July 20, 2006
This Is Getting Very Real, Very Fast
About a month ago, Sleater-Kinney broke up, but I wanted to see them one last time at one of the half-dozen final shows they'd be playing. Two weeks ago, tickets went on sale for their August 1 show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC and airfares were shockingly reasonable, so I decided I'd try to get a ticket. They were only $15, and I could always sell it on eBay if things didn't work out. Diligently hitting refresh, I think I was the ninth person to get a ticket in the online sale. So now I had a ticket. It wasn't entirely academic anymore. Like everything in the stupid universe, the show would take place during the week my mom's family takes to vacation up north, so I looked into airfares out of Traverse City and into National, because I can totally handle the Metro, and they were shockingly reasonable. So...I bought a plane ticket. I still have to book my hotel room, but this is going to happen. I leave Cherry Capital Airport at 11:21 AM on Tuesday, change plane in Detroit, and get to National at 3:19 PM. The concert is at 7:30, so I've given myself a little time. The next day, I fly out at 12:19 PM, have a much longer layover in Detroit, but I get back in time for dinner at 6:45 PM. This is going to be something.
July 2, 2006
The Song That's Shaking Me (Tastefest, Pt II)
My brother punked out on declined to accompany me to the New Pornographers show on Sunday night, instead opting to go watch more fireworks, so I dropped him off after seeing An Inconvenient Truth and headed downtown to meet Dave and Emily on my own. I took three seats in maybe the fifth row, just a little stage-right of center, three seats off the aisle, and waited for them to come over. Carl, Blaine, Kathryn, Kurt, John, and Todd were all onstage setting up. Seats started filling up fast after that. We still had maybe 45 minutes to wait after they showed up, and we spent a good amount of it mocking other people, including the disturbing number of people who were trying really hard to look like hipsters, but just looked stupid instead. I present to you a selection from both shows:
Baby Steps
The kid with the overdue-for-a-cut-by-a-couple-weeks hair with the Modest Mouse t-shirt. (CP)
Your Intentional Deconstruction Is Overly Obvious
The skinny college freshman with the Led Zeppelin t-shirt and jeans with the seat ripped to shreds wasn't fooling anyone. Neither was the guy with the shirt where only the back was shredded, arranged just so with the tattoo at the base of his neck perfectly framed by the tatters. (CP/TNP)
So You're Retro, Huh?
The girl who looked to be taking her entire wardrobe from Hairspray and Thora Birch's character from Ghost World. (CP)
Age-Inappropriate!
The fiftysomething woman wearing the tight purple "I Enjoy Punk/Ska" capris with the chains attached to the pocket. (CP)
Are You Ironically Being "That Guy" Or Are You Really That Guy?
The dude with the hipster glasses and the cowboy hat with a skull and crossbones painted on the front and the Cat Power t-shirt. (CP)
Is That Part Of Your Settlement?
The kid who looked to be barely out of high school wearing the Thriller t-shirt. (CP)
You Had Me Until You Turned Around
The college-aged guy with the hipster glasses, short hair, goatee, and ringer t-shirt...which read "WEEZER" on the front. (CP)
Pro: You Pretty Much Got It Right.
Con: You Still Look Like An Idiot.
The guy wearing the cowboy hat and YMCA t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, because hipsters hate sleeves. (CP)
The girl wearing the '70's/'80's cotton dress with the shoulder pads and the pseudo-frilly front. (TNP)
You Do Know Neko Isn't Touring With Them, Right?
The girl with the Fox Confessor Brings The Flood tour shirt. (TNP)
Oh. My. GOD.
The guys who looked like they were Cinderella at the height of hair metal. Big black hair, full of Aquanet (or equivalent). Tight pants. Leopard print, longsleeve shirt. TERRIFYING. And they couldn't have been more than 5'6" or so, maybe 90 lbs. Then the girl with the big platinum blond wig (looking more "Ironic '50's") sits down next to them. What is WRONG with the youth of this continent? (TNP)
Dave, in particular, got this girl in front of us to absolutely crack up over the Slippery When Wet Bon Jovi clones. When he'd spotted people wearing both C'mon, Feel The Illinoise! and Greetings From Michigan shirts, he told us that it was clearly time for the show to start. Eventually, some guy from 89X (who had no idea what band he was introducing) got up to thank the sponsors, and then everyone came out. The setlist:
Yesterday, for Cat Power, people began lining the security barrier well before the show began. Oddly, this time no one was up there at all until the show started. All of a sudden, everyone got up and crushed forward, leaving a couple of rows of empty chairs in their wake. Practically, what this meant is that I had a really clear sightline to the stage for pictures, of which I took a few.
The played an excellent show. Neko is Neko, but Kathryn is a more than adequate replacement. She was awesome on "The Bleeding Heart Show", especially, and "Letter From an Occupant" was tighter than the last time I saw them (with Neko). Carl kept reminding people that they were, in fact, the New Pornographers. At one point, he noticed the halfpipe set up in the other part of the parking lot. "We should have a halfpipe at all our shows. I feel like I'm in a Sonic Youth video." He and John Collins started trying to play the song from whatever video they're referring to. "That goes on for, like, four minutes. And then Kim Gordon says something."
There are a lot of bands who just don't take requests at all. One thing I love about them is that these guys do. I don't know what they were planning on for the encore, but one guy was trying hard to get a paper airplane to the stage with a request for "The Fake Headlines", which they did. Kurt Dahle, however, did puncture his image of infallibility. He missed two stick tosses, which is just disappointing. Maybe he had too much to drink, or not enough. Who's to say?
July 1, 2006
Once I Wanted To Be The Greatest (Tastefest, Pt I)
We were supposed to go to Chicago for the weekend, but my dad backed out. He's taking off a lot of time this summer, and he didn't want to lose this Monday. So I drove back home to Detroit instead of west to Chicago. It was Tastefest weekend, and there were free shows to attend. Saturday, I drove downtown with my brother to see Cat Power (and maybe Ray Davies, if the weather held).
It was in the mid to upper 80's when I claimed a pair of seats for us, maybe ten rows back. We were 45 minutes early, but the band was setting up for soundcheck. My brother doesn't like to wait, so I sent him off to get drinks while I sat in the sun. I'm glad I stayed. To do soundcheck, they just started doing parts from various songs, individually at first, then they started to play together, and these people know what they're doing.
Steve returned and gave me my pitifully small Harp, but it turned out to be just what I needed. He worked on his enormous lemonade. The festival guy got up onstage and thanked the sponsors before introducing Cat Power, who was nowhere to be seen. The band started playing a song, giving soloes to the trumpet, saxophone, organ, and guitar and one of the backup singers introduced them. They played another instrumental selection, too, before Chan joined them onstage for "The Greatest", punctuating her phrases by punching the air, or holding up her fists as the winner of her mythical bout. She's not exactly a conventional performer, nor is she a comfortable one.
She kept bouncing around the stage for nearly the entire show, ponying, twirling, playing with her necklace (a plastic-looking version of the charm seen on the cover of The Greatest). If you didn't know she was sober, you would be forgiven for wondering if she was drunk.
They played much of The Greatest; the title track (as mentioned before), "Living Proof", "Lived In Bars", "Could We", "Willie", "Where Is My Love", and "The Moon" were definitely there. The band left for a bit to give her a solo set. She covered "House of the Rising Sun", then used the same key for a slow cover of "Hit the Road Jack". She played her own "Hate", and maybe another tune or two before the rest of the band came back for more. She ended the real show with a big, powerful "Love & Communication". She got together with her backup singers as the band waved goodbye to sing some a capella Motown ("Tracks of My Tears"), and when everyone else had gone, she skipped back to the piano for another song. She seemed to be really enjoying herself, unwilling to go until they were practically dragging her offstage. She has the reputation of being such a fragile performer, it was good to see that.
Clouds were moving in again. The weather report said everything was supposed to deteriorate as the evening went on, with "likely thunderstorms" at 8:00, just before Ray Davies was scheduled to go on. We could see rain looming, so we decided to head back home.
June 28, 2006
My Favorite Band Is Gone
Like every college freshman in America, back in 1999 I started reading The Onion, and I began noticing the music reviews in The Onion AV Club, mostly that I barely knew any of the bands mentioned. Back then, Guster was as indie as I got, and I only knew about them because they were getting recommended all the time on the Treefort, a Barenaked Ladies email listserv, along with Travis and Moxy Früvous. I knew that none of those bands were musical innovators, and commercial radio had been going steadily downhill throughout my time in high school. So I got Napster and I started downloading.
All Hands on the Bad One was released on my birthday in 2000, but I didn't really notice it until it started showing up on best-of lists at the end of the year. I decided that this was a band I should be paying attention to, and, as a methodical engineering student, I did my research and decided to start with Dig Me Out. The first song was the title track.
When I first heard it, I didn't think I liked it. Where were the hooks? What happened to the bass? The singer wasn't that concerned with conventional ideas of what made a good vocalist. I left the rest of the album to download and went to get on the bus. I found the guitar line running through my head for the rest of the day and I listened to the song again and again when I came back. Later, I started noticing Janet's drums. I downloaded "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" (from Call the Doctor) too, but that was even weirder. A couple of years later, my old roommate told me he thought I was mad at him and playing it just to piss him off, because "they sound like cats."
The rest of Dig Me Out was just as different. The first six tracks are as tight and blistering as anything out there. "One More Hour" was a bit of a shocker. I didn't know that Corin and Carrie were sapphically inclined before then, let alone that they used to go out with each other (Corin's now married to filmmaker Lance Bangs and they have a son together). "Turn It On" is just hot. Some lines from "Words + Guitar" became my default away message for a while.
I moved on next to All Hands on the Bad One, skipping over The Hot Rock. I downloaded it first, then I saw it for sale at Borders, so I bought it. To this day, I maintain that whatever source the mp3s were taken from is superior to what's on the CD pressing. The CD sounds thin, the mp3s have the bass better supported. It's completely weird. All Hands on the Bad One is their most accessible record (ever, I suppose now). "You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun" is a genuine pop song. But that's not to say the album is conventional, or that it's not punk. "Ironclad" cuts pretty hard, and songs like "#1 Must Have", "The Professional", and "Male Model" are biting feminist criticisms.
You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun
I don't know when exactly it happened, but it was around this time that they became my favorite band. They took a stand, they carved out their own territory, and they were going to say exactly what they wanted. As a band, they mattered like no other group I'd heard. They weren't ironic or arch, they were impassioned, and I liked that.
In August of 2002, they released One Beat, and I was there in time to buy the limited edition. One Beat is the "political" record, as if their omnipresent feminism wasn't a political stance. It finds them furious at the president and the war machine they see gearing up, most prominently on "Faraway" and the jittery "Combat Rock". As a band, they started moving away from the raw, angular guitar lines that were their signature sound. You can hear it on "Light Rail Coyote", written about Portland, where all three of them were now living. They were adding three-part harmony too, like on "Oh!".
I got The Hot Rock around that time, too. I don't mean that's when I bought it, it's when I understood it. I'd listened to it before, but I didn't really connect with it, and I'm not sure what changed. Miranda July directed their first video, for "Get Up", and it's my favorite video they've ever done. The Hot Rock itself is a lot more pop than Dig Me Out (which it followed chronologically), and it marked the first big change to their sound.
They passed up Detroit on the first leg of their touring behind One Beat, but they came back through on February 19, 2003. The show was originally supposed to be at the Magic Stick, but was moved next door to the much larger Majestic Theatre. The Majestic isn't really much of a theatre – it doesn't even have seats – but the extra space took away a lot of the intimacy of the show. Doors were opened early, at 8:00. The Black Keys were opening, and they didn't show up until 9:30, when my back was already aching, and played a terrific set. Sleater-Kinney started playing at 10:30, but something was happening and they weren't really connecting with the crowd. Like the guy next to me said, "Too many f---ing scenesters." Tickets were $14, Sleater-Kinney is a critical darling, and Wayne State University is a couple of blocks from the theatre, so all the wannabes had decided to come out to judge the band. They could sense the ambivalence onstage, and started calling the crowd on it, that to give their best performance, they needed more from the crowd. Eventually they gave up on getting more. The thing is, I loved the setlist they played. I heard "Dig Me Out", "Get Up", "Turn It On", most of One Beat (including a moment during "Sympathy" that nearly put me on the floor), and "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone". "IWBYJR" is a song that sounds much better live. They take it faster than on the album, and now they have Janet Weiss to handle the drums.
Call the Doctor is a prickly album. I picked it up in Chicago, visiting my aunt and uncle for Easter in 2004. Released in 1996, Corin Tucker's vocals here make Dig Me Out seem like an exercise in restraint. "Little Mouth" is the densest ball of fury I've ever heard, clocking in at 1:44. "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" came off of here, too. My favorite is "Good Things". This album took awhile to get used to. I was listening to it for the first time while driving back home with my brother and I could almost hear him grinding his teeth. But it grows on you, a lot. A lot.
The Woods, their last album, came out on May 24, 2005. It's the same day that the first and second seasons of NewsRadio came out on DVD and I started my new job. I really liked that day. The first single, "Entertain", had been available on their website for a while, and I'd even heard a very early version of it at the 2003 show, so I knew that their direction was changing. But The Woods is still a remarkably different album from anything that came before. It's big, fuzzed-out guitars, full of feedback, pounding drums, cloaked in reverb, and there's a guitar break that lasts for the better part of eight minutes. Jason Dohring would call it "f---ing joyous." Listen to "The Fox". It makes me want to turn up the volume until it hurts. The whole album, on first listen, was just cacophony to my ears. But then I listened to it again and things started falling into place. After a few more listens, the internal logic of the songs began to make sense, and I started recognizing an incredible, jaw-dropping 7th album.
In an interview, years ago, Courtney Love was talking about S-K, and said something like, "My God, if only they were writing hooks", like they were squandering their potential on arty angular guitar lines. I disagreed with her when I read it the first time, and I disagree with her now. But they did throw in a monster guitar hook on "Jumpers" that just keeps going round and round on the instrumental breaks. The song is about San Francisco and the people who leap from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Again, they bypassed Detroit on the first leg of the tour, but they came back in October. Unfortunately for me, the show was on a Tuesday and I live 150 miles away now. I didn't know whether to go or not. I knew I shouldn't; it would be really late driving back, gas was $3 a gallon, I was already going to another concert that weekend, but I just had to, so I drove across the state without even a ticket in my hands.
They absolutely killed. They played St. Andrews Hall this time, which at least feels a lot smaller. The energy in the room was much different. Doors didn't open too long before the opening band, The Ponys, started playing, and it wasn't that late before S-K came out too, blasting into "The Fox" with Corin's huge voice cutting through everything. I was standing/bouncing in the fourth row, surrounded by other people who were just as interested in getting lost in a show. They played almost all of The Woods and finished with a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Promised Land", and then I drove home.
All was relatively quiet after that. Carrie was having severe allergic reactions, so they cancelled a European tour. But then they played a few shows again. I heard that they were playing Lollapalooza and I was briefly excited, but then I realized I had a wedding to go to on that day in Ann Arbor. Then Tuesday they announced they were breaking up and I felt the same way I did when I heard that Elliott Smith had died.
They still have a few shows left to play. Louisville (July 29th) is a festival show, 8 hours by car. Washington, DC is only a $143 flight away, and it doesn't look like the 9:30 Club is selling tickets to it yet. They'll be playing a farewell show in Portland at some unscheduled date, according to a Subpop representative, but that's not really in the picture for me. I miss my favorite band, and they're not even totally gone yet.
After work yesterday, I went out and finally tracked down their self-titled debut album from 1995. At under 23 minutes, it's really an overgrown EP, even with ten tracks on it. It only hints at how good they'll get in the future on songs like "Don't Think You Wanna". Whoever said all bands should break up after their first album is an idiot.
This is the first time my favorite band has ever just decided to pack it in. I feel lucky that they've delivered 7 albums that I love and that I've been able to see them twice in concert, but I honestly thought they had at least one more album in them before I had to start worrying about this sort of thing.
If you want a few mp3's, e-mail me. g|z|m|y|s|l|o|w at umich dot edu, just take out the "|".
June 19, 2006
No, There Really Is An Immaculate Machine
The Avalon Front doesn't list a start time for the bands that play there, just "Friday Night", which turns out to be barely accurate. I rush around, looking to find my birth certificate, but nothing doing there. I find my voter ID card, so I feel good about my chances of getting back into this country. According to the US Customs Service, US citizens are exempt from passport control procedures when trying to re-enter the US, but a passport or birth certificate "may speed things up".
Normally I don't drive 150+ miles and cross international borders to see a band like Immaculate Machine, but I'm heading home to Detroit anyway, so it's more like driving half an hour to go to a non-smoking bar. On the road, I call my brother, who lets me know that he's called the bar, and that they wouldn't be playing until 11:30. I stop speeding.
Stuck in the traffic jam in the 696 construction zone, I feel confident that I'll be eating alone. I've just gotten off the phone with my sister, calling to tell me that my parents are finishing up their round of golf and want us to meet them for dinner. Forty-five minutes later, I'm surprised to be home and even more surprised to see my brother sitting in the kitchen, watching TV. It appears that my sister has nothing to wear.
Dinner is fine, but I need to remind myself better that gorgonzola is much too strong to be the main filling for ravioli, a lesson I feel sure I've learned before.
Just before 10:00, my brother and I set out for the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. For a nice summer Friday, it's surprisingly uncrowded. We pay our toll and head underground. At the halfway point, we spontaneously break into song. "O Canada, a great big empty land..."
Oops. I forgot to think about getting into Canada. The nice young woman working Customs on the Canadian side reminds me that you technically need a birth certificate to enter. But she lets me slide, in large part because I am so obviously my brother's brother. She rocks.
My brother hasn't really had much to do, navigatorially, and he's a little lost when I ask him which way I need to turn on Ouellette. With the queue building behind me, I guess right, which turns out to be not wrong. We drive around, looking for cheap parking, but it's all about $5. Parking on Victoria seems auspicious, seeing as Immaculate Machine is from Victoria, BC.
We really have no idea where the club is, just that it's near University and Ouellette, and we drove by University. We head back that way. We guess again that it's on the closed-off block of University. We walk down one side of the street. I think about going into the Scotiabank to use the ATM, but it looks really closed. Just after 11:00, going back down the other way, we almost walk right past the Avalon Front, down one level in a larger entertainment complex. After paying the $5 cover, the modern, concrete around the entrance gives way to the familiar cheap brown wood, black paint, and bad lighting of a bar where live music is played.
Divided by a solid rail against which some extra-tall half-circle tables are pushed, the left half of the bar is an elevated platform with regular tables and chairs. Right of the middle is a corridor, then some pillars vaguely define the stage area, which isn't elevated. The Avalon Front is allegedly a dance club on non-Fridays, so that may be the explanation for this.
We find a table just off of stage right. I'd rather have stage left, since that's where Kathryn's keyboards are, but we're ridiculously close, and it doesn't look like we'll be competing for space. If there's more than fifty people in the bar, I'll be surprised. I get a Guinness, even though it's not on tap. My brother's already so sleepy that he doesn't even get anything, so now I feel the need to tip extravagantly.
This Guinness is way colder than beer from the British Isles should be.
Whoever's working the stereo tries to destroy my theory that the more obscure the band, the more obscure the music on the PA when he plays a bunch of songs that I know. Hot Hot Heat, "Get In Or Get Out", Beck, "Sexx Laws", another song I should really remember the title of. Oh, they're just playing all of Mutations now. Slackers.
The opening band starts setting up at 11:40. They're a quartet from Saskatoon called From Chimpan-A to Chimpanzee. In my head, Troy McLure begins to sing. Walking in the door earlier, I thought that the bassist was a homeless man, sitting at the bar with his unwashed, not-shoulder-length hair and beard that must afford a nice level of protection on the prairie in winter. The rest of the band look like Urban Outfitters shoppers. It turns out that Wide Mouth Mason doesn't have a monopoly on South Asian musicians from Saskatchewan, as the female singer looks to be of that persuasion.
They play, and they're decent, but not exceptional. They kind of fit into the same category as We Are Scientists and other bands that play kind of indie rock, but the sort that has a chance to get played on the radio. Especially with Canadian content rules.
Some Canadian guy walks by our table and asks what we know about Immaculate Machine. I tell him about how I saw them play in October at a club in Kalamazoo opening for the New Pornographers, and that I think they're pretty good. I mention that Kathryn handles the vocals when the New Pornographers tour without Neko. This earns raised eyebrows and an honest-to-goodness "Eh?" from the guy, and I feel all knowledgeable.
Immaculate Machine didn't waste a lot of time before following. Brooke, the guitarist, is a lot taller than I remember. Kathryn is wearing a black t-shirt with a big lightning bolt on it under a jacket. Luke, the drummer, has cut his hair and shaved. He looks so much like the drummer for Chimpan-A that I'm not sure it's really him until he takes off his shirt after the third song and I see his dumb chest tattoo. Thanks, Luke. Not.
I downloaded Ones & Zeroes last week, just to make sure I like them as much as I remember from seeing them open for the New Pornographers in October, and they play most of that album tonight. I'm still impressed by Kathryn's keyboard work. Her left hand is their bass, her right is playing the keyboard melody, and she's singing. Brooke's a better guitarist than I remember, and his singing has improved.
They play three songs not on Ones & Zeroes. One is "Skyscraper", which has to do with pirate gold and businessmen. Another was "Dear Confessor", so I make a joke to my brother about Neko's Fox Confessor. "Death of a Rockstar" paraphrases Linda Evangelista, opening with "Don't wake me up for anything less than ten grand today..." and talking about how celebrity can let you get away with just about anything, and how it's valued so much over having a brain in your head.
After a ripping take of "Please Don't Leave Without Us", the show is over. Kathryn walks to a booth in the back that's been converted to use as a merch table. I go over to buy some things and engage in witty repartee. "Hey, good show." "Thanks." "Uh, yeah. I'll take Ones & Zeroes and Transporter." "Actually, we ran out of Transporter. But you can get it on our website." "Uh, OK. I guess I'll just take Ones & Zeroes." I am a sparkling conversationalist.
Going back over the border, the Southern guard gives me a hard time. "I don't wanna see a voter ID cawrd fr'm yew." Whatever. Just let me go home. It's 2:15, I'm very obviously not drunk, and I have identification that marks me as a citizen.
At home, Angola and Mexico are tied, but I'm too tired to watch the rest of this. The ESPN ticker has stalled on a 4-2 score involving Pittsburgh.
June 18, 2006
Maybe Sparrow
I have a lot to say and no real idea where to start. It's almost all about Neko Case, so I'll forgive you if you don't want to go further.
This doesn't just come from anywhere, just so you know. Why you'd care, that's your business. It starts with Craig letting me know that I'd missed Neko's performance of "Maybe Sparrow" on Letterman, which in itself was frustrating, but YouTube can be coutned on to help out with that, and I finally saw it this morning (Take a look here). Then, still at YouTube, I saw that Neko had made a video for it. There's a somewhat clearer version up on her website, but here's the YouTube:
If you own Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, those animations should be instantly recognizable. They're from Julie Morstad, who did the cover art and some of the other drawings for the liner notes of Fox Confessor, including the same girl/sparrow from the video. I've already said how much I love the liner notes from this album, so I don't really need to go rehash all of that, except reiterate: I love the liner notes from this album.
The video itself I also love. For much of it, it's a near-literal telling of the song, which is really living dangerously, but it works remarkably well. The drawings/animations are a lovely complement to the bits of live performance and the collaged portions where they combine. I could watch it many times in a row. In fact, I probably will. Have I mentioned much I love this song, too? It's one of my favorites.
The whole album is so remarkable, so beautiful. When it came out it generated a lot of positive reviews, and some hailed it as her masterpiece, but no one seemed to love it in the way that I did. Pitchfork's review seems rapturous enough, but the 7.7/10 rating seems more than a little light (especially when Franz Ferdinand gets an 8.3 and Bloc Party an 8.9) and it's seemed more so the more I listen.
The beauty of the internet is that sometimes you stumble on someone who can put their arguments together and frame things in a way you haven't been able to. This review, at CokemachineGlow, says a lot that I want to, and it's helped me to see things that I hadn't put together. The fatalism that permeates the album, I'd only seen it in individual songs, instead of as a running theme.
