Seattle Subsonic - August, 2011
Star Anna, Alone In This Together Video
In a rare moment of brevity, I will simply let the music do the talking for Star Anna’s new video for “Alone in This Together” from her new CD of the same name. Great Tune. Great Band
Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs will be playing a free show Thursday night (tomorrow) at Hiawatha park in West Seattle. Details here.
The Head and The Heart Frontman Chokes The Tractor’s Sound Engineer, Receives Appropriate Backlash
Boy, success didn’t go to this guy’s head at ALL!
Line Out has all the details of this douche-bag’s major fuck-up. Eric Grandy weighs in over at Reverb with the collective club ban angle (will they or won’t they?).
Personally, I think their schtick sucks, so, whatever. Hope the guy’s neck is ok.
Can’t Deny CANT
Just finally listened to a couple tracks from Chris Taylor‘s (Grizzly Bear bassist/producer) new solo record, Dreams Come True, and, man, was I sucked in fast. Syrupy and solid and soulfully ephemeral electronic tracks. They are sliding down my cerebrum right now and “hypnotized” isn’t entirely the wrong word for what I’m feeling. “Answer” has a particular brooding R&B aspect to it. He’s going with CANT (not the contraction) as his project’s name.
You’ll recall my overwhelming adulation for Veckatimest a few years back (or maybe you won’t, I don’t know you), and it’s now a bit more apparent why that album, and Yellow House, is so entrancingly awesome.
CANT – Believe (taken from Dreams Come True – Terrible Records / Warp Records) by Warp Records
CANT – Answer (taken from Dreams Come True – Terrible Records / Warp Records) by Warp Records
Where’s the Seattle angle you ask? Taylor is from this town originally, and according to Wikipedia, has a birthday in 3 days. Do him a gift and check out these tunes. The album comes out September 13 on Taylor’s own Terrible Records imprint. He’ll perform at the Triple Door October 3rd.
Oregon State Penitentiary Part II: I’m Not Here, Moment of Passion, Twenty-Five to Life
We get over by the stage in the Big Yard. It has the air of an outdoor music festival. The sun is beaming, the skies are clear, the Yard open. It must be at least a couple football fields in size, no bleachers though, just those thirty-foot walls surrounding everything. There’s a stage being set up in one corner just inside the fence. As big as the Yard is, nothing is totally open here, locked fences all around. From the building, we’d walked between them, had to have the guards in one of the towers let us into the basketball courts and then again into the Yard. The female guard escorting us had to call up a few times, “Uh … tower 10, gate 9 please.” Silence as the gate remained locked. “Tower 10, gate 9 please.” The gate opened, and we went into the Yard where there were many guys busy at work setting up for the show.
It is the prison roadie crew hard at work with the stage and tent, the amps and instruments, the sound system. They are all dressed in blue, a color we’d been told not to wear because blue equals inmate. Again, we all remember the orange vests for there will soon be 1000 men in blue out here. For now though, there are just the two crews setting up, a stage crew and a sound crew, and a few guards in orange vests like us. There is mixer by the stage for the monitor and stage mix and another one about fifty feet directly out from the stage for the Yard mix. The Slants begin to help setting up their instruments, so I have a few moments on my own. People are buzzing around me running wires and cables and setting up speaker columns, mixers, and amps. They are placing microphones around the drum kit and testing PA levels, and in the swirl of movement, I fall out of the scene to observe, have one of those moments of disappearance. Read the rest of this entry »
Video For Voices
Another video from Dumb Eyes (who’ll also be providing visual stimulation at that Cairo Vibrations thingy I mentioned yesterday) for Soft Metals‘ “Voices”. My earlier blurb about the band here. I’m pretty hooked on this album right now, FYIIIIIIIII.
SOFT METALS – VOICES from Dumb Eyes on Vimeo.
Vibrations Festival: August 20th in Volunteer Park
Cairo‘s plans for world domination trudge on, with barely a wince or flinch from the destruction left in its wake.
This Saturday, August 20th, the multi-faceted art & music venue/boutique/label (you might have heard about their first album here) enters into the festival fray with a zero dollar admission concert in one of the country’s most carefully and beautifully designed urban parks, that of Volunteer. (Designed by a pair of bros. who copied their dad’s design of Central Park! Yes, that Central Park! Plus, like, the entire city of Seattle!) Vibrations runs from 2pm to 11pm and is non-ageist in its admittance policy. You can find all the fun at the band stand in the northwest quadrant near the reservoir.
If, as a frequent looker or occasional gazer of SSS, you find your tastes aligning with mine, then we will agree to agree that the lineup is something to behold. Especially for a sunny summer Saturday. If you can’t decide whether the music will be any good or not, I’ve added some mp3′s here for you to peruse and/or sample beforehand. Do yourself a solid:
Charles Leo Gebhardt IV – “Teach My Heart”
Witch Gardens – “Small Daring Boy”
More on Purple & Green here
More on Metal Chocolates here
Press Release after the jump/cut/fold/whatever:
Oregon State Penitentiary Part I: The Slants, Hallowed Be Thy Name, Life Vest, Thirty-Foot Walls.
I arrive at the Oregon State Penitentiary, a little after 10:00 on Saturday morning. I park in the visitors parking lot and sit in the air conditioning of my Jetta for a moment wondering how it will all go down. This is prison after all, maximum security prison, and shit can go down at any time, any moment, any reason. I sit for a few more minutes a mixture of excitement and fear as I’m about to willingly enter this facility and spend an afternoon in the company of 2000 inmates milling about a court yard, what they call The Big Yard, with a handful of guards to keep them in check as they watch a rock band. I turn on the CD player where Iron Maiden continues “Hallowed Be Thy Name”. I’ve had the song on repeat for nearly the whole way down from Seattle. It seems fitting when coming to a maximum security prison where there are men doing time for rape and murder. Some are here for only a decade (only???), some for life, some on death row, which is the shorter version of life. Bruce Dickenson sings:
Somebody cries from his cell,
“God be with you!”
If there’s a god,
why does he let me go?
I turn it off. Perhaps they all think it, “Why me?” Maybe not. I guess I’ll find out on the inside, but some shit went down for them to end up here, and looking at the thirty-foot walls from the outside, I know right away I’d hate to be stuck on the inside. Yeah, there is indeed a ton of crazy shit that goes down in this world. Jim Morrison was right. People are strange. Crazy more like, mad, despairing, lost. How do people end up here? I turn the CD off thinking that I don’t want any shit to go down. No shit. That’s my motto for the day.
Studio 66, The Purrs, Gigantic Machine, Spinning a Woman
We got to the Lo-Fi Performance Gallery for the Studio 66 event just as DJ Chrispo was doing his thing. He was my contact for the show, and had been kind enough to get me on the list for a night of DJs and live bands mixed between the two rooms. DJ Chrispo was spinning in the loft by the back room just before the psychedelic pop of The Purrs, and while he was working the mix, there was a woman dancing with a Hula hoop. She was sexy in a orange dress cut nicely short and with a tattoo on her right upper arm. She swung that hoop around and gyrated with a smile, and I thought that dancing just might be a fun thing to try. I suggested to my photographer companion that she take some pictures of the Hula hoop dancer, and she did, and in the dark of the lens, the hoop flashed blue.
“Look at this!” she said, “Cool!” It was.
Between sets of the DJ and the band, the back room fell quiet, and I met DJ Chrispo and thanked him for getting me in, “I liked what you did. It was a little more rock than I’d anticipated. And the gogo dancers are a nice touch.” And they were. Gogo dancers always are.
I Dunno ‘Bout You Guys, But I’m Kinda Stoked For The Mister Heavenly Record
“Super group” trepidations and celebrity bassist appearances aside, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the forthcoming Out of Love, out August 16th on Sub Pop. Amazingly, I have a copy, but have yet to spin it! Mister Heavenly is Nick Thorburn (Islands, The Unicorns), Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse—only the not-very-good We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank; nobody mentions that) and Ryan Kattner aka Honus Honus (Man Man).
More info here. Recorded live to tape at Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, WA!
Hey Everyone, Jesse “The Duke” Lortz Is BACK!
After some time wallowing in his own mire, the creative genius behind defunct stone-folkers The Dutchess and The Duke is at it again. That’s right, Jesse “The Duke” Lortz is back in our empty lives and he’s got a new wine-swillin’, livin’ room lady singin’ guitar project he wants us to REVEL in! Case Studies is the name (how nerdly!), and it sounds NOTHING like a person writing in all CAPS and with several exclamation points would lead you to believe! In FACT, it’s rather melancholy. Deception!
Case Studies: Daggers from Case Studies on Vimeo.
New album, The World Is Just a Shape to Fill the Night, is out August 16th on Sacred Bones Records. Stream the whole thing over at Paste Magazine. It was (mostly) recorded at a secluded cabin in Sequim. How idyllic!
Witchburn, The Good Riff, Dr. Evil, Moon
It seems about once a year I catch Witchburn, and always at El Corazon. They’re one of my favorite Seattle metal bands, and they do rock the Sabbathy riffs, and really at the end of the day, what can be better than that? Not long ago I was supposed to see Black Sabbath tribute band Supernauty. I traded a couple emails with the bass player, but somehow the signals and wires and what have you got all mixed up so that when I showed up with notebook in hand, I was told I wasn’t on the list, and the bass player seemed not so interested in getting me on the list so I left. And better for it really. I’ve seen the original both with Ozzy and Dio. What did I need of a tribute? I prefer the rock and the riffs and the grooves to be new and unheard, to be a kind of learned thing that only one band does in its own way. Witchburn does just that, Sabbath-like to be sure, but heavy and original.
So I got to El Corazon and ordered a Blue Moon in that odd place of a bar that is in a separate room from the music. And I drank a few and scribbled in my notebook of original riffs and grooves when the music started at what by my watch seemed to be about twelve minutes early. It was a Witchburn song called “Be Purified” and liking that one I had no choice but to chug the rest of my beer and make a dash for the other room where bodies and arms and hair were already in motion. It was a riff I learned how to play a long time ago when I first wrote about them after running over a cat. It was a riff that made the memory of the dead cat go away because good music does that. It heals.
One thing about Witchburn is that they tune low, very low, E string all the way down to C. That’s a large part of the reason they can chunk as heavily as they do being minus one guitar these days after the bass player left last fall and guitarist Jacy Peckham switched to bass where as each song went on he certainly seemed at home. I was apt to think the bass suited him better and thus the band better. They were a four piece now, a four piece in no need of a fifth.
As they played, I laughed and thought in a God-like voice in my head, “And lo, the band played, and the riffs were heavy. And all was good.” The first time I saw them two years ago, I was inspired to write about music that moved the soul and got one to thinking about shaking an angry fist at the moon for all the things that one was up against in life. That piece actually made it into early versions of my book, and Read the rest of this entry »
White Orange, LOUD, 15 Inches, Sometimes Less is More
I wrote previously that sometimes I need some heavy rock in the face of all the acoustic music happening in Seattle right now. And I do. Don’t get me wrong though. I love a lot of it, and even my own next musical project will be acoustic (a rocking acoustic to be sure), but still, sometimes I want to see a band that just rips it to the point of making my ears bleed, to the point of making me mimic Bruce Dickenson from Live After Death when he said, “When I go away from Long Beach back to England, I want to be able to go to the hearing doctor and go, ‘Doctor, Long Beach fucked up my hearing for good.’” Enter White Orange from Portland at the Sunset Tavern.
Now, The Sunset is not a large place, but White Orange had two guitar players and a bass player, and each of them had a speaker cabinet with two 15 inch speakers in it and amps that knew not the meaning of quiet, that knew only the tones of heavy and heavier, loud and louder. Case in point, the bass player ran his rig through not one but two overdrive units, Big Muff if I remember correctly, although by the time I learned that detail the beers had flowed, and I forgot to note it down. Either that or it’s one of those illegible scribblings from the end of the night. Anyway, no matter because talking to the band after the show, I learned that their tone was simple derived from that volume, even in small clubs, even if it meant not hearing much of any of the vocals. They would not sactifice tone. One had to admire that. They believed in the music enough that there would be no compromise, or rather vocals could lay buried but amps could not be turned down. The music would always rock.
