I wrote a long enough entry about R.E.M. last time I saw them, so I’ll keep this one short.

Celebrating the release of their new best-of compilation, “In Time,” R.E.M. performed a rare club gig on Wednesday, at the 1300 person capacity Avalon in Hollywood, California. The show was publicly available for a short time through the R.E.M. website, handled completely by the wonderful people at the R.E.M. fanclub. The rest of the tickets were industry and a handful of radio contest winners (the show was broadcast on a few Clear Channel networks).

The show started promptly at 9:00pm, with no opening act or warmup whatsoever. I had a spot in the second row inbetween Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey. The crowd was virtually all fanclub, so it was hot from the start. The band blasted through “Finest Worksong” and went right into “These Days,” setting the tone early. “We are young despite the years, we are concerned, we are hope despite the times,” Stipe yelled during “These Days.” They played a lot of older material, including Document‘s “Exhuming McCarthy” and “Welcome To The Occupation,” and almost all of it seemed eerily prescient now that history has cycled.

The show was loose and casual, and it lacked the purposeful intensity of the Hollywood Bowl show last month. I didn’t really mind so much, because the band seemed to be going out of their way to put together a varied setlist. Except for “Losing My Religion” and “Man on the Moon,” the setlist was pretty much surprise after surprise. Getting to hear the moody dirge of “Sweetness Follows” and the orchestrated vocals of “At My Most Beautiful” was great enough, but the greatest pick of the night had to be phenomenal “Life and How to Live It,” my absolute favorite track from the magnificent Fables of the Reconstruction.

Getting to see R.E.M. on a small stage was really special, but I think my expectations were a bit off. I wanted something with a charge, manic energy, something that would make me feel like I was at the 40-Watt in Athens in 1985. Instead, the band drank a little champagne, relaxed and touched on a lot of the beauty and grace of their music that defined their later years, mixing in just a little bit of the power and personal protest of their earlier ones.

Setlist
Finest Worksong
These Days
Wake-Up Bomb
So Fast So Numb
Exhuming McCarthy
Animal
Sweetness Follows
Bad Day
World Leader Pretend
Strange Currencies
Losing My Religion
At My Most Beautiful
She Just Wants To Be
Walk Unafraid
Man On The Moon

Encore
Life And How To Live It
Welcome To The Occupation
Nightswimming
Final Straw
Permanent Vacation
Imitation of Life

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1) Angry Inch – Wig in A Box - Sleater-Kinney & Fred Schneider

2) All Medicated Geniuses – This Is Our Emergency EP - Pretty Girls Make Graves

3) Past Lives – Automatic Midnight - Hot Snakes

4) Heaven and Hell – Live at Leeds – The Who

5) We Don’t Want Your Fucking War – The Song Is Love – The Quails

6) Reptilia – Room On Fire – The Strokes

7) Combat Baby – Old World Underground, Where Are You – Metric

8) My Side of The City – Yoko – Beulah

9) She Tried – Deliverance – Bubba Sparxxx

10) Billy Liar – Her Majesty - Decemberists

11) The Town Crusher – Set You Free – Chisel

12) Let’s Rave On - Chain Gang of Love - The Raveonettes

13) Black Eyed Susan - 14 Songs – Paul Westerberg

14) Dancing in the Dark – Live at Brownie’s – Ted Leo

15) The Poisoned Well – Featuring Birds – Quasi

16) Needle In The Hay – Royal Tenenbaums – Elliott Smith

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Ever since I snagged a copy of “Hot Shit” earlier this year, I’ve been eager to see Quasi bring it live. Unlike their previous efforts, there’s a lot more going on than just Roxichord and drums, and yet there are still only two members of Quasi: super songwriter Sam Coomes and drummer Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney). How would our heroes fare? Beats me. That’s why I go to the shows.

The night started with a quartet from Memphis called the Porch Ghouls. Signed by Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, the Porch Ghouls play what they call “Ruckus Music,” which I gather is a strain of garage blues with an emphasis on suitcase drums and maracas. Ryan Valentine is officially the harmonica player, but on most of the songs he was playing maracas like the guy in Ghost World uses nunchucks. Just to make the visual even weirder, he looked sort of like Bacardi from those Bacardi and Cola ads (white man’s afro, big sunglass and a thin, thin moustache). They weren’t that bad, but they weren’t great either. Their set was mostly blues covers (RL Burnside and the like), but when they started playing Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” my face started twitching uncontrollably. I think it was shortly after that I took a powder.

Next up was Sacramento’s very own Hella. Hella’s one of them math-rock outfits, just guitar and drums, with no vocals. Spencer Seim is a pretty credible guitarist, but I’ll guarantee you not one person is watching him play. If you’ve never seen Zack Hill from Hella play drums, it’s honest to God jawdropping to watch. Hunched over his his drumkit, he hits harder and faster I’ve anyone I’ve ever seen, bashing with the dull ends of his sticks (the tips break and fly off at an alarming rate). His limbs can barely keep out of each other’s way as he pounds away like a rock n roll Animal. While Hella is remarkably proficient, they’re also relentlessly oppressive. Standing for an hour before a wall of guitar noise and hyperspeed drums just wears you down. Hella is phenomenal for a few minutes, but I found myself running to the bar before the set finished.

Sam and Janet came on the stage with little fanfare, taking their time to connect everything. Coomes doesn’t even unbox his keyboard, leaving it in an unfinished wood traveling coffin and setting it up on a precarious stand that rocks as he plays. Weiss naturally sets up her kit to face Coomes, which allows the audience to see all the wry smiles and dirty looks that go back and forth when they’re improvising their breaks.

I was a bit disappointed to see Janet startup a looped music sample and don the clicktrack headphones to play the first song, “Hot Shit,” but things got better once the headphones fell off and the pair freelanced the bridge and the finish. The bizarrely structured “Seal the Deal” followed, with its long instrumental intro going for three minutes before the sweetly sung verse and chorus end before they barely have a chance to begin. It’s backwards and inside out, but somehow the song works perfectly and I can remember every part. They played another of my older favorites, “Under a Cloud,” which started with Janet’s booming drum work and settled into this great summery song about how much Sam hates summer.

The basic dichotomy of happy, poppy melodies and Sam’s smirky, cynical lyrics is Quasi’s bread and butter, but it’s something they’ve been getting away from on their newest material. Coomes has been bringing in more of a bluesy guitar sound and he’s been strapping on the Stratocaster with great regularity. I was surprised at Coomes’s guitar playing, as he effortlessly combined fits of noise with some wonderful blues work. He ripped through “Good Time Rock N Roll” and the politically charged “White Devil’s Dream” with this weird passive-aggressive anger. When Sam plays guitar he’s got this great evil eye look that he’ll occassionally flash. Watch for it.

One of the really great songs on Hot Shit is “Drunken Tears,” where Sam’s playing gets wildly off-kilter, almost jazzy, and it’ll often include some playing with his head or his feet. On the other side, Weiss continues to convince me that she’s probably the best drummer working today (Weiss humbly thinks Hella’s Zach Hill holds that title). She has a knack for coming up for just the right parts for her songs and she plays with a Keith Moonish freedom that I don’t see often enough. In general, her work in Quasi has a lighter feel than her pounding Sleater-Kinney stuff, but she can get down and rock with Quasi just as well. I think the only real disappointment was not hearing “Sunshine Sounds,” arguably the best thing on the new record, a Flaming Lipsy number that simply has too much going on to replicate with just two people. Weiss already plays keyboard, drums and sings simultaneously; maybe she’ll grown an extra limb or two to play “Sunshine Sounds” on the next tour.

For the encore, Quasi brought out opening act Hella to close out the show with a bang. Setting up both drumkits on stage, Quasi and Hella ripped through Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” for lasted almost twenty minutes. The song proper ended at about 10 minutes but then descended into a mess of screaming and instrument abuse, culminating in Coomes dry humping his keyboard and then crawling off stage on all fours with Hella guitarist Spencer Seim riding Coomes like a pony. After the leads left the stage, Hill let up like he was ready to go home, but Weiss just shook her head and challenged him to keep going. The drummers went on after that for another set, mimicking each other’s riffs and playing follow the leader until they finally finished. It was noisy, messy and incredibly self indulgent at times, but it was also one of the biggest, loudest, craziest finishes I’ve seen in a long time and I had a blast watching Hill and Weiss put on a drum clinic of epic proportions.

Go see Quasi to see Sam violate his instruments. Go see Quasi to see Sam tell Ashcroft to fuck off. Go see Quasi because they drag Hella along and you get to see two of the baddest drummers in all the land go to work. Go see Quasi because I said so.

Merch Notes: If you end up at the Quasi show, buy a copy of “Hot Shit” that includes the “Live Shit” CD. The package itself costs $11 or $12 and the live CD is really phenomenal.

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Man, this place has really gone to shit since I started the other column. Over there are plenty of concert reviews (and man, have I seen some great shows lately), but here? Nada.

I’m going to get some monthly mixes up here soon, but I’ll probably forego the liner notes for a while until I regroup.

Back in the real world, I just spent last weekend in Vegas for my homie’s 30th birthday. It was a pretty usual weekend with lots of drinkin’, eatin’ and a little bit of gamblin’. The new experience of the weekend was driving home on the back roads, through Nevada mining towns and crazy desert roads, eventually breaking down in Amboy, California. Amboy is literally in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but chloride farms for about 30 miles, and about 60 miles from 29 Palms, which is a tiny military town.

Welcome to Amboy, population us.

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If you’ve been reading Donewaiting at all this year, you’re bound to know who Ted Leo is. I don’t think any one single national act has gotten as much coverage as Mr. Leo and his Pharmacists on this site, and deservedly so. When someone can come along and combine touches of The Jam, Elvis Costello, The Clash and bits of 2nd wave ska together and make it sound all his own, he rightly earns a little press.

When Ted Leo arrived in L.A. last weekend, he was packing light. Sans Pharmacists, Leo was winding down his completely solo tour before criss-crossing the country again with the full band in tow. Despite my unclean love for Ted Leo, I’m generally wary of solo shows. Unless you’re a phenomenal guitarist like Richard Thompson or have a magnetic voice like Cat Power, there’s a certain coffeeshop/busker feel to solo guitar shows that’s difficult to escape.

Leo is neither a stunning technical guitarist nor a magnificent vocalist. However, he is a charismatic performer and an unparallelled songwriter. In the solo format, the real star was Leo’s songs themselves. Leo’s real talent as a writer lies in his ability to keep his songs intense and intellectual while maintaining a sincere emotional honesty. In “Timorous Me,” he captures the relationship between performer and fan in a single couplet: “I watched her singalong with every word/in the prettiest voice I never heard.”

Playing with only an electric guitar limited Leo’s song choice quite a bit, as many of his songs are multi-instrumental raveups. The aforementioned “Timorous Me” plays perfectly solo, and the untitled track (the one with the Sexy Mouth chorus) from Ted Leo’s first solo EP sounds far better live and solo than on record. In general, songs worked better if Leo was chopping away at fuller chords rather than single note noodling. “High Party” gets structurally inverted, with the solo becoming a slowdown bridge than a rip roaring climax. Older fans may be interested to hear that Leo also performed a lovely version of Chisel’s “The Town Crusher.”

Leo played three new songs that are all available on the Tell Balgeary, Balgury is Dead EP. The Cars-sy melodies of “The Sword in The Stone” are immediately memorable, making it my early favorite of the new material. The punchy “Bleeding Powers” and the power pop protest of “Loyal to My Sorrowful Country” round out the troika. Leo filled out the set with a few covers including the hyped up folk of Ewan McColl’s “Dirty Old Town.”

As Leo finished up his short set and began to leave the stage he made a quick 180 and decided to cut the bullshit. Realizing he didn’t really have a band to conference with, he went straight into the request encore portion of the show. He denied us “Squeaky Fingers” and “Dial Up” and rejected “Ballad of a Sin-Eater” by explaining that it’s the one song with no guitar on it. Of course, two songs later a lightbulb seemed to go off in his head and he tossed out a few maracas and tambourines and played “Sin-Eater” anyway with a spankin’ new guitar arrangement.

He closed with the only song that could properly follow “Sin-Eater.” He said “This one’s from my boss” before launching into Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancin’ In The Dark.” Leo strips the song of its 80s trappings and let’s it bleed a little slower and sadder than the Boss’s original. It’s melancholy but not moribund and Leo still plays the chorus with a touch of optimism and light. The only thing that would have improved it would have been Leo pulling a girl from the audience to boogie-down.

It was a short set but it was worth the negligible amount of money charged. I still don’t trust solo performances much but Ted Leo does a great job of keeping it loose and amusing and making a club show feel like a dude in his bedroom, playing just because it’s fun to play music.

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Before taking the stage at the Troubadour on October 4th, Beulah hadn’t played Los Angeles (or anywhere, for that matter) for over a year and half. During that time, they’ve fought through breakup rumors and several actual divorces to record an album, Yoko. With all that bad mojo floating around them, I was happy just to see new material and get a chance to see them perform live.

In studio, Beulah’s specializes in lush, meticulously orchestrated pop music as grand in scope as their absurdly long titles. Beulah recreates this live with six guys, three guitars, two keyboards, trumpet, bass and drums. It’s the kind of material that normally doesn’t translate well, usually burdened by bad PA equipment and poor mixing. This particular night, the sound was spotty for a large portion of the show. The band as a whole was mixed very loudly, trading in dynamic subtlety for sheer volume. This was fine for the more rocking numbers, but it hurt some of the more precise songs, particularly “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart.” Lead singer Miles Kurosky’s vocals were also buried in the mix for most of the night. Oddly, I preferred the band when the vocals meshed in with the rest of the band like another instrument. When it was brought up front later in the show, you could see the weakness of Kurosky’s voice. I don’t know if Kurosky was just rusty, but his voice sounded strained when he tried to project and emote too much. By the end, they’d shaken off the cobwebs and were clicking wonderfully, painting their huge sonic landscapes, with particularly epic renditions of “Night Is the Day Turned Inside Out” and “Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand.”

The main function of this tour is to promote Yoko, a darker, moodier record than all their previous material. The band wisely favored the few up-tempo songs on “Yoko” to sustain consistency throughout the set. The dramatic guitars of “A Man Like Me” were one highlight and sexy piano work of “Me and Jesus Don’t Talk Anymore” was another. If you ever get bored one day, listen to “Me and Jesus Don’t Talk Anymore” along side Spoon’s “That’s the Way We Get By.” Alongside the newer material was a little bit of everything from the back catalog, going as far back as the “Maroon Bible” from Handsome Western States (featuring the eternal question “If I was Jack the Ripper would you still kiss me?”). Representing When Heartstrings Break, “Score From Augusta” moved fast and loose while “Matter vs. Space” floated with an easygoing grace. The songs from The Coast is Never Clear sounded best of all, particularly the funky horns of “A Good Man Is Easy To Kill” and the upbeat melodies of “Gene Autry.” I’ll go out on a limb and say that “Silver Lining” is definitely the greatest love letter to punk rock that features a trumpet ever written. Oh, those handclaps!

Beulah’s always had a pretty high audience participation factor, just from sing-along alone. During one particular round of requests, Miles Kurovsky asked a young lady that was yelling “My Side of the City” to join the band on stage and sing the vocals. After much hemming and hawing she finally gathered her courage and jumped on stage. Of course, once the song started, the microphone didn’t work. By the time she and Miles slid to another mike, the song was half over, but they got their licks in anyway. No, she wasn’t a good singer, but damned if it wasn’t fun to watch.

Going strong for almost two hours, Beulah played just about everything that anyone could hope for. Maybe they were out of practice for a little bit, but the show ended with smiles plastered across the faces of fans and band members alike. Beulah?s tour has just started, so they should be in your town trumpeting joy and happiness any minute now.

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