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The Thrill Ain't Gone Nowhere

The Black Keys have returned from some unexpected side projects with a winner. I’ve had a copy of Brothers for a few weeks and in typical new ‘Keys record fashion, it’s been in heavy rotation.
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There are a few remarkable influences in this record, and as fate would have it, I am grateful to have been well-prepared for my first listen of Brothers after a long spell of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke tunes in the past months. Because I think this record might strike you as “different” or “a departure”, I am going to suggest a few more artists to consider as prerequisite before getting the most out of this record: B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, WAR, The Spinners, and if someone ho you’ve missed it,  Muddy Waters‘ Electric Mud.
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I’ll also contend that you’d be missing part of the progression of the band if you haven’t played Attack & Release (2008), guitairist Dan Auerbach’s solo record Keep It Hid (2009) and the Blakrok collaboration record, also from last year. Brothers, like Attack & Release,  is again produced by Danger Mouse. Knowing that, you may detect a different sound right off the bat with “Everlasting Light” but if not, you’ll might catch the ghost of Gnarls Barkley by the time you’re listening to “Too Afraid to Love You”. Be it the producer’s influence alone or otherwise, this record crams more sound, and more new sounds into it. There are far more layers of guitars, especially effective on “Unknown Brother” and “The Only One” with new rich acoustic guitar tracks in the rhythm section of the former song, and the keys on the latter. Lessons in funk and rhythm – honed, distilled, and exploited to create the entire Blakrok experience – are mobilized again for “Sinister Kid” (perhaps written after hearing WAR’s “Lowrider” on a jukebox one night?) and also in the fuzzed out bass groove of “Next Girl”, a song any Band of Gypsys fan can instantly appreciate. Even Dan’s voice gets “effected” – in the opener, “Everlasting Light” and most notably in “Never Give You Up”, some studio magic takes us back to a golden age of Motown. It’s very unexpected, but successful in its devotion to their signature “mid-fi” sound.
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This record is going to pay dividends to those that have been listening from the beginning. It’s a jump from Rubber Factory and Thickfreakness, which were bare-bones, (mostly) two instrument stomps that was faithfully recreated in their packed live shows, but it follows on logically from A&R, Keep It Hid and Blakrok. While this album sounds great cranked up to 11 in the house, on might think it will be quite a different Keys show if more than two people are on stage come October. For this reason I am reminded that a Brothers tour does not mean “playing the album front to back” with an encore of “Grown So Ugly” and “Till I Get My Way.” In the shows I have seen in past, the band masterfully produces the essence of their songs, foregoing rhythm guitarists, programmers, backup singers and bassists. I’m optimistic that the boys will create another facemelter of a show from their ever-expanding catalog of songs.
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It was overheard this week that “if i had just heard this as their first record, i wouldn’t buy another”. I see it from a different angle – I don’t want Pat and Dan to produce The Big Come Up nor Rubber Factory again. What would the 60s have been Help! and A Hard Day’s Night represented the breadth of the Beatles? A decade of The Black Keys ought to take you new places, and Brothers surely does.
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The Black Keys play the Paramount on Friday October 2. Presale tickets just became available through their website.

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.

DJ Krush @ Neumo's

DJ Krush, Foscil, SunTzu Sound appearing at Neumo’s on a Sunday night.

It’s been about 8 years since I saw Krush last, shortly after the release of Zen if I recall correctly. The man is a master of turntable-ism, and though his releases of late have been hit-or-miss, as well as few and far between (hell, his myspace page hasn’t been logged in to in nearly two years), he’s still not to be missed live. Word is this tour only includes five US stops. Need a preview of his live set? Check out Code41o9.

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DJ Krush,

Foscil,

SunTzu Sound

Doors at 8pm. $15 adv, available at ticketswest.com and Rudy’s Barbershops.

Queens of the Zeppelin Fighters?

While some around here may decry the varied and sundry side projects of Jack White, this writer has a penchant for the work of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, UNKLE, Desert Sessions, The Wellwater Conspiracy). And it appears we can add another mysterious moniker to his impressive resume: Them Crooked Vultures. The name was spilled this summer by his EODM bandmate Jesse, and from the teaser vids on YouTube and their own site, the lineup is kinda the supergroup of the year: Dave Grohl (who recorded and toured with Josh for QOTSA’s “Songs for the Deaf”), Alain Johannes (Eleven, Chris Cornell’s band, and longtime guitarist for QOTSA) and… drum roll, please: John Paul Jones, of Led Fawking Zeppelin. The poster for their Chicago appearance featured the Foos’ “FF” logo, a symbol from Zep IV and the “Spermy Q” image from Queens’ second album. Sweet.

There is about as much conjecture flying around as truth with regard to this band’s future recordings, but the body of work that’s appearing on the YouTubes and reviews of their Lollapalooza two weeks ago confirms that they have an album’s worth of music in the bag.

Their official (though basically empty) site is here. So far it’s just got a vbulletin forum and a google maps plugin that may or may not tell you where they are at the moment.  I eagerly await more.

Kick It in the Sun with Built to Spill

This Friday afternoon whilst the sun is blazing, get an extra dose of face-melt by pedaling on over to the UW for some free rock and roll in the sun. Legendary PNW rockers Built to Spill will be joined by Ra Ra Riot on the fresh green lawn in front of the HUB from 3-7 tomorrow. Though our pals over at RainyDawg Radio tout the show being “open to UW faculty and students”, it’s like, a public institution and stuff.

If they don’t play “Kicked It in the Sun”, I’ll buy you a ham sandwich.

Moondoggies for Dawgs in the Sun?

Stuck on UW campus all day today? There is help for you, fellow rock fans, and it is in the shape of local musicians Moondoggies, scheduled to appear on the HUB lawn today between 2 and 4pm as part of a “Tune In, Tune Up” rock-music and bicyles shindig.
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You can thank the fine folks at the UW Bike Shop (such nice folks) and my HUB basement neighbors in the Rainydawg Radio station for making this happen.
If’n you’ve already got one of them college degrees and are out and about this weekend, word on the street is that they’ll be at QA Easy Street Saturday around 5pm.

We Want More Moisture!

As I have been buried in non-music  projects for the past few weeks, I have been unable to get my tail down to Hale’s Palladium for the much-lauded Moisture Festival. I dispatched a good friend to head down last week to serve as a report for the Subsonic Faithful and a preview for yours truly:
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“Burlesque and my mother…a night at the Moisture Festival.
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Perhaps inviting your mother (and one of her ex-boyfriends) to a burlesque show would seem to some like a mistake. Luckily for me the Moisture Festival burlesque performers gave us just enough tongue-in-cheek to help me get over watching topless ladies while sitting next to a man who brought me to Care Bears Movie the last time I saw him. All of the individual performers were beautiful and sassy, but Lily Verlaine’s Southern belle and Babette LaFav’s shadow display really stole the show. Maybe it was the Primus pumping in the background while naughty shadows went from sexy to psychedelic and back again, or maybe it was Lilly’s way with her ice cube.
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All of the male performers during the show really stood out, not just because they had different goodies to flash but also because they were clever and funny. Nanda, the last group of the night had impressive physical abilities but it was the absurdity of their routine that won me over. Who knew ninjas battling robots could be so risque? The Aerialistas looked incredible and both on and off their ropes, but my favorite aerial routine had to have been Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey, they really live up to everything their name might imply.
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My mother and her friend loved the show as much as my friend and I (maybe even more) and after the initial shock of watching wiggling flesh with my mother wore off it was a great night. Moisture Fest 2010 can’t come soon enough!”
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Brought to you by Barno, and the metric system, the standard of measure in her native Canada.
With this endorsement, I had no choice but to sell part of my soul for a pair of tickets to tonight’s show, which starts in two hours!

Raphael Saadiq Brings Stimulus to PDX

Last weekend at the Wonder Ballroom Raphael Saadiq appeared on stage without introduction nor opening band. His competent and energized backing band was already stomping through their take on “Age of Aquarius” and from there, none of them looked back. He has an extensive back catalog of R&B jams from which to assemble a set list, and he did so expertly. From “100 Yard Dash”, “Let’s Take a Walk” and “Sure Hope You Mean It” from his latest LP, to the Tony Tone Toni hits “Whatever You Want” and “Anniversary”, he crafted a fantastic show. It was pretty dynamic .
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During the opening song, the facade he displays on the cover of “The Way I See It,” began to rapidly strip away. Those black-rimmed glasses disappeared, and by mid-set, the shirt and tie were gone, too, revealing a ripped and tattooed crooner gone wild. The energy and  charisma of the star was infectious: smiling, I told my date,”It just became THAT show! Awesome.” He delivered pure, unhindered and honest entertainment: a giant dollop of soul, some skilled choreography with his terrific backing singers and a little affable banter between songs. It was a the kind of feel-GREAT, make ya grin like a carefree fool kinda show that anyone look relish. Our little group of six never stopped dancing – and we definitely weren’t alone. The whole place was movin’ and groovin’. I hope Raphael and his band make a return trip to the PNW this year. I heard that their Showbox appearance  termed “the best show the venue has ever had.”

Menagerie of Music News

A delightful numbered list of schtuff that I have had on my mind regarding this thing we love so much:
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1. The Liars Club headlined a RAWKIN’ show last night at the Bit. Special thanks to the Blood Red Dancers who kicked out the jams. Was it a short set, or did I just want to HEAR MORE? Fortune 500 was impressive as well, with a fine rendition of REO Speedwagon’s “Take It on the Run”. I think their bouncers are trainers at nearby LA Fitness (which was conspicuously empty, from the looks of things from the Ballard Bridge last night). While the sound mix could have been improved for the room, SubSonic favorites Liars Club rocked a new song, “Proposition” just before the finale “Trust Fund.” They also cranked out a newer track, “Squint My Eyes”, which is on their myspace page. The concensus of those in attendance was that LC is really perfecting their presentation. New to their set is backing vocals from both guitarist Chris and bassist Alex, with a unique and welcome version of crowd control whereby singer KC herds wallflowers up to the front of the stage.
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2. Though I have been spinning a lot of Coltrane and Stan Getz lately while doing taxes,  I have been tapping my foot to some louder, more raucous stuff: Kula Shaker, the Murder City Devils and Iron Maiden‘s first album representing the old school, and  Eagles of Death Metal‘s “Heart On”,  and Silversun Pickups from the sorta new-school. I can’t wait for their second album to drop… Coming in April.
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3. An interesting little EP arrived on my desk here in my corner office here at SubSonic HQ. Zpiderflower‘s “I, Zpy”. If you like Blockhead, Little People, Groove Armada‘s “Edge Hill” or “Brother” by Blu Mar Ten, you will be keen on this. I’m hearing some other elements in it from The Bee Gees to Porno for Pyros‘ “Pets”. Despite the DIY appearance of the EP we received, the production value is high and it is an enjoyable little record. I especially like the atmosphere provided by the acoustic guitar on the penultimate track, “Darling, Don’t Take That Over the Border.”
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4. Pearl Jam‘s 1991 debut, “Ten” is being sent back out to the market on March 24 as a re-released and enhanced LP. There are scads of details on the packaging and the release dates over at pearljam.com, but the hot ticket right now is the music player there that gives you  full-length, high-quality streams of five of the remixed or newly-available songs. Two highlights: the instrumental song “Brother” from the “Lost Dogs” b-sides collection from 2003, which is no longer a Mike McCready-does-Hendrix wankfest. This version has vocals, and seems like less of a throwaway track. Second is the remix of “Once”, which hits a lot harder with a cleaner vocal track and much more pronounced bass low end from Jeff Ament’s bass.
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5. That Dan Auerbach record kicks ass. I have tickets to the March 10 show at the Showbox-Market. Do you?
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6. Moisture Festival is coming up March 11th-April 5th. While I’ve been invited for each of the past four years, this year I am getting a paper route so I can get my rear down to Hale’s for can-can girls, burlesque, comedy and of course, really good beer.
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7. Shout out to the hard-workin’ folks in the Mt. St. Helen’s Vietnam Band! Have you seen their latest tour schedule? Holy smokes! They’re on the way to SF this week for the Noise Pop Festival but they’ll be back Friday March 6th for their record-release party at Neumo’s. (Don’t worry, kids, you can go, too. It’s all-ages.) Soon after, they’ll be rockin’ Sasquatch and SXSW.

Hell Hath No Fury

… like a newly-unemployed, broke-ass student who is sick and tired of Ticketrapist.
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So I just completed my transaction with Ticketf**ker so’s I can go see the much-publicized and currently-discounted Gutter Twins show, and some little pop-up evaded my Safari settings and offered me a chance to provide feedback on my experience with the BowelMaster website.
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Heh heh. I couldn’t help myself. The words flowed like tequila into my mom’s orange juice glass….
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“Your “convenience” fees are a cockslap to the face of music lovers. I bet being an employee of Ticketmaster is a little like being a meter maid: you can’t tell anyone what you do because you’re universally despised.
Thanks for operating a monopoly. Charging 30-40+% surcharge on shows is a shame[ful atrocity, recession or not]. Do you have any idea how many shows I *don’t* go to simply because I don’t want my bank account to be violated by your obscene taxes? I’m just one person, I know, but I’m not alone in buying scalped tickets. Your business model is as out of touch or irrelevant as most of the shows/artists you promote: Fall Out Boy, Elton John, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, Britney Spears, Ronnie Milsap, and Queensryche.
I wish you’d go away.
I want to see a show [Raphael Saadiq. -ed.] in Portland but you want NINE DOLLARS per ticket for “handling” or some such horseshit. For me and my girlfriend to attend the show, we basically pay a 45% tax on the price of the two tickets. And for what? All of your shit is handled through the goddamned interwebs. So I am basically paying for another person to go. Rad. Howsabout you send one of your flunkies down to the show with us, make it worth my while? I don’t care who it is, but s/he is going to carry my jacket, open my beers and politely laugh at all of my fucking jokes.
There. You wanted feedback through BizRate? You got it.
cc: seattlesubsonic.com”
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Damn, I am pretty wound up. I gotta go chill out.