Joy Playlist for the End of the World

I don't really think the world is ending.  I don't think this is the new normal, it's not going to happen more and more until it's what we're used to.  I don't have bad dreams about Ray Bradbury's short story All Summer In A Day, about what it's like to live on a distant planet and only see the sun once every seven years...okay, I have those dreams.  But when I'm awake, I know that daycare will open, I won't have to wear a mask on the rare occasions I go to my office, I won't have to find just the right secret time, and still weigh the dangers of going to the park to let my not-quite-yet-four-year-old climb and climb and climb, like her body is meant to do.  Like there is nothing else in the world to do but climb, and climb some more.

And so certain songs just sound so much more right now than usual.

Pixies--Caribou (Come On Pilgrim)

The way his voice just shreds, it's perfect.  That scream, wail, snarl, it felt like release, like liberation.

 The Clash--Straight to Hell (Combat Rock)

Hell sounds charming, quaint almost.  Like something to put on the list for "when we can, whenever that is..."

Built to Spill--The Plan (Keep It Like A Secret)

Pure nostalgia.  I heard this song, and had this urge to pull out every album I bought because Radio K was playing it between 1997 and 1999, and play them in chronological order.  The best BTS album, hands down, no debate, and one of the best songs on the album.

Bright Eyes--We Are Nowhere And It's Now (I'm Wide Awake It's Morning)

Conor Oberst's voice is the right voice all the time.  But when is the right voice more important than right now?  This song, this whole album, just sets my head and my heart and my guts and my toes on fire.

This is today's episode.  There's an episode every day, but they are all in my head.  I hope to share some more.

P.S.

Skyway--The Replacements (Pleased To Meet Me)

Oh.  Ohhh.  I hit the "Publish" button and then, immediately, this.  It doesn't matter what is happening in the world, in my house, in my head.  This is one of those rare, precious songs.  It's like having my heart freshly laundered and pressed, wafting that childhood smell, the detergent my grandmother used that smelled like the sky.  I am brighter, lighter, a little bit renewed.

Modest Mouse, You Can Do Better

Modest Mouse show at the Crystal Ballroom. Opening band: Survival Knife. Hubby and I are sitting here trading fables about how this suburban, amateur aggro-Sabbath wannabe disaster ended up opening for MM.

Hubby: It's who you know.
Me:  Maybe it's their punishment for not finishing the album that was promised over a year ago?  "If the album isn't on my desk by March 1, you get Survival Knife, and don't try calling my bluff because god help me, I'll do it."
Hubby: This smacks of something the label saddled them with.
Me: They totally forgot they needed an opening band, and told their agent, "oh, crap, anyone, whoever, just make sure they make us look good."  Or better yet!  "We're still hardcore, right?" "Isaac, you were never hardcore. You're a word nerd." "No way, we were totally hardcore. I mean are, we are! Totally aggro!" "Dude, you wrote a song about what an ass Bukowski was. A poet. Total nerd." Isaac then goes out and finds a band he thinks is hardcore, proving his nerddom.

Ohmygod it's finally over.  Somebody owes me that awful 45 minutes of my life back.

Home Alone

I'm home alone this week, and I had all these shows I wanted to see.  There was a good show every night...well, since Wednesday, so I've only missed two.  Wednesday night, though, was Nick Jaina, who just doesn't play shows in town anymore.  What a shitty time to be sick.  It's probably allergies, but I suppose it doesn't matter what it is.  I just have to wait it out either way.  But tonight, not only was I feeling better (maybe, a little), but I already had a ticket.  So I was going for sure.  Low, dammit!  I'm pretty sure the last time I saw Low live was in something like 2002, at the State Theatre in Minneapolis.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Low is a band out of Duluth, MN, who have been around for 20+ years.  They told a story tonight about  being on tour 19 years ago tonight, driving home to northern MN from Louisiana overnight, and as the sun rose, they drove into range of Radio K (I can only assume, based on how the story ends), and heard that Kurt Cobain had died...followed by the first time they heard themselves on the radio.  They're the band that was first called "slowcore".  Even though the lovely fiance was out of town for tonight's show, he knew I'd want to go, and when he was at BarBar for happy hour one evening, he picked up a ticket for me.  (P.S.  Dear lovely fiance, you know how I hate Christmas music?  There's one Christmas album I'll listen to...here it is:  Low Christmas...it's the only one, though.)

Anyhow, I'm still a bit under the weather, and I get to the show and I'm wondering how I'll hold up.  I get there late, as is my style when left to my own devices and I don't know the opener.  First, I get to the ticket-taker stand, and she explains, "I need to stamp the back of your right hand.  This stamp will allow you re-entry, so you can come and go."  Why are you telling me this...oh.  It's amateur night, isn't it?  So I walk into the venue, and it's astoundingly crowded.  The signs say the show is sold out, but I had no idea Mississippi Studios had enough exits for this many people.  My next thought...oh, thank god I was late.  This Thalia Z...omebody (I forget the last name, there was a Z and a d and...oh, whatever) looked like she was 60 years old and had done some hard living, with years of needle drugs and a lengthy stay in prison on drug-related murder charges, and had cleaned up her act...now touring as the female Johnny Cash, if he were a total hack instead of a musical genius.  She was even wearing black jeans and a black button-up shirt, though the shirt was made for someone three times her size, and she looked more like she had recently raided the state prison you're-going-to-be-released clothes closet and couldn't find anything that fit.  You have no idea how glad I am that I missed all but 1.5 songs from this woman.  But then, between sets, I'm stuck in this tight-packed crowd.  What's the word for claustrophobia, but instead of anxious, you're irritable?  That's what I get at sold-out shows.  No matter the size of the room, the crowd reaches this tipping point at shows that sell out in advance, I don't know how to describe it, but it's a different crowd than at shows where you know you'll be able to buy a ticket at the door.  To my right is the contingent that is sitting crosslegged on the floor.  To their right is an obese woman in a black crushed-velvet dress that might have been fashionable some time contemporaneous with Low's first album, with a mohawk that's been slicked back into what I can only describe as an inch-wide mullet, held in place (why?  it seems pretty well subdued already...) by a butterfly clip.  I'm pretty much going to have nightmares about that miserable, greasy, handcuffed mohawk that must dream about spiking free.  To my left is some woman monologuing in an irritated but surprised way about how her husband is selfish, and won't put money in the joint account to pay the bills, as if she's just discovering this personality trait and is amazed, trying to figure out what to do.  This is, like, 20 minutes of going on about this, as if there's any detail to be shared beyond what I just summarized.  Um...first promise yourself you'll never pair up with anyone again before you know (and are comfortable with) how they handle money, and then buy a plane ticket to far, far away and change your name.  He's clearly too lazy to find you, and you said yourself there's nothing in the joint account, so...no loss, right?  And right in front of me is this overdressed woman, also monologuing, to this younger woman who looks barely old enough to get in.  They've both got drinks in their hands, as the older woman (clearly with some paraprofessional knowledge) goes on, and on, and on...and on...about how inpatient alcohol treatment works, and how to talk to this friend of hers about treatment without scaring him off, working up to all her professional horror stories, overdoses and bad drug combinations and bizarre stories of half-remembered sexual encounters and half-overdose-remembered-sexual...I'M NOT LISTENING!  SHUT UP!  Low has got this countdown projected behind the stage, and there is approximately a minute a half before they start to play...and I have to get away from all these people.  Remember that condition I've got, claustro-fuck-you-all?  Where I get all pissed off in a crowd of people who are elbowing me and talking about self-absorbed bullshit that doesn't belong in a music venue when a band's about to play who should stop you from even whispering, and absorb all your attention?  I was about seven feet from the stage, and could see all the musicians' faces, and I couldn't take it anymore.  I fled for the back of the room, next to the bar.

Whew.  Apparently the people who like music are taking refuge back there with me.  Larry Crane and a couple of his friends, for one.  Crane doesn't remember having met me, but when a friend of his asked, "Where are these guys from?" I was the one who gave them the right answer, and they all seemed impressed.  I also ran into a friend of a friend who we regularly see at the semi-annual house-show "recital-bacchanal" events this friend puts on.  The show starts, and at first, many in the crowd have a hard time figuring out when the band is just making noise between songs and when a song has started.  They begin with the only song from the new album that I've heard (thanks to OPB music).  There's blurry found-footage montage stuff projected behind the band.  Alan doesn't talk to the crowd at all.  It looks to be Zak Sally playing bass and keys again.  They play for about an hour before they play anything else I know (i.e., anything more than 10 years old).  But it doesn't matter.  Their catologue is so consistent.  Alan and Mimi trading the low and high parts (Alan must have a range like Ritchie Young, from baritone to a high, clear soprano-like tone with no hint of falsetto), such slow bpm yet building to such intensity.  It all felt like home.  Driving through some empty territory between towns, heat cranked up to high and the windshield still freezing, knowing that wherever I'm headed, there will be joyful people with good beer and a roaring fire when I get there.  But that cold space between, when I'm driving, is full of slow, intense drama to try to keep the cold at bay.

I got home and looked through the box of all my oldest CDs, the ones that have never been committed to computer.  Is it true that I only have two Low CDs?  And that they're Long Division, their second album, from (holy shit, I'm old...) 1995, and OWL (Low remixes) from 1998?  It's been over eight years since the person who got referred to here in this blog as the Evil Ex raided my CD collection when he left (fuck you, I'm kicking you out instead...and I paid for the CDs!).  That's far, far too long to go without Things I Lost In The Fire.  Dinosaur Act is still stuck in my head from tonight's show.  If I have anything to say about it, it will never leave. 

P.S.  The Pink Floyd cover they played tonight is something they've been playing since 2002; it was the B-side for the 7-inch single of Canada, which competes hard for my favorite Low song ever.  I actually know Fearless better as a Low song than as a Pink Floyd song.  And this whole aside makes me think that I must have Trust (2002) in another box somewhere that is also not committed to computer.  Damn you, iTunes, for demanding that I put a physical CD in the computer or find some recorded track somewhere, rather than being able to download my faintest memories, the things that most need preserving.

Last Days Of Pompeii

Grant Hart played the East End last night.  Grant Hart!  I'd never been to the East End, and it seems they cater a lot to hardcore and punk bands.  First, I want to describe the venue a bit.  It's been a number of things over the years, with a ton of '90s and early 2000s Portland bands having fond memories of the place under various monikers (The Rabbit Hole is the only one I can remember).  I expected a grungy, dirty hole along the lines of the (now defunct) most recent incarnation of Satyricon, Rotture, or the bathrooms at Backspace.  Instead, it was rather a nice little place.  A small upstairs room with really nice wood floors and vintage 1960s touches like Danish wood-framed mirrors and a padded-vinyl black portable bar (that's probably the dj stand).  Big open stairs take up a lot of the upstairs room, and go down to another room full of nice vintage furniture and candles on the table, plus a foosball table.  Not nearly enough bars have foosball.  A hallway heads off to the bathrooms (these are the as-expected incredibly gross and dingy ugliness, the only place that met that expectation), and strangely, passes a little vintage clothes-records-and-stuff shop that is only open 4 pm-midnight Thursday to Sunday (timed to coincide with when people are downstairs in the East End, I guess).  I bought a green and yellow polyester dress for a dollar, and if I had a few hundred dollars to spare I could have gone nuts there.  Finally, there's a small room downstairs with another bar that's the show venue, with an eight-inch-high platform as the stage.  Dark, but not dirty.  

Drunk Ladies opened up.  From down the hall in the vintage shop (man, they had some great stuff!), it didn't sound like my thing.  Heavy and maybe a little proggy.  Cheap Meats was next.  They were actually a lot of fun, all classic early shouty punk done pretty well (if appropriately sloppy).  Then, surprisingly, much of the crowd cleared out.  The 20 or so people that were left were there for the same reason I was.  Grant Hart is a fucking legend.  One of the two songwriters in Husker Du, and later made a little (very little) splash with his band Nova Mob, Grant's been pretty much just covering his Husker Du and Nova Mob songs, alone with a guitar, for twenty years or so.  Almost every song was familiar, and I haven't seen him in at least ten years.  I'm not sure I can even say he's a great musician or anything anymore, but the songs still make me all warm and happy.  He's a weird guy, I didn't understand any of his stage banter, but I sang along with all the songs.

Dancing In The Dark

Pretty great show tonight at Backspace.  Forbidden Friends opened up, their first show ever.  It's sorta a Thermals side project, if they all just stood up one day and moved one instrument to their left (except that Maggie Vail sits in, too).  Not surprisingly, very much like The Thermals, but slightly lower key, sometimes a little poppier, and with a little less vitriol.  I liked it.  They played four songs.  

Ted Leo (solo, no Pharmacists) headlined this show.  One of the Lovely Boyfriend's favorite bands.  I started thinking a lot about how I integrate bands into my favorites, and why I have such a hard time embracing other people's favorite bands.  Because this is clearly something I should love.  Typically, when I come at a band on my own, I hear a song or two.  And I like that song or two, sometimes right away and sometimes after many listenings.  Then I buy a CD.  I listen to it in order.  It has a flow, and one song cues the next in my mind.  Then I buy another CD, and I integrate that into my mind and my music life.  Then another.  Sometimes this is at the pace of the artist's creation, like Menomena.  I learn their music catalog in their order, at their pace, starting at the beginning.  Sometimes it's in my own order, at my pace.  I'll reluctantly admit that I came to Spoon really late to the party.  I knew a bunch of songs, but didn't realize what they were, and then one day, I just took a leap and bought...oh, where did I start?  Gimme Fiction, or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, whichever came first.  And then the other one.  Then another, and another, until I had integrated it all.  When someone else loves a band, the music comes at me all disorganized.  It's like what I hate about poorly-done college radio. You don't know what it is, you don't hear it very often, and you may never hear it again.

All this is a long, meandering way of saying that I think I really like Ted Leo.  As often as the punk moniker gets attached to him (as often by himself as by anyone else, from what I can tell), my impression all along was that it wasn't the right primary descriptor.  The solo show made it confirmed for me this impression I've never been able to fully articulate...he's a singer-songwriter at heart (but not in a bad way!), but with a higher average BPM. Charming lyrics of moderate-to-high complexity, filled with clever turns of phrase, mostly major key...heck, my mom would have loved this stuff.  The closest punk comparison is mid- to late Replacements without so many ballads (no Here Comes A Regular), but he's way smarter.  He fires off lyrics like Elvis Costello, so many words fit into a line that there's no reason to put the rhyming words on the downbeats.  Oh...and he was really nice about bumping into me and almost, but not quite, making me spill my beer.  A couple of fun covers, The Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues and Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark, and references all over the place.  I heard The Jam, Neil Young, the aforementioned Elvis Costello, and things probably too obscure to call a reference but made sense in my head, like John Vanderslice.  It was a pretty good show.

What Have I Been Doing Lately?

This time of year, just when I most need some excitement, it gets hard to drag my ass out to shows.  By the time I would leave the house, it's been dark for four hours already, and getting off the couch seems like work.  I've been to a couple of things over the last month or so.  A friend's party with some good music.  New Year's Eve at Mississippi Studios with Dirty Mittens (great!), Ramona Falls (one of my favorites), and Heliosequence (good). 

A recent theme that is not making this project any easier is shows starting totally late.  A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Wild Flag at Bunk Bar.  We got there way early, figuring the place would be packed, and knowing that Bunk Bar sandwiches are better than anything we could have concocted at home for dinner.  I'm a pretty good cook, but damn.  Those are good sandwiches.  I got a grilled cheese, because I had eaten something and wasn't very hungry.  The grilled cheese was pretty ordinary, but the lovely boyfriend got a squash sandwich with bacon, and it was amazing.  I actually went back the next day for a sandwich because I was so disappointed that I hadn't been hungry enough for one of their real, serious creations.  We got there at 7:30, figuring people would be lined up, or at least start pouring in shortly thereafter.  No, it was pretty sparse there.  Glad we misestimated that way, rather than the other way, I guess.  The first band didn't start until after 10:00!  Late.  Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives were supposed to open, but Drew Grow had apparently been in a pretty bad car accident (everyone who mentioned it said he'd be fine but had broken a bone or two), so Ramona Falls had stepped in to replace them.  Their NYE show was a bit more dynamic, but Brent Knopf is always awesome.  I loved that the stage was lit only by a utility light (you know, a bare bulb at the end of an extension cord, with a plastic cage and a hook) that was just laid on the floor of the stage.  This was Ramona Falls' first show since Brent announced he was leaving Menomena, or in other words, their first show as Brent's main project.  Wild Flag spent a lot of time setting up, and hung the utility light from the rafters.  So damn bright!  I guess they had someone filming.  I have to admit, my first thought about WF was, "Gee, another band that wants to sound like Sleater-Kinney....oh, wait..."  As the set went on, they became tighter and just looked like they were all having lots of fun.  Even Janet Weiss had this big, genuine grin on her face.  By the end, I was really enjoying it.

A couple of nights ago, I went to see a show at Branx.  Not normally a venue I would go to, but it was to see The Thermals.  I don't get that opportunity nearly enough!  The show had been changed from the 20th to the 28th, and the door time on the website had been changed from 8 to 7.  We got there at 7, and there was a line.  Doors weren't open.  We waited a few minutes, got bored and cold, and went to Produce Row for a beer.  We went back to Branx about 8, and the line had gotten really really long.  But about 8:20, it was clear that doors weren't at 8, either.  I'm a huge proponent of all-ages music in theory, but I have to say, I'm not always a fan of hanging out with high school kids, especially as they stand in line, showing off for each other and practicing smoking cigarettes (they weren't very good at it).  So we went off to La Merde for another drink and some Trivial Pursuit questions.  We were back at 9, and they were just starting to let people in.  We got in line, and slowly moved inside.  Guidance Counselor was just starting to set up.  I love Guidance Counselor.  As much fun as they were when they were messy nerd-punk wildness, as the band gets tighter, it's just as fun and maybe even more so.  Ian's got this total art-school-rock Devo/early Talking Heads thing going on now, which is just amazing.  They finish up, and I start listening to some of the chatter around us.  "Did you see Wampire?"  "No, did they play already?"  "I heard they played at 9, were you in yet?"  What the fucking fuck?  The first band played before the audience was in the venue?

I understand why all-ages music isn't doing well in this town, if that's how shit gets run.

I was terribly disappointed I missed Wampire!  I've only seen them once, and it was a super-short set at PDX Pop Now! this past summer.  Not that this set was much longer (and on the same stage, actually). 

Last up, The Thermals.  They've got marvelous energy, and it seems to emanate from Kathy Foster's hair.  Sorry, Paul Alcott, but your hair is maybe only #2 in town for most amazing to watch during a set.  They may not have been as into their set as I've seen them, but they don't put on a bad show.  They've got really good and great, and this show was really, really good.

On a side note, the place has been cleaned up a bit.  a few new "walls" (framing and drywall that goes partway to the ceiling), a small bar area for the 21-and-up crowd, a nicer stage with an enclosed backstage area.  Oh, and some spray-insulation on the ceiling, perhaps to minimize noise from Rotture upstairs.  The bathrooms looked kinda clean, too, at least upstairs in Rotture, with some of the graffiti covered up and real locks on the (still handmade plywood) stall doors.  Things that still need to be fixed:  Doors at 7 should not mean doors at 9.  Doors at 9 should not mean first band starts the second the doors open.  The ventilation system is still all closed off, and I'm not sure if that really means there is genuinely no ventilation in the place...how could that be legal?  Yet the ventilation system has cool air running through it, even though the vents have metal plates bolted over them, because after an hour of sweaty kids dancing, water starts to condense on them and drip onto the crowd below. 

I'm not sure it's the best this town can do for all-ages music.  I could rant and rave all day about the closure of Berbati's (occasionally all-ages), The Artistery, and Satyricon all within a month or so, but cripes, is this the kind of place we want carrying the torch?  Long live Backspace, and I'll even give some props to the split-floor arrangements at the Crystal Ballroom and the Wonder Ballroom.  I just wish there was another way.  More ways.  More places.  I was a sixteen-year-old kid hopping in my (thanks, dad!) 1975 Volkswagen Beetle as soon as I was old enough and driving into Minneapolis to go to all-ages shows at First Avenue, but that place is on the same circuit as the Crystal.  It's not like other towns have it that much better, those all-ages venues on a smaller scale in other places don't survive either.  Is it because I want a beer with my show?  Is it because kids are ghettoized in this country and adults don't want to hang out with them? 

What is this better way?

But Wait! There's More!

Look at me, blogging before I forget what I've seen and heard! [edit: clearly I started this post quite a while ago, and I'll cover most of August.] I'm the queen of the blogosphere! (Yep, I'm picturing me standing on the prow of the internet, all Titanic-style, bits and bytes and letters spraying in my face in the wind...). I've had plenty in the past couple of weeks to describe in weird and wonderful and nonsensical post-literary flourishes. Was that a bit grandiose? Or maybe a bit dismissive and self-ridiculing? Whatever; as long as it's some of both I'm good with it.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the all-B show. This show was at Mississippi Studios, and it appears that the cool goes where Alicia Rose books. There's almost nothing I want to see anymore at Doug Fir since she left, and I go to MS all the damn time. Breakfast Mountain opened, and I got there partway through their set. It was excruciatingly loud power-synth-and-drums electro-something. The Beauty, whom I've described before, haven't changed a bit except that there were three of them instead of two. This time, it was a big ol' bear, a tattooed skinny punk, and a gangly, kind of dorky guy doing Prince-influenced ipod-driven dancepop. Then Brainstorm, whose PPN Festival description still fits just as accurately. It was awesome watching people try to dance, including this one guy who I wished I could put on Youtube for his dorky, over-the-top hippie-meets-fourth-grade-dance-class (jazz hands!) weirdness.

Last week was four shows in six days. Tuesday, I saw Blue Giant at Mississippi Studios for a free, supposedly secret show for them to tune up and pull shit together before they go out on tour. Delorean (there are two Deloreans, spelled differently, one's from Spain and one's from Portland...my spelling may be wrong but I know I have the right city) opened with some fairly bland mid-tempo folk-pop. Seemed like a good opportunity to hang out in the new BarBar space next door, MS's new resto-bar (oh, shit...I hate that non-word, sorry about that) that's there to subsidize the music. Then Blue Giant rocked the house, explained away the flags (something about how Portland is the best place on earth, so they needed to figure out what they had in common with their fellow Americans before they went out on tour into the midst of them, and what they came up with is that they're all Americans, so they're bringing some flags), amazed and awed. When My Love Is Gone, It's Gone For Good. But I still adore BG.

Thursday: Dragging An Ox Through A Waterfountain...uh...or Dragging an Ox Through Water at the Lovejoy Fountain. No Opener or anything, tiny shoebox-sized amps, big steel pot-lids as windchime-like hanging percussion. Fascinating stuff.

Saturday, I saw The Angry Orts at Doug Fir for their CD Release show. Nucular Aminals opened up, and I thought I liked them, and I might be wrong. I didn't like this set much, nerdy and weird on purpose (and I like nerdy...but I have issues with weird-on-purpose). The Ascetic Junkies followed. Why one of them said hi to me, by name, good-to-see-you-again, baffled me...gotta be work-related. These guys are far too cute, a nearly square-dance-ready froth of gingham and ukelele and sorta-bluegrass. Then the Orts just blew me away. I've seen them a bunch of times and loved them, but this was just the next level. Sara was kind of trashed, but just put on an even better show, all Blondie and Sleater-Kinney...then covering Joan Jett. In a corset. Great band, astounding songs, and then Sara's just such a dynamic and fun performer.

Then Sunday there was just an unbelievable show at Rontoms. I got there for part of Monarques, who do such throwback 1950s and early 1960s stuff...it strikes me as simplistic and boring (and oh how glad I am I didn't have to live through that era of music, for such straight and straightforward stuff to be considered revolutionary and rock-and-roll). But then The Dirty Mittens did their thing. Power-yelping, playful, charming, high-energy, hooky, and so undeniably talented. Ramona Falls up last...Brent of Menomena looking like the most understated but also the one with the true, subtle emotional depth. And then he launches into "I Say Fever," and...wow. Not so understated. You want smoke machines and strobe lights. And yet still emotional depth. There are times when he's my favorite voice in Menomena, and Ramona Falls totally highlights what I love about Brent. (Of course, the other side projects make them all my favorites in turn...)

Huh...I can't even remember when this show was that I'm reading my notes from. Oh! This was a couple of weeks before the festival, at Mississippi Studios. Gregory Miles Harris up first. He's supposed to have been in town for years, playing very rare, unappreciated shows for the privileged few. He did this more-Half-Japanese-than-Half-Japanese high-pitched squeaky weirdness that had some hints of brilliance to it and a lot of silliness. Sometimes charming and sometimes tiresome. Alan Singley and Pants Machine next. I'd seen them a couple of times recently at parties, so the "world premiere" songs weren't really world premieres to me. Good set, moderately together, and always fun. IOA (or ioa) finished up. Damn, Amanda's got an astounding voice and I'll go see anything she does. Warm, chanteuse-y, songwriter-y stories. Papi Fimbres adding some complexity. But it doesn't have the otherworldly, anti-pop qualities I love so much about Point Juncture, WA. I bought an IOA (or ioa?) CD, and I can't get the Boxcar Children song out of my head, but some part of me is just sitting there, crosslegged, defiant, pouting, waiting for the next PJWA disc.

Okay, that will have to cover it for now. I saw a few lovely, short, acoustic sets in someone's backyard and still have the blisters to show for it (it's a long story...and then I got companion blisters the next weekend commercial-amateur-rafting on the Deschutes), and probably some other stuff, but no more looking back! Onward to September!

PDX Pop Then!

Here's where I put the requisite apologetic groveling for not writing more often. Yes, I've seen lots of shows. No, I haven't blogged about them. No, I don't remember the details or my snarky observations. This is like my scrapbook, so it kills me when I don't have the time to document where I've been and what I've seen...how am I supposed to remember what to tell my grandchildren?

Last weekend was PDX Pop Now! This was my fifth year attending the festival, I think, and my fourth year having something to say on the interwebs about it. My third year as a volunteer. It's kinda become my thing. I know how things work, I know what to eat and what to avoid in the green room (don't eat more than one Voodoo Doughnut per day...it's not good for you; get in on the dried fruit on day one, because it will be gone by Saturday morning), I know the people and some of the bands.

Friday started with Blue Horns. They are a reliable, failsafe power trio that is always on...and never impresses me as something terribly interesting. They started things off with a bang, absolutely, but my rush to get there to see Band One was probably unnecessary. Ylang Ylang was next...a new-ish portlandy hot...well, in any other town they'd be called a supergroup, but around here it's just a really good side project. Power trio plus viola, with Charlie Salas-Humara of Panther on guitar/vox and Jake Morris of The Joggers on drums. They've gotten all sorts of tighter since I last saw them, their debut show at Jackpot Records, though they're still a bit goofy. Some goth-pop references from the early 80s plus plenty of rawk to go around. I'm loving them. Kusikia was next, a lot of noise but some melody too. Bits of prog-math, some dark stuff, and great at what they did without really grabbing me. Ages and Ages next...first of all, I loved their conceit of selling one single t-shirt for $50 instead of lots of t-shirts at eight or twelve bucks apiece, and I wish someone had bought it (it was written in Sharpie). The music, though, was amazing, a big sing-along onstage but with perfect songs and harmonies, a bouncy campfire-y group of many. So very fun, and their track on this year's PDX Pop Now! compilation is one of my favorites. Rollerball followed, and this is a band I find nearly impossible to describe. But, of course, I'll try. Some trio of prog-gothy, occasionally metal-tinged, occasionally charmingly melodic complexity and, at times, conceit. Impressive, if not always successful. AndAndAnd was crazy-shouty and wild with some Americana undertones, a great time if perhaps a bit overrated. Not that I'm knocking them, I just heard a few people say that was the set they were most looking forward to all weekend, and I gotta say, there's no way they trump The Joggers. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Witch Mountain was...well, I hate metal, so it was a beer set. I wandered down the street to La Merde, my typical Festival hangout (Produce Row gets too crowded), and came back in time for the last bit of Jackie O-Motherfucker. They've been in town for ever and ever, and I can't believe I've never seen them. Well, now I can say I've seen them. Based on what I'd listened to before the fest, I expected to be totally bored, and I wasn't, but that's really the best I can say. Tu Fawning does beautiful stuff, and this late at night after working all day, I was itching for more rock. The headliner for the night was AU, playing with some outfit out of Idaho or Colorado or something they had picked up called Dovekins. I think it kinda ruined them. This brilliant, complicated high-energy experimental duo ended up devolving into aimless hippie-ish jams. There was facepaint. And one of Dovekins seemed rather rude to me in the green room before the set.

Saturday, I was there nice and early. Things started out low-key with Shoeshine Blue doing lovely, folky Americana stuff, nothing overwhelming, but a nice way to ease into the day as I had my first cup of coffee. And that peaceful start was shattered by Tiny Knives, an all-female punk-metal trio of the big-snarly-hair sort. It was...um...a lot. Soup Purse was described to me, repeatedly, as Harsh Noise. And when I described them as Noise, I was repeatedly corrected. Harsh Noise. My attempt to check them out in advance led me to think, if this is harsh noise, how can it be so boring? Lots of clicks and taps with little in the way of notes. It was more interesting live, with some stories and some weird stuff, and yes, some notes. I've gotta at least appreciate a noise band (Harsh noise!) with a horn section. The purses full of soup were a bit much. And more than a bit messy. And got left behind, smelling like split pea. Guantanamo Baywatch was next, and was (appropriately) outside. Tongue-firmly-in-cheek surfpunk, but really well-done. More fun than the song names (Cum Fart Food) would suggest. A total party, but not one where someone barfs on your shoes before the night is over. The Tumblers were up next. They were the closest to a country band the fest had, though in a throwback traditional-country-western sort of way, not a modern pop-stars-with-twang-and-jingoism way. Cute without inviting condescension. O Bruxo, a late addition to the lineup, was another "yawn, we are so used to supergroups in this town we barely bat an eye," supergroup-with-pseudonyms conflagration. Amazing stuff mostly in Spanish, as if world-beat-dance stuff didn't suck and instead overwhelmed with awesome. Led by "Papi Chulo" (David Fimbres, to appear later during the fest playing flute). Grey Anne is always lovely, and since I've seen her a bunch of times, I have to admit, I wandered off to find a snack and sit down for a bit. Fear No Music is a modern/experimental classical collective, made up during this set of a violinist, a keyboardist, a laptop synth player, and a multi-percussionist playing vibraphones and homemade instruments. Dynamic and fascinating, and they seemed to love playing for a baffled rock audience on their feet instead of a baffled classical audience crossing and uncrossing their legs in uncomfortable symphony hall seats. Operative had some of the elements of music, including rhythm and notes. I'm not so sure it was music. It had a driving beat at times, but it got old quick.

Time for an arbitrary new paragraph, I think. Brainstorm was next. I love this band. They're like the train wreck that would result from a DC mathcore band playing folk songs with a tuba. Yes, there's a tuba. Not to get ahead of myself again, but this may be the first two-tuba PPN fest! Moby Dick references, barbershop quartet sounds, vocals like slave-spirituals, 80s electro-casio bleep-pop, and crunching metal guitar all overlap in a way that sounds like it should be awful, but much like a peanut-butter-and-soy-sauce sauce for noodles, ends up kinda transcendent instead. Asss...uh...okay, I have to admit, I couldn't pay attention all the time. I don't totally remember Asss. They played a very, very short set, on the sidewalk instead of the stage, and it was kinda drone-y and I think it was supposed to be experimental. Da'Rel Junior was stellar, brainy, self-conscious (as opposed to conscious?) hip-hop, funny and earnest. He's staff at a local social service agency, working with "troubled" youth, and he told a few stories about his job. He also covered The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire, which was kick-ass. Wampire up next...a total party in which not every single member of the band took their pants off, but they got close. And the music was pretty fun, too. Bouncy, joyful, utterly lacking in pretension, and probably well-stocked with cassette tapes.

Defect Defect and Eternal Tapestry was the Saturday-evening beer set for me. Uncomplicated thrash-punk (DD) doesn't do much for me. And...well, I saw ET once, and when I described how much I abhorred them, I think I was blunt enough that I made some people uncomfortable. Let's just leave it at that. Okay, fine...I said, "Sitting through that set, I thought I'd rather relive my mother's funeral." I saw them at Mississippi Studios opening for The Joggers last April, and they riffed for 26 minutes straight on one chord. The sax player played the same note in the same rhythm for six solid minutes without alteration. I really began to ponder the possibility of literally dying of boredom. It was physically painful. I was told repeatedly that, while the performance I saw was not necessarily out of character for them, it was not typical, but I just didn't think I could chance it. So I skipped 'em and headed back down to La Merde for some delicious beer. But I rushed back to ensure that I didn't miss Blue Cranes. And they didn't disappoint. They have never failed to exceed my expectations, and my expectations for them these days are pretty sky-high. They not only blew me away, but impressed the 19-year-old boys surrounding me, eagerly awaiting Hockey. The memorable quotes from these kids: "That was so good I almost cried." (And about the boy who said that: "He's a musician, he knows this stuff.") Followed by, "Wow...I've never seen live jazz before!" They set up this amazing, yet frustrating deal at the merch table whereby one could only buy their brand-new, not-yet-released disc if under 21, with ID (they are huge supporters of all-ages music and venues, and their upcoming CD release party, I believe, is at a 21-and-up venue). Diabolically brilliant. Hosannas (formerly Church, whom I believe I've discussed at least once in the past, and maybe more than that) was down to two members from four, with very little notice (they announced their breakup shortly before the festival, actually), and weren't as compelling or dynamic as they've been in the past. i sure hope they get their shit together and re-form as a new band with either some new members or some material built for two. But despite Hosannas not quite being up to par, this closing Saturday set was my favorite of the festival. Joggers were up next...and they knocked that shit right out of the park. They've traded in some of their laid-back 70s influences for more plain-ol' crushing rock. And then, incongruously, there was a digeridoo. And a bear suit (sans head) and a one-piece coverall. Somehow their power-rock and these rhythms you can't really dance to still end up catchy and fun as all hell. Hockey finished up. Suburbanites and little kids with their dads and...oh, hell, I danced too. They took forever to set up, and they were reportedly total divas about the whole thing, and they pulled icky, creepy greshamites up on stage to dance...but they still rocked the house.

Saturday night faded out with this rollicking solo drum set that was sorta a guerrilla set. There were a few guerrilla sets, but I ignored most of them, because even I need ten or fifteen minutes of rest here or there. But this one sounded like it would be unimaginably cool. The drummer from the next day's first band, Why I Must Be Careful, played all. fucking. night. And then played WIMBC the next day, which looks exhausting even if he's gotten a good eight hours of sleep. Of all the things I missed or didn't totally pay attention to, this one kills me the most...I arrived for the day just a few minutes after WIMBC ended. Did I describe them earlier this year? So amazing. Overwhelming, confusing, inexplicable. Probably the two smartest musical minds in this city playing jazz-based freak-outs that sometimes sound like just pounding (on drums and keys), but is really more like the musical equivalent of bio-chemo-neuro-nano-rocket science that is so far beyond your comprehension that all you hear sometimes is noise, with little glimpses here and there of what amazement you'd be privy to if you were 60 IQ points smarter, spent 15 years studying music theory, had an advanced degree in calculus, spent a couple of decades on small Pacific islands with Margaret Mead, then spent years learning extreme kung fu at one of those impossibly isolated mountain Buddhist monasteries devoted to ass-kicking that only exist in kung fu movies. But, having arrived late, I can only imagine such mathematical biochemical primordial jazz ass-kicking as it was at the festival. I did arrive for Michael The Blind, whose folky, floaty yet sturdy, flute- and oboe-like voice mesmerizes me. The only other time I've seen him was at the PDX Pop Now! CD release show in...2006? It was at Berbati's, and it must have been '06 because I remember the poster was the one with the bicycle. Joey Casio, up next, was pure, unadulterated electronic dance thump. Thump, thump, thump...I'll be back later. I missed Cloudy October, Atriarch, and Lewi Longmire due to my responsibilities as a volunteer this year. Cloudy October is supposed to be awesome hip-hop, and I'm sorry I missed him. Atriarch is crunching, earsplitting metal that I don't mind having missed. Lewi Longmire is folk-country-rootsy twang that I probably wouldn't have hated despite my frequent anti-twang bias, and is supposed to be one of the nicest guys around. Krebsic Orkestar was an amazing, awe-inspiring 14(?)-piece gypsy brass band doing this fascinating yet accessible eastern-european stuff that got people bobbing heads and even shaking hips. And they brought the other tuba of the weekend. Autistic Youth was...loud. Punk. Loud. Billygoat (damn, this was an incongruous set) showed 45 minutes of the most amazing stop-motion animation, mostly paper-cut stuff of excruciating and dazzling detail, accompanied by buzzing, swelling, and swirling electronica meant to highlight and showcase the animation. It was the beautiful, awe-inspiring, charming, constantly-changing animation that kept amazing me and making me smile. Please Step Out Of The Vehicle played their supposed last show ever, as Travis Wiggins is moving to Hawaii to accompany his girlfriend who is starting graduate school or something. A bunch of familiar songs, "Papi" Fimbres making his flute hoot and holler in ever-more weird and wonderful ways, I am indescribably glad to have been there for this. I sang along. I sat down behind the stage for I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House, but still heard clearly the actually pretty engaging and enjoyable roadhouse-blues-countrypunkrawk. Like Jackie O-Motherfucker, they've played in town for a decade or something, and I'm glad I've gotten to see them. Unlike JOM, I actually had some fun seeing/hearing them. Ben Darwish was next. I couldn't decide whether he played crowd-pleasing stuff less complex than he's capable of, or whether he defied the crowd by remaining somewhat low-key. Or both. His drummer was amazing, though. I dubbed Get Hustle (prog-funk-metal-psych-party-rawk-experimental-huh?-core) my beer set for the night, and I was off to La Merde again. Is it awful that I can't remember if I came back for part of AAN, whom I remember liking after having heard them online? I do remember I heard Reporter, whose dance-electronica (with fog machine and light bracelets tossed into the audience) was kinda...meh. Whatever. Luck-One hip-hop led off the Sunday headlining outdoor set, but I couldn't hear him well enough to distinguish the lyrics, so I got some Koi Fusion and just tried to hang out and listen. Parenthetical Girls...well, I believe I've described them in the past as Colin Meloy's literary theatricality filtered through Morrissey's personality disorder (I love both Meloy and Morrissey, though I do see the downsides of each), but I forgot to mention that Zac Pennington can't actually sing, which makes things even worse. Typhoon blew a few fuses and led to a long delay, then once they got going seemed to be rollicking...and by then I was tired and wanted to get things taken care of and go home, so I helped with picking up inside and whatever else. Skeletron, at the end, should have been terribly exciting, but I have to admit, I wasn't feeling much of anything at all, even their ("they" being Starfucker as a two-piece, really) super-party-indie-dance-electro-dance-party-indie-andsoforth. It was fun, but it wasn't like Menomena last year or anything.

I think I saw more of the bands this year than ever before. I think I got to the end a bit emotionally exhausted, but my feet were still pretty intact even during the closing set on Sunday. I think I don't know what I'd do without a free three-day festival devoted to the current in local music.

Working backward

I'm going to start with the most recent show I've seen, then work backward until I tire of typing.

Done!

Just kidding. Last weekend I saw Ted Leo and the Pharmacists with Hungry Ghosts and Golden Bears opening. Hungry Ghosts is a hot mess, as someone I know would say. "Hey, girl!", she'd also say. She'd then put a few dozen words into trying to convince me to do her job, while simultaneously trying to explain away why she wouldn't be there when I got there. Anyhow, this band was tight, yet all over. They were proggy, they were rock-y, they were inexplicable. Honestly, they were a great band I didn't like. You should probably go see them, and decide for yourself.

They were followed by Golden Bears. If you read back a few years, you'll find a post in which I lament the Golden Bears' horrendous, atrocious medieval folk-metal and the uncomfortable situation my attempts to evade that horrendous medieval-ness led me to. Suffice it to say that if you're ever in need, you can call the Portland Mercury something else, but it's really a maaaagaziiine......sadly, neither the Golden Bears nor the Portland Mercury has evolved beyond my poor attempt to do something more complicated than hear the band. Lose-lose.

Ted Leo was a fun pop-punk, or at times punk-pop, band. As has been the case when I've seen TL and the Pharmacists in the past, he's had interesting things to say, he's made some interesting chord changes, and he's done both things at once. Go average punk-pop-punk...whoohoo! Lots of energy, some good melody, some good beats, some unnecessary melody, and some unnecessary beats. And so on.

And some equally scintillating average music criticism to come, I promise. Yay!

Finding the Positive

Things that feel good this week:

Live music. Starting to garden again for the year. Someone really special to me who wants to improve my mood and yet doesn't get frustrated with me when it doesn't always work.

Two weeks ago, my department was eliminated at work. The economy? No, turns out my department made money that paid for some things that aren't going so well in a mental-health non-profit. Incompetence? No, we've got the most clinically savvy and ethically responsible mental health team in the agency. Personnel problems? Maybe...the administrative team left something to be desired. Government regulations? Also a maybe. Power play by which my agency asserts itself as a major player in influencing child and family mental health in this state? Probably. Anyhow, I'm awesome at what I do, and I'm going to be jobless...in a few weeks? A few months? Maybe I'll find a job? Whatever. I'm too tired to worry about it. Two days after that, I got on a plane to the cold, snowy midwest to pick up a large-ass luxury sedan (leather seats, sunroof, miles to the gallons-and-gallons-and-gallons) I inherited when my mom died of lung cancer at 60. Thank you, Someone Special, for embarking on that kind-of ridiculous errand with me. Five days of airplane, layover, airplane, taxi, visit the relatives, drop the bags at the rented house my dad abandoned last week, discover the heat's out, call for help, get the furnace working again, visit the relatives again, drive through Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington, and Oregon, sleep in motels, hope for good weather, try to see buffaloes and museums and Native American villages and state parks and whatever, find out everything's closed in the upper Midwest in the winter, have some fun anyway road trip. If you ever find yourself driving I-94, I recommend the large animal, Viking, and Paul Bunyan sculptures. And Riverfront Park in Spokane. And I recommend doing it in the summer so you can see the National Buffalo Museum and the Indian villages and the Lewis and Clark camps and the Pictograph Caves and the good parts of Yellowstone. Ultimately, there's an unbelievable amount of nothing along I-94 and I-90, and along the trip from I-90 to I-84 through Washington. But it was still kind of fun. And I am now the proud owner of an aging Mitsubishi Diamante Old Lady Car With Heated Leather Seats That Seems To Leak Antifreeze. I figure I combine that with the Even More Aged Honda Civic Hatchback Without Power Anything That Leaks Whenever It Rains and maybe I can trade in for half of a New Small, Efficient Car Without Any Problems Yet.

After I got back, there was an unbelievable amount of music I could go see. I went the jazz route. Saturday, I went to see Blue Cranes at The Cleaners at Ace Hotel. Wow. I've seen these guys a couple of times, and I'm still...oh, Wow. Bowled over. Such classic experimental jazz without misstep or dumbing-down, yet it's perfectly understandable and accessible to an indie-rock-listener crowd too. Every note is perfectly placed, yet there are clear improvisational solos. Dynamic, intelligent, hook-y, charming, powerful-as-all-hell stuff. The next night was Lindsey Stormo/Ben Darwish and Why I Must Be Careful at Rontoms, the closing after-party of the Portland Jazz Fest. Lindsey had this light, untrained showtunes-wannabe voice that warbled birdlike in the high ranges or reached desperately for blues standard sounds in her lower ranges, but consistently sounded weak and tentative in any range. Maybe, with a good voice teacher, she'd be right for the chorus of a light operetta out of the Gilbert and Sullivan catalog. Ben Darwish was simply the hired hand that comped along with her, so I didn't get to learn anything about him as a jazz pianist. Why I Must Be Careful absolutely blew me out of the water, though. Shit. I mean...shit. Pounding, experimental keyboards and drums and...holy shit. This stuff was so overwhelming, I couldn't understand it then and I can't describe it now. All I can say is, you have absolutely got to go see this shit for yourself, because it's beyond amazing. Fists flying, drumsticks everywhere, chaos and disorder to the untrained eye (ear), but yet the two of them clearly never lose each other no matter how many times they lose me, and their musical genius outstrips any band I've ever heard. Holy fucking shit. Shit.

Until I next find the stamina to write...

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

Okay, so it started with this email.

Anyhow, it turns out there was a secret Dandy Warhols show at rontoms tonight. For free. In a room that holds, what, 150 people if they're all really, really good friends? And I was there. In the front row, so close that Courtney Taylor-Taylor could have spit on me. The Boyfriend gets these emails from rontoms telling him about the shows, and there was a *SURPRISE SECRET HEADLINER* and a hint. Marvelously, unbelievably, the-best-of 1990s with pedals galore and a bell-sleeved dress and a boy-bob haircut and a practiced sexy pout. It was a great time, and I'll get to tell my grandkids about it.

I know, I'm terribly behind. I'm working on it. Sasquatch, and PDX Pop Now!, and all sorts of little shows (and not-so-little ones) in between. There are posts galore in draft, half-finished, scribbled notes, snippets and partial sentences and fragments and bits, fermenting and bubbling, nearly ready to burst forth into cascades of schadenfreude and fascinated disdain. But today, I saw Jared Mees and the Grown Children, had a nice dinner entirely sourced from my garden and the farmer's market (except for some salt, pepper, butter, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar), then went to see the Dandies. Seriously...the Dandies. I'm still wowed by that.

More to come. As always.

Surmounting the Insurmountable

I've got two whole music festivals to review. It's like 100 bands. No, I don't mean it's "like 100 bands." If I were exaggerating, I'd tell you it was 124941 bands or something. I really think that between Sasquatch and PDX Pop Now!, I've got 100 bands to cover. I'll see what I can do.

See, I'm crazy far behind because of all these shows to see (and review), but also because of other stuff that isn't music-related. I found out in June that my mom has lung cancer. I only went out to see her for five and a half days, but it's just incredible what that takes out of my summer.

In not totally unrelated news, it's amazing what a sick mom going through chemo turns out to be a great excuse for, from...uh...not blogging, to getting The Boyfriend to take me out to a Pixar movie (perfect call, by the way, and from now on, I demand that Pixar release a new movie whenever I'm sad), to getting The Boss to do some work for me and go easy on me when other stuff isn't done!

I ought to start with Sasquatch. Three stages (plus a comedy/dance stage) for three days solid. To start with, I gotta say, two days was plenty. I mean, I'm glad they got rid of the anomalous, incongruous mismatch that was Friday night, and it's hard to complain that they replaced it with a third full day of top-to-bottom three-stage awesomeness. But I'm complaining. And then, they seem to have sold 150% of the tickets this year than in any past year I've gone (2007, 2006, 2004). There wasn't a spot near the main stage from the moment we got there to the second we left. There wasn't a way to get close to the second or even third stage. Nothing felt obscure or underappreciated. There wasn't anything I would remember for the rest of my life as a one-time-only front-row chance-of-a-lifetime like Decemberists on the third stage in '04. It was uncomfortably crowded from moment one to the second we passed the gate back into the parking lot for the third time. The sun was brutal, like knives on my grey Portland-wintered skin. The good news is that it didn't dip into the bitter, windy 50's in the evenings, and I never left miserable and shivering, wishing I could stay for the next band.

Day 1: Blind Pilot, a Portland band, was nice enough, with some really PDX-y twang-folk, vibraphones, banjo, violin, and upright bass. I would never complain about having to see them. Gotta admit, though, I would never complain about having to miss them. Death Vessel was minor-key folk-rock with violin and female vocals, some serious twang and some 1970s rock. Doves (I hate that they're not The Doves, they're Doves) were average alt-rock. Passion Pit were marvelous, with bouncy falsetto synth-fun. It was full of the kind of vaguely cynical joy that would be the perfect soundtrack to a lost John Hughes film (rest in peace, Breakfast Club!). I thought of the Snuggle-Ups. At this point, I lost The Boyfriend, and there is very nearly NO cell phone reception in The Gorge. I was distracted for the next few sets, wondering what would happen if we never found each other again in the sea of millions that was the Sasquatch crowd. I saw M. Ward, who is just as good live as he is in the studio. In other words, I could have just listened to the CDs. Devotchka was interesting, with accordion and violin, gypsy-influenced indie and straight-out gypsy. I'd like to hear more. The Mount St. Helens' Vietnam Band did some minor-key stuff in their rock. Interesting. Arthur & Yu was (at best) OK. Low key. Animal Collective was not as weird as expected, with some (ugh) world beats, mostly just aimless and repetitive, with some computer-psych and projected visuals. Sun Kil Moon started with a Red House Painters song and then followed with a bunch more that might have been RHP. Just too slow, pretty, and quiet for a weekend like this (or a weekend like those I spend at home doing things, either...). Somewhere in here, I was working my way up the hill by the main stage, when The Boyfriend somehow spotted me in the crowd. Whew! Ra Ra Riot was surprisingly un-riotous. With a name like that, you'd expect pop-rock '80s revival like every other band out there right now, but instead, there was a cello and a violin. Quiet bits and interesting details, with maybe a nod to Vampire Weekend here and there. The Decemberists did Hazards of Love straight through, like an orchestral-rock opera. I've seen them twice before at Sasquatch (and a dozen times or so other places), and this was a disappointment. No banter, no breaks at all between songs even, and certainly no singalongs and giant cardboard whale jaws. Though I have to admit, there's a ton of impressive, crushing rock in The Hazards of Love. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are retro early-80s girl-rock, wild and shouty with lots of eye makeup. There seems to be an invisible bass player. Bon Iver was pretty, with some complex lyrics and two or three drummers at times, a wailing falsetto like a musical saw, but still, occasionally boring in the midst of all this overstimulation. It would have been a great fit on Barsuk five or six years ago in the Nada Surf/All Time Quarterback/Rocky Votolato heyday.

Sunday, we started with Viva Voce. This was ROCK. We really needed some straight up rock. There were times, though, when they shaded a bit 1970s, and it seemed like they were going to meet their other band, Blue Giant, in some in-between musical middle ground. Viva Voce has become a four-piece with that one girl from that Portland band, you know the one, and that one other guy from that other band or two. Oh, yeah, the added female was Corrina Repp! Now I remember. I don't remember where we know the drummer from, though. Point Juncture, WA has become more beat-driven, with less vibraphone, but Amanda's voice still sounds like a vibraphone. Nice shorty jumpsuit, Amanda! Hockey was one-trick-pony party music, all deliberate throwback with sweatbands and little running shorts with the contrasting trim, but damn, were they a shit-ton of fun. They consistently remind me of Har Mar Superstar, except for the fact that one would never, ever want to see Sean in vintage little-bitty running shorts. Ew. The Walkmen were surprisingly uninteresting for all the attention they've gottten over the past however many years. Kind of a Brit-wannabe guitar-and-warble thing, occasional forays into Irish punk-lite. John Vanderslice, as always, managed to get the audience to give him things (sunglasses this time). A good set from him, but he's just never going to live up ever again to the Crystal Ballroom show from MFNW last year. Calexico was weird Mexishit. I like them less every time I hear them. I did a walk-through of the Fences set, and thought only they had some Barsuk-like potential. St. Vincent gave us a bunch of weird twinkly and boom-y noises that sometimes came together into a song, a bit Bjork-like. The song that sounded like 1930s Disney cartoon-short songs laid over total rawk guitar was probably pretty representative. The Builders And The Butchers continue to do some mashup of party rock, angry rebel folk-rock, 1970s faux-medieval, and actual medieval songs about the plague. Despite that description, they're a hell of a fun time. The Submarines could best be described as pop music for Target commercials, though they weren't quite as bad as Chairlift is (okay, that was an Ipod commercial, but the first nine times I heard it, I was sure it was a Target commercial). The Murder City Devils were certainly a rock band. It was a reunion show. They gave us messy, howling punk-rawk that referenced The Stooges and The Pixies...and yet, I didn't really enjoy it all that much. TV On The Radio was like an alt-rock Earth, Wind & Fire. Does that sound like a compliment? It's a compliment. The Boyfriend had this to say (he loves them): "Like a Prince and Steely Dan collaboration produced by Wayne Coyne." Gotta love that. M83 surprised me with the Kate Bush-like banshee vocals over the very-1980s orchestral ambie-rock. I went into it remembering they did orchy-ambie, but not the Bushy-banshee. At this point, we were just worn out, and skipped Of Montreal to go back to the hotel to sleep (yes, at my insistence we went with the soft life, a cottage with a big bed and ankle-deep sheepskin rugs and a mineral-bath whirlpool tub, rather than a tent plopped down in the middle of a dusty gravel-and-grass parking lot elbow to elbow with a gazillion other showgoers all partying all night).

Monday we caught just the tail end of The Heartless Bastards as we waited in line to have our bags searched. Sorry, Boyfriend, I know how much you wanted to see them. Their sound really filled the whole bowl at the main stage. Deerhoof followed: I would have been utterly gaga for this stuff in 1996. As it is, I still really enjoyed the super-twee tiny Asian female vocalist barking and crooning multilingually over experimental, sometimes-prog, sometimes-metal booming. There were even occasional funk-leaning bits, before they were again subsumed by the noise. The Pica Beats, despite the program's description, utterly failed at being Seattle's Decemberists. They had a Barsuk-y thing going on, major key with lots of ooh-ing, kind of indie-twee (but not twee-twee). I couldn't hear the lyrics well enough to decide if they too, like the Decemberists', were written by a word-drunk English major. Horsefeathers was loveably consistent, sounding like they always do, but there was no saw this time. We found a tiny bit of shade and lounged in this unexpected refuge, and the gentle old-style front-porch folk was the perfect accompaniment. Here, I started to lose track of what was going on. I think it was The Elephants that was all bouncy with xylophone, nearly worthy of pogo-ing up and down in the dust, with some sort of Vampire-Weekend-like Paul Simon references. I liked it well enough, but my mom would love it! The School of Seven Bells was up next--shoegazery, gothy electro-n-guitar wail. Kind of Siouxie and the Banshees-ish, but her voice wasn't really strong enough to carry it. Gogol Bordello was aiming for gypsy-punk, but undershot and ended up with cartoon-pirate cheese and Lord Of The Dance synth awfulness and some Klezmer Metallica (that's even worse than it sounds). Blitzen Trapper has gotten remarkably consistent. I'm not sure I love them, but they're really good at what they do, mostly 1970s twang southern-rock stuff that's almost but not quite tongue-in-cheek. With the mustaches and bellies to match. Monotonix was loud, with nods to The Doors and Hendrix, but with crowd-surfing (and standing on a drum held up by the crowd, and other "X-Treme!!!" variants on this theme). Interesting to watch trumped interesting to listen to. I'm glad I saw the Silversun Pickups so I could finally lay to rest that internal debate. It turns out the vocalist is male. That makes the band already about 72% less interesting. No, I don't usually prefer female-led bands, it's just that otherwise, SSP just sounds like middle-years Smashing Pumpkins in a not-very-interesting way. Beach House got lazily compared to the Beach Boys in the Stranger reviews...shit, not even close, guys. Repetitive, slow-moving pop without the deliberate electro that would save something described as "repetitive and slow-moving". Girl Talk was a sometimes-interesting, sometimes-too-popcultury layering of a bunch of rap (not hip-hop, really, just rap) over a bunch of pop music samples and references from the past 40 years: Jackson 5, Men Without Hats (Pop Goes The World!), Red Hot Chili Peppers, MGMT, and an overwhelming bunch of pop tripe I don't recognize and don't wanna. Erykah Badu was so not my thing. I don't understand why she was on this bill. I wasn't the only one--the crowd at the mainstage was as sparse as it was all weekend, and plenty of the people who were there weren't paying attention. The actual old-skool fingers-on-a-record-on-a-turntable scratching was pretty cool. The rest of it was too-current-sounding soul-r&b-lite-black-oriented-pop-radio crap. Finally, Explosions In The Sky did a lot of stuff in 3, pretty and pounding, all instrumental. I wanna put it on a mixtape...or better yet, receive a song or two on a mixtape, so I don't need to buy any.

The end.

Followed by a long, leisurely drive back to Portland, skipping the gorge to drive over the mountains and skirt Mount Rainier. Very pretty, and it was interesting to get up into some real elevation and see thick layers of snow still on the ground, many feet deep. We had taken the gorge route the previous weekend when...oh, I didn't tell this story, did I? The boyfriend asked if I'd go to The Gorge Amphitheater the previous weekend to see The Dead (not The Grateful Dead, just what's left of them). After about seven seconds of trying to figure out how to say this tactfully, I just gave up and said, "culturally, I can't make that leap." Because I can't stand hippies, and I can't imagine hanging out with a crowd that has their own language and their competitive insideriness and their defensive hate for anyone who actually makes a pathetic (but nonetheless somehow upper-class, nouveau riche, and gauche?...maybe it's the deodorant, or maybe just the forty-nine-cent comb I can't live without) five figures a year working full-time for genuine justice and equality, because I make them look lazy and ineffective...and oh yeah, I hate The Grateful Dead and any variant thereof just utterly viscerally. The sound makes me just cringe. To me, death sounds like a reasonable alternative. After a day or two of mulling that over, rather than being (probably justifiably) resentful, The Boyfriend charmingly asked, "Well, do you want do go to Washington with me for the weekend anyway?" We stayed in a room in a B&B that was a converted late-mid-century church, I'm pretty sure our room was in the choir loft. Over the two weekends, we tried just about every breakfast joint in the county, explored the little natural foods store, toured a little homestead history center, and tried out a few wineries. And had some of the best food in, of all places, Yakima, WA. Three meals in Yakima, three absolute home runs.

Wow, that was a load off my chest. Glad I could share that with you, and not have to keep it all inside anymore. More jubilant mexican food and uncontrollable hippie hate to come. Or at least more music on the docket.

To all things not hairy and reclusive

Getting one step closer to being caught up? Shit, it's a long road. It's a good thing I take notes! This post covers all things not Sasquatch (the music festival). The first show on the list was John Vanderslice at Mississippi Studios. I walked into the middle of the Mimicking Birds set. It was whispery folk/non-folk/post-folk minor-key sometimes-arhythmic stuff. I kinda liked it. I could imagine listening to it late at night with a crowd of friends, if I were the sort of person who sat around in a darkened living room late at night with a crowd of friends. It had a bit of the Nick-Drake-Volkswagen-commercial vibe--not that it sounded like that, it just had that feel. Once, as the band got started slowly into a song, someone in the back of the club started clapping far, far off the rhythm, and the lead singer looked out into the audience with an air of fear. There was an oddly Paul Simon bit in there somewhere, and some stuff that sounded like My Morning Jacket but without Jim James. JV was up next. He did some new stuff, including one that was startling in its intensity. I mean, even compared to most of his stuff. And many of his songs have this disturbing, almost dangerous quality to them. One of the things I love about Vanderslice. though, is how quickly his songs become familiar, even though they're odd and complex. I left humming Too Much Time, and bought the new album on my way out. Vanderslice loves his fans, and loves Portland. The stage banter is almost the best part. It's kind of fascinating watching him convince the audience to give him things. This time it was a flashlight, to light the dark part of the stage where his keyboardist was sitting. He tossed it up to someone in the balcony who carefully trained it on the dark corner. He talked, like he does every time he's here, about how much he wants to move to Portland. "I moved to San Francisco to be with a girlfriend. I should have just kept going up I-5." (someone in the audience:) "You can find a Portland girlfriend!" (JV:) "Yeah, I'm sure my wife would love that!" Later on: "Do we have a set list?" (someone in the audience:) "I took it." (JV:) "Oh, okay, can you read me what's next?" Several times, he started a song, then stopped. "I fucked that up...can we start over?" It's like hanging out with the guy. But it's kind of uncomfortable when the audience treats it as such, shouting out between songs faux-personal connections about that one time I talked to you at that show in that one city, do you remember? I don't really want to be associated with those folks, the ones called home by his stories of mental illness and desperation. I just want to revel in the complicated storytelling and the intensity of the guitar, broken up by goofball self-effacement and playful interaction between songs.

Sasquatch came next, sequentially. Three days of three music stages (sometimes four) out in the baking sun of the Eastern Washington high desert. That gets a post all to itself--maybe two.

I've actually lost track of the sequence of all the other non-Sasquatch shows! I will randomly pull notes out of the pile next to me on the couch. And the winner is....Bazillionaire! At Langano Lounge, which is the basement of an Ethiopian restaurant. This is the new-er-ish band of Jesse, who used to be in Point Juncture, WA. Jesse may be one of the nicest people I've ever met. I once gave him someone else's Oreos, because he's just so nice you can't help but do things like that. I was so relieved that the band was really likeable. I'd hate to dislike the music of someone so damn nice. As they launched into their set, I thought, "It's kinda like Nada Surf, but loud, messy, live-sounding, and awesome." Jesse: "That's the one that sounds like Nada Surf." I heard a bunch of other good '90s stuff in Bazillionaire: The Promise Ring, various Apartment Music bands. Great '90s indie echoes seem to be the theme for Langano Lounge (...she pronounces definitively after being there twice). They had a viola player that apparently drove up from Southern Oregon somewhere and rehearsed with them for a night. The bassist is reportedly the new bassist for Swim Swam Swum, which is odd beyond belief. SSS is music for pogo-ing wildly to, bouncy punk-pop joy. The bassist stood statue-like and still, her back to the audience, watching her fingers. In SSS, she will look like she's in slow motion. Maybe she'll run in terror from the stage.

Next drawn out of the hat is the PDX Pop Now! 2009 CD release party! This year, I was prepared for (and resigned to) the uncomfortable setup that is Holocene as an all-ages venue. Nice gesture, poor design. The avid drinkers among us (show of hands? my hand's up...) are kind of ghettoized to what ends up feeling like a little catwalk next to the bar. But the emcee for the night was adorably gorgeous in a tuxedo (hi Seth!). Anyhow, The Taxpayers started out. They had kind of a Jared Mees vibe, with bits of Irish punk, a moment of klezmer, and a good dose of garage rock. And some accordion. Is there such a thing as accordion punk? They apparently told long, rambling stories and jokes, but I couldn't hear any of that. Next up, What's Up? This was all instrumental. I have little patience for all-instrumental stuff. But they managed to hold my interest admirably. Three guys playing their set in the middle of the crowd, with keyboards, bass, and either drums or guitar. It was math-rock-y but fun, not I'm-smarter-than-you mean-spirited. I tried (and mostly failed) to take some cool pictures of the set. Jared Mees and the Grown Children were up next. I found it a bit unfortunate that they were on a bill with The Taxpayers, who sorta stole their shtick. Bouncy twang-craziness that you can't help but love. The boyfriend asked him about the song The Tallest Building In Hell. Is it about a relationship gone painfully and irrevocably sour, or is it about stressful and difficult times ultimately resolved? I was on the side of the lyric, "patience pays off...eventually." I seem to have won that one. Copy was up last. I took a few pictures of the keytar, then crashed, losing all ability to make sense of what was going on. I'm pretty sure I helped with clean up, then...was there Potato Champion? I have a vague memory of The Carts that may or may not have been from that night.

Finally, I went to this show at A Roadside Attraction for one reason and one reason only. I came across info on this band called What Hearts, and there was apparently a band member with the same name as a pretty good friend of mine from high school with whom I had lost contact years ago. What's the chance it could be the same person? Someone highly Nordic from suburban Minneapolis? What Hearts was what could, either uber-charmingly or cliche-dly be called 'old-timey music.' It was whispery, twangy, and ultimately beautifully lacking in novelty. I was entranced. It did end up being that high school friend of mine, and it was both mundane and profound to make such an old connection and have it feel both familiar and unexpected/distant/nostalgic. They were followed by an act led by a female musician with a stellar if a bit decorative and romantic-pop voice, who played some piano and then a bit of...accordion? Wait just a minute. With hair like that, and that nose...it's Ali Ippolito! She continues to be a remarkable musician whose musical tastes I just don't always jibe with. Angry accordion solo (yes!) into sexy-piano-pop-blues like Fiona Apple (no! Go back!).

But wait, there's more! Just not right this second. Sasquatch still to come. Lots and lots of Sasquatch.

Next!

Still getting caught up. I just realized I saw a show I did not list in the attempt at a list in the last post. A benefit for PDX Pop Now! called Make It Pop!. Ryan Sollee of The Builders And The Butchers started, but I got there just for half of the last song. I had a cupcake and a beer from Captured By Porches brewing. I'd like to drink more of their beers. Loch Lomond played next, and they were the only full band of the night. Richie Young's vocal range never fails to astound me. He ranged from birdlike to baritone, with the band occasionally calling up Fleet Foxes and pointing the occasional finger at an Irish folk dirge. Then there was cake. Marty Marquis of Blitzen Trapper followed. I guess he's not the main songwriter for BT, but certainly worthwhile in his own right. He looks like a math genius heading toward his first psychotic break, with this wild, curly red hair and beard that looks all ready to matt up at any provocation. And the glasses to match. Like BT, he calls largely upon the '70s, but instead of BT's prog rock, he goes more of a Neil Young slant, with some fingerpicking and a nod to Gordon Lightfoot. And some good stage banter about Yakima and ghosts. Brandon Summers of The Helio Sequence was next on the bill. He also called upon Neil Young, lots of strummed guitar and harmonica. There were also moments that recalled Paul Simon. I suddenly felt like everyone in Portland is exactly my age. My musical childhood seems to be reflected everywhere around me. James Mercer of The Shins headlined. A tiny venue holding maybe 100 people (okay, the Ace Hotel site says The Cleaners holds 160, but I bet it's less once you set up a space for the band to play), mostly seated cross-legged on the floor, enthralled. He played some familiar stuff, some unrecorded stuff, and a couple of brand new songs. He twanged things up a little to match with the '70s-folk vibe of much of the rest of the show. He said Weird Divide is his mom's favorite song. My mom really likes The Shins, but everything she likes is mid-tempo and major-key, so Weird Divide is out. It was utterly kick-ass.

Next up was The Shins and The Delta Spirit at the Crystal Ballroom. The Delta Spirit was all references, no referrer. All hat, nothing to hang it on. This one sounds kind of like Joe Cocker, then that one sounds all Dylan-wannabe, with some Springsteen bits...oh, a few moments of Tom Waits before a whole bunch more Joe Cocker. "We're playing rock!" Eh. The Shins always put on a great show. They make these pretty songs that are a bit weird, and then live, they make these weird, pretty songs rock. Garage rock from the late '60s. But pretty. And weird. It was interesting to see the full band at the Crystal just a week or less after seeing James Mercer solo from 11 feet away. Again, a few new songs, which bodes well on the new album front. They did what Spoon did when I saw them at the Crystal a couple of months ago: Take their familiar songs and filter them through a kaleidoscope of a zillion fractured and shifting influences and references and tongue-in-cheek stealing from classic bands. The Shins doing Spoon covering Billy Joel borrowing from early '70s garage punk. The Shins doing Devo doing a calypso arena-rock number. The Shins pretending they're the Doobie Brothers but with Andy Summers playing guitar. Sadly, New Slang was just kind of the perfunctory "we have to play this, but let's just get through it" cover of themselves that the most pop single always seems to get from innovative bands like this. I'd love it if interesting bands reconstructed their singles in live shows the way they do other songs. Then, on top of all the references and playing at being other bands, The Shins actually covered a Beach Boys song. It was pretty great. To come full circle for my week, they started the encore with a cover of Neil Young's Helpless. See? Everyone in Portland is my age, and grew up sitting on the speaker in their footie pajamas while their dads played their favorite records over and over again. It was a marvelous show, and I left happy.

Side note: My parents are moving and semi-retiring, and getting rid of most of their stuff. My dad's set aside a bunch of records for me. At first, when he told me there were 22 of them, I was sure I'd veto most of them, but no, it was just a few. I'm getting Simon and Garfunkel, The Doobie Brothers, and (blush...I shouldn't admit this) James Taylor. Earth, Wind & Fire. Neil Young. Crosby, Stills & Nash's first record. Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell (Court & Spark!). Sergio Mendez & Brazil '66. Though I was crushed to find out that the stellar, high-end Technics record player from the early 1980s, this perfect-condition piece of machinery that would be the envy of any DJ, got sold in the estate sale. You win some, you lose some. At least I get the cookie jar.

Has it really been two months?

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.