Embarrassment of Riches

It's been an awesome January for live music. From a personal perspective, it's been a tough year so far. I inherited a car...you do the math. Yep, I started my year giving $487 dollars to Delta Airlines for a one-way bereavement fare. But then, after a much cheaper friend-of-an-airline-employee standby ticket back to Portland that landed me in first class (hot breakfast!), there was all this music to make things better. I'll tell you about the driving-the-car-from-the-midwest-in-snowy-February road trip next month. And a quick public service announcement: If you smoke, quit. Now. Yesterday. Because lung cancer sucks, and there's no such thing as remission, much less a cure.

Anyhow, back to the music stuff. There are more shows this month than I can possibly see. I thought about going to Blunt Mechanic, Guidance Counselor and Vellella Vellella, Point Juncture WA, Jared Mees, Akron/Family and Au and Wow & Flutter, Liv Warfield, Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar and John Roderick (of The Long Winters)...so many shows. But there was so much overlap. It's surprising to me how many nights this month haven't had good shows to go see, given the thousands of good shows to see this month. Some nights I've just been tired. I'm always tired this time of year, and then on top of that, it's been a rough month for me, as I mentioned. But I did get out to see a Yes On 66/67 benefit last week at the Full Life Cafe and Center. I missed Quiet Countries, sadly. I wonder what a Quiet Countries acoustic show is like? Got there in the middle of Nick Jaina's set. It was just him and the bassist, totally stripped down, playing mostly tracks from the new one, which won't come out for a few months. I've gotten a sneak peek, and I can tell you it's beautiful, but low-energy. Working toward the adult-alternative end of the indie-folk spectrum, though not anywhere near Borders-Bookstore-Cafe territory. It's not bad, it's just very, very subtle. Nick was followed by St. Frankie Lee. I swear to you, I took notes. I remember crouching down with a pen in hand. But I don't know where those notes went. St. Frankie Lee were messy, lacking in cohesion. They looked young. Perhaps they had some potential. She had kind of a pop voice that didn't hold much appeal for me, and she did most of the singing. His voice was plain and unadorned, in a good way. There were a lot of people onstage, but the only really interesting one was the multi-instrumentalist playing the trumpet, the plastic portland glockenspiel, and the saw. She wasn't great at any of these things, but that could change. I'm looking forward to her next band, or maybe the band after that. Bazillionaire was next. I think Jesse's a great and fun musician, and an ordinary lyricist. I feel bad saying that, since he's one of the nicest and most genuine people I only vaguely and casually know. And he works at the Full Life Center and organized the show, and deserves a ton of credit for that. But I always enjoy seeing Bazillionaire. Last up was Swim Swam Swum. They did their best to liven up a dwindling audience in an alcohol-free venue that was basically set up like a preschool, but for developmentally delayed adults. You could tell they weren't totally feeling it, and seemed to drag a bit, but stuck it out and got everyone bouncing.

By the way, vote yes on 66 and 67. Not only will the Full Life Center, an enrichment and job training program for developmentally disabled adults, survive with a 'yes' result, and it will probably benefit all my clients' other programs, which makes my work life tolerable (I work for medicaid dollars, so I think my job and my program and my agency are pretty safe, but hey, vote yes just in case, okay?), but seriously, don't you think there's something wrong about the corporate tax in Oregon staying at $10 for 79 years? I mean, I suppose I wouldn't complain if I was also paying the same dollar amount in income taxes that Oregonians were paying in 1931, but I'm not. If the measure passes and the corporate minimum (something crazy like 97% of corporations pay the minimum) increases to $150, I'll still be paying more per year in income taxes than ten corporations in Oregon, but at least it will no longer be more than 150 corporations. Can I incorporate? It seems way cheaper. Also, the individuals making four times my salary need to be paying a higher tax rate than I do. If I ever make that kind of money, and I grumble about my taxes, slap me.

Anyhow, the next show I saw was Har Mar Superstar with Dat'r and The Beauty at Mississippi Studios. I had forgotten this, but I've seen The Beauty before. It's hard to forget the image of a chubby, tattooed bear and a skinny, pierced punk with microphones, dancing around to recorded synths. It's a little like The Snuggleups, though not quite that awesome. The Beauty ranged all over in their meta-tongue-in-cheek influences. Disco funk (Earth, Wind, and Fire). '80s pop (George Michael, Michael Jackson). Sexy-funk R&B (Prince). '90s boy band (I don't know this genre well enough to guess at who). All filtered through an electro-dance-homoerotic-mostly kidding lens. Great fun, though I wished throughout the set that they were The Snuggleups instead. Dat'r is just Dat'r, as they always have been and always will be. Wildly creative, hyperkinetic, Atari-joystick-triggered electro-dance with, refreshingly, virtually no R&B elements anywhere. Live drums to spice things up. Paul Alcott's hair. Last up, Har Mar Superstar. All schtick. A paunchy, balding guy looking like a cross between Jon Lovitz and Danny DeVito in his long-haired days, telling us all how awesome and sexy he is. During the course of the set, he stripped down through four or five layers of costume, ending up in gold sequined fingerless elbow-length gloves and Paul Frank leopard-print briefs. He's a pretty amazing performer, and his band is good. The songs are fun, and exceptionally tongue-in-cheek, R&B/white funk-based dance stuff. The crowd was atrocious and ugly and inconsiderate, packed tight and elbows everywhere, trying to play sexy and instead just coming across as clumsy and unaware of their own bodies in space. I had an elbow-to-the-beer experience four different times, and I was being careful. Great performance + good music - ugly, unpleasant crowd lacking in any sense of irony = okay experience.

Tonight, I went to Rontoms. The Angry Orts opened up. I'd never seen them before, and I loved them. Despite the difference in gender ratio (Orts are one woman, three men), they sounded most of the time like an ever-so-slightly toned-down Sleater-Kinney. The guitar and bass were sometimes a bit lusher and fuller than the bulk of the S-K catalogue, and Sara's yelping and warbling is usually a bit softer, warmer, and poppier than that of S-K. It's interesting how such a slight variation from a theme takes one from riot-grrrl to really not riot-grrl. There was also one number, in 6/8 time, that was a kind of rock-y folk twang a la Norfolk and Western. Tempo No Tempo followed. They are apparently from San Francisco. They did kind of a half-Fugazi thing that just wasn't all that interesting. The half that they couldn't fill with Fugazi was some mish-mash of heavy goth, Dick-Dale-type surf-punk, and shouty geek-punk. None of these elements was prominent enough nor good enough, and the crossed styles seemed to confuse them. I didn't stick around long enough through their set to get to World's Greatest Ghosts, whom I saw once and loved.

Back In The Saddle

Sorry, folks, I got behind. And when I got behind, the idea of getting caught up again was just too daunting. But I've given up now. How does this benefit you, you wonder?

New posts, that's how.

New Year's Eve was the Fir Ball at the Doug Fir. Inside Voices opened up. Some potential, but lacking in variety of tempo. Just slooooooow. And kinda slow. And they varied from mostly twangy to really-really twangy. But all that bass...that's gotta be good for something. Next up was The Shaky Hands. I loved them for the two years they played live after their first album came out. Bouncy, happy, fun, poppy...it was easy to forgive them their hippie tendencies. Then they went into hibernation, and created the second album. Classic rawk with nary a bounce or a pop to be seen (heard). I was crushed. I avoided them. Like that former friend who did that one thing in high school, and you couldn't quite tell him how embarrassing it was, so you just went out of your way to avoid him in the halls and not make eye contact in math class. But they've found a middle ground that rocks (not rawks) and still buzzes and bounces with that weird, infectious voice Nick Delffs has. Last up, Quasi. Covering The Who. With special guests Sean Croghan and Corin Tucker. You know how amazing this sounds? Well, it was about a kazillion times better than that. I sang along. I bobbed my head. I headbanged! It was awesome.

Tonight, there was a free showcase at Backspace. We missed Zoo Girls, and decided (well, I decided, and because I'd had a really hard day, The Boyfriend went along with me) that classic 80s video games at Ground Kontrol around the corner would be more fun than Eat Skull. We came back for Tango Alpha Tango, which ranged from charming blues-folk to over-the-top classic groove metal reminiscent of Led Zeppelin but with more jams and screaming. I wasn't sure what to think, and it seemed to me neither was the band. Y La Bamba came next, and they were beautiful and subtle as always. The capacity all-ages crowd had no subtlety to spare for them, though when I got a chance to listen I enjoyed it. Finally, Typhoon finished up. Seemingly made up of everyone in every band and non-band project of Boy Gorilla Records (and Boy Gorilla Coffee, and Boy Gorilla Whatever Else), they relied heavily on drone-pop with lots of spaghetti western horn flourishes. Does this sound like it would suck? Because it didn't. They did have a number of more up-tempo bits that weren't so droney, but the horns were insistently and persistently spaghetti-ed. Great fun.

'Til next time,
OMS