Entries from January 2004
January 30, 2004
1) Song for Myla Goldberg – Her Majesty - The Decemberists
I listened to this song enough that I think the next book on the reading list should be Myla Goldberg’s Bee Seasons. I hope it’s good or else I’m going to go pick a fight with Colin Meloy.
2) Ain’t It The Truth – Arkansas Heat - The Gossip
Of all the songs I heard at the Gossip show, I think this is the quintessential Gossip tune: raunchy, brash and really, really short.
3) Ambulance – Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes - TV on the Radio
TV On The Radio makes all those barbershop quartet/corner doo-wop comparisons concretely obvious on this pretty little ditty.
4) Seven Chinese Brothers – Reckoning - R.E.M.
The Decemberists played the open string run that opens this track during one of their concert segues and it reminded me to play Reckoning again. What a timeless album that turned out to be.
5) A House Is Not A Motel – The Forever Changes Concert – Love
I picked up this DVD and watched it last month, and I swear to god, I had no idea Arthur Lee was Black. I’m such an idiot.
6) Heavy Metal Drummer – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco
I was watching the Wilco doc I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and this song stuck, mostly because of that bizarre Tweedy/Bennett argument over the noisebreak intro to this song, and that little bit where Tweedy’s kid plays the drum intro with his hands.
7) Flint – Michigan – Sufjan Stevens
I think Michael Moore would love this song.
8) Honest Mistake – Other Songs – Ron Sexsmith
Ron Sexsmith is my favorite artist to fall asleep to.
9) Satisfaction – Live at the Old Waldorf – Television
What a weird song to cover for Television… it’s a pretty straight cover, with a virtually identical guitar line.
10) Vaseline – Radio One Sessions - Elastica
This popped up on the IPod random run once, and it stuck out as being so perfectly dumb. That’s tough to hit.
11) Feel Good Hit of the Summer – Rated R – Queens of the Stone Age
nicotinevaliumvicodinmarijuanaecstacyalcohol…. c-c-c-c-cocainnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Is it really a surprise that their tourbus is always getting pulled over?
12) Helpless- Copper Blue - Sugar
I remember in high school I totally fell in love with this song because I couldn’t quite understand how Mould could play with so much distortion and open chords and still get those great ringing tones.
13) Guns of Brixton - From Here to Eternity – The Clash
This version starts with the classic Bo Diddley beat before getting to one of my favorite Clash tracks.
14) Hearts of Oak – Hearts of Oak – Ted Leo / Pharmacists
I saw Ted Leo. He played this song and I went woo.
15) Track 17 – Live * Los Angeles – DJ Z-Trip
It’s Rage Against The Machine’s “Testify” tracked up to an instrumental version of “Billy Jean.” It’s fucked up and brilliant and done live on two turntables.
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January 25, 2004
I posted this before, but Duffy up and deleted it during some post maintenance. I wasn’t going to re-write it, as it was just a quick link post, but hey.
Sleater-Kinney joined the 21st century and finally put up an official website, with all sorts of neat stuff on it. There’s some cool stuff in the download section, including a few realvideo clips from their tour in Mexico with Pearl Jam. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein both have personal collages which link onto various pictures and Top 10 lists and things like that. It’s all pretty nifty and it looks like the band has a big hand in the content, writing most of it themselves.
The best news is that they are currently writing songs and hoping to hit the studio before the end of the year. My one complaint was that they didn’t link to the Sleater-Kinney Concert Review Archive that I run, a website I maintain. Of course, since that post, they have since linked me, so I now I look like a whiny jerk.
The real reason I reposted it (other than the unnecessary plug for a favorite band), is that this was the third post in a row about a Portland based band on KillRockStars. The PDX/KRS trifecta had to be recorded for posterity.
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January 22, 2004
A lot of times I feel like I cover the Pacific Northwest far more than anything bands from L.A., but I don’t mind so much since the stuff from up top is so much more interesting than anything going on down here. The Decemberists hailed from Portland and were on Olympia, Washington’s KillRockStars. The very next night at the Troubadour I saw the Gossip, hailing from Portland, supporting their second album, Movement, available from KillRockStars.
The Gossip are about as raw and basic as it gets, with Kathy Mendoncaa drumming mostly with her snare and kick and virtually no cymbals or hi-hat and Brace Paine playing a guitar with only four strings (who needs that high B and E?) They keep it simple, keep it moving and keep it grooving, setting the stage for the dominating presence of their lead singer, Beth Ditto.
Once Beth Ditto she takes the stage, you’re not paying attention to anything else. Ditto delivers fierce punk with a soul/blues/gospel twist to spine-tingling effect. Dancing, shimmying and shaking, she’s in constant motion, pushing at such a maddening pace that she’s worked fanning herself into her repertoire of dance moves. When the Gossip tore into “Fire/Sign,” the crowd was absolutely churning, begging for revolution and deliverance with every note. With the chorus of “Jason’s Basement,” the Troubadour wasn’t far from the sweaty house parties that the Gossip started at. Singing “no inhibitions / come and dance with meeeeeee” repeatedly, it wasn’t long before fans started taking Ditto up on her offers, climbing right on stage for an overheated dance party that threatened to blow the doors right off the place.
With songs that barely clock two minutes, the eleven song setlist disappeared in a hurry. Even with the worked up audience, the Gossip only came back for a one song encore of “Ain’t It The Truth,” with Ditto jumping into the crowd and singing most of it from the floor. The extremely short nature of the show left me with mixed feelings about it all. It was a spectacular half-hour, and I appreciate a band going full-tilt for an entire set, but it left me wanting for another four or five songs, at least. It seemed short for a headliner but there probably aren’t too many people eager to book the Gossip as an opener. Who’d want to try and follow that?
Notes: At no point in the show did Beth Ditto strip down to her skivvies, as she has been known to do. I also spotted Jay Clark from Pretty Girls Make Graves in attendance. Both bands are members of the Dim Mak family.
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January 19, 2004
What better way to inaugurate January than to step back in time with the Decemberists? The dry winter concert season is finally starting to lighten up, and I’m finally able to jump back in the fray with one of my favorite bands from last year. I was slightly hesitant about the live situation with the Decemberists, as their albums have long stretches of sparse and delicate songs, which don’t necessarily always translate in concert. Colin Meloy’s slightly nasal voice also lives on the edge of off-key, so I was scared that a bad vocal performance could slip quickly into unbearable.
Alas, all my fears were unwarranted. Crowding the stage with five members, the Decemberists weighed their setlists heavily towards their uptempo pop work and were able to put together a driving show that didn’t lag at any moment. Blasting off with their ode to Bee Season author, “Myla Goldberg,” the band’s work has a little more oomph than on vinyl. The lineup starts as a traditional rock band, but within a few songs Jenny Conlee substitutes her keys with an accordion, Chris Funk alternates his Telecaster with a pedal steel and Nate Query ditches his bass for an upright. Even drummer Rachel Blumberg mixes in a Glockenspiel with her drumkit. This freewheeling combination of the old and new keys their timeless sound. With all these variables, The Decemberists lucked into a fine mix for the evening, as the instruments popped without overpowering Colin Meloy’s enthusiastically enunciated vocals. It’s great when people can hear a song for the first time and actually understand the lyrics. Meloy’s storytelling is the Decemberists’ greatest strength, and I’m glad that it didn’t get swallowed up by bad club acoustics.
They stepped back with one of their very first recorded numbers, the wistful and cruel “Oceanside,” and played quite a bit of material from their first record Castaways and Cutouts. “A Cautionary Song,” featured Chris Funk (aka Crutchy McGee) swinging his arms back and forth like Popeye, since that song didn’t require his instrumental services. Newer material worked just as well, with “Billy Liar” bouncing its tale of a misbehaving truant to much approval and “Chimbley Sweep” providing an extended instrumental break in its Russian circus-like bridge. The greatest early highlight was definitely “Los Angeles, I’m Yours,” a love/hate song to Los Angeles that every Angeleno in attendance could identify with. The set closed with the ever clever “Legionnaire’s Lament,” which has some of the most stunning arrays of goofy rhymes ever penned.
The encore started with Colin Meloy playing a solo version of Big Star’s “Ballad of El Goodo,” one of the very best versions of that song I’ve heard. Meloy approaches the song with an uncertainty and vulnerability that really flips the chorus around. Blumberg came back on stage to accompany Meloy on the fragile beauty of “Red Right Ankle,” with another winning performance by Meloy. The full band finally came on to romp through “California One” and segue that to “Youth and Beauty Brigade” with a few touches of R.E.M.’s “7 Chinese Brothers” mixed in.
Just like that, it was finished. The show was a bit crunched as there was a dance party scheduled right aftewards, so the set lasted a little over an hour. It was a bit of a disappointment since I heard the night before the show went closer to eighty minutes, but that’s me being cranky. The Decemberists were far more entertaining than I thought they would be, and everyone in the well-kept and well-read audience were ready to join the Decemberists’ Revolution.
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January 6, 2004
It’s a new year, so you know what that means: Weak ass resolutions like actually writing on your own webpage. After a move, a computer crash and a real, real lazy holiday season, I think I am finally ready to restart this thing. Get ready, I will most likely lose momentum after a week or two.
So anyway… for the holidays, my friends bought me this set of clay poker chips. It’s 300 count, eleven gram casino weighted stuff, so it feels good in your hands and it makes a good sound when you splash the pot. With the continuing growth in popularity in poker, I’d made some rumblings of starting a poker night, and I guess this was a transparent ploy in order to STEAL ALL MY MONEY. That said, I’m such a sucker that kids lick my face.
I was never a huge card player, but there is a certain fascination in it, and the speed and high-risk nature of No-Limit Texas Hold Em (as seen on TV) is pretty alluring. I’m pretty sure I have the gambling addiction gene, as many Asians do, but growing up poor has cured me of that by giving me a heinous allergy to losing well earned money. But you know, chips aren’t real money. *cough*
So the first thing I do is not to learn cards… OH NO, THAT WOULD BE THE EASY WAY OUT. The first thing I tried to learn are poker chip tricks! Look cool at the table while saying goodbye to your chips. I’ve learned the back to front trick, I’m kind of close on the chip twirl and I’m about as coordinated as Jerry Lewis while trying the chip shuffle. I can do the knuckle roll a little bit too, but I drop the chips pretty often.
Pretty much nobody I know is a decent player, which is perfect as we’re all terrible and learning. The interesting thing I’ve noticed, all my friends play like telemarketers from the SubContinent: They call everyone and everything. All your chips and it’s an Ace-High vs a Straight Flush? CALL.
Whatever. I got chips, I got a felt tablecloth… I’m all-in, baby. Um, unless actual money’s involved.
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