September 9th, 2008
You can get the finger
What Finger?
The Middle.
-Kriss Kross
A pox on your house, El Rey Theater. Don’t take it personally. I dig the art-deco interior, the adjoining cafe serving spectacular sweet potato fries, the fact that ticket prices are usually kept decent. Really though–you guys blew it last week. Wail all you want about public safety, the children, the fear of thousand-carat chandeliers becoming permanently pungent like Otto’s jacket. But under no humane circumstances can you allow people to throw down $42 (including Ticketmaster extortion) to see Lee “Scratch” Perry and not let them smoke weed.
Now I’m not looking to do the self-righteous rant and rave about “cannabis legalization,” because, “y’know…it’s like….totally good for the soul, maaan. Besides dude, do you know all the things you can do with with hemp?” Shit, it’s practically legal in California if you’re wise enough to get your prescription. So why couldn’t you tell the Tonton Macoutes to play it cool, ease off, instead of forcibly ejecting every soul daring to follow Perry’s admonition to “smoke your splifs.”
Consider the crowd. 92 percent having once plastered Bob Marley posters to their dorm room walls, crooning in Wiggum-like bleats to “Jammin” with dread-locked, Trustafarian glee. Mixed in were the prerequisite ex-frat boys, skate-punks there for openers Abe Vigoda (who I regretfully missed) and a smattering of the genuine article, aged Rastas there for one of reggae’s patron saints, the BIG to Marley’s 2Pac. There’s an obvious amount of oversimplification in that analogy, not least of all because at 72, Perry continues to tour and release music and Marley and Perry were collaborators not rivals. Yet there’s a certain congruity in the way Marley/Pac’s inherent charisma, knack for self-mythologizing, and photogenic appearances made them ripe for iconography. Whereas, Biggie worship these days seems mainly the province of blogs, hip-hop mags, and “lines coming out Jay-Z’s fat mouth,” and the average music fan outside of Jamaica and Britain probably doesn’t have a clue who Lee Perry is.
Perry During His Short-Lived “Jughead Jones” Phase
Of course, they’ve heard Perry’s music, considering he produced most of the pre-Island Bob Marley material and invented the Dub sub-genre with King Tubby. But Americans have a way of reducing foreign genres to one band, so when most non-music geeks think of reggae, they think of Bob Marley & The Wailers. In fact, I was one of those people until about three years ago when I vaulted past the “every Reggae Song sounds the same” phase and begun to dig deeper, a development that almost immediately led to Perry.
Few artists have amassed such a prolific discography, so predictably I haven’t heard a lot of inevitably bible material, but off the strength of those early Marley records, Arkology, Dry Acid, The Congos’ Heart of the Congo’s, Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves, and the Upsetters’ Super Ape, Perry’s ripe for inclusion on any short list of G.O.A.T’s. Indeed, with most of his peers lying six-feet deep, viewing one of the last reggae legends live felt like watching a wizened, half-mad prophet, one on a George Clinton-like plane of eccentricity–unsurprising, considering Perry’s been weird for a very long time (at least, if this old Jools Holland footage of Perry at Black Ark is to be viewed in its entirety.)
The point to this gibberish is that by the time Perry finally graced us with his presence at a quarter past 11, no one one in the room had a choice whether or not we should smoke. I mean what’s a sane person to do when presented with a Dub deity dressed in a Lucky Charms NASCAR jacket, wearing a hat filled with flashing lights and miscellaneous tchotchkes, topped with a burning stick of incense, the reggae equivalent of sticking a feather in your hat and calling it macaroni. Or something. Either way, the moment that droning, head-nodding, stoned space funk kicked in, pools of smoke began billowing from the crowd, followed immediately thereafter by lurching security guards, grabbing and forcibly removing people as though they were engaged in some sort of unnatural drug-fueled orgy. A warning would’ve been nice, instead they carted off people like Reefer Madness had been a vital instructional video in their security training.
The Other Kind of Green
So for the most of the show, the place was Miley Cyrus concert sober, with a short-tempered crowd muttering obscenities and staring balefully at the joints they’d smuggled in. At one point, my friends and I crouched down low and burned one, taking shallow, clipped puffs and exhaling the smoke into our shirts. It was absolutely ridiculous but these were the desperate measures we were resigned to. Because really, Perry was phenomenal, ever-energetic and dynamic, delivering impromptu karate kicks on-stage, warbling with a soaring, adenoidal, alien trill, his backing band sharp and eager to impress with trembling, fuzzy blasts of guitar, zonked out keyboards and haunting melodica bursts.
At one point, Perry even brought out a young girl from back-stage to dance with, not in a skeezy old pervert way but in a charming, debonair, drug-addled sort of way. Of course, Perry’s allegedly been sober for the last 20 years, but when you smoke that many trees, your mind is permanently altered. And indeed, Perry dwells in that extraterrestrial orbit with Clinton, Sun Ra, and Cam’ron (how else to explain the video with the boxer shorts and the black eye?). The set-list ran the gamut from the classic 60’s and 70s catalog to the more dancehall inflected “God Save His King,” and “Pum Pum” from the Andrew W.K.-produced Repentence, Perry’s recent effort for Narnack Records.
By the encore, when Perry performed that old Marley staple “Kaya,” the crowd had thinned, nerves no doubt aggravated by the cruel, unyielding and forced sobriety. Yet those who stayed to the end were treated to an incredible performance by one of the finest musicians to ever turn a cheap mixing board and even cheaper weed into the stuff of legend. At 72 years old, who knows who much longer Perry’s going to be able to play, so it’s highly advised to catch him before it’s too late. Hopefully, next time he returns to LA, he’ll play in a more narcotically neutral venue. Or maybe, the El Rey will just learn to lighten up.
Download: The Lee Perry Primer
MP3: Lee Perry-”Roast Fish and Cornbread”
MP3: Lee “Scratch” Perry & The Upsetters”-”Black Panta”
MP3: Lee Perry-”Pum Pum”
Produced by Perry
MP3: The Upsetters-”Super Ape”
MP3:The Congos-”Fisherman”
MP3: Bob Marley & The Wailers-”Kaya”
MP3: Junior Murvin-”Police and Thieves”
Lee “Scratch” Perry Set List
- Introducing Myself
- Secret Laboratory
- Inspector Gadget
- Jungle Safari
- Roast Fish & Corn Bread
- Jah Live
- Sun Is Shining
- One Drop
- God Save His King
- Pum-Pum
- I Am A Madman
- Devil Dead
- War Inna Babylon
- Kaya
Posted in Beards, Blazers, & Glasses | 4 Comments »
July 17th, 2008
Photo Via New York Times
Zimbabwe native and ex-Stylus scribe Andrew Iliff knows more about African music than Vampire Weekend. He also rocks better sunglasses.
The house lights finally dimmed, the final stragglers in their places, a single spot lit up over the stage at the Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, illumining a women named Kokanko Sata warming up her kamelen n’goni. Leaning over, a friend whispered to me, “Look how much potential energy there is on stage!” In the spilt glow of the spot, a serried array of guitarists sat just to one side of Sata; the nearest in a series of percussionists warmed the surface of a calabash with his palms; behind him, the highest point on the stage, Tony Allen fidgeted amongst an armory of cymbals like a fleet of UFOs, clad in a silver-white satin spacesuit; to the right stood the seven-man Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, silently waiting to go off like a Chekovian shotgun, a finger of bicep curled around a sousaphone trigger. At the centre of the crowd, Sata’s solitary melody was meditative, throat clearing; seldom has musical restraint seemed so tense, like an abandoned mic turned up high.
Allen introduced the Hypnotic Brass with a beat that skittered like rock-heavy surf. “Sankofa,” from the recent Lagos Shake album of Allen remixes and collaborations stepped into the all-but empty space, constructing a crisis-stricken fanfare atop a relentlessly ascending march, a grim call to The Last Battle. In between phrases, the players – all sons of Sun Ra Arkestranaut Phil Cohran – grooved in I-Three synchrony, making copulative gestures with their, um, horns.
And Damon Albarn, the guy with his name on the marquee? Hunched over a pint-size keyboard like a schoolboy playing hookie on a park bench, sporting the smile of one who is getting away with it. The all-for-one staging kept just about everyone onstage all evening, no matter how few or many were performing, presumably so that Albarn, geeking out at the foot of Allen’s drum riser, wouldn’t be all on his tod.
Albarn During His Willy Wonka Phase
Albarn’s omnivorousness risks overreaching; it takes some kind of Mad Hatter to accomplish the transition from Simone White’s cerebrospinal urban folk (a ruefully Alice cover of Fred Bango’s “Bunny In A Bunny Suit”) to Lobi Traoré’s highwire blues, whose breakneck, polyvocal clatter is cousin to the din of Konono No. 1. And indeed there were some bum notes over the two hours of the Albarn Invitational: handclapping gospel singalong stultified after Allen’s liquid lecture in rhythm; Victoria Williams Southern savant act wore thin when her eccentric guitar strum stifled and stymied a string of collaborative percussionists.
Albarn’s bloody-minded avoidance of any ethnobongo “world music” fetishism – an obstinate refusal to pay any attention to borders – is the trademark of Honest Jon’s, the label Albarn co-owns. Opening its doors with Mali Music, a collection of tricked-out field recordings from Albarn’s first visit to Mali, Honest Jon’s now flogs a mongrel catalogue that makes putting archival Baghdad folk alongside homoerotic Japanese prog appear inevitable.
Thus, on a stage draped with flags, the British flag got equal prominence with the Malian, and a Hypnotic Brasser wore his American flag like a superhero. When Bocoum shouted “Feet!” and his violinist indulged him with a little soft-shoe shuffle in bright white sneakers, his equally pearly-white smile was an offshoot musical solo, not a minstrel’s exhibition. Some earlier publicity materials described Albarn as “curating” the show, but Albarn himself introduced it as “Honest Jon’s Chop Up,” using a Nigerian term for a feast, and “served” might have been better. Albarn’s presence was like that of an affable chef eager to watch people eat: burbling unintelligible introductions, grinning encouragingly, unnecessarily breaking up the silent pause while the next course is served. The draw-your-own-conclusions approach was less in evidence in Williams wide-eyed birkenstocked remark halfway through – “They’ve been playing some of these songs since the 14th century!” – about as welcome, and necessary, as being reminded that the introduction to “Fake Empire” is really a ¾ rhythm played against a 4/4 rhythm, you see how that works?
Freed of curatorial responsibilities, Albarn was easily the most unnecessary man onstage, huffing with ADD gusto at his melodica as though he’d just got it home from Fisher Price. Finally he borrowed Simon Tong’s guitar and Sata’s centrestage microphone to lead an all-in rendition of “Sunset Coming On,” the beautiful if slightly flat-footed closer on Mali Music. But just as it was all getting a little kum-ba-yah, Albarn leapt into the air, the pace doubled to a Traoré tempo – only this time with twenty people walking the highwire all at once. As the audience rose to its feet and danced in the aisles, Albarn slipped back alongside Traoré, flailing inexpertly at his guitar, a delighted guest at his own banquet.
Download:
MP3: Tony Allen/Hypnotic Brass Ensemble-”Sankofa”
MP3: The Good, The Bad & The Queen-”The History Song”
MP3: Blur-”Girls & Boys”
MP3: Gorillaz-”Dirty Harry”
Posted in Beards, Blazers, & Glasses | 2 Comments »
June 24th, 2008
(photos by Timothy Norris)
Sometimes, I think music critics hate jam bands for the jokes. After all, on that endless litany of items capable of inspiring comedic rancor, nothing is easier to mock than hippies, save for maybe George Bush, nu-Metal and/or Coldplay. It doesn’t exactly help matters either when the moment that you park in the lot next door to the Orpheum, you’re treated to the spectacle of a group of the heady set inhaling enough nitrous oxide to keep the dentists of Southern California in stock for the next six months.
Hey, It’s Renowned Thespian, Matthew McConaughey
Inside, things don’t improve much, at least not initially. See, few bands on earth get more people dancing than Widespread Panic. It’s sort of weird. Of course, this would be totally fine were it not for the inescapable reality that hippies are the worst dancers on earth—bar none. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Soul Train candidate myself, but watching a couple thousand ecstatic, flailing, gumby-limbed members of the white dreadlock set had me half-believing in my chances of joining the Rocksteady Crew. With a step back and a look of bemused detachment, you’re liable to think that you’re trapped in that Chappelle’s Show skit where John Mayer plays the guitar to the delight of a rhythmless horde of twisting white people. But hippies don’t do the twist. They sort of gyrate with this bizarre, off-kilter lurch lost somewhere between the mating dance of a Chinese Heavenly Crane and Elaine Benes’ spastic “dry heave set to music” from Seinfeld. Unfortunately, the heaving isn’t always dry, at least judging from the guy in the front of me who vomited out three hunks of weed brownie onto the floor during the second set of Friday night’s Widespread Panic show.
Jimmy Herring, Legendary Guitarist, Organic Juice Kingpin
So yeah, I get it, nothing’s less cool than admitting to liking jam bands, especially the in the year 2008 when there aren’t many “jam” bands left, And out of the wreckage, Panic remain standing, the stalwarts, 22 years in the game, still one of the biggest draws in music. Of course, you never hear about them unless it’s in conjunction with jokes about hippies, which brings me back to my first point that critics hate jam bands. There are a variety of reasons for this, some legit (self-indulgence, usually shitty lyrics, drum solos) and others that stem from a general critical loathing of goofy sincerity, patchouli, and drugs.
There Are 14 Things Wrong With This Picture, Name Them
Of course, the drugs definitely help. I’m sure it’s possible to enjoy a jam band show sober but I wouldn’t recommend it. In the lobby, a group of benevolent seeming souls sat under a banner that read: The Gateway, Clean and Sober Widespread Panic Fans. More power to them I guess, but that’s not an idea I can safely endorse. There’s too much time to think. I’m pretty sure that during one of Jimmy Herring’s guitar solos Friday night, I could’ve read Ulysses. But in the proper frame of mind, I really like Widespread Panic and I’m totally okay with admitting that. Maybe I’m not about to go about and buy any of their nine studio albums or seven official live albums, but if you’re trying hard enough, it’s damned impossible not to enjoy a Panic show. After all, happiness is a rare commodity in Los Angeles, and even the most dedicated cynics ought to like something about any band capable of eliciting that much joy from their audience.
Stuff White People Like
Musically, you won’t find a much tighter working unit. In a way, they remind me of the jam band equivalent of modern day Wilco: slick, professional and filled with a surfeit of dazzling stoner guitar solos. Except instead of the more avant-garde leaning Nels Cline, Panic wrangled their own ax-legend in Jimmy Herring, formerly of the late-period Allman Brothers and The Dead. You have to be pretty great to make a living filling in for three different seminal dead guitarists and Herring doesn’t disappoint. He’s not showy or flashy, just good, the world’s oldest seeming 46-year old with his white ponytail, Levi’s and tucked-in flannel shirt making him look more akin to an organic juice magnate than guitar legend. But in full volume, the guy sounds like what kids think they’re doing when they rock out at Guitar Hero.
I Can’t Feel My Face
Despite looking eerily like debauched 19th Century President Franklin Pierce, lead Panic singer/guitarist John Bell makes for a solid front-man with a flexible range that sounds at times a whole lot like Jerry Garcia and at others, particularly on fan favorite, “Whiskey and Ribs,” he descends capably into believably bluesy lament. Sonically, the band doesn’t re-invent the wheel and may lack the experimental sheen to make them critically respectable, but they know to rock and sometimes on a Friday night, that’s really all that you want. Their shows have a collegial geniality to them that you practically never find in indie rock, there’s no arch irony, no pretension, just bluesy Southern Comfort rock n’ roll. Plus, with the music industry in perpetual chaos, there’s something to be said about a group that can get the same people to see them three consecutive nights. So what if the shows are a little funny, it’s more important that they’re fun.
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May 27th, 2008
I think that everyone who reads this blog is in accord that the world doesn’t need another El Producto concert review where the writer strains to cram in the words, “Orwellian,” “dystopian” and “nihilistic.” Instead, here are a few scattered thoughts from last Thursday’s LA stop on the Def Jux: Spaceships and Soy Milk 2008 World Tour.
- It’s nice to see that people are okay with liking hip-hop again. Not like I blame indie rappers for trying to push genre boundaries because let’s face it, rap’s been mired in an Andruw Jones-like slump/bloat for the majority of the decade. But if I had to watch one more rapper come on-stage with a watery three-piece backing band whose greatest musical achievement was taking acid with Bootsy Collins on the 1987 P-Funk tour stop in Scranton, I was going to stab myself with a rusty ice-pick. There is no shame in coming on-stage with just a DJ and a hype man and burning that motherfucker down. After spending the previous year touring with a band in Clockwork Orange jumpsuits, delivering diluted bass licks and dull drum fills, it’s comforting to see El back in two turntables and a microphone mode.
- Hearing El rhyme over the instrumentals for “Born to Roll,” “Can I Kick It,” and “Children’s Story” provided a nice respite from his sledgehammering Space Odyssey beats but moreover, it was also good to know that enough time has passed for artists to cop to their formative influences in a sober-eyed (if not slightly nostalgic) homage to the Golden Era. Not that rappers need to spend their time wallowing in misty-eyed reminisces about the boom-bap days. That’s what blogs are for.
- As highly as I regard El-P’s work, he’s better off leaving the political diatribes to his songs. I know he’s a polemicist and like his arch-nemesis Dubya, he doesn’t
“do nuance,” but I’m willing to guess that 96.3 percent of his audience is already supporting Obama. Therefore his anti-Clinton and McCain rants feel perfunctory and preachy. Like is Hillary Clinton not making enough of an ass of herself daily where El-P needs to make on-stage diatribes against girls prideful that a woman has gotten that far in a man’s world? So what if said woman is probably a mutant cyborg? Fuck it. Play “Mike Douglas” instead. Rants against coke-rap worshipping music journos are way funnier than those against politicians who everyone already finds unctuous in the first place.
Shave and A Haircut…Two Bits 
- To the very pretty blond girl freaking in front of me during “Stepfather Factory”: While I found you very attractive and thought that there was no reason on earth why you should ever have to find yourself in the company of a bearded white guy in a Che cap, you also might want to listen to the lyrics of the song in question. There is absolutely nothing danceable about a song that paints a harrowing picture of life under an alcoholic, abusive step-father. Nor should you be grinding to the “Overly Dramatic Truth” either. The song is a four-minute ode to being in your early 30s and having hollow, regretful, coked-out sex with naive 22-year olds. Wait a minute…
- A little bit of advice to the Myspace MC’s passing out copies of their CD in front of the venue: by passing out your demo at an indie rap show in the year 2008 you are automatically branding a scarlet “R” on your forehead for retard. If you haven’t heard, there is this little invention called the Internet and you are far better off wasting your night badgering bloggers to write about you than you are trying to hit up guys smoking cloves in angora sweaters who may or may not believe that your songs are in fact, music “for the heartbroken revolutionary.” To say nothing of naming yourself Guido Corleone, which is arguably the only rap name worse than Lil Young.
- No MC in this decade has been more over-hyped than Dizzee Rascal. Yes, this includes Lil Wayne. When Boy in Da Corner came out the rap dilettante set trumped Dizzee as the dream hybrid of Biggie, ‘Pac and The Streets. Instead, dude’s the Brit-rap Twista, minus the “Slow Jamz,” “Poppin’ Tags,” and “Po Pimp.” Granted, I’ve never heard Showtime, which Ian Cohen says is by far his best effort, but his debut and his latest, Maths and English are nigh unlistenable. Yes, he can flow just fine but his Brit patois renders everything unintelligible, which wouldn’t be damning in and of itself if he had any cadence. Instead, everything barrels out with the same rapid-fire monotone and after five minutes you’re left with a side-splitting migraine and the belief that Dizzee may also have the worst beat selection skills of any MC this side of Nas. I know that people wanted to paint Dizzee as the avatar of the grime scene (hey, remember grime?) and a poet of Britain’s disenfranchised immigrant population, but c’mon, this guy named his label Dirtee Stank. The label logo features turds with flies coming out of them. C’mon dude, you’re doing the work for me.
Download:
MP3: El-P-”Fuck the Law”
MP3: El-P-”Mike Douglas”
Camu Tao Tribute:
MP3: SA Smash ft. Vast Aire-”Slide On Em”
MP3: Sa Smash-”Illy”
MP3: Camu Tao-”Hold the Floor”
MP3: Mhz-”Rocket Science”
MP3: Mhz-”Magnetics”
Posted in Beards, Blazers, & Glasses | 15 Comments »
May 23rd, 2008
Photo Via Timothy Norris (See More Photos of the Show at Play)
There’s something primal about the Kills. Not some sort of cheap $2 voodoo either. They offer no gimmicks, or eye-popping flash or smoke machines to dazzle you. This is sound as dirt. Raw, blistering, fuck-you noise built off a devil’s deal between the blues and punk. The triumph of brute simplicity over needless complexity. The Kills. Two people. A man, Hotel, pork-pie hat, cragged face, leather jacket zipped up to his neck, reeling back and forth, letting loose wiry, attenuated strands of sharp noise from his guitar. A woman, VV, cloaked in leopard print, raven hair snapping with every whip of her head and every peacock thrust.
Thing is, The Kills don’t make music, they weave spells like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Which sounds cheesy if you aren’t there, but not if you are and get helplessly sucked into the tractor-beam tension that swallows the room whole. At times, VV and Hotel tip-toe to about an inch of the other’s face, with the sort of “will they or won’t they” drama that could sustain a bad television sitcom for at least two years. As far as front-women go, no one is even comes close to the girl born Allison Mosshart. She performs in an almost possessed trance, spitting, strutting, spinning, climbing up on the speaker and staring at the crowd like a beautiful, wicked queen scornfully surveying her subjects. At other times, she picks up a guitar and unleashes an alluvial delta howl, with a snarling viciousness that’s almost frightening, yet seems appropriate to the alienated love-lashed tone of her lyrics.
Song titles include “I Hate the Way That You Love,” “Love is a Deserter,” and “Sour Cherry,” where she bellows about being “the only sour cherry on the fruit stand.” It’s impossible to leave a Kills show without sweating. I saw at least four ashen-faced young men practically shaking last night, as though they needed to rush home and take a cold shower. Anyone dimly wondering where all the riot grrls went, would do well to look here. Just don’t look directly in her eyes.
Download:
From Midnight Boom
MP3: The Kills-”Cheap and Cheerful”
From No Wow
MP3: The Kills-”Love is a Deserter”
From Keep On Your Mean Side
MP3: The Kills-”Kissy Kissy”
Posted in Beards, Blazers, & Glasses | 3 Comments »
May 20th, 2008
I caught the Mezzanine Owls’ Monday night Spaceland residency show yesterday. As usual, I walked away impressed. I’ve already written about them once, or twice, or thrice this year, so I’ll keep this brief. Essentially, they’re one of those bands that gets better every time I see them and have earned the right to be considered one of the best local bands in LA. Mouse from Classical Geek Theate devoted more words to the show than I could ever hope to. He also has pictures. You should see them. I also caught The Henry Clay People’s set too. They do the meat and potatoes guitar rock thing but they do it damn well and are really fun to watch live. I wish I had their enthusiasm and joie de vivre. Maybe I should just start doing meth or something.*
* Oh what, I can’t do meth humor? Lighten up people. What’s next, you’re gonna’ tell me not to do dead baby jokes?
Download:
MP3: Mezzanine Owls-”Snowglobe”
MP3: The Henry Clay People-”Somewhere on the Golden Coast”
Posted in Beards, Blazers, & Glasses | 4 Comments »
May 1st, 2008
It happened again. The dancing thing. I’m not quite sure how and I’m not sure why. I know we talked about this the other day but I’m not ready to move on until we get to the bottom of it. Because this whole thing is getting embarrassing. Seeing Hot Chip two times in three days and grooving (yes, grooving) at both of them? What’s next, traveling to Berlin to snort Molly off a chick named Molly? Dressing in all-black, slicking my hair to the right and listening to only Neu! records? Actually learning the meaning of the phrase “deep German House?”* The ramifications are endless and ghoulish.
The thing is, I actually do dance, it just takes a lot, and when I do, it’s invariably to music made by black people. You know that Chappelle skit where Dave brings John Mayer and his electric gee-tar around the barber shop and everyone starts heckling him. That’s me. Sure, part of it’s because John Mayer really fucking sucks, but really, put on some hard drums in broad daylight when I’m totally sober and I’ll suddenly find myself swaying uncontrollably, beat-boxing and asking ?uestlove to borrow his afro pick. **
Read the rest of this entry »
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March 24th, 2008
Every time I write about Jens Lekman, I’m tempted to compare him to Morrissey, even though I know I shouldn’t. After all, both songwriters specialize in witty and literate love-lorn laments sung in a smooth, mahogany baritone. And invariably, any time you can compare someone’s voice to an article of fine office furniture, it’s a good thing. Granted, Jens hasn’t written anything nearly as good as The Queen is Dead but really, who has? Besides, Lekman has one thing on the notoriously chilly “Pope of Mope,” namely an inherent charm and affability unmatched by few songwriters in recent memory.
You can sense Lekman’s likability on his records. “A Postcard to Nina” finds him posing as his lesbian friend’s boyfriend for her bigoted German father. ” Yet rather than censure the old man’s ignorance, Lekman takes the softer, kinder approach, wryly poking fun at the awkwardness of the meeting and the weird, kindly e-mails that Nina’s father sends Jens in the aftermath. The hardest thing in the world is to be funny without being mean (perhaps one of these days I’ll learn how), but in person, Lekman is the rare person who manages to be supremely nice without ever being dull. Forget the songs themselves, which are almost uniformly good, his between song banter is flat-out hilarious. With the timing and delivery of a crack stand-up, Lekman regaled the crowd with background stories that played like DVD commentary.
Read the rest of this entry »
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March 2nd, 2008
Last Thursday night’s Mezzanine Owls Digital EP/7″ release deserves more than than the cursory paragraph summary I’m going to give it. I’m pressed for time on this sunny Sunday and besides Mouse from Classical Geek Theatre has already spent 1000 words documenting the evening, as have several others (also see Jax’s mega-post.) At the risk of redundancy, I’d like to add to the praise. Out of the half dozen or so times I’ve seen the Mezzanine Owls, this was by far their best performance, an observation that Kevin Bronson seconded. Not to say that they hadn’t impressed me before, but they’ve taken that Step to the next level. The jump from good local band to one worthy of breaking out. They’re playing at SXSW next week and you should see them out if you get the chance.
The Mae Shi, who closed out with the evening with an electric, jittery performance will also be playing at SXSW. They are also very good. I’ve never really weighed in on The Smell bands, mainly due to my own preference to mock rap videos from the 90s to dog-piling the indie hype machine. But to get all bandwagony, the lot get the official Passion of the Weiss Seal of Approval (comes with free cassette single of “Motownphilly.”) Live, The Mae Shi are a cross between Health and The Deadly Syndrome, loud, histrionic gestures (Christmas lights, white sheets), endless energy and general awesomeness. Now that I’m using the word “awesomeness” again it’s an obvious sign that I need to get outside and enjoy my Sunday. Olly olly oxen free.
Download: from The Mezzanine Owls Digital EP
MP3: Mezzanine Owls-”Snowglobe”
MP3: The Mae Shi-”Run to Your Grave”
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February 7th, 2008
The Green Room backstage at the Jimmy Kimmel Show is one of the more supremely wonderful places on earth. It’s Xanadu–a place specifically designed to hit all the pleasure receptors of the male mind. No matter how refined or cultured you think you might be, it’s impossible not to get a little jangled when thrown smack dab into world of miniature cheesecake-filled buffets, an open bar, leggy blondes sipping Cabernet in corners , a string of vintage video games like Ms. Pacman and Galaga and walls plastered with big-screen plasma televisions beaming Pau Gasol’s successful attempt to integrate into the framework of the triangle offense.
Of course, you’d expect nothing less from a guy who made his name hosting something called “The Man Show” but still, this is sort of the place where time stops. I mean Tuesday was a pretty big deal and all, but nary a single screen had election returns on. This was just as well because it would’ve been incredibly annoying to have had to deal with a bunch of dudes in fedoras waxing fauxlosophic on the nuances of Obama’s health plan.
Moreover, that’s besides the point of the Kimmel Green Room. It’s escapism at its finest, one of those LA fantasies that you always suspect is going on the entire time right under your nose. Y’know, turn the fake candlestick, the walls spin around and you find yourself face to face with a bevy of beautiful women, a tomato quiche and Alexis Taylor, the lead singer of Hot Chip shooting pool wearing a electric yellow “Where’s the Beef” hat and a pair of argyle MC Hammer pants. Due to programmer Felix Martin’s illness, the band had missed its lone LA gig at the El Rey the night prior but they’d wrangled a replacement for the Kimmel show and the next thing I knew was several drinks deep, hypnotized by this temple of the Id. (Though to be fair, the hypnosis may have been caused by the dazzling combination of argyle and Zubaz .)
Jimmy Kimmel: The Talk Shows he’s created over the years, I don’t really watch them, but the fact that he’s making them, I respect that.
The promotional blitz has to do with Hot Chip’s, Made in the Dark. You’ve probably heard of it, after all, this is a blog. It’s a solid record with some spectacular moments and some middling ones. Truth be told, I stand somewhere between the 7.0 Pitchfork review and LA Weekly editor, Randall Roberts’ break-down of why Hot Chip should be your new favorite band. Made in the Dark is definitely good but as the ‘Fork review points out it lacks anything as poignant as “And I Was a Boy From School” or as buoyant as “Over and Over” (though it comes close several times). Plus, its last two songs are pretty useless with Hot Chip suddenly abandoning song-craft for boring piano-man ballads that suggest Elton John with a fixation for Kraftwerk and Prince.
The live show is a different story altogether. At last year’s Bonnaroo and Coachella, both times Hot Chip blew me away and certainly not through charisma or stage presence. They barely acknowledge the crowd and rarely show emotion. It doesn’t matter. They bring the funk like Redman despite looking more Red Buttons. Songs that float lazily on the record are gutted and re-constituted into anthems. As Randall’s feature pointed out, it’s hard not to dance and this poses massive logistical problems for their heavily Caucasian fan base. The average Hot Chip show can get ugly, think awkward hipsters performing whooping crane-like thrusts that look more suited to an attack strategy from The Karate Kid.
On Kimmel, Hot Chip played just two songs, first single, “Ready for the Floor,” and “Hold On,” the latter a seemingly odd choice considering at nearly six and a half minutes it’s the albums longest track. It’s also its best and I imagine its selection means Hot Chip must be aware of exactly how great it is. It’s the sort of song that actually sounds like what Craig Mack thought “Flavor in Your Ear” sounded like: “some robotic futuristic George Jetson” shit. It’s space disco with bongos sung by a tiny British guy channeling Prince in argyles and a chartreuse hat. And it’s brilliant. Weird, I know. Even more impressive was that “Ready for the Floor,” was the only tune that aired, which means that Hot Chip played “Hold On” strictly for just 100 or so people that swarmed Kimmel’s stage. But the way they played it, you’d have thought they were headlining a festival. It was about the only way to end a very bizarre and very fun endeavor. And how about that Pau Gasol?
Buy Made in the Dark
MP3: Hot Chip-”Ready for the Floor”
MP3: Hot Chip-”Hold On”
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