On Sunday evening I traveled north to my old stomping grounds for a concert with Jen, Drew and Heather. Rogue Wave was playing, and after discovering their song “California” a while back, it seemed like it would be a show I’d like. Besides, it’s not a bad place to catch a show, whaddaya think?
There were 2 stages with somewhere around 6 bands. I caught 4. Here’s the line-up, and an overall review:
The Whigs – This band was pretty good as far as straight up rock goes. They had elements of punk and grunge which made sense why they drew an enthusiastic crowd. These are the reasons, however, as to why I found them fairly ordinary. I only caught the last couple songs of their set, though, so in fairness I give them a 3 and a half of 5.
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Rogue Wave – The reason I went to this concert (or at least initially) was to see these guys. I was truly disappointed with them as a live act. Their stage presence is non-existent. I really enjoy their recorded stuff, so maybe they are better off sitting in a studio without the pressure of entertaining a live crowd. The sound was treble heavy, and there was no real distinction in the catchy riffs that make their recorded stuff special. It sounded like all five members of the band were struggling to be the center of attention.
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The Silent Comedy – Wow, these guys are intense. Brothers Joshua and Jeremiah Zimmerman are the foundation of the group. Jeremiah explains their sound way better than I ever could:
“It’s electric blues rock played with folk instruments,” says Jeremiah. “Like a tent revival and a hoedown but happening at a whiskey bar.” Think O Brother, Where Art Thou? set to an experimental-rock soundtrack.
Their sound is one of a kind, and will make you want to stomp your foot. If you are into handlebar mustaches, dusty trail hats, and waistcoats, you will love these guys.
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Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Have you heard their song “Home” yet? You should check it out. The band is great, and the lead is a great live performer. This is freak folk at it’s peak, sounding a lot like Devandra Bernhart with a better beat. Make your own opinion though. Here’s the video:
Jen introduced me to these guys a couple of weeks ago and holy shit, they have some awesome covers. Pomplamoose is the name, and I highly recommend going to youtube to check them out. They do a great version of Micheal Jackson’s Beat It and Beyonce’s Single Ladies, along with another number of great tunes.
So I had no idea of who Lady Gaga is, but really enjoyed the Pomplamoose version of the song, so I figured that I’d do a little research about the Ga to the Ga. After looking into the phenom for about 20 minutes I came to the conclusion that I have never seen a larger load of dump in my entire life. If you find yourself looking into what people are listening to today and come across Lady Gaga, run, don’t walk, to the bathroom, drop your trousers, and take a shit. Pick it up. Squeeze it between your fingers. Maybe paint the mirror with it. That’s what listening to Lady Gaga is like. You will be disgusted with yourself, the generation of people that endorse this kind of music, and with what passes as art in 2010.
So here is Pomplamoose covering Lady Gaga’s Telephone. With Jack Conte’s absurdity on the drum kit, and Nataly Dawn’s mellow jazz reaching dangerous levels of extremely adorable, this is a duo that has potential to put out some fantastic music.
If you have been following Beck’s Record Club project, you know that his 4th installment has been shared in it’s entirety. Much like the clean-up hitter in baseball, the coveted 4th slot has knocked one out of the park. This time the artists are covering INXS’s Kick, and it is obvious that the audio and video recording has reached new levels of fantastic with the experience gained.
I’ve just recently been really into St. Vincent, She/They have been getting plenty of rotations on the turntable lately, so it was especially cool to see Annie Clark pop up in Beck’s Record Club. If you haven’t heard her stuff before, definitely go check it out. She’s an incredibly talented musician, bound to do great things.
So either I could tell you about each song, and lose you in the thicket of boredom, or I could just share this stuff with you. So take a hit and take it in. It’s some really good stuff.
CocoRosie released their fourth studio album this month, Grey Oceans. Here’s the background: CocoRosie consists of two sisters, Bianca “Coco” and Sierra “Rosie” Casady, and are known in the oddball-hipster music circles as a freak-folk duo. I’ve reviewed CocoRosie’s first album La Maison de Mon Reve when blogging with the fine people of iGenius. iGenius no longer exists and, for those who do not know, was the blog before Satan spawned Destroyed By Madness. Here’s what I had to say about CocoRosie’s first album:
Let’s see how far my small audience is willing to stretch into the folk, blues, indie, weird experimental music world. Let me first start off by telling you that I enjoy this album, a lot. It’s interesting, it’s catchy, it’s weird. There’s no getting around it. I’m not sure if I like it because of its eclectic weirdness, or some other reason. If you just want a taste of CocoRosie, then the song I would highly recommend as an appetizer is “By Your Side” from the album La Maison de Mon Reve. If you can hold that one down, then dive into “Terrible Angels,” the first track on the album. Its a completely different sound than the first, but equally good.
Some of the tracks just don’t work, though. The ideas are all noble, but in most cases, poorly executed. I can’t really say where this album falls on the radar in terms of history of the band, as this is the first album that I have been exposed to. But an album with this kind of unrefined indie something, in my opinion, can only lead to an even better album a few years later. I’d be interested to see if that has happened yet.
Since then, I have become a larger fan of the oddball style of CocoRosie. Some will give the freak folk creation credit to Devendra Banhart, but he ain’t got nothin’ on these two sisters. The reason that I included the last review in this one is partly due to laziness, but also due to nearly everything written last time holds true for this new album. I bought the vinyl last weekend and haven’t taken it off my turntable since then. It’s a great album from start to finish that has shining moments of catchy indie folk songs interspersed with experimental tracks that instead of being just plain weird, are the eddys in the river that keep you circling in anticipation for what will flow past next.
Between a classically trained opera singer, beaten down indie folk, electronic, and the wounded sound of a children’s toy piano, this is a fun place to turn to. So, if you are looking for something spectacularly different than anything else out there, pick up the new CocoRosie album.
I haven’t covered an album in a while. It makes sense that I should write something about an album that came out mid 2009.
The Eels have done it again, but I like this album more than others in their catalog. Not necessarily because it’s ground-breaking in any way. It actually follows their very Eels formula with degressive riffs, and scratchy vocals. But, it is a little less mainstream and a little more lo-fi raw, like a continuation of Souljacker but with lyrics, however simple, of substance. The album is called Hombre Lobo – 12 Songs of Desire, and I enjoyed the album enough to buy it twice, first on vinyl then digitally.
I’ve listed what the word Desire means to me in previous posts. This album is a bounce to and from heartbreak for Hombre Lobo (or E), admiration of the woman who left, self-doubt, longing and the struggles that go on in his lonely head. All he wants to do is forget his senses and stand for something, but in the end, make no real decision at all. And he does it with the simplest words and easiest rhymes. Take it in for what it is. Simple, easy, and true.
The Eels have been putting out music for a decade or more now, but if you haven’t gotten into them by now (or him), you won’t go out and get this album. But never fear, chances are if you are reading this, you will get the album in the mail within the next couple of days.
There is an EP containing a few of these songs, that also has his cover version of Bob Dylan’s classic Girl From North Country. I had to get it. Its a great song, and a great cover of one of my all time favorite songs. And it’s what made me decide to pick up Hombre Lobo instead of End Times, his most recent album released in early 2010. I might review that one next, while comparisons are fresh.
Because I enjoy the Eels, I am going to give the album a (unusually only if you don’t) high rating.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the absurdities going on between The Fiery Furnaces, Radiohead, and now Beck, but it’s all quite retarded. The super-official statement is that Matt Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces told Radiohead “Fuck You” because he thought they were dedicating a song to American composer Harry Partch when in fact, they were dedicating it to WWII vet Harry Patch. Here’s what Matt Friedberger had to say about the subject, interpret it yourself.
Oh, please listen to our new song about Harry Patch, Fuck you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That’s a put-on. That’s a branding technique and Radiohead have their brand that they’re popular and intelligent. So they have a song about Harry Patch.
How’s the song? Is it 48 notes to the octave? What does it have to do with Harry Patch? Oh, my wife says I am being very rude. She doesn’t like me insulting Radiohead. She’s afraid they will send their lackeys through the computer to sabotage us. But they needn’t worry — we are a band that sabotages ourselves.”
So what is the outcome, you ask? Beck writes a song about Harry Partch, of course. Check it out.
Enjoy the wacky world we live in with me. And if you really want to, brand yourself indifferent enough to find amusement in misunderstandings. By the way, I do like The Fiery Furnaces. I also saw them live once. They were awful.
As I sit here at my desk on a Friday wearing a pink shirt, and since any trace of manliness has already escaped me, I might as well tell you about the Shawn Colvin concert I went to last Friday. She’s had a few hit tunes, although I didn’t know her by name before last week. These hits include: well, just one that I remember named Sunny Came Home. She has a very folk following, and a much older folk following at that. This is an artist that your mom will probably recognize and enjoy.
The venue was in the outskirts of San Diego’s Little Italy at a place called Anthology. It was a fairly small room, and that intimacy was utilized during the show. It’s a restaurant, and while she played, everyone sat at their table, ate their dinners and drank plenty of wine. It was really nice to watch a show, a very talented singer songwriter, while eating a great meal at your seat. And their wasn’t a bad seat in the house.
Jen had the itch to go out and see some live music that Friday night. So she was super excited to learn that an artist she is a big fan of was playing. I’m not going to pretend that after one show I now know a lot about Shawn Colvin, because I don’t, or that I’m going to go out and pick up a record of hers, because I won’t, but the show was really good. It was really mellow, and she made a point to try to connect with the crowd in between songs. She told stories of past and present about where the songs came from, and why she wrote them. It was personal, and beautiful.
She also covered a handful of songs including The Beatles, Tom Waits, and her newest “hit” is a cover of the Gnarles Barkley song Crazy.
I went to a free concert at the Del Mar racetrack on Saturday night. The horse races draw thousands of people out to gamble and watch the horses. I’d bet that the weekends draw many poor gamblers, especially when the track appeals to non-gamblers by adding concerts, microbrew festivals, and chili cookoffs. Last year I went to see Cake, again for free, and they rocked. This year was no different. The Flaming Lips were amazing.
The show seemed to take a while to get started, but after they came out on stage, the wait was completely justified. First of all, the concert started with many female dancers in gerbil costumes. (In case you don’t know, the Flaming Lips are known for not only drawing fans in crazy costumes, but they often bring many for fans to hang out on stage with them during the span of the show.) Then, behind the stage, on a huge megatron screen backdrop, their was the image of a woman dancing. She was naked and colored in psychadelic patterns and colors. Eventually, she sat down and spread her legs. The camera zoomed in on her vagina, which was represented by a bright glowing yellow light. A door opened on the huge megatron screen and the band came out from this dancing woman’s vagina. There was about 15 minutes of awesome music, not really a song, but great beats and rocking jamming. The lead singer, Wayne Coyne, got in a huge germil ball, and rolled off the stage and into the crowd. After gerbil surfing, he returned to the stage, left the ball, and the balloons, streamers and confetti came from all directions. It was probably one of the wildest and most elaborate productions I’ve ever seen at a rock concert.
The show in no way reflected the price of admission. The lead, Wayne, interacted with the crowd all night, and really made the show something to remember. If you ever are presented with Flaming Lips tickets, don’t pass them up. You will not be disappointed with the show.
Remember when I covered new music? I do. I miss that. So here it is.
The Decemberists have been around since 2000 and have been making records since 2003. My introduction to them via WPBR was through a song named Los Angeles, I’m Yours off of the Billy Liar single. It’s has a authentic and original sound, especially found in Colin Meloy’s vocals, and is an all around beautiful song. It was at that time that I bought not only the aforementioned single, but the full length album Picaresque. Although the collection of songs on these two albums are far different than the song that turned me on to them, the promise of great music was ever-present. I did not imagine how great this band could get, though.
Picaresque was a bit difficult to swallow at first. Meloy’s vocals didn’t seem to fit. The next two albums that came out fully surpassed my expectations in every way. The band moved from the indie label Kill Rock Stars, to the superpower Capital, and came out with 2 full length albums that climbed the ranks a hundred places overnight, literally. They are The Crane Wife in 2006, and The Hazards of Love earlier this year. These are fantastic records that have earned many rotations on my turntable.
The Hazards of Love is the perfect merge between pop music and rock ballads. Many of the songs are entirely too long for the radio, although you won’t realize it while listening to them. The lyrics keep the listener interested with an intelligent and playful use of the english language which compliments the music with perfection.
If you’re (you know who you are) on the Destroyed By Madness mailing list, then expect to get this album in the mail within a week. It’s a treat to listen to. I’ll enjoy hearing your feedback. This is one of my favorite albums to come out in 2009. It has definitely earned it’s rating.
The internet is not something you can just dump something on. The internet is not a big truck. The internet is a series of tubes!? The internet is you and me.
No I’m not finished!
Check this out. It’s pretty much the funniest shit in the world.
Then watch this. I can’t really get enough of it.
And if you’re like me, you’ll need an mp3 of this as well.
The Eels have done it again, but I like this album more than others in their catalog. Not necessarily because it’s ground-breaking in any way. It actually follows their very Eels formula with degressive riffs, and scratchy vocals. But, it is a little less mainstream and a little more lo-fi raw, like a continuation of Souljacker but with lyrics, however simple, of substance. The album is called Hombre Lobo – 12 Songs of Desire, and I enjoyed the album enough to buy it twice, first on vinyl then digitally.
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