Seattle Subsonic - February, 2010
Piecora’s Pizza Is Now A Music Venue, Too
Raise your hand if your favorite memory of Piecora’s Pizza on E. Madison St. is post-grade school soccer game grub fests. Yep, me too. CYO, BABY! The long-standing New York-style pizzeria has decided recently (I think) to get into the music biz. Why not? Everyone else is doing it. It’s not like there’s a dearth of bands out there to occupy your calendar with. Chop Suey is just a few blocks down the hill and makes for some nice competition.
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It’s called Piecora’s Back Room and shows are presented by Radio Free Seattle. Here’s the current schedule:
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13th – Manooghi Hi, Deseo Carmin
19th – The Glass Notes (Robb Benson’s new project), Sean P. Bates
26th – Ghost Lobby, Osaka Explosion
27th – Astronomer Royal, The High End
March:
5th- Ryan Looman of Smile for Diamonds, Whitney Ballen, Peter Hanks
12th – theZim & ARock, Mesa & Ari, Hannalee w/Matt Knotter of Shim
13th – Conservative Dad, Shining Skulls
19th – Tamara Power-Drutis, Aliya Hashemi, Scott Weltzer
Next Weekend Should Totally Rock
Though there’s a lot of cool stuff going on this weekend (Head Like An Espresso Truck, Cumulus Festival, Vivian Girls at the High Dive, etc.), I just wanted to give you all a heads up on next weekend, which should be prove to be just as attractive. Friday night (2/19) at the Funhouse will feature fuzzed out garage-rock label nomads Thee Oh Sees and Unnatural Helpers. I’ve been really jonesin’ to see both of these bands, especially Thee Oh Sees, who tour through Seattle all the time. I’ve described their music as a “gruff, snarky burst of discordant melodies, a cracked homage to the early punk bands of the 50s and 60s and the culmination of all the crud swimming around in John Dwyer’s head.” YES. Local racketeers Unnatural Helpers have a new 7″ (that there’s the cover art) scheduled for release through Hardly Art on March 30th, as well as some fantastic momentum following years of stunt-inducing lineup changes and little recognition. THE TIME IS NOW. Together with the crusty punk poetry of late 70s SoCal stalwarts the Urinals, this is a match made in a crazy place somewhere.
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Saturday at the Comet (2/20) should be a doozy as well: veteran punk musicians in new punk bands. Mike Jaworski’s new outfit, Virgin Islands, has been rabidly booking shows left and right; seems he couldn’t just stand idly by while the town lacked a rowdy, indignant Joe Strummer-style shit-kickin’ rock band. They pretty much sound like the Cops, only better. Little Cuts, comprised of Drew Church (the Cops) on bass, Dave Hernandez (the Shins, saw him play with Kinski once) on guitar, and Curtis James (the Old Haunts) on drums. They’re kind of reminding me of the Ponys or the Wrens right now. Groovy, dirty, exuberant. They also play tomorrow (2/13) at the Wildrose. Western Hymn, Craig Extine’s new band, is on the bill too. His former band, the Old Haunts, broke up last year, but he’s still strokin’ that snaky swamp gee-tar with intriguing results.
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Here’re the first four (4) tracks off of Help, Thee Oh See’s 2009 LP, just for good measure:
Handsome Furs in Asia
Montreal duo Handsome Furs are nothing if not gluttons for travel. One gets the idea that they’d forfeit their blossoming music career if it meant they didn’t have to stay home for any significant length of time. Well, lucky for them (and us, in a way), they have literally one of the awesomest jobs/lives/hobbies that most of us could only wish for. They’re married, they have a deal with an excellent record label (Sub Pop), they make fantastic music, and they tour like nobody’s business. Last year, Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry spent a significant amount of time winning over crowds in Asia (China, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand), and good ol’ Ted Turner’s Cable News Network asked them to document their experience on film.
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GO HERE TO WATCH SINCE THEY WON’T LET ME EMBED THEM
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Given that I myself spent some time in Asia and their second LP, Face Control, was my favorite release of 2009, I have a particular interest in this unique chronicle. It’s planned as a series, and so far two ~6 minute episodes are up on the site. Dan plays cameraman/narrator most of the time and most of the footage so far is them sightseeing, but, via their myspace blog, Alexei says:
To those who are curious:Contrary to popular belief, we just got very lucky to get this series posted on CNN. We are, ya know, not connected to important people or anything… Just lucky enough that some one gave us cameras and wanted to see what we did with them.
And, please, rest assured that all the music scene stuff is coming in time. (So far the first two episodes are only from our first few hours! )X,Alexei
Fatboy Slim and David Byrne join for Imelda Marcos tribute album
OK, so I know I may have just blown your mind, but take a breath and read that headline again. This is a real thing. The album is called Here LiesLove and I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. Not” IMHO“, awesome. Just friggen awesome. It’s a 22-track song cycle about the life of former First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos and her childhood servant, Estrella Cumpas. In addition to Byrne and Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love features performances by Santigold, Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine), Sia, Steve Earle, St. Vincent, Natalie Merchant, Tori Amos, Sharon Jones, Nicole Atkins and many others. Along with the recording, The Public Theater in New York City is developing a theatrical version of Here Lies Love for a future production.. WTF?
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To begin, how the hell did Fatboy Slim and David Byrne ever get paired up? Well, there’s a relatively good answer for this and strangely enough… it revolves around Imelda. I know, I know, my brain hurts too. Apparently, Imelda Marcos had the same affinity for clubs and discos of the ’70s and 80′s as she has for shoes. David Byrne, being the insatiable scholar and intellect he is, has been tracking the story of Imelda’s rise to power and the tragic parallel story of Estrella, the woman who raised her as a child. Being that the disco scene was such a large part f this, David approached Norman Cook (Fatboy) to help him put a soundtrack to the story. Starts making sense.
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The deluxe package of Here Lies Love, is available beginning April 6th, and consists of two CDs of music, DVD with six videos and 100-page hardcover book, will be available both online and in stores. The record is also available as a digital download with 12-page digital booklet, a deluxe digital download with 53-page booklet and videos, and a double-CD with 24-page booklet. Yes.. REALLY. If you want a taste of the sound you can hear samples here: where you can also download the Santagold song, Please Don’t. Other music and additional information is available at www.davidbyrne.com, www.herelieslove.net and www.nonesuch.com. And now, if you have a thread of consciousness left, I will destroy what’s left of your head with the tracklist.. after the jump.
Cumulus Festival: Feb 11-13
| Thursday, February 11, 2010 | ||
| 8:00 pm | ||
| Friday, February 12, 2010 | ||
| 9:00 pm | ||
| Saturday, February 13, 2010 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
The Cumulus Festival is descending upon us fair-skinned fawns in cloud city this weekend. The enveloping experimentation of Seattle’s best and dreariest post-rock outfits (with help from a few from PDX) will reverberate with equal parts spherical wash and ominous thunder throughout this meteorological nightmare of a town. The atmospheric conditions look to be flooded with dirge, and hazy intonation will precipitate from the heavens. It will be the sound from under the clouds; hey, we should be sponsoring this thing! (Check our tag line.)
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Both the Mars Bar and the Funhouse will host the 3-day expo, starting this Thursday, February 11th. Seattle prog-ambient vets Joy Wants Eternity headline Thursday night, while soul-psych tribal trippers This Blinding Light top Friday’s bill under the Needle. The real rain comes, IMHO, Saturday night when Portland’s Talkdemonic—featuring one of the Northwest’s most spectacular drummers in Kevin O’Connor—takes the stage. Theirs will be the most crushingly beautiful music of the bunch. Shoegazing sound-wallers Bronze Fawn and the one man mist of Bill Horist open to create a heavy billowy mass of suspended water awesome.
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Check out the site’s calendar for times and monies. The curators says the bands run “the gamut from chill to bombastic, folksy to mechanical, minimalist to maximalist.” Links to each band’s site and a free downloadable .zip sampler can be found here. So hop on your puffy cumulonimbus or your ice-crystal cirrostratus and drench yourself in the Cumulus Festival.
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$8 / 21+
The 2nd Annual Cumulus Festival Descends
The Cumulus Festival is descending upon us fair-skinned fawns in cloud city this weekend. The enveloping experimentation of Seattle’s best and dreariest post-rock outfits (with help from a few from PDX) will reverberate with equal parts spherical wash and ominous thunder throughout this meteorological nightmare of a town. The atmospheric conditions look to be flooded with dirge, and hazy intonation will precipitate from the heavens. It will be the sound from under the clouds; hey, we should be sponsoring this thing! (Check our tag line.)
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Both the Mars Bar and the Funhouse will host the 3-day expo, starting this Thursday, February 11th. Seattle prog-ambient vets Joy Wants Eternity headline Thursday night, while soul-psych tribal trippers This Blinding Light top Friday’s bill under the Needle. The real rain comes, IMHO, Saturday night when Portland’s Talkdemonic—featuring one of the Northwest’s most spectacular drummers in Kevin O’Connor—takes the stage. Theirs will be the most crushingly beautiful music of the bunch. Shoegazing sound-wallers Bronze Fawn and the one man mist of Bill Horist open to create a heavy billowy mass of suspended water awesome.
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Check out the site’s calendar for times and monies. The curators says the bands run “the gamut from chill to bombastic, folksy to mechanical, minimalist to maximalist.” Links to each band’s site and a free downloadable .zip sampler can be found here. So hop on your puffy cumulonimbus or your ice-crystal cirrostratus and drench yourself in the Cumulus Festival.
Sasquatch Launch Party At The Croc: w/ Fresh Espresso, Atlas Sound, and Surfer Blood
Just saw this on the Crocodile‘s facebook page. Sounds pretty cool and it looks like you can pick up free passes at both Easy Street locations. Or by listening to The End; which…why would you do that, again? The 2009 records from both Atlas Sound (about who I’m genuinely surprised at his inclusion here) and Fresh Espresso made my Favorites lists of last year. They good. More recently, I’ve been pleasantly pleased with Surfer Blood‘s Astro Coast. It’s high-energy Floridian power-rock with brit-pop and pop-punk tendencies that recalls both Weezer and the Smiths in careful doses, but with enough weird and woozy moments to keep it interesting.
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Goes down on a Monday, February 15th, with tickets available on the 12th. Press release from Live Nation after the jump/cut/fold/whatever.
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See The Future
Seems like just last week I was spinning my fresh new copy of Them Crooked Vultures CD and planning to buy tickets for their show at the Paramount. Now months have flown by, and I am still regularly playing that album, and LOUD. I can confidently count that show as one of the best I saw last year, and the best rock record I heard in 2009.
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I’ll admit, I was skeptical about the show, and I was vocal about this – I’ve been burned before by setting my expectations too high for the first tour of a hotly-anticipated band. (A Perfect Circle comes to mind) And I was doubly wary because the tickets were so damned expensive – about fifty bucks a piece. When a band’s only put out one record, there’s about an hour of material to work with. Sure, the back catalog of Zep songs alone would be like sitting through Wagner’s Ring Cycle, but I had a strong sense that this supergroup wasn’t going to touch the members’ previous work. And I was right. Right, for one, that they wouldn’t play any covers, and right to set my expectations low because I had my socks rocked off that much more. It also paid off that our buddy Matt was the sound tech and helpfully advised where to stand for the show. Helpful tip of the day: consider asking the guy at the boards for the best sound location in the house. The band thundered through all of the songs on the album, plus a B-side called “Highway 1″. Though I admit having to grit my teeth and avert my eyes from the stage during Josh’s inane hulu antics for “Interlude with Ludes”, the album’s only throwaway track, the rest of the show was structured a lot like the record: loud, quiet, loud. If you have the record, you know this is often the case within one song.
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The whole show came across better live than on the record, from the vaguely Pearl Jam-esque “Bandoliers” to the homage to Cream with “Scumbag Blues.” The extended outro to “Bandoliers” was especially powerful with the guitar-drum battle between Grohl and Homme. As you’d expect of some high-profile rockers, their equipment and lighting was top-notch. The illuminated fretboard on JPJ’s bass was about as mezmerizing as the number of strings that may have been attached to it. Eight? Ten? I dunno. Kudos to Grohl for trying his damnedest to try to wear out his bass pedals.
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When comparing notes over beers after the show, we collectively agreed that our initial skepticism was pretty misplaced. While the last Queens of the Stone Age show was inferior to shows past, we should have respected the cumulative road time that those three musicians have accrued. Between the Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Zeppelin, Queens, and Eagles of Death Metal, that’s quite a few decades of rock music experience. As Grohl said a few years ago of this project, it “wouldn’t suck.” He’s right.
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In case you have had your head in a cave, or missed my fanboy post here last summer about the emergence of the rock supergroup made up of the (last) drummer of Nirvana, Queens’ frontman Josh, and Zep bassist John Paul Jones, you can catch them this weekend on that NBC sketch comedy show that airs on Saturday nights at 11:30pm. Or, you can cut out the adverts and check ‘em out on the youtubes.
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Continuing their support of the Deserve the Future tour, Them Crooked Vultures is scheduled to play Coachella Festival on April 16.
Bassnectar Cozza Frenzy Remix Pack v.1 Release
Bassnectar is sick. If you’ve never been to one of his shows your seriously missing out. Even if your not into the super electro-upbeat-tempo sounds, the live setting will floor what your pre-cognition would be. Hundreds of sweat-soaked, head-bobbing, body pulsing peeps sucking every last drop of aural bliss out of the tables and what is the entity known as Bassnectar. The super low house hitting bass will shake even the most timid Seattlite out of their rain soaked pail-skinned shell and into the sexual heat. This is no shit, the show is killer, and he definitely has a way of making a house move to every beat. Tomorrow night Saturday, February 6th he’s lighting up The Showbox Sodo and unveiling his latest cuts called Cozza Frenzy Remix Pack v.1.
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The release is great and features remixes of album tracks by RJD2, Stagga, Son of Kick, Robot Koch, J-Boogie, Amp Live and more. Some of the songs include several remixed versions of Teleport Massive, Boombox, and West Coast Lo Fi Rides Again on the bonus tracks. Go to the link, download the album, and pump your body into whatever headspace you need to get down with the get down. And seriously I’m not fucking around go to the show, the guy will light the place up like he dropped a match on it. C out!
Morning Quickie: Stream Tapestry of Webs & New See Me River Info
I keep coming back to the well on these guys because they’re awesome. You can stream Past Lives‘ new one, Tapestry of Webs, in its entirety over at the brand-spankin’-new pastliveslife.com. More musing on that here and here. Best songs I hadn’t heard yet? “Vanishing Twin” and “Hospital White”. Record release show is February 20th at Black Lodge, with TOLSATD and Naomi Punk.
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Also, bad-ass local grim-folkers See Me River provided a small nugget regarding their upcoming LP, The One That Got A Wake (ha! word play!). From myspace:
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We finished our new record “The One That Got a Wake” towards the end of last year. It’s a really awesome album that we’re all really proud of. It should be out shortly.
Seattle Rock LIVES! Virgin Islands and Little Cuts take to the Comet.
On Saturday Feb 20th, there is a full slate of local rock all smashed into the Comet – likely to cause a total implosion of awesome. Former lead man of the COPS (RIP) Mike Jaworski takes the front again with his newest and greatest project, Virgin Islands. They have only have a single EP, The Age of Anxiety listen here, recorded so far. I have to say, it’s righteous front to back and there is not a scrap of fat on it. Fast, furious, frantic rock-n-roll straight through. They’ve taken all that made the COPS good and made it great.
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Little Cuts, also on the bill, have quietly been putting together a fan-fuggin-tastic punk rock trio of their own. Consisting of former COPS bassist Drew (Droo) Church along with Dave Hernandez (of Shins fame) and drummer/incredible tattoo guru, Curtis James (Old Haunts) taking up the skins. Tight licks ranging from freight train to F-15. Say goodbye, face. This is a supernova of Seattle greats.
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Who the fuck said Seattle rock was dead? Ha.
See you there.
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Saturday February 20th, $7
@ the Comet
with Western Hymn,
Little Cuts and
Intelligence Fans: Trainwreck! At The Orient Express Starts Tomorrow!
It wasn’t too long ago when I first stepped foot into the Orient Express down in SODO near the Spokane Street Bridge. I gazed upon the huge fish tanks with a childlike wonder. I roamed the tiny halls with a childlike curiosity. Then I drank shots of tequila like an old fashioned a-dult. Formerly Andy’s Diner, the place is now a kitschy Chinese restaurant and lounge constructed (most awesomely) from several old train cars and home to a myriad of banquet, bar, restaurant and, yes, karaoke rooms. In short, it’s a one stop shop for dive bar fun.
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Well, as luck would have it—and oh does it have it—there’s a new night there and one of my favorite bands, the Intelligence, has its grubby little paws all over it. Lars Finberg and his woman Susanna Welbourne formed a band, named it Puberty, and invited some dudes from the Old Haunts, the Shins, and the Cops to play with ‘em as the house band. Curtis James, Drew Church and Dave Hernandez play in a newish band called Little Cuts and will be joining Finberg and Welbourne in what looks to be a debaucherously wacky time. The Facebook page says Mike Jaworski (Virgin Islands, the Cops, Mt. Fuji Records) is in the mix, too. Yowza.
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A DJ, drag queen, and signature drink will all play host to the catatonically zany tunes of Puberty. If you like the Intelligence, you’ll no doubt enjoy this offshoot. You can listen to some demos on that aforementioned FB page (I wouldn’t worry about their sluggish nature, the band will surely rip the roof off the place). The inaugural “Trainwreck!” goes down tomorrow night (2/4) at 10 pm, and looks to be setting up shop for the next two first Thursdays as well. Press release (copped from Line Out) after the jump/cut/fold/whatever.
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