So Cow, So There

May 28, 2009 at 11:09 pm | Posted in Funhouse, Gigs, mp3, Music, Previews, Sunset Tavern | 4 Comments
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SoCow looking for a blurb about his upcoming Seattle gigs.

I’m not usually one to do show previews. I’m more the type to tell you about them after the fact.  But I feel it is my civic duty to tell you about the two upcoming So Cow shows here in Seattle, especially  since both the Seattle Weekly and the Stranger totally missed the boat, or cow as it were on these gigs.  On record So Cow are one guy, Brian Kelly who spent some time in South Korea, but hails from Ireland. Live, he’s got a full band with him to fill out the empty spaces.  He’s put out a bunch of singles and CD-r albums and has kind of flown under a lot of people’s radar, but just a about a month ago Tic Tac Totally put out a very nice 33 and a third that compiles some the older CD-r tracks as well as some new ones and seems to have garnered a bit of attention too.  My friend Bill over at Sound Bites put it succinctly when he said this about So Co:

…owing more than a little to the Pastels, Flying Nun, Calvin Johnson, Jeffrey Lewis… but he’s clearly got his own point of view. Highly recommended.

This is truly grade-A stuff and not to be missed, and since they’re playing two shows here in the delightfully sunny emerald city you really don’t have an excuse to miss them. Sunday night So Cow are at the Funhouse sandwiched in between the Suspicions and the Electric Kisses. Monday night at the Sunset Tavern over in Ballard  looks a little more enticing with the Coconut Coolouts headlining and Oakland’s Dreamdate on the bill as well. I’m so smitten with this Tic Tac Totally album, that I will likely be at both of these gigs.

mp3: So Cow – Casablanca


mp3: So Cow – To Do List


Both songs are from the Tic Tac Totally LP, which you can buy directly from the label.  You can also download a covers ep from the So Cow website (for free) that includes the Who‘s Boris the Spider and Kirsty MacColl‘s They Don’t Know and the Television Personalities‘ This Angry Silence.

A New Political Party: The Leisurely Socialists

May 27, 2009 at 10:51 pm | Posted in mp3, Music, Sarah Records | Leave a comment
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Are you a socialist? Do you enjoy leisure? Like to Party?

If you are a regular reader of this dusty corner of the internet then you probably get excited by the likes of Orange Juice, the Monochrome Set , Vic Godard, the Bluebells and the Close Lobsters.  The promo sheet for Socialist Leisure Party lists off a few of those bands, and listening to it, made me think of the others.   So Socialist Leisure party have some choice influences going for them, but they also have pedigree.  Half the band (Andy Hitchcock and Kevin House) used to be in Action Painting!  Action Painting!  somehow got lumped in with British music papers manufactured scene called the New Wave of New Wave which included bands like SMASH and These Animal Men.  Yes it was quite a forgettable scene, but I always liked Action Painting! They put out a handful of singles on Sarah and along with Boyracer seemed to be derided for not sounding like all the other bands on Sarah, meaning they were noisy.

Socialist Leisure Party would likely have fit much more comfortably into the more typical Sarah Records style, but it’s 2009 and Sarah has been defunct for over ten years.  Not to worry though, thanks to the fine folks over at Shelflife, Socialist Leisure Party have a nice home and a snazzy new release that is one part 7 inch and one part CD.  Tactical POP! For Coffee Cadets is part of the Shelflife 1000 series where each release is limited to 300 copies and contains a record and a CD, both the exclusive tracks.  So you’re going to need both a turntable and a CD player to listen to the entire thing, and you will want to hear it, for the guitars jangle and whirl, and Andy Hitchcock vocals have that delicate balance between wistful melancholy and youthful nievete.

mp3: Socialist Leisure Party – Head In the Hay (buy Tactical POP! For Coffee Cadets)

Here are couple bonus mp3′s from Action Painting!:
mp3: Action Painting! – Collapsing Cloud (from Sarah 087)


mp3: Action Painting! – Classical Music (from Sarah 073)

Out of Time

May 25, 2009 at 10:30 pm | Posted in Music, Seattle | Leave a comment
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Occidental

Have you ever felt as if you are no longer in the present, standing somewhere that has a look and feel to it that could be 1909 instead of 2009? Probably not, but it kind of happened to me twice on the same day. First as I was biking with my boss back from a meeting, we stopped at a coffee shop on Occidental Street in Pioneer Square to get some coffee. For those of you not familiar with Occidental Street, it’s a brick street lined with huge sycamore trees and old brick buildings. It’s opened to only bicycles and pedestrians. All of these factors combine to give these two blocks a look and feel of about a century earlier. As I was standing there on the street with the sun trickling through the trees I had a strange feeling that I could almost feel the past. Not that I know what the past feels like but it was a feeling where I felt that not much had really changed at that Occidental Street location in over a 100 years, and the people walking, sitting and talking, just going about their business haven’t changed much either. As I stood there by myself on a sunny afternoon as the world and time passed by ,it was only a brief moment that I felt it. I wasn’t transported or anything, just that the past seemed nearly palpable.

The second out of time experience occurred on my bus ride home and was entirely different from Occidental Street incident. I was listening to an instrumental from Dead Mellotron that kind of put me in this sublimely weird trance. As the song finished, I came to and looked around on the crowded bus. The sun shining through the windows created an effect giving me the sense that the bus was from the 1940′s or 1950′s. I figure that people back then had to deal with the same uncomfortable seats and lack of air conditioning as we do today. We were stopped in traffic, and it oddly did not feel like my normal bus, but a bus that had people on it from some other time and place. Again, no one was wearing period dress, they just had strange timeless looks about them. A guy across from me had fallen asleep reading a book, the girl next to me had dozed off as well. Some people just stared expressionless like they do in those old black and white photos where you had to keep very still or the photo would become blurred. I hit repeat on my mp3 player to listen to the song again to try and repeat the entire experience, but to no avail. The bus came to its first stop and people got off and new ones got on, but the new people looked rather of the present day.

A few years ago I read two books by Jack Finney called Time and Again, and From Time to Time which are about a government project that has figured out how to travel back in time. There’s no use of a time machine, or any other high tech methods. The way to travel back in time was to immerse oneself into the culture of the period to which is your destination. Essentially it is a mental trick of transporting oneself back in time. My mind was probably just off doing its own peculiar thing since I was probably suffering from lack of sleep and getting over this weird cold I had earlier in the week, but it’s always fun to wonder, what if?

mp3: Dead Mellotron – Ghost Light Constellation (Dead Mellotron Myspace)

Spring Fever Edition of the Basementcast

May 21, 2009 at 10:21 pm | Posted in Basementcast, Music, Podcasts | 6 Comments

backyard-chicken
When we first moved into our house, one of our neighbors offered us some chickens. She assured us that they were little trouble and that once you have a farm fresh egg you’ll never go back to the store bought ones. I balked at having chickens in the backyard, and still buy eggs from the grocery store or the farmer’s market. There are times that I wish we would have taken the offer, usually it’s at breakfast time. What does this have to do with the fourth installment of the basementcast you may wonder? Absolutely nothing, but there are backyard references made a few times in this one and a cameo appearance from my daughter Elsa who also talks about the backyard, sans chickens of course.  It’s the spring fever edition of the basementcast.

basementcast #4: download


Track list:
Woodentops – Get It On
Answering Machine – Cliffer
Eat Skull – Stick to the Formula
David Kilgour & Sam Hunt – Chords
Tea Cozies – Pretty Pages
Pylon – M-Train
Super Furry Animals – The Very Best of Neil Diamond
Heptones – Tea for two
Signed Papercuts – Of My Heart
So Cow – Greetings
Fresh & Onlys – Peacock & Wing
Idle Times – Million Miles Away
Legends – Always the Same
Vincent Vincent and the Villains – Killing Time
Gene Vincent – Race With the Devil
Hula Boy – When Owls Cry
Surfire Broadcast – Stars Hang Bright
B.I.S – This is Fake D.I.Y
Bill Nelson – Do You Dream in Colour?
Intelligence – Saint Bartolomu
Jazz Butcher – Domestic Animals
The Saphires – Gotta Have Your Love
Wooden Shjips – For So Long
Atlas Sound – Solo or the Square
Nite Jewel – Artificial Intelligence
Softies – I Love You More
Cat Walk – On The Cracked Pavement
Teenage Lovers – Number One
Wounded Lion – Pony People
Richard Swift – Lady Luck

Definitely Not Dead: Obits at Neumo’s

May 18, 2009 at 10:43 pm | Posted in Gigs, Neumo's, Seattle | Leave a comment
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Obits | Lights | Unnatural Helpers at Neumo’s | 16 May 2009

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Neumo’s felt like a greenhouse Saturday night, partly from the 75 degree day we had and partly from the blistering sets from all three bands which kept the temperature quite tropical throughout the night. I arrived mid-way through Unnatural Helpers‘ sweaty opening set. The band just singed to Sub Pop spin-off label Hardly Art but have released an album and single on Seattle label Dirty Knobby. The band do post punk/hard core that reminds me of bands like Holy Rollers and Candy Machine from back in the 90′s DC/Baltimore scene. Guitarists Leo Gebhardt and Brian Standeford do time in Idle Times and bassist Kimberly Morrison has another gig in the Dutchess and the Duke, leaving drummer/singer Dean Whitmore the defacto head helper.

The Lights were very good, so good, I wondered as they steamed through Victims of the Pleasure of the Sense of Hearing from their first album if the Obits could match the intensity of  these Seattle angular noise-nicks. The Lights played mostly all new songs, with a few old favorites thrown in to string us along.  The old songs weren’t really necessary to keep me interested, but everyone, myself included certainly appreciated hearing the afore mentioned Victims, probably their most straightforward pop song.   I shouldn’t have really doubted the Obits’ ability to rock.  Their pedigree for rocking is unmistakable considering Rick Froberg’s former face blistering bands Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes.  I mentioned how it was hot, well at least hot for Seattle. During the Lights’ set there was a woman at the front with a hand fan that she waved the entire set. The Lights played faster, she danced and waved the fan faster. I don’t think it was doing much good, and she was probably making herself hotter as fast as she was waving it. I lost track of her during the Obits set, but I’m guessing she may have passed out sometime during their ripping, heat inducing set. The Obits started off a bit wobbly with the first two songs not really hitting on all cylinders, but they owned the room by third song. Oddly it was the only one in which former Edsel front-man Sohrab Habibion sings lead. Something seemed to click with the band at this point, whether it as them just taking a couple songs to get warmed up, or if it was the first song in which Froberg and Habibion combine not only guitar but voices as well for the chorus.  From then on the band were on it with lightening hot Pine On, the tense eeriness of Light Sweet Crude, and the just plane fun Back and Forth.   Now that the album has been out for a few months I had a better familiarity with the songs that I was missing last summer at SP20 and earlier this year down in the ID.   My familiarity also made the way Froberg’s and Habibion’s intertwined guitar riffs play off each other become much more apparent. Their styles are different, Froeberg delivers his surf-punk licks juxtaposed with Habibion’s post-punk, but they combine to create a tense wallop. The other half of the band are no slouches either, bassist Greg Simpson drummer Scott Gursky laid down some pretty amazing riffs as well, the best being the intro to Two-headed Coin which starts with Simpson’s bouncing bass line over Gursky’s shaker’s and drums. The way these guys play together you can tell that they’re totally digging and exploring their sound, It seems like a simple straightforward formula, but the Obits add an experienced complexity to it that is easy to miss because they make it look so easy.  It’s almost as if they rock without even trying.

mp3: Obits – Military Madness (Graham Nash cover found on their Record Store day 7″)

Here are the rest of the Obits’ west coast dates with the Lights:

May 19 – Blue Lamp, Sacramento CA w/ The Lights
May 20 – Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco CA w/ The Lights
May 21 – Cellar Door (CA), Visalia CA w/ The Lights
May 22 – Spaceland, Los Angeles CA w/ The Lights
May 23 – Casbah, San Diego CA w/ The Lights

The Vaselines: All This Suff and More

May 13, 2009 at 11:37 pm | Posted in Gigs, Music, Neumo's, Seattle | 2 Comments
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Vaselines at Neumo’s, Seattle | 12 May 2009

Son of a Gun! The Vaselines.

Seeing the Vaselines last night was like sex on the second date. The first date was last summer at Sub Pop 20 festival where there was heavy petting and even some dry humping. Their set at Marymoor Park last July was just about perfect with Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee’s sexually tinged funny stage banter and even better harmonies, they were easily the highlight of that perfect summer afternoon. After a first date that goes so well, you always kind of prepare yourself for a letdown on date number two. You start to see the imperfections, maybe a few wrinkles or a bald spot.  The Vaselines may have their imperfections, but I’m still blinded by lust to really notice any of them.  Francis joked saying that you may think you’re at the wrong gig if you’re looking for the people on the poster, referring to the much younger looking Vaselines that adorned the advertising for the show.  They also tried to explain their long absence with wild stories of Eugene becoming a Hare Krishna, explaining his lack of hair, and Frances’s time in prison for allegedly getting facials from underage boys.

With the Vaselines,it’s all about sex and god, and they did not disappoint in either department.  Eugene introduced Monster Pussy with a few double entendres, about Frances’s cat and then went on to call Jesus a cunt for not giving him a bike for Christmas. Teenage Jesus Superstar was a role playing song with Eugene playing the part of the teenage kid reading comic books in his room and masturbating.  Francis played the roll of his mother.  The Vaselines are kind of like the dirty version of Billy Bragg or Robyn Hitchcock, where the between song banter is sometimes as good as the songs.

They were backed again by Belle & Sebastian members Stevie Jackson on guitar and Bobby Kildea on bass, and the songs had a smoother polish to them than the recorded versions that I’m so familiar with from Way of the Vaselines.  The better sounding Vaselines is probably due to the band being better musicians than they were 20 years ago.  Even though they sounded less ragged, they still have the attitude and humor that made them so special in the first place.  There is no way that anyone at this gig went home disappointed from this gig, besides sounding great, they played every single one of their songs and even graced us with two brand new ones.    Both new ones employ generous amounts of harmony, I think I liked the first one which they’re calling Picked a Cherry best.  The other new one is so new it doesn’t even have a name yet, referred to on the set list as New New Song.  The classics sounded, well classic.  They started the set with Son of  a Gun, their fist single which appeared on Stephen Pastel’s 53rd & 3rd label back in 1987, and then Monster Pussy and The Day I was a Horse, which got a funny intro from Eugene telling about how it was written about the experience of taking acid and thinking you’re a horse.   Frances had the boys swooning when she mentioned that she was looking for a second husband so that she could live in America.  Never mind the impossibility of it all, there were takers everywhere to join here harem.  With three songs from their discography that they had yet to play, wouldn’t you know it, they came back for a three song encore, of Rory Rides Me Raw, their danc-y Divine cover You Think You’re a Man and then Dum Dum.  Before Dum Dum, Eugene said that this would be their last song because they didn’t have any more to play.  Just like last summer, the Vaselines were just about perfect playing their timeless songs like it was 1989 and Dum Dum just came out, only this time a lot more people were paying attention.

Video I shot of the as yet to be titled New New Song:

The Stranger, Seattle Weekly , Seattle Subsonic and Seattle Metblog were also there.  Here’s the set list in case you’re the type that’s interested in the exact order of how everything went down. (No I’m not the one who pinched the setlist before the encore, it was the guy in front of me)
vaselines setlist

Erik Blood One More Time

May 8, 2009 at 11:00 pm | Posted in Chop Suey, Gigs, Music, Seattle | Leave a comment
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Erik Blood at Chop Suey, Seattle | 8 May 2009

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Ok, I wasn’t going to write anything about this show, because I’ve gone on more than enough about how good Erik Blood‘s record is.  I have certainly seen him enough and written about him enough to point where I don’t have anything new to say, but the gig last night was easily his best yet. Maybe it was the fact that he finally played somewhere that has a decent sound system.  Maybe it was the fact that legendary Crocodile Cafe sound guy Jim Anderson was manning the sound board making the songs really crack.  Maybe it was continuous perfect sound of the three guitar maelstrom, that filled the room.  Maybe it was the three part harmonies on Too Early and Too Late.  Maybe it was the fact that his jaw dropping The Way We Live album is finally getting released, and this was the gig to celebrate it.  Maybe it was that he played the album highlight Better Days which deftly mixes northern soul and shoegaze for the first time ever and totally nailed it.  Maybe it was the hilarious new song Jet Inside You which I can only assume is from his aborted concept album about pornography.  Maybe it was the fact that the songs from this album just don’t get old with me.  Maybe it was the earnestness in which gay rights anthem To Leave America was played,  transcending the words, letting  the music convey the message all by itself.  Maybe it was all of the above, yes of course it was.  Maybe you should buy the record.

mp3: Erik Blood – To Leave America (from the Way We Live, out 12 May digitally)

Destoying to the Converted

May 8, 2009 at 9:53 pm | Posted in Crocodile, Gigs, Music, Seattle | Leave a comment
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Destroyer at the Crocodile, Seattle | 6 May 2009

Dan Bejar Destroying Solo
There are many times that I go to a gig expecting to be converted and I was hoping that seeing Destroyer live would put me over the top as a fan. It happened last year at the Silver Jews when I saw Dave Berman in person he single-handedly made me a believer. I had a sense that Dan Bejar might be capable of doing something similar seeing him live. I am what you would probably consider a casual Destroyer fan, appreciating the records, and really loving about half of the songs from each one of them. Bejar is capable of totally wowing you with his unique take on pop songs.  He totally stole the last New Pornographers album with his Myriad Harbor, and his albums offer similar glimpses to this kind of pop genius, but they also can be excruciating affairs that meander off in strange directions.   Destroyer is the primary musical vehicle of Vancouver, BC resident Dan Bejar who also records with various other bands including the afore mentioned New Pronographers with Carl Newman and Neko Case and Hello Blue Roses with his wife Sydney Vermont.

Destroyer InbibesWednesday night it was Bejar sans band, the lone figure up on the very large Crocodile stage. He wasn’t entirely alone, he had an acoustic guitar and two bottles of Stella Artois from which he drank copiously between songs. Bejar is kind of a gangly strange looking fellow, part hippy, part renaissance man, but his appearance belies his songs which are part Bowie, part Dylan, and part Lawrence (Felt). His set consisted of songs plucked from his extensive catalog of records including some old ones like Destoyer’s the Temple from Thief, Helena and Beggars Might Ride from from Streethawk.  He didn’t neglect recent albums playing European Oils and Painter In Your Pocket from Rubies and Foam Hands from Trouble in Dreams. Quiet at first, he started to warm between songs, eventually making fun of us for remembering Bobby McFerrin and then pandering to us with a Sub Pop reference before playing New Ways of Living saying it had appeared as a single in the Sub Pop singles club before it showed up on the Your Blues album. He also gave a shout out to the Amtrak bus which he unconvincingly endorsed as a scenic ride. In short it was a good show, and I’m sure that die hard fans totally appreciated every minute of it, but my status as a casual Destroyer fan remains.  Perhaps I need to see Destroyer in full band mode to be fully converted?

mp3: Destroyer – Destroyer’s the Temple (from Thief.  Thief and City of Daughters were recently reissued on vinyl, get them from Darla)


mp3: Destroyer – Painter in Your Pocket (from Rubies, Merge is the place to go for most of the Destroyer CD’s)

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