Okay, so I've been busy. But that's no excuse for ignoring you, the blogoverse, is it? NO, it is not. Bad OMS. I'm not sure I can even count how many bands I've seen in that time. A quick review gives me 56, but I figure I must be forgetting some. There was some good (and great), some bad, and definitely some ugly.
The Heartless Bastards, with Gaslight Anthem and A Death In The Family. Andrew Oliver Kora Band and Krebsic Orkestar (real Balkan gypsies, not jam-band hippies). The Shins and Delta Spirit. Bazillionaire. What Hearts and...oh, some band that was led by Ali Ippolito (it may be called When The Broken Bow). The 2009 PDX Pop Now! CD release show with Copy, Jared Mees and the Grown Children, What's Up (ETA: I have been corrected. They are, it turns out, What's Up?.), and The Taxpayers. John Vanderslice and Mimicking Birds. And Sasquatch, which has bloated to three full days, where I saw: Blind Pilot, Death Vessel, Doves, Passion Pit, M. Ward, Devotchka, Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band, Arthur & Yu, Animal Collective, Sun Kil Moon, Ra Ra Riot, The Decemberists, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bon Iver, Viva Voce, Point Juncture WA, Hockey, The Walkmen, John Vanderslice (again), Calexico, Fences, St. Vincent, The Builders and the Butchers, The Submarines, Murder City Devils, TV On The Radio, M83, The Heartless Bastards (again), Deerhoof, The Pica Beats, Horsefeathers, Bishop Allen, School of Seven Bells, Gogol Bordello, Blitzen Trapper, The Duchess and the Duke, Monotonix, Silversun Pickups, Beach House, Girl Talk, Erykah Badu (not by choice, I swear), and Explosions In The Sky.
Am I forgetting anything?
I'll start at the very beginning. A very good place to....erm...sorry. I thought i had exorcised Mary Poppins. Anyhow, moving on. I hadn't been to Berbati's in a long time, but one of The Boyfriend's favorite bands was playing, so there we were. Thanks to confusion about how Berbati's labels tickets (I've also shown up an hour before the music starts over this, leading to total awkwardness), we missed Cage The Elephant, which is too bad, because the New Music Hour song is pretty good. We walked in early in the Death In The Family Set. Teenage-boy-working-at-a-gas-station-with-the-little-undergrown-mustache-hoping-he's-more-emotional-and-deep-than-his-high-school-dropout-peers aggro-lite. Music for guys with an IQ of 90. The Boyfriend: "At least they're not from Portland." OMS: "Nah, they'd be from Gresham." Then, the reason we were there, The Heartless Bastards. A particular favorite of The Boyfriend. I'd call them the best possible version of caucasian bar-blues-rock. Because caucasian girl-fronted twang-leaning blues-rock is such a narrow genre, it overlapped with things I hate, like Tina & The B-Sides and early KD Lang, but the absolute lack of self-conscious schtick saved it every time it wandered into those territories. The drums were absolutely ass-kicking. The venue has seen better crowds. Once, a bouncer suddenly perked up, ears forward. A second or less later, he leapt into action, diving into the crowd to grab a guy by the throat and shove him backward out the door. He apparently deserved it, though once The Boyfriend pulls me deep into the front-of-the-stage crowd, I can't see anything except the headstock of the bass and the weird hair of that one guy ten inches in front of me, who isn't really even very tall, but moves two inches every time I do, without fail. The crowd did get difficult a couple of times, once at this loud, chatty couple who, once they decided (under duress) to leave, got shoved in the back so I ended up with her beer all over me. Thanks, I hadn't noticed a problem before that. Last up, Gaslight Anthem. Really lite aggro-lite. Almost emo-core. One guy (bass?) looked a bit like Henry Rollins' wussy momma's boy little brother. The guy who was at the show in his Black Flag safety-pinned jacket should hang his head in shame. Bad, bad stuff. We left early.
Next was the Andrew Oliver Kora Band and Krebsic Orkestar at Mississippi Studios. The Boyfriend snagged free tix by being on the Mississippi Studios mailing list (I sometimes do the same with the Doug Fir list), so I had no idea what we were getting into. The who what-now? And an Orkestar? Shit, don't make me go see an Orkestar! It's gonna be a jam band, isn't it, but with mandolin and flute or something. I just know it. But I'll try anything once. At least I'll get to complain about it in my blog. How wrong I was! The Andrew Oliver Kora Band was traditional jazz (keys, trumpet played by an old man in Converse, drums, bass, occasional guitar) wrapped up with some West African kora music. The world-beat elements were so subtle I didn't gag as it went down. Turns out a kora sounds a lot like the bastard child from an illicit harp-banjo tryst. I ended up really enjoying some of it, when the west-African sounds were more '30s Paris jazz club exotic and less world beat boring. Krebsic Orkestar turned out not to be a jam band! That revelation was like finding out you don't have to have that root canal after all. It was big band x eastern European gypsy stuff, which could have gone either of two ways, but was marvelously dark and smoky rather than silly cheese. Had they covered Caravan, it would have fit perfectly. They had three trombones, a souzaphone, three trumpets, a...what's the sideways bent-up trumpet? Oh! Flugelhorn! I adore the flugelhorn. Where was I? Oh...yeah, a saxophone, and three percussionists. Their utterly unplanned, unrehearsed encore occurred in the middle of the floor in a circle. The people doing the probably traditional-folk line-dancing in the audience seemed like snooty nerds, but I didn't let them ruin my enjoyment of the show except when I had to move out of their way or get stepped on. Some people...give me one good reason I should go out of my way to accommodate you? Why should I move so you can enjoy yourself, rather than you staying the hell out of my way so I can enjoy myself? But anyhow, much fun, and a pleasant surprise.
Much, much more to come. Much.
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