them live again, especially considering that I've been living with, and loving, Furr since then. Luckily, they were every bit as delightful as I remember them being. No lie: the title track from that album's as good a song as has been written this decade. Eric Earley was touched by something holy when he pulled that shit out of his guitar. Portland boyfriends!
After a bit of wandering, I caught a good chunk of the Thermals' set. People! I thought we had an understanding here! I thought that when it turns out I've been an ignorant moron who's slept on a band this awesome for far too long you'd have the friendly decency to publicly scold me about it or something. But noooo, I've just been going along with my daily life like it's no big deal that I've never listened to these guys. Clearly, this is a major oversight on my part. They tore the place up with a combination of ferocious punk rock energy and an extremely smart sense of fun. They covered a whole mess of classic '90s "alternative rock" bangers, which somehow, through the sheer force of their chops and goodwill, came off as a successful way to play to the crowd in this specific setting rather than cynically pandering to it. Smiles all around. I've clearly got some musical homework to do now.
Every time I get excited about seeing the Walkmen, I always kinda figure it's a nostalgia thing for me, since I so associate their music with my early days in the city: living in the apartment at 1945 W. Chicago Ave., stealing all Giddy's CDs, drinking too much, making friends with the Grinnellians. But then when I actually see them, I'm always bowled over anew with how fucking solid they are. As my life has progressed over the intervening years, theirs as a band has too--they've grown warmer and richer and deeper (pick the fine wine/Scotch whiskey metaphor of your choice). And, not to make an unfortunate pun on their most well-known song (which they did play, right near the top of the set--to get it over with, I presume), there's something almost Rat Packish about their self-presentation these days. And I mean this in a good way! The jazz inflections in the material from You & Me especially seem to come out a little more emphatically when you see them all casually dressed in nice button-down shirts and when Ham does a little chat to the audience over a song's instrumental introduction. It suits them well. Rather than becoming stale or a parody of themselves, they've truly found a way to continue growing as musicians and performers while still being instantly recognizable as the Walkmen. No small feat, that. Don't write these guys off, y'all, just because you feel like you got the hang of them in 2003. I would strongly encourage you to catch them live the next time they roll through your town.
I like dancey, rhythmic music a lot more than I typically let on, but, holy shit, was I ever unimpressed with M83. I actually laid down in the grass along the periphery of the park, staring up at the sky, too bored to even move. If you can let me know what the big deal about this group is, please do. But as far as I could tell, it wasn't much more than an endlessly recombinant collection of tacky and uninspired tropes--breathy female vocals over gated drum sounds, etc., etc.--somehow apparently legitimized/elevated in the minds of the crowd due to their French pedigree.
I started getting really squirrely at this point, out of relative boredom with the bigger acts that had been scheduled on Sunday evening to feel like some sort of culmination of awesomeness, out of physical fatigue from having been on my feet, drinking booze, and eating crap for two days, and out of emotional fatigue from navigating the sheer quantity of douchebaggery when you get that many people gathered in the same space at the same time. After a quick jaunt to get some soy ice cream (see above re: eating crap), I tried to make my way back over to see part of Grizzly Bear's set and ended up unintentionally wedging my way in front of two meatheads who were actually--I couldn't believe my ears--spitting all kinds of vitriol about the "faggots" and their autoharps on stage. Really, guys? Really? I quickly darted away into another spot but was so keyed up I couldn't soak in the band's sound at all. I suppose it didn't help my ability to pay attention that they were kind of indulging their own worst sonic tics at that moment, too, doing those trademark pummeling explorations of sustained crescendos that I find the least interesting thing about them, even when I'm feeling generous. They did segue into "While You Wait for the Others" soon thereafter, which helped redeem their excesses a bit for me, but I fear the damage had already been done.
I caught maybe two of Mew's songs back on the B stage and quipped that there was probably a high likelihood that a portion of the stoners in the crowd thought they were actually watching Passion Pit, what with the stratospheric tenor vocals and hella bass. Speaking of bass, that stage always seems to struggle with a too-muddy mix; it was actually so intense that I could only handle a few minutes before I had to wander elsewhere.
And thus began the wait for the Flaming Lips. The park was packed by that point, and I had absolutely no desire to fight forward closer to the stage. But, since so much of the effectiveness of their show relies on making the audience feel surrounded and overwhelmed--by love and joy and beauty, ostensibly; with stuff and noise and spectacle, if you're cynical about it--it ended up feeling like I was sitting on a beach, watching a storm far out at sea. It was epic and magnificent, but untouchable and unknowable, a lovely, distant curiosity. And then at a certain point after they all took to the stage, I kind of chuckled to myself as I realized, "oh wait--when you go to a Flaming Lips show to witness the circus, that means you have to listen to their music, too." Ouch. Look, I respect the hell out of Wayne Coyne, but, much like I feel about Will Sheff and Okkervil River, I'd vastly prefer to read his interviews and his wise, warm, witty quotable quotes than listen to virtually any of the songs he's ever written. The tunes simply don't do that much for me.
After standing on tippy-toes, trying to see as much as I could of what was happening on stage, I bailed out, to check in on The Very Best over at the B stage. Best decision of the weekend, by far. There wasn't much of a crowd back there, but the folks who were there were totally feeling the groove and having a balls-out fun time. My mood shifted for the better immediately and I couldn't help but start dancing. The vast difference that I felt between the two stages seemed like the most glaring example of the way that the Pitchfork fest seems to be buckling under its own weight at this point. Every inch of the Flaming Lips show felt rote and coldly calculated, despite its patina of "OMG, we're just a bunch of crazy guys who dig bright colors and wacky shit!" while everything about The Very Best felt organic and vividly human. That latter feeling is why I make the effort not just to attend the Pitchfork festival year after year, but why I go out to shows at all when I can usually think of a million other reasons--too tired, too broke, too far to travel, too late on a school night, etc.--why I should skip 'em. And, as I said above, that feeling was somewhat in limited supply this year, which made it feel all the more precious at the moment. The group left the stage, and we all cheered wildly for an encore. They came back and said, "you want one more song? Well, we're gonna play two!" the second of which was some kind of remix of Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There." Everybody took their lighters out and generally lost their shit. Since I don't really watch much TV or listen to the radio anymore, I totally missed the onslaught of MJ jams that everyone was revisiting after his death, so this was actually the first time this month that I'd even heard his voice. I got instantly choked up. The whole surprising combination of events was the festival highlight for me, for sure.
Which made going back over to the Flaming Lips for their big finish feel even more lame. After the truly moving musical embrace of that moment, hearing Wayne warbling through "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" felt really shallow...and that's one of their few songs that I actually like! I sort of tolerated the subsequent self-satisfied performances of "She Don't Use Jelly" and "Do You Realize??" and then made my escape from the park in what felt like a really anticlimactic way. In fact, Wayne was still demanding "do you realize??" as I made my way out of the gates and over to the Green Line. I do realize, Wayne, really, I do.
Big thanks to Parowpyro for being a game-for-anything festivalgoing companion for the weekend; you should check out his own entertaining take on the weekend's activities here. The rest of my pictures are posted on Flickr, but for some more professional shots, I would recommend looking through Robert Loerzel's (start here) and, as always, Kirstiecat's, which should continue rolling out over the next few days, weeks, and even months as she perfects them.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Moon, Tarantino, Micachu, Baby Teeth
Moon--Let me chime in and say that this film is wonderful. It strikes me as somewhat miraculous that it got made at all. It's so quiet and so patient and so taut and so mature. Sam Rockwell is fabulous; when that guy's good, he's superlative. It's also one of the most audaciously anti-capitalist things I've seen in recent memory, literalizing the plight of how a person can be wholly exploited by a system that depends on the service s/he can provide yet doesn't reciprocate in any meaningful way, until the person is spent and discarded. Don't sleep on this one, guys.
Reservoir Dogs--OK, ready to feel old? Do you realize that this film came out in 1992? A full 17 years ago? What the hell! Anyway, when's the last time you've watched this, kittens? It holds up sooo well. I've decided that in anticipation of the release of Inglourious Basterds I'm going to work my way through Tarantino's directorial output in chronological order, so last weekend I settled in for a total dude night of pizza and beer and bloodshed. But for all the violence that often clouds people's impressions and interpretations of this film, I was shocked to realize that this movie is basically a love letter to restraint, to patience. Patience and language. After the jewel heist goes wrong, everything that happens happens while they're waiting for the gang boss to show up and tell them what to do. And, of course, Tim Roth's undercover cop character is secretly waiting for the boss to show up so he can bust him. That's it. That's the whole movie! The sheer perversity of it tickles my brain. And, that's why the ear-slicing scene is actually so crucial. It's upping the stakes beyond the beyond, asking how long do you wait? how long can you stand it while everything is going to hell around you? how much of a professional can you possibly be in the most extreme circumstances? And, of course, other than that grizzliness, what else fills the time while you're waiting? Language. Talking, idle chatter, storytelling, jokes, debates, random bits of remembered pop culture detritus, ribaldry, reminiscences--in other words, all the stuff that Tarantino is (rightly) most remembered and renowned for as a writer/auteur. It's delicious to listen to, but also, at bottom, it's really kind of delightfully old-fashioned. That he was able to fool everybody into thinking he's this rock-'em, sock-'em bad boy when he really just wants to put people in a room and get them talking is the ultimate credit to his talent.
Micachu and the Shapes, Live at Schubas--I was really thrilled to see how good Micachu was live. Her songs' charms rely way less on Matthew Herbert's production than, say, Pitchfork would have you believe. The music is a bit cracked, to be sure, but to paraphrase that great Leonard Cohen line, it's only so the light can get through. Mica Levi herself is completely adorable, a born performer and bandleader, a fact made all the more apparent because it doesn't feel like she's trying at all. Her drummer and keyboard player support her ably, taking every left turn in these songs with ultimate grace and ease. Local viola virtuoso Anni Rossi opened. After seeing string players like Owen Pallett and Andrew Bird process their instruments through an arsenal of looping pedals, it's nice to hear someone just play for a change. She's a bit like a less affected Regina Spektor--quirky without wearing the quirk like a badge of honor. Plus, she's got a lovely, lilty voice. Look for more good things to come from her. Pictures from the show here.
Baby Teeth, Hustle Beach--It's the moment we've been waiting for, kittens: Hustle Beach has finally been unleashed on the world. Yay! I couldn't be happier for the guys. I've only had a chance to listen to it once through so far, but most of the songs are familiar from their recent live sets, various Daytrotter sessions, and Abraham's 52 Teeth song blog. It all sounds great. I'm glad to see many of the reviews that have been posted so far are dealing so directly with the humor in their sound and songs, as that's one of the things I cherish most about them and feel truly sets them apart. Although, the somewhat tortured response that "Big Schools" has received as an album opener is a bit curious. I know he's not the coolest reference point these days, but this kind of epic narrative of mute, unacknowledged suburban discontent and myopia seems straight out of Ben Folds's playbook (in a good way--think "Army" or even "You to Thank"). Anyway, check their MySpace page for upcoming tour dates; I would strongly advise you to check out their live show if they're going to be anywhere in your vicinity (New Yorkers especially: August 7 at Cake Shop).
Reservoir Dogs--OK, ready to feel old? Do you realize that this film came out in 1992? A full 17 years ago? What the hell! Anyway, when's the last time you've watched this, kittens? It holds up sooo well. I've decided that in anticipation of the release of Inglourious Basterds I'm going to work my way through Tarantino's directorial output in chronological order, so last weekend I settled in for a total dude night of pizza and beer and bloodshed. But for all the violence that often clouds people's impressions and interpretations of this film, I was shocked to realize that this movie is basically a love letter to restraint, to patience. Patience and language. After the jewel heist goes wrong, everything that happens happens while they're waiting for the gang boss to show up and tell them what to do. And, of course, Tim Roth's undercover cop character is secretly waiting for the boss to show up so he can bust him. That's it. That's the whole movie! The sheer perversity of it tickles my brain. And, that's why the ear-slicing scene is actually so crucial. It's upping the stakes beyond the beyond, asking how long do you wait? how long can you stand it while everything is going to hell around you? how much of a professional can you possibly be in the most extreme circumstances? And, of course, other than that grizzliness, what else fills the time while you're waiting? Language. Talking, idle chatter, storytelling, jokes, debates, random bits of remembered pop culture detritus, ribaldry, reminiscences--in other words, all the stuff that Tarantino is (rightly) most remembered and renowned for as a writer/auteur. It's delicious to listen to, but also, at bottom, it's really kind of delightfully old-fashioned. That he was able to fool everybody into thinking he's this rock-'em, sock-'em bad boy when he really just wants to put people in a room and get them talking is the ultimate credit to his talent.
Micachu and the Shapes, Live at Schubas--I was really thrilled to see how good Micachu was live. Her songs' charms rely way less on Matthew Herbert's production than, say, Pitchfork would have you believe. The music is a bit cracked, to be sure, but to paraphrase that great Leonard Cohen line, it's only so the light can get through. Mica Levi herself is completely adorable, a born performer and bandleader, a fact made all the more apparent because it doesn't feel like she's trying at all. Her drummer and keyboard player support her ably, taking every left turn in these songs with ultimate grace and ease. Local viola virtuoso Anni Rossi opened. After seeing string players like Owen Pallett and Andrew Bird process their instruments through an arsenal of looping pedals, it's nice to hear someone just play for a change. She's a bit like a less affected Regina Spektor--quirky without wearing the quirk like a badge of honor. Plus, she's got a lovely, lilty voice. Look for more good things to come from her. Pictures from the show here.
Baby Teeth, Hustle Beach--It's the moment we've been waiting for, kittens: Hustle Beach has finally been unleashed on the world. Yay! I couldn't be happier for the guys. I've only had a chance to listen to it once through so far, but most of the songs are familiar from their recent live sets, various Daytrotter sessions, and Abraham's 52 Teeth song blog. It all sounds great. I'm glad to see many of the reviews that have been posted so far are dealing so directly with the humor in their sound and songs, as that's one of the things I cherish most about them and feel truly sets them apart. Although, the somewhat tortured response that "Big Schools" has received as an album opener is a bit curious. I know he's not the coolest reference point these days, but this kind of epic narrative of mute, unacknowledged suburban discontent and myopia seems straight out of Ben Folds's playbook (in a good way--think "Army" or even "You to Thank"). Anyway, check their MySpace page for upcoming tour dates; I would strongly advise you to check out their live show if they're going to be anywhere in your vicinity (New Yorkers especially: August 7 at Cake Shop).
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Dirty Projectors/Sea & Cake and King Sparrow--Live in Chicago
So, if you've been following my Twitter updates since the beginning of the month, you know that I've really fallen in love with the new Dirty Projectors album. Aside from the fact that it's just, y'know, good, I think part of the reason why it's hit me so hard is that it's poised right in the center of the Venn diagram where my garden-variety indie rock tastes meet my recent penchant for annoyingly spazzypants stuff meets my ever-present regard for highly trained/highly skilled musicianship. I find myself listening to it through to the end of "Fluorescent Half Dome," then immediately scrolling back up to "Cannibal Resource" to start the journey again. It's astonishingly good.
And yet, as the calendar was inching closer to their free show at the Pritzker Pavilion, I found my enthusiasm and anticipation constantly tempered by the memory of how lackluster I'd found their set at the Pitchfork Music Festival last year. Gorgeous to behold and impressive to contemplate, but nothing that moved me viscerally. Well, I don't know if it's a function of my liking Bitte Orca more than Rise Above or if another year of touring and a brand new set of songs has kicked their stage show to a new level or what, but, as I hash-tagged from my after-set Tweet: #mind=blown.
It goes without saying that these guys are brilliant musicians, but what I saw Monday night was, perhaps more importantly, a brilliant band. I had an unexpectedly good seat way down in front, rather than out on the lawn, so I was able to soak everything up with a minimum of distraction (which probably helped my feelings of goodwill). Their trademark technical virtuosity was definitely on full display, but they were also overflowing with all the expansiveness and vitality that I'd missed in them last year. Of course, the increased prominence of Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman helps this enormously, but Longstreth himself seems to be coming into his own in much the same way that Kevin Barnes was on those first tours behind Hissing Fauna; it's clear that he's finally, truly comfortable with his idiosyncrasies as a musician and performer, which has allowed him to relax into his talent much more fully, trusting that it's going to do the work for him rather than him having to do the work on behalf of his talent. There's just this abundance of warmth emanating from him now. It's beautiful.
They played through all the highest highs of Bitte Orca ("Useful Chamber," of course, along with my current personal fave "Temecula Sunrise," as well as "Remade Horizon" with its insanely intricate harmonies that got the place going bonkers early on in the set and "Stillness Is the Move," aka this summer's unbeatable jam) and a short suite from Rise Above. I think the song they closed out with may have been a cover, but I couldn't tell you of what.
[Apparently the band was in a nasty car accident on their way from Detroit to Toronto in the subsequent days, but Pitchfork reports that everybody's doing OK.]
Theirs was a ridiculously tough act to follow, and true to form, the Sea and Cake didn't really try. Which isn't to say S&C put on a bad show; not at all. It's just that they're such consummate professionals that it really doesn't seem like anything would phase them. The scenester audience started its mass exodus as soon as the DPs were off stage, which I found tacky but not unexpected, but, personally, I felt like it was such a treat to just get to kick back and let their sound wash over me on such a perfect summer night. (Also, J. Hop's term "buttery sambas" has been making me giggle nonstop for the past two days. It's the kind of rock crit description that CTLA and I probably would have made fun of a few years ago, but now I just kind of am delighted by how right on but simultaneously affectionate and silly it is.)
I'm currently having computer troubles, so I can't get my few photos off my camera and onto my at-home laptop for uploading to Flickr, so I'm going to post a link to awesome local photographer Robert Loerzel's photoset from the show instead. They're much better than my shots anyway.
Afterward, I hightailed it up to Schubas for a King Sparrow show that had some awesome hype machine muscle behind it: a write-up from Chicago's own DeRo a few days prior and some prime-time love from Metromix in that morning's Red Eye. There was an impressively sizable crowd in attendance (esp. for a 10 pm show on a Monday night), and the guys definitely delivered. Though "Sightseers" will probably never not be my favorite song, I kept hearing other little things that I'd forgotten how much I loved: that cascading instrumental bridge in "Forest," the bouncy little pre-verse turnarounds in "Bones and Skin," and of course the overall sexy ferocity of "All's Cinnamon." I also love how their general collaborative kickassery prevents me from isolating any one element of their sound to the exclusion of the others; they work as such a seamless unit that a gush that starts out about John's drumming inevitably starts to transform in my brain into a gush about Sean's bass lines, which always leads back around to Eric's guitar and vocals. In short, these guys are the real deal. The Monday night rock show, triumphant once again.
And yet, as the calendar was inching closer to their free show at the Pritzker Pavilion, I found my enthusiasm and anticipation constantly tempered by the memory of how lackluster I'd found their set at the Pitchfork Music Festival last year. Gorgeous to behold and impressive to contemplate, but nothing that moved me viscerally. Well, I don't know if it's a function of my liking Bitte Orca more than Rise Above or if another year of touring and a brand new set of songs has kicked their stage show to a new level or what, but, as I hash-tagged from my after-set Tweet: #mind=blown.
It goes without saying that these guys are brilliant musicians, but what I saw Monday night was, perhaps more importantly, a brilliant band. I had an unexpectedly good seat way down in front, rather than out on the lawn, so I was able to soak everything up with a minimum of distraction (which probably helped my feelings of goodwill). Their trademark technical virtuosity was definitely on full display, but they were also overflowing with all the expansiveness and vitality that I'd missed in them last year. Of course, the increased prominence of Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman helps this enormously, but Longstreth himself seems to be coming into his own in much the same way that Kevin Barnes was on those first tours behind Hissing Fauna; it's clear that he's finally, truly comfortable with his idiosyncrasies as a musician and performer, which has allowed him to relax into his talent much more fully, trusting that it's going to do the work for him rather than him having to do the work on behalf of his talent. There's just this abundance of warmth emanating from him now. It's beautiful.
They played through all the highest highs of Bitte Orca ("Useful Chamber," of course, along with my current personal fave "Temecula Sunrise," as well as "Remade Horizon" with its insanely intricate harmonies that got the place going bonkers early on in the set and "Stillness Is the Move," aka this summer's unbeatable jam) and a short suite from Rise Above. I think the song they closed out with may have been a cover, but I couldn't tell you of what.
[Apparently the band was in a nasty car accident on their way from Detroit to Toronto in the subsequent days, but Pitchfork reports that everybody's doing OK.]
Theirs was a ridiculously tough act to follow, and true to form, the Sea and Cake didn't really try. Which isn't to say S&C put on a bad show; not at all. It's just that they're such consummate professionals that it really doesn't seem like anything would phase them. The scenester audience started its mass exodus as soon as the DPs were off stage, which I found tacky but not unexpected, but, personally, I felt like it was such a treat to just get to kick back and let their sound wash over me on such a perfect summer night. (Also, J. Hop's term "buttery sambas" has been making me giggle nonstop for the past two days. It's the kind of rock crit description that CTLA and I probably would have made fun of a few years ago, but now I just kind of am delighted by how right on but simultaneously affectionate and silly it is.)
I'm currently having computer troubles, so I can't get my few photos off my camera and onto my at-home laptop for uploading to Flickr, so I'm going to post a link to awesome local photographer Robert Loerzel's photoset from the show instead. They're much better than my shots anyway.
Afterward, I hightailed it up to Schubas for a King Sparrow show that had some awesome hype machine muscle behind it: a write-up from Chicago's own DeRo a few days prior and some prime-time love from Metromix in that morning's Red Eye. There was an impressively sizable crowd in attendance (esp. for a 10 pm show on a Monday night), and the guys definitely delivered. Though "Sightseers" will probably never not be my favorite song, I kept hearing other little things that I'd forgotten how much I loved: that cascading instrumental bridge in "Forest," the bouncy little pre-verse turnarounds in "Bones and Skin," and of course the overall sexy ferocity of "All's Cinnamon." I also love how their general collaborative kickassery prevents me from isolating any one element of their sound to the exclusion of the others; they work as such a seamless unit that a gush that starts out about John's drumming inevitably starts to transform in my brain into a gush about Sean's bass lines, which always leads back around to Eric's guitar and vocals. In short, these guys are the real deal. The Monday night rock show, triumphant once again.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Up, Away We Go, and Others
To use Dono's helpful and apt term, now it's time for another omnibus edition of Wrestling Entropy.
First off: Up, you guys! Of course, it's utterly delightful. The sublime image of the house floating over the cityscape, held aloft by that riot of candy-colored balloons brought tears to my eyes, and the simple but golden "chipmunk voice" gag with the dog collar made me laugh so hard that some lady in the theater turned around to glare at me. But, as with WALL-E, perhaps what left me most breathless was the filmmakers' obvious familiarity with and affection for film history: did anyone else catch the Eadweard Muybridge reference over the closing credits? I laughed hard, sharply, once, then sat there stunned as the image disappeared--did that really just get tossed off like that? 'Cause damn. Not to mention several of those loooong "wait for it" sight gags (Carl descending the staircase on the chairlift, Russell being dragged across the dirigible window) felt clearly influenced by Jacques Tati's sensibility (especially Playtime).
But more than any of that, I was deeply touched by the emotional poetry of the thing. For those of you who know a little about my family, the story reminded me a hell of a lot of my dad (only without the redemption [ouch]): crotchety old bastard can't let go of either his memories of the past or his stuff, which prevents him from engaging in the life that's right in front of his eyes in any sort of psychologically honest or present way. I sat there violently shaking my head yes, yes, yes, yes during the scene when Carl realizes that in order to get the house airborne again he has to divest himself of all the material possessions he'd been clinging to that were weighing him down. Somebody over at Pixar clearly understands the mechanics of grief, and healing.
Unlike Away We Go, which I was totally prepared to give a pass to...until they decide to go live in Verona's childhood home. Eurgh. I ran into my friend Ray at the theater, and we were both fairly disgusted with the ending. Why would this couple, who claims to place such a high priority on community, choose to go live in isolation among the ghosts of her dead parents? Especially when Burt's brother and niece were clearly in need of some help of their own? Pixar would have gotten it right: Up ends with the old man's house disappearing into the clouds (because you gotta let that shit go) and the formation of a newly configured, slightly improvised family unit. That's the right ending. Away We Go ends with a retreat into childhood and away from genuine engagement with other people under the guise of "making peace with the past" or some bullshit. This is not the right ending. Don't get me wrong--there's much more to commend Away We Go than I thought there would be (particularly the Montreal vignette and, as ever, Paul Schneider in general), but fuck that ending, man.
Elsewise: I caught the Man Man/Gogol Bordello show a few weeks back (pics here). I tell ya: there is almost no band working today that I trust as much as I implicitly trust Man Man. It doesn't even bother me that they don't banter with the audience. (I usually like a little banter.) They're just too busy creating a whole new world during the 30-45 minutes they have to give us. What more could banter possibly add to the experience? What an astonishing group of musicians.
As for Gogol Bordello, it's good to get recharged with that immigrant punk energy every once in a while. Plus, I couldn't help but marvel at their graphic design all night. Whoever designed their slingshot logo is totally firing on all cylinders: there's David and Goliath iconography combined with a sort of Marxist/populist ideology and a super juvenile punk rock sneer. Yes, please.
St. Vincent live at the Metro (pics) was a delightful way to spend a Sunday evening. For whatever reason, I haven't fully warmed to Actor yet, but I really enjoyed hearing all the songs live. (It definitely didn't hurt that she claimed it was the best night of the tour so far.) When she started really blasting on some of those apocalyptic guitar freak-outs, I just couldn't help grinning and thinking, "this is truly feminist music. This is the sound my fucking ovaries would make if amplified."
If each era gets the metanarrative about show folk and storytelling that it deserves, what does it say that the '70s got The Killing of a Chinese Bookie while we get The Brothers Bloom? Sigh. I don't mean to be a dick about it, and it's obviously unfair to put a young guy like Rian Johnson up against Cassavetes, but also--come the fuck on. "Live the story until it comes true," etc., etc. It's clearly a young person's movie--both from within and without. At the same time, though, I don't want to begrudge Johnson his apprenticeship because he's got a lot of raw talent and I want him to be able to continue to have a career. But, the wide-eyed naivete and quirk qua quirk really exhausted me. And I have a fairly high tolerance for that sort of thing.
Popular opinion seems to be that Zach Galifianakis makes/steals The Hangover, but I was rather partial to Ed Helms's performance. There's something quietly commanding about him here that I wasn't really expecting (Stephanie Zacharek, with whom I don't often agree, noticed this too). Of course the movie is outrageously offensive and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I've long had an inexplicable affection for this "shit goes down in Vegas" subgenre of movies, so I knew I couldn't miss it. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.
First off: Up, you guys! Of course, it's utterly delightful. The sublime image of the house floating over the cityscape, held aloft by that riot of candy-colored balloons brought tears to my eyes, and the simple but golden "chipmunk voice" gag with the dog collar made me laugh so hard that some lady in the theater turned around to glare at me. But, as with WALL-E, perhaps what left me most breathless was the filmmakers' obvious familiarity with and affection for film history: did anyone else catch the Eadweard Muybridge reference over the closing credits? I laughed hard, sharply, once, then sat there stunned as the image disappeared--did that really just get tossed off like that? 'Cause damn. Not to mention several of those loooong "wait for it" sight gags (Carl descending the staircase on the chairlift, Russell being dragged across the dirigible window) felt clearly influenced by Jacques Tati's sensibility (especially Playtime).
But more than any of that, I was deeply touched by the emotional poetry of the thing. For those of you who know a little about my family, the story reminded me a hell of a lot of my dad (only without the redemption [ouch]): crotchety old bastard can't let go of either his memories of the past or his stuff, which prevents him from engaging in the life that's right in front of his eyes in any sort of psychologically honest or present way. I sat there violently shaking my head yes, yes, yes, yes during the scene when Carl realizes that in order to get the house airborne again he has to divest himself of all the material possessions he'd been clinging to that were weighing him down. Somebody over at Pixar clearly understands the mechanics of grief, and healing.
Unlike Away We Go, which I was totally prepared to give a pass to...until they decide to go live in Verona's childhood home. Eurgh. I ran into my friend Ray at the theater, and we were both fairly disgusted with the ending. Why would this couple, who claims to place such a high priority on community, choose to go live in isolation among the ghosts of her dead parents? Especially when Burt's brother and niece were clearly in need of some help of their own? Pixar would have gotten it right: Up ends with the old man's house disappearing into the clouds (because you gotta let that shit go) and the formation of a newly configured, slightly improvised family unit. That's the right ending. Away We Go ends with a retreat into childhood and away from genuine engagement with other people under the guise of "making peace with the past" or some bullshit. This is not the right ending. Don't get me wrong--there's much more to commend Away We Go than I thought there would be (particularly the Montreal vignette and, as ever, Paul Schneider in general), but fuck that ending, man.
Elsewise: I caught the Man Man/Gogol Bordello show a few weeks back (pics here). I tell ya: there is almost no band working today that I trust as much as I implicitly trust Man Man. It doesn't even bother me that they don't banter with the audience. (I usually like a little banter.) They're just too busy creating a whole new world during the 30-45 minutes they have to give us. What more could banter possibly add to the experience? What an astonishing group of musicians.
As for Gogol Bordello, it's good to get recharged with that immigrant punk energy every once in a while. Plus, I couldn't help but marvel at their graphic design all night. Whoever designed their slingshot logo is totally firing on all cylinders: there's David and Goliath iconography combined with a sort of Marxist/populist ideology and a super juvenile punk rock sneer. Yes, please.
St. Vincent live at the Metro (pics) was a delightful way to spend a Sunday evening. For whatever reason, I haven't fully warmed to Actor yet, but I really enjoyed hearing all the songs live. (It definitely didn't hurt that she claimed it was the best night of the tour so far.) When she started really blasting on some of those apocalyptic guitar freak-outs, I just couldn't help grinning and thinking, "this is truly feminist music. This is the sound my fucking ovaries would make if amplified."
If each era gets the metanarrative about show folk and storytelling that it deserves, what does it say that the '70s got The Killing of a Chinese Bookie while we get The Brothers Bloom? Sigh. I don't mean to be a dick about it, and it's obviously unfair to put a young guy like Rian Johnson up against Cassavetes, but also--come the fuck on. "Live the story until it comes true," etc., etc. It's clearly a young person's movie--both from within and without. At the same time, though, I don't want to begrudge Johnson his apprenticeship because he's got a lot of raw talent and I want him to be able to continue to have a career. But, the wide-eyed naivete and quirk qua quirk really exhausted me. And I have a fairly high tolerance for that sort of thing.
Popular opinion seems to be that Zach Galifianakis makes/steals The Hangover, but I was rather partial to Ed Helms's performance. There's something quietly commanding about him here that I wasn't really expecting (Stephanie Zacharek, with whom I don't often agree, noticed this too). Of course the movie is outrageously offensive and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I've long had an inexplicable affection for this "shit goes down in Vegas" subgenre of movies, so I knew I couldn't miss it. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Well, Hello There, Stranger!
My darlings! I have to catch you up on all the fabulous goings-on around these parts lately. Usually when this blog is quiet, it's just because I'm being a lazy-pants, but this time it's actually because I've been too damn busy to sit down and write (in addition to being a lazy-pants). We gotta get through this briefly or we'll be here all day:
The Flight of the Conchords, Live at the Arie Crown Theater
I'm not a huge fan of the Flight of the Conchords or anything--I've only ever seen the first season of the TV show and don't own the CD--but someone offered me a free ticket, so hell if I was going to turn that down. The show was at, of all places, the cavernous Arie Crown Theater. As soon as I walked in, I thought, surely the size of this room will be death to whatever charms there may be in this show. But, damned if those guys didn't prove me wrong. Though the show would probably have been much better in a smaller venue, they have soooo much stage presence that they managed to keep the place humming with laughter and energy for their entire (surprisingly lengthy) set. Of course, it helps that they let a good chunk of their real-life charisma seep into the songs, rather than playing up their helpless sadsack shtick from the show--these guys are pretty fucking funny and pretty fucking talented, and you know they know it, and that's not a bad thing. By the end of the night, it was feeling a bit like sugar overload, but overall, I'm supremely pleased I had the chance to catch the show. Pictures here.
Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, Live at the Lakeshore Theater
When I visited my brother in San Francisco last year, he scored us some last-minute tickets to see Janeane Garofalo and Mary Lynn Rajskub do some stand-up comedy. It was an incredible night, and I stole a ridiculous amount of material from Janeane's set (the most notable being her bit about "the gravy boat"--I'm sure most of you who spend any time with me in real life are infinitely annoyed by my constant reuse of the term by now). When I saw that she was going to be coming to the Lakeshore Theater with Marc Maron (from whom I've also stolen a ridiculous amount of material over the years), I couldn't wait to have the chance to catch her again. I went with some gay boyfriends, and we had a delightful time. She's such an amazing talent. I almost got a little choked up after the show was over thinking about how big a part of my adult consciousness she's been. I'd always been a stand-up comedy nerd, even when I was probably too young to be watching much of what I was watching, but I feel like seeing her stand-up specials on Comedy Central when I was in high school was this amazing shift. She looked like me and was angry like me and was just ranting on this amazing tear, rather than delivering punchlines with the more typical stand-up comedy rhythms like (as much as I adore them) Judy Gold or Joy Behar or Rita Rudner. And for her still to be around, and still to be operating at this ridiculously smooth, high level feels like such an amazing gift.
Aleks and the Drummer, Live at the Empty Bottle
It was hard for me to believe that I'd still never seen Aleks and the Drummer play live in a proper venue (last year's brief set at the Wicker Park Street Festival barely counts), so I made the effort to catch their show at the Empty Bottle earlier this month. They're really a fabulous band, towering over the current proliferation of other boy/girl drums/keyboards groups. I think this is due mainly to their appealing weirdness--Aleks is just about as bat-shit crazy as they come (in a good way--that voice! those clothes!), and Deric, in his spasmodic ferocity, absolutely stands as one of the best rock drummers around town (and I'm seriously not just saying that because he's a pal). Catch 'em while you can, Chicagoans. Pictures here.
Leonard Cohen, Live at the Chicago Theater
Leonard Cohen's always been one of those guys I knew I should be into, but just never took the time. Oh sure, I'd heard him sing some of his songs here and there, as well as all the covers, of course ("My penis is like a Leonard Cohen song: everyone likes it better when it's covered"), and just kind of figured "OK, I got it. Deep voice, poetic lyrics, female back-up singers. Done." Well, what I never took the time to properly realize is that fandom is the aggregate of letting Leonard Cohen work on you--you can't just listen to one song and leave it at that. You have to be willing to absolutely drown in Leonard Cohen for a while, and then you'll be baptized as a hysterical drooling fan. Which is exactly what happened to me at the Chicago Theater. Benji--who's been a fan ever since he heard a DJ playing Cohen Live as he was packing up at the end of the night at the bar in Bloomington--offered me one of his two tickets, and I'm infinitely grateful that he did. It was an absolutely magical night. First and foremost, of course, were the songs. And when I say songs, I don't just mean "bits of music and lyrics written and played by a singer and his band"--I mean, these are songs. There's just no denying the craft at work there. There's a reason why people cover his stuff all the time; it must feel like putting on a really well-tailored set of trousers or expensive pair of shoes. They're just that well done. But the man himself was absolutely oozing with energy and joie de vivre. He played for something like two and a half hours, literally skipping on and off the stage between sets and encores. His reverence for both the act of performing and for the other musicians on stage with him was deeply touching. He would step back and hold his fedora to his heart whenever anyone was taking a solo, and the two times he went around the stage introducing everyone individually, he bowed to them all with true respect, humility, and affection. And as all this was unfolding, it was hard also not to be reminded of his age, how this might be one of the last times any of us might ever see him perform live on stage. It didn't feel like a victory lap in the lazy or self-congratulatory sense--it felt like a man preemptively saying farewell on his own terms. Needless to say, I was a teary-eyed wreck by the end of the show. You can be sure I'm a huge Leonard Cohen fan now. Pictures here.
State of Play
If you're gonna go in for an elegy-to-newspaper-journalism movie, you'd be far better off with The Soloist. State of Play isn't bad, necessarily, it's just a bit...thin. (Unlike Russell Crowe, amiright? Hey-oh!) The cast is full of amazing actors (oh, Helen Mirren, cradle me to your bosom and insult me, please), but the script felt incredibly flat. It's hard to imagine what would have attracted so much talent to the project, other than maybe working with director Kevin Macdonald hot off his success with The Last King of Scotland.
Baby Teeth, Live at the Empty Bottle, with My Dear Disco
What the hell--springtime on a random Thursday: might as well go check out a Baby Teeth gig. They're getting ready to release their next LP this summer, and they brought a shitload of new jams to the Bottle last week. It really made them step up their game a bit, too. They played with an almost nervous intensity I've rarely seen in them before--and it suited them well. Perhaps they were also encouraged by the shit-hot opening set from Ann Arbor's My Dear Disco (between them and Nomo, what the FUCK is in the water up there?!). Imagine a version of Maroon 5 populated by a bunch of dorky yet adorable college-age dudes and a set of uilleann pipes, and you can kind of envision what they're up to. Apparently they usually work with a female singer, too, but her voice was blown out, so she wasn't on stage that night. I can't even imagine how much more over-the-top awesome that would make the group, though. They had incredible energy and incredible musicianship. I'll look forward to seeing them again soon. Pictures here.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Despite having been obsessed with the movie since its release in 2001, I'd never had the opportunity to see the show live on stage. The American Theater Company has been putting it on this month, though, and I knew I had to jump at the chance for tickets. Ohhhh, kittens, let me tell you how hard I sobbed. Going in, I pretty much knew I'd be a goner by the end at least, but I wasn't anticipating how much just hearing the songs themselves would kill me. I forget what an emotional attachment I have to them. All it took was the opening notes of "The Origin of Love" and I was like, "oh. Right. This music" and the waterworks just started flowing. I don't know that the production itself was necessarily exceptional--though the wardrobe person wins major points for putting Hedwig in a punked-out Obama "CHANGE" t-shirt dress for her entrance--but there's just something incredibly special about the show itself. Even though it's been a number of years since I've actually sat down and watched the movie, it was fascinating to see the emphasis the two media put on different aspects of the story. When you're not distracted by the physical presence of Tommy Gnosis, the relationship between Hedwig and Yitzhak gains so much more resonance and importance. Giving her back her power at the end of the show and ending with her on stage while Hedwig walks off, almost stripped bare, becomes such a beautiful gesture after you've spent an hour and a half watching her sit there, seething quietly, literally on the periphery of the stage and our awareness. And because we haven't been distracted by the actual sight of Tommy and Hedwig's love affair and we're not craving the sugar rush of that "first love" narrative, the D/s dynamic is allowed to flourish in a much more organic way here, whereas it always felt like kind of an afterthought to me in the movie. Anyway, I'm super, super glad I finally had a chance to see it live. (I snapped a quick picture of the awesome set design.)
Angels & Demons
Sublimely hideous. This thing was so talky it should have been a radio play, while also being gratuitously, graphically violent (to compensate?). Tom Hanks does a game job of trying to keep the thing afloat, but it's really Ewan McGregor's movie. The choice that he makes to play his character as perpetually soft-spoken was kind of brilliant. And the plot twist involving the helicopter totally sucked me in; I jumped right to the assumption they wanted me to make and loved them for playing on my gullibility. I found the overall logistical simplicity of the movie amusing, though. It seems that an easy attack that people often make on faith and Western religions especially is that they're reductive and binary--good/evil, right/wrong, eye for an eye, etc. But this movie was doing the same thing with "knowledge"/"research." It was never a matter of truly interpreting anything; it was just "here is a symbol; do you know what the symbol means? If yes, then proceed to the next plot point."
Destroyer (solo), Live at the Empty Bottle
Dan Bejar is becoming one of those musicians that I will immediately, reflexively go see if he's playing in town. It just feels like a compulsion, like I need to be in his presence if he's here, maybe as some sort of energetic exchange for all the pleasure that his music brings me. He played a solo set at the Bottle on Sunday night, and it, appropriately, felt like something holy. He reached deep into the Destroyer back catalog, thrilling the fanboys clustered around the edge of the stage, while also hitting us with some Swan Lake and New Pornos ("Streets of Fire"). I will also stand by my assertion that not nearly enough people give this guy credit for being as funny as he is. His ability to perform a meta-narrative of Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert at the same time that he's giving us a legitimately gorgeous Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert was just brain-ticklingly awesome. "Did I play anything from Your Blues?" he mumbled into the mic at one point about halfway in to the set. The place went bonkers with people shouting out song requests. "Forget it. That album's too hard," he mumbled back, not so much shooting down the idea as making it clear he never meant it in the first place. A lot of times that night I found myself laughing like I laugh at Wes Anderson movies--alone, in the odd corners around the jokes, not even so much at anything funny that's happening. He's really such a singular talent. Pictures here.
Less germane to the usual pop cultural subject matter of this blog, but no less time-consuming and significant in my life recently: I did another 30-day juice fast, lost ten pounds, cut off all my hair, and spent a weekend helping out around the Zen Buddhist temple that I attend during the celebration of the Buddha's birthday (kinda like Buddhist Christmas). So, yeah. It's been a busy few weeks. How about you, my darlings? What's going on in your corner of the world?
The Flight of the Conchords, Live at the Arie Crown Theater
I'm not a huge fan of the Flight of the Conchords or anything--I've only ever seen the first season of the TV show and don't own the CD--but someone offered me a free ticket, so hell if I was going to turn that down. The show was at, of all places, the cavernous Arie Crown Theater. As soon as I walked in, I thought, surely the size of this room will be death to whatever charms there may be in this show. But, damned if those guys didn't prove me wrong. Though the show would probably have been much better in a smaller venue, they have soooo much stage presence that they managed to keep the place humming with laughter and energy for their entire (surprisingly lengthy) set. Of course, it helps that they let a good chunk of their real-life charisma seep into the songs, rather than playing up their helpless sadsack shtick from the show--these guys are pretty fucking funny and pretty fucking talented, and you know they know it, and that's not a bad thing. By the end of the night, it was feeling a bit like sugar overload, but overall, I'm supremely pleased I had the chance to catch the show. Pictures here.
Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, Live at the Lakeshore Theater
When I visited my brother in San Francisco last year, he scored us some last-minute tickets to see Janeane Garofalo and Mary Lynn Rajskub do some stand-up comedy. It was an incredible night, and I stole a ridiculous amount of material from Janeane's set (the most notable being her bit about "the gravy boat"--I'm sure most of you who spend any time with me in real life are infinitely annoyed by my constant reuse of the term by now). When I saw that she was going to be coming to the Lakeshore Theater with Marc Maron (from whom I've also stolen a ridiculous amount of material over the years), I couldn't wait to have the chance to catch her again. I went with some gay boyfriends, and we had a delightful time. She's such an amazing talent. I almost got a little choked up after the show was over thinking about how big a part of my adult consciousness she's been. I'd always been a stand-up comedy nerd, even when I was probably too young to be watching much of what I was watching, but I feel like seeing her stand-up specials on Comedy Central when I was in high school was this amazing shift. She looked like me and was angry like me and was just ranting on this amazing tear, rather than delivering punchlines with the more typical stand-up comedy rhythms like (as much as I adore them) Judy Gold or Joy Behar or Rita Rudner. And for her still to be around, and still to be operating at this ridiculously smooth, high level feels like such an amazing gift.
Aleks and the Drummer, Live at the Empty Bottle
It was hard for me to believe that I'd still never seen Aleks and the Drummer play live in a proper venue (last year's brief set at the Wicker Park Street Festival barely counts), so I made the effort to catch their show at the Empty Bottle earlier this month. They're really a fabulous band, towering over the current proliferation of other boy/girl drums/keyboards groups. I think this is due mainly to their appealing weirdness--Aleks is just about as bat-shit crazy as they come (in a good way--that voice! those clothes!), and Deric, in his spasmodic ferocity, absolutely stands as one of the best rock drummers around town (and I'm seriously not just saying that because he's a pal). Catch 'em while you can, Chicagoans. Pictures here.
Leonard Cohen, Live at the Chicago Theater
Leonard Cohen's always been one of those guys I knew I should be into, but just never took the time. Oh sure, I'd heard him sing some of his songs here and there, as well as all the covers, of course ("My penis is like a Leonard Cohen song: everyone likes it better when it's covered"), and just kind of figured "OK, I got it. Deep voice, poetic lyrics, female back-up singers. Done." Well, what I never took the time to properly realize is that fandom is the aggregate of letting Leonard Cohen work on you--you can't just listen to one song and leave it at that. You have to be willing to absolutely drown in Leonard Cohen for a while, and then you'll be baptized as a hysterical drooling fan. Which is exactly what happened to me at the Chicago Theater. Benji--who's been a fan ever since he heard a DJ playing Cohen Live as he was packing up at the end of the night at the bar in Bloomington--offered me one of his two tickets, and I'm infinitely grateful that he did. It was an absolutely magical night. First and foremost, of course, were the songs. And when I say songs, I don't just mean "bits of music and lyrics written and played by a singer and his band"--I mean, these are songs. There's just no denying the craft at work there. There's a reason why people cover his stuff all the time; it must feel like putting on a really well-tailored set of trousers or expensive pair of shoes. They're just that well done. But the man himself was absolutely oozing with energy and joie de vivre. He played for something like two and a half hours, literally skipping on and off the stage between sets and encores. His reverence for both the act of performing and for the other musicians on stage with him was deeply touching. He would step back and hold his fedora to his heart whenever anyone was taking a solo, and the two times he went around the stage introducing everyone individually, he bowed to them all with true respect, humility, and affection. And as all this was unfolding, it was hard also not to be reminded of his age, how this might be one of the last times any of us might ever see him perform live on stage. It didn't feel like a victory lap in the lazy or self-congratulatory sense--it felt like a man preemptively saying farewell on his own terms. Needless to say, I was a teary-eyed wreck by the end of the show. You can be sure I'm a huge Leonard Cohen fan now. Pictures here.
State of Play
If you're gonna go in for an elegy-to-newspaper-journalism movie, you'd be far better off with The Soloist. State of Play isn't bad, necessarily, it's just a bit...thin. (Unlike Russell Crowe, amiright? Hey-oh!) The cast is full of amazing actors (oh, Helen Mirren, cradle me to your bosom and insult me, please), but the script felt incredibly flat. It's hard to imagine what would have attracted so much talent to the project, other than maybe working with director Kevin Macdonald hot off his success with The Last King of Scotland.
Baby Teeth, Live at the Empty Bottle, with My Dear Disco
What the hell--springtime on a random Thursday: might as well go check out a Baby Teeth gig. They're getting ready to release their next LP this summer, and they brought a shitload of new jams to the Bottle last week. It really made them step up their game a bit, too. They played with an almost nervous intensity I've rarely seen in them before--and it suited them well. Perhaps they were also encouraged by the shit-hot opening set from Ann Arbor's My Dear Disco (between them and Nomo, what the FUCK is in the water up there?!). Imagine a version of Maroon 5 populated by a bunch of dorky yet adorable college-age dudes and a set of uilleann pipes, and you can kind of envision what they're up to. Apparently they usually work with a female singer, too, but her voice was blown out, so she wasn't on stage that night. I can't even imagine how much more over-the-top awesome that would make the group, though. They had incredible energy and incredible musicianship. I'll look forward to seeing them again soon. Pictures here.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Despite having been obsessed with the movie since its release in 2001, I'd never had the opportunity to see the show live on stage. The American Theater Company has been putting it on this month, though, and I knew I had to jump at the chance for tickets. Ohhhh, kittens, let me tell you how hard I sobbed. Going in, I pretty much knew I'd be a goner by the end at least, but I wasn't anticipating how much just hearing the songs themselves would kill me. I forget what an emotional attachment I have to them. All it took was the opening notes of "The Origin of Love" and I was like, "oh. Right. This music" and the waterworks just started flowing. I don't know that the production itself was necessarily exceptional--though the wardrobe person wins major points for putting Hedwig in a punked-out Obama "CHANGE" t-shirt dress for her entrance--but there's just something incredibly special about the show itself. Even though it's been a number of years since I've actually sat down and watched the movie, it was fascinating to see the emphasis the two media put on different aspects of the story. When you're not distracted by the physical presence of Tommy Gnosis, the relationship between Hedwig and Yitzhak gains so much more resonance and importance. Giving her back her power at the end of the show and ending with her on stage while Hedwig walks off, almost stripped bare, becomes such a beautiful gesture after you've spent an hour and a half watching her sit there, seething quietly, literally on the periphery of the stage and our awareness. And because we haven't been distracted by the actual sight of Tommy and Hedwig's love affair and we're not craving the sugar rush of that "first love" narrative, the D/s dynamic is allowed to flourish in a much more organic way here, whereas it always felt like kind of an afterthought to me in the movie. Anyway, I'm super, super glad I finally had a chance to see it live. (I snapped a quick picture of the awesome set design.)
Angels & Demons
Sublimely hideous. This thing was so talky it should have been a radio play, while also being gratuitously, graphically violent (to compensate?). Tom Hanks does a game job of trying to keep the thing afloat, but it's really Ewan McGregor's movie. The choice that he makes to play his character as perpetually soft-spoken was kind of brilliant. And the plot twist involving the helicopter totally sucked me in; I jumped right to the assumption they wanted me to make and loved them for playing on my gullibility. I found the overall logistical simplicity of the movie amusing, though. It seems that an easy attack that people often make on faith and Western religions especially is that they're reductive and binary--good/evil, right/wrong, eye for an eye, etc. But this movie was doing the same thing with "knowledge"/"research." It was never a matter of truly interpreting anything; it was just "here is a symbol; do you know what the symbol means? If yes, then proceed to the next plot point."
Destroyer (solo), Live at the Empty Bottle
Dan Bejar is becoming one of those musicians that I will immediately, reflexively go see if he's playing in town. It just feels like a compulsion, like I need to be in his presence if he's here, maybe as some sort of energetic exchange for all the pleasure that his music brings me. He played a solo set at the Bottle on Sunday night, and it, appropriately, felt like something holy. He reached deep into the Destroyer back catalog, thrilling the fanboys clustered around the edge of the stage, while also hitting us with some Swan Lake and New Pornos ("Streets of Fire"). I will also stand by my assertion that not nearly enough people give this guy credit for being as funny as he is. His ability to perform a meta-narrative of Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert at the same time that he's giving us a legitimately gorgeous Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert was just brain-ticklingly awesome. "Did I play anything from Your Blues?" he mumbled into the mic at one point about halfway in to the set. The place went bonkers with people shouting out song requests. "Forget it. That album's too hard," he mumbled back, not so much shooting down the idea as making it clear he never meant it in the first place. A lot of times that night I found myself laughing like I laugh at Wes Anderson movies--alone, in the odd corners around the jokes, not even so much at anything funny that's happening. He's really such a singular talent. Pictures here.
Less germane to the usual pop cultural subject matter of this blog, but no less time-consuming and significant in my life recently: I did another 30-day juice fast, lost ten pounds, cut off all my hair, and spent a weekend helping out around the Zen Buddhist temple that I attend during the celebration of the Buddha's birthday (kinda like Buddhist Christmas). So, yeah. It's been a busy few weeks. How about you, my darlings? What's going on in your corner of the world?
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Cold Hands, Warm Heart
My darlings! What's been keeping you warm this cold, snowy winter? (That is, other than living in AZ/LA/Austin, you motherfuckers.) As for me:
~Patton Oswalt's Werewolves and Lollipops. Bushman evangelized it to me over Thanksgiving, but it wasn't until I listened to it a few times while I was sick in bed earlier in January that the old familiar Felusian obsession started to kick in. There's so much melody in the way this guy uses language. Just listen to the pacing and cadence in his words and delivery. It's really no coincidence that he's on Sub Pop, right? With that pitch-perfect, instantly ingratiating combination of sweetness and bite that the best bands on their roster are known for? It actually doesn't phase me in the slightest if one of his bits pops up when I'm listening to my iPod on shuffle--which is really saying something coming from me, since I'm usually weirdly sensitive about listening to speech through headphones (as a rule, I can't handle podcasts for this very reason). It's just absurdly elegant stuff. Highly recommended.
~Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion. I AM NOT MADE OF STONE, PEOPLE! RTW and I were discussing the album a few days after it (officially!) came out, and he said that the album didn't "surprise" him the way Strawberry Jam did. I think that's well said, and squares with my own experience of them both. But, once MPP finally clicked for me, it clicked hard. I also quite enjoyed Nick Sylvester's post (via) on all the Hipster Runoff-inspired backlash.
~Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper.
~Baby Teeth live at the Empty Bottle, celebrating the release of their "Hustle Beach" single. They were unfortunately beset by some technical difficulties and other mishaps (Jim's amp blew up about a quarter of the way into the set, something got bobbled after the long, dramatic intro to "The Birds Are Crying" and they had to start the song over again, they began "Looking for a Road" in the wrong key and had to start that one over again too), but it's still always a treat to see them, no matter the circumstances. Plus, Abraham played guitar on the final song of the set, which had to rival Rufus Wainwright's guitar playing for sheer awkward wonderfulness. I nearly died laughing when he started tuning up and proclaimed, "we're going to play the Satriani song that Coldplay ripped off."
~JT & the Clouds. Before Baby Teeth went on, the crowd was treated to a bloody fantastic set by Chicago-based band JT & the Clouds. These guys have apparently been around for a few years, and I want to punch myself back in time for only discovering them now. Imagine Lyle Lovett fronting an Americana-inflected soul band, and you're maybe 40 percent of the way to conceptualizing their appeal. Lead singer Jeremy Lindsay makes beautiful art out of his young-David-Byrne-esque awkwardness (as far as being an "uptight white guy trying to stumble into grace," as Jim White once described Byrne in The Believer), riding a line similar to the one Dan Bejar has mastered where there are quotation marks around quotation marks (around quotation marks?) around his whole performance. There's an underlying sense of humor to the proceedings that's so bizarre and so winning and so integral to the success of what's happening on stage. It's like someone put all these guys' brains in backward. The other part of their success can be chalked up to the fact that the guys in the band are flat-out incredible musicians. They're casually tossing off four-part harmonies over strutting soul grooves like they came up in an era when those virtues were expected of gigging musicians and not exceptional. I just stood there with a huge, stupid grin plastered to my face the entire time. I don't think I've been this surprised and excited by a previously unknown-to-me opening act since we were first introduced to Polly Paulusma before the Divine Comedy's show at Schubas in '04. (I mean, at least I'd heard of the Cold War Kids before they first grabbed my attention in '06.) Chicagoans, please be sure to check these guys out the next time they're playing around town. You won't be disappointed, I promise. The rest of you should check out their most recent album The City's Hot Yeah the City's Hot and enjoy all the semi-obscure Chicago geographical references.
~More local music! What Wrestling Entropy post would be complete these days without a pimp for King Sparrow? Catch 'em tomorrow night at the Subterranean.
~Patton Oswalt's Werewolves and Lollipops. Bushman evangelized it to me over Thanksgiving, but it wasn't until I listened to it a few times while I was sick in bed earlier in January that the old familiar Felusian obsession started to kick in. There's so much melody in the way this guy uses language. Just listen to the pacing and cadence in his words and delivery. It's really no coincidence that he's on Sub Pop, right? With that pitch-perfect, instantly ingratiating combination of sweetness and bite that the best bands on their roster are known for? It actually doesn't phase me in the slightest if one of his bits pops up when I'm listening to my iPod on shuffle--which is really saying something coming from me, since I'm usually weirdly sensitive about listening to speech through headphones (as a rule, I can't handle podcasts for this very reason). It's just absurdly elegant stuff. Highly recommended.
~Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion. I AM NOT MADE OF STONE, PEOPLE! RTW and I were discussing the album a few days after it (officially!) came out, and he said that the album didn't "surprise" him the way Strawberry Jam did. I think that's well said, and squares with my own experience of them both. But, once MPP finally clicked for me, it clicked hard. I also quite enjoyed Nick Sylvester's post (via) on all the Hipster Runoff-inspired backlash.
~Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper.
~Baby Teeth live at the Empty Bottle, celebrating the release of their "Hustle Beach" single. They were unfortunately beset by some technical difficulties and other mishaps (Jim's amp blew up about a quarter of the way into the set, something got bobbled after the long, dramatic intro to "The Birds Are Crying" and they had to start the song over again, they began "Looking for a Road" in the wrong key and had to start that one over again too), but it's still always a treat to see them, no matter the circumstances. Plus, Abraham played guitar on the final song of the set, which had to rival Rufus Wainwright's guitar playing for sheer awkward wonderfulness. I nearly died laughing when he started tuning up and proclaimed, "we're going to play the Satriani song that Coldplay ripped off."
~JT & the Clouds. Before Baby Teeth went on, the crowd was treated to a bloody fantastic set by Chicago-based band JT & the Clouds. These guys have apparently been around for a few years, and I want to punch myself back in time for only discovering them now. Imagine Lyle Lovett fronting an Americana-inflected soul band, and you're maybe 40 percent of the way to conceptualizing their appeal. Lead singer Jeremy Lindsay makes beautiful art out of his young-David-Byrne-esque awkwardness (as far as being an "uptight white guy trying to stumble into grace," as Jim White once described Byrne in The Believer), riding a line similar to the one Dan Bejar has mastered where there are quotation marks around quotation marks (around quotation marks?) around his whole performance. There's an underlying sense of humor to the proceedings that's so bizarre and so winning and so integral to the success of what's happening on stage. It's like someone put all these guys' brains in backward. The other part of their success can be chalked up to the fact that the guys in the band are flat-out incredible musicians. They're casually tossing off four-part harmonies over strutting soul grooves like they came up in an era when those virtues were expected of gigging musicians and not exceptional. I just stood there with a huge, stupid grin plastered to my face the entire time. I don't think I've been this surprised and excited by a previously unknown-to-me opening act since we were first introduced to Polly Paulusma before the Divine Comedy's show at Schubas in '04. (I mean, at least I'd heard of the Cold War Kids before they first grabbed my attention in '06.) Chicagoans, please be sure to check these guys out the next time they're playing around town. You won't be disappointed, I promise. The rest of you should check out their most recent album The City's Hot Yeah the City's Hot and enjoy all the semi-obscure Chicago geographical references.
~More local music! What Wrestling Entropy post would be complete these days without a pimp for King Sparrow? Catch 'em tomorrow night at the Subterranean.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Early November Pop Notes
SB asked me recently, "don't you have to write about the TV on the Radio show on your blog?" Truth is, I wasn't really planning on it. I just didn't feel like I needed to pile on them again after my Dear Science review. As I mentioned to Parowpyro over email, I can't think of another band I like as much as TVotR that's left me as resoundingly underwhelmed as they have recently (aside from perhaps Bloc Party--I could barely get through Intimacy). I'm glad I finally had a chance to see them live and all, but the show did absolutely nothing for me. Unlike a lot of folks, I actively enjoy Sitek's overstuffed production aesthetic, so the songs, translated live, were missing quite a bit of oomph for me, even when they brought a whole shitload of people onstage for a percussion jam and sent the horn section up into one of the boxes. I swear, I'm not trying to be stubborn or contrarian or whatevs, I just wasn't feeling it.
Openers the Dirtbombs fell a little bit to one side of the too-loud/too-heavy spectrum for my taste to make me want to listen to their stuff on a regular basis, but they were enjoyable enough live. The one thing that really endeared them to me, though, was the way they utilized what's usually just dead-air space after their set: their lead singer/guitarist and one of their drummers (yes, sigh, one of their drummers) started to unplug and pack up their gear as the lights came up, while the other guitar player, the other drummer, and the bassist continued to vamp on a nice little groove. As the bassist, and then the guitar player, began to drop out, splinter off, and pack up, the drummer kept his backbeat steady, even as the roadies began to disassemble the drum kit out from underneath him, until he was just banging on the side of the kick drum. It was a highly amusing use of that transitional time, and a fun challenge to see how long they could keep it going. I cheered way louder for that stunt that I did for any of their other songs that night. I just appreciated that extra little bit of silliness and playing with the form of "rock show opening set."
Movie-wise, I made damn sure to get my ass out to see Rachel Getting Married and loved it, loved it, loved it. I don't know if it's just because I've been to four weddings this year since mid-August (with a fifth coming up this weekend!), but it just totally wrecked me. A handful of the people I've talked to about the film have complained about the meandering pace and the ridiculously idealized/utopian vision of the attendees, the music and other entertainment at the reception, and of course the wedding itself. Aside from the fact that I have an inherent soft spot for these kinds of movies where so much of the pleasure of the piece is derived from watching beautiful, talented people give of their beauty and talent in what feels like real time (it reminded me a lot of sentimental fave The Anniversary Party), I think it's precisely those elements that are key to the film's success. You need them to be able to breathe a bit, to unwind from all the horrifyingly tense scenes of family drama. It would just be too relentlessly unpleasant, claustrophobic, and even melodramatic otherwise. I just felt like it was extraordinarily well paced, both from scene to scene and from front to back, especially as information about Rachel gets parceled out. The right to happiness you see she's earned so dearly by the time she's ready to walk down the aisle absolutely destroyed me. It just hit me in a deeply personal place. Seriously, I was a mess there in the theater. I wouldn't say that Anne Hathaway is brilliant, though she's used extremely effectively and certainly has scenes of brilliance (the cringe-inducing speech at the rehearsal dinner stands out especially). Kudos to the ever-enjoyable Bill Irwin for elevating what could have been a boring patriarch character (the malaprop "hungabungas" for "hamburgers"--whether improvised or appearing in the actual script--made me want to barf with glee, it was such a perfectly dead-on one-word encapsulation of his genial suburban dad attitude), and, all my recent carping about TVotR to one side, I thought the casting of Tunde Adebimpe was inspired. He's clearly very attractive, but not in an over-the-top kind of way (imagine if the part had been played by Taye Diggs or whoever--egad), and he's got such a quiet, gentle strength in his onscreen presence that was absolutely necessary for getting you to connect with the otherwise underwritten character. I'm not necessarily recommending this movie to you--if your expectations are too high from all the glowing write-ups it's received already, I don't want to contribute to the disappointment they'll probably engender in you if/when you eventually see it. Plus, I'm just not in the mood to fight about it too much, because, as I said, I loved it, full stop, and just kind of want to keep my warm feelings about it for a little while longer.
I also had a chance to catch up with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd been hoping would be a teenage, indie rock Before Sunrise set in New York, but ended up being more like a millennial indie rock Adventures in Babysitting set in New York without the urban scariness (the city is definitely a benevolent presence throughout in that by-now cliched "the city is another character!" kind of way). Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but...expectation management and all. Cera's charm, while not exactly wearing thin quite yet, could just use a fresher environment to flourish in; I'll be eager, for obvious reasons, to see how he fares in the Scott Pilgrim movie.
I just can't get enough of the Sea and Cake's new one. Honestly, I now think a lot of my indie rock fatigue from last month was really just disappointment that none of those new releases was Car Alarm. After growing to love Everybody so much last year, I didn't really realize how much I was looking forward to the follow-up. It's dandy. Just really easy on the ears--and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. My dad and a fellow musician friend of his always used to say of their favorite jazz soloists "they play it the way you want to hear it played," and I think the same is eminently true of the Sea and Cake in general.
Juana Molina's Un Dia has also gotten quite a bit of play recently. Kittens, this is music to blow the remaining autumn leaves right off the treetops. Either that or to keep those lonely ones left over plastered right where they are, melancholy but vibrant, lit from inside with a dying fire, in perpetuity. Everything I've ever read about Molina has led me to believe I'd respond really well to her work, and I'm happy not to have been wrong in that assumption.
"And then, he DJ'ed the afterparty." Hallelujah. Bring it.
Openers the Dirtbombs fell a little bit to one side of the too-loud/too-heavy spectrum for my taste to make me want to listen to their stuff on a regular basis, but they were enjoyable enough live. The one thing that really endeared them to me, though, was the way they utilized what's usually just dead-air space after their set: their lead singer/guitarist and one of their drummers (yes, sigh, one of their drummers) started to unplug and pack up their gear as the lights came up, while the other guitar player, the other drummer, and the bassist continued to vamp on a nice little groove. As the bassist, and then the guitar player, began to drop out, splinter off, and pack up, the drummer kept his backbeat steady, even as the roadies began to disassemble the drum kit out from underneath him, until he was just banging on the side of the kick drum. It was a highly amusing use of that transitional time, and a fun challenge to see how long they could keep it going. I cheered way louder for that stunt that I did for any of their other songs that night. I just appreciated that extra little bit of silliness and playing with the form of "rock show opening set."
Movie-wise, I made damn sure to get my ass out to see Rachel Getting Married and loved it, loved it, loved it. I don't know if it's just because I've been to four weddings this year since mid-August (with a fifth coming up this weekend!), but it just totally wrecked me. A handful of the people I've talked to about the film have complained about the meandering pace and the ridiculously idealized/utopian vision of the attendees, the music and other entertainment at the reception, and of course the wedding itself. Aside from the fact that I have an inherent soft spot for these kinds of movies where so much of the pleasure of the piece is derived from watching beautiful, talented people give of their beauty and talent in what feels like real time (it reminded me a lot of sentimental fave The Anniversary Party), I think it's precisely those elements that are key to the film's success. You need them to be able to breathe a bit, to unwind from all the horrifyingly tense scenes of family drama. It would just be too relentlessly unpleasant, claustrophobic, and even melodramatic otherwise. I just felt like it was extraordinarily well paced, both from scene to scene and from front to back, especially as information about Rachel gets parceled out. The right to happiness you see she's earned so dearly by the time she's ready to walk down the aisle absolutely destroyed me. It just hit me in a deeply personal place. Seriously, I was a mess there in the theater. I wouldn't say that Anne Hathaway is brilliant, though she's used extremely effectively and certainly has scenes of brilliance (the cringe-inducing speech at the rehearsal dinner stands out especially). Kudos to the ever-enjoyable Bill Irwin for elevating what could have been a boring patriarch character (the malaprop "hungabungas" for "hamburgers"--whether improvised or appearing in the actual script--made me want to barf with glee, it was such a perfectly dead-on one-word encapsulation of his genial suburban dad attitude), and, all my recent carping about TVotR to one side, I thought the casting of Tunde Adebimpe was inspired. He's clearly very attractive, but not in an over-the-top kind of way (imagine if the part had been played by Taye Diggs or whoever--egad), and he's got such a quiet, gentle strength in his onscreen presence that was absolutely necessary for getting you to connect with the otherwise underwritten character. I'm not necessarily recommending this movie to you--if your expectations are too high from all the glowing write-ups it's received already, I don't want to contribute to the disappointment they'll probably engender in you if/when you eventually see it. Plus, I'm just not in the mood to fight about it too much, because, as I said, I loved it, full stop, and just kind of want to keep my warm feelings about it for a little while longer.
I also had a chance to catch up with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd been hoping would be a teenage, indie rock Before Sunrise set in New York, but ended up being more like a millennial indie rock Adventures in Babysitting set in New York without the urban scariness (the city is definitely a benevolent presence throughout in that by-now cliched "the city is another character!" kind of way). Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but...expectation management and all. Cera's charm, while not exactly wearing thin quite yet, could just use a fresher environment to flourish in; I'll be eager, for obvious reasons, to see how he fares in the Scott Pilgrim movie.
I just can't get enough of the Sea and Cake's new one. Honestly, I now think a lot of my indie rock fatigue from last month was really just disappointment that none of those new releases was Car Alarm. After growing to love Everybody so much last year, I didn't really realize how much I was looking forward to the follow-up. It's dandy. Just really easy on the ears--and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. My dad and a fellow musician friend of his always used to say of their favorite jazz soloists "they play it the way you want to hear it played," and I think the same is eminently true of the Sea and Cake in general.
Juana Molina's Un Dia has also gotten quite a bit of play recently. Kittens, this is music to blow the remaining autumn leaves right off the treetops. Either that or to keep those lonely ones left over plastered right where they are, melancholy but vibrant, lit from inside with a dying fire, in perpetuity. Everything I've ever read about Molina has led me to believe I'd respond really well to her work, and I'm happy not to have been wrong in that assumption.
"And then, he DJ'ed the afterparty." Hallelujah. Bring it.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Man Man, Live at the Bottom Lounge
Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty has written insightfully recently about the "cluster of impressions" you often form about a particular artist or band before you've ever heard their music based on the general way other people talk about it (usually reductively, usually in a way that makes you think it's not for you). On a somewhat related note, I had the joy of discovering this weekend what it's actually like to see Man Man perform live, which was so much more interesting than what I'd been assuming it would be like to see Man Man perform live over the past three years that I've been trying to get to one of their shows. Sure, there's the white clothes and the warpaint and the circus pirate Salvation Army band Looney Tunes song structures, but does anybody talk about how smart these guys are? Even when I'd heard a million times over that old chestnut "they're so much better live," I just assumed that was a testament to their energy or insanity or a general anything-goes unpredictability. But I wasn't really prepared--at least until I read Honus Honus's comment in a recent issue of Magnet magazine that his intention was to make the band a musical version of the Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain--to be confronted with this overwhelmingly intelligent controlling consciousness humming behind and in the spaces between the notes. These dudes know exactly what they're doing, and, three albums and many, many tours into their career, they've gotten absurdly good at doing it. (I was at the early show on Saturday night and have no idea how they were going to do all that again immediately thereafter.)
It's not exactly that they're hiding how smart they are or anything--it's more that their chosen aesthetic allows them to work on two levels simultaneously. The cliched, received-wisdom-about-Man-Man level is the level that allowed all those fourteen-year-old boys to flail around in a mini-mosh pit at the lip of the stage, just buzzed out of their gourds on the electricity in the music and performance. (And let me tell you--I very rarely ever wish I were a fourteen-year-old boy, but I sure as hell did on Saturday night. It would have felt surpassingly awesome to be able to participate, and reciprocate, with the show in that way.) That's the level you expect, the level you can predict. But the second level, the quieter level that you'll never really see until you're present in a room with them when they're doing their thing live on stage is the level that...what? I'm having a hard time even conceptualizing what it is. It's a level of confidence, I suppose--their own confidence that they're in complete control of what they're doing, which in turn gave me as an audience member the confidence to trust them to take me where they were going to take me. (This is the same confidence I felt last summer when I saw of Montreal play for the first time at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and in many ways I think the comparison is apt.)
This confidence also binds together all the disparate elements that compose the standard Man Man talking points (the aforementioned white clothes, warpaint, etc.). When someone starts describing those aspects of their performances, it tends to sound like the most eye-rollingly hipsterrific collection of willfully random yet somehow artsy/pretentious affectations smashed together to give an overall impression of "OMG, crazy!" But it's actually all remarkably, even precisely, balanced in practice, like some sort of exquisitely spiced curry that plays sweetness and heat and savory elements off each other until your primary impression is just "holy fuck, I don't know what this is, but I know I want more of it."
And for as much as I've been enjoying Rabbit Habits this year, the album is almost rendered obsolete by my desire to never listen to their music anymore unless I can hear it live, so overwhelmingly satisfying is the complete live performance package. Almost--because one of the spices in the curry is the fact that these guys are amazing musicians, and, shit, just listen to them play. CTLA and I always become enamored of Chris Funk's proficiency on multiple instruments whenever we see the Decemberists play live, and it's like Man Man has three Chris Funks in the band. The marimba parts, the Django Reinhardt-aping guitar lines, the squawking horns--the casual mastery is thrilling. Plus, of course, Pow Pow is an insanely gifted dervish on the drums and Honus Honus is pure sex, a young Tom Waits soundalike that mightily resembles Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited, 'stache and all.
I realize their aesthetic may not be for everyone, and I realize that my attempt to describe what they're doing here is only contributing to the problem, adding to whatever cluster of impressions you've formed around them, but I would seriously encourage you to check out their show if they tour anywhere close to where you live in the near future.
Opener Tim Fite was likewise a welcome surprise, a wonderfully oddball combination of Shockheaded Peter-era Tiger Lillies and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, capable of getting a roomful of hipsters to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" not just once, but twice in the course of the show. Um, and then he rapped?
The rest of my pictures from the night are posted here.
I also did make it out to that Jamie Lidell/Baby Teeth show at the Metro I was pimping a few weeks back, and it was every bit as fantastic as I was expecting. Baby Teeth played a shitload of new material that sounded awesome, and Lidell's band has indeed tightened up since the beginning of their tour in June. And Jamie's voice is just...wow. "Rope of Sand" always kind of gets ruined for me on the album because of those breathy female ah-ahs that get layered in toward the end of the track, but hearing him sing it live just totally destroyed me in the best way possible. There's a certain point at which this guy is just so talented that it's like he's sneezing diamonds. Pics from that show here.
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