The Great American Music Hall was a bit sedate when I showed up for the Yes on A party. The measure to fund teacher salaries with a parcel tax needed a two-thirds vote and it was a few points shy, but moving up since the conservative absentee ballots were counted. “I wish it weren’t this close,” school superintendent Carlos Garcia told me, lamenting the high vote threshold. “It’s too bad. But I still have faith in San Francisco.”
A few minutes later, that faith was rewarded when the new results came in: 69.6% yes with 88.8% of votes counted. The room erupted.
School board member Hydra Mendoza started to loudly whoop it up into the microphone, calling up her colleagues to say a few words and help celebrate. “These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we’re doing,” Garcia said. School board member Mark Sanchez recognized the measure’s chief fundraiser: “Let’s give a big shout out to Warren Hellman.”
Mendoza closed: “Turn on the dance music. Wooooo!”
Great American Music Hall
Yay for A!
Election night parties
Here’s a roundup of the main local election night parties:
Yes on A – Great American Music Hall, O’Farrell and Polk streets
Yes on F, No on G – Grace Tabernacle Church, 1121 Oakdale
Yes on G, No on F – Javalencia Café, 3900 3rd Street
Mark Leno – Campaign HQ, 1344 Fourth Street (at “D” Street)
San Rafael, CA 94901 (he might also stop by Lime, 2247 Market Street, where some DCCC candidates – including Laura Spanjian and David Campos – are having a party)
Carole Migden – Campaign HQ, 121 9th St., near Minna
Joe Nation – Wipeout Bar and Grill, 302 BonAir Center, Greenbrae
Fiona Ma for Assembly – Soluna, 272 McAllister
No on 98/Yes on 99 – 1601 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland
League of Young Voters, Sandoval for Judge, progressive DCCC candidates and some Yes on F and No on Prop. 98 supporters – El Rio, 3158 Mission Street
And then there’s the Bay Guardian’s “Don’t Dodge the Drafts” election night party, 7-9 p.m. at Kilowatt, 3160 16th Street btw Valencia/Guerrero. Bring your voting stub for drink specials.
Burn this
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER More power, I say, to sibling twosome Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger of Fiery Furnaces. FF’s forthcoming 51-track, double-CD/triple-LP retrospective, Remember (Thrill Jockey), has been burning up my ear holes for more than two hours now, charged with the power of fraught familial relations, rock-out thunderbolts, and mysterious blueberry boats. And I confess, part of my wonderment at their artistry stems from the fact I could never be in a band with my own bro. Judging from our childhood knock-out, tooth-and-claw smack downs, we’d be at each other throats within minutes of our first band practice — and triumphantly playing bad vibes with the vanquished’s finger bones. Those are our kind of family values.
I get the impression the Friedbergers’ relationship is just as intense, if less bloodied, talking to a chatty, quirky, and disarmingly frank Matthew on the phone from New York City. "We weren’t friends growing up necessarily," he concedes. "We were friends after I left home, but we have to talk to each other so much now that we aren’t friends in the same way. We have to spend so much time together that it’s … ridiculous." Doubling back on himself, the ever-analytical 35-year-old guitarist-keyboardist-vocalist just as quickly shrugs it off. "But that’s the way it goes."
Still, we all know that family bands traditionally have sold the dream of togetherness: feather-light musical fun with none of the fighting-for-grub-at-the-dinner-table heaviness. Seventies ensembles like the Osmonds cozied up to those warm ‘n’ fuzzy associations in the genre’s TV-pop heyday — at the very moment that the generation gap seemed its widest — while more recent combos such as Danielson Famile somewhat self-consciously play off of them. Not so with Fiery Furnaces. An electrical, emotional current between the magnetic, sexily verbose vocalist Eleanor and musical mastermind Matthew runs like a live wire through their songs, many of which show up on Remember, which splices together reworkings from various shows in 2005 and onward. Overall the collection — set for August release but available on tour — is musically formidable, capturing the aggression of their live performances alongside drummer Robert D’Amico, percussionist Michael Goodman, and bassist Jason Loewenstein, and coming off as a little overwhelming.
"Yeah, it’s long. It’s long. It’s long," Matthew drawls somewhat wearily. "People sometimes resent the idea that they have to sit down and listen to the whole goddamn thing. So we wanted to make it clear: you needn’t do that. Please use it as you wish." Consider it, he says, chuckling, "straight background music. I mean, I could say that it’s meant to be an opera about the band, starring the band." Or — Matthew adds, rearranging his thoughts like a tune — look at the songs as objects that show the group "aging." Or try it this way: "It made sense to have the record be about the songs traveling, so to speak. What kind of journeys the songs went on, I say with a smirk," he says, a playful smirk clearly audible over his cell.
That searching sense of play — and enthusiasm — has kept the pair going as FF, which Matthew readily admits he never thought would last this long. Growing up in Oak Park, Ill., he performed in teenage rock combos before his younger sister summoned up the courage — with encouragement from friends and her broheim — to make music. The Brooklyn twosome decided to record their songs in 2002, he recalls, and "then we thought, well, we’d better try to be good."
"It’s no accident we have the same taste," he explains, though they aren’t the type of sibs who were "giving each other supportive hugs all the time." "That’s because our taste was formed by the same things, given to the extent she heard all the records that I listened to when I was a teenager. She’s younger than me, so she heard them at the same time, whether she wanted to or not, because I played them loudly. Even more than that, we understand each other — the things we refer to when thinking of what’s meant to be good in rock."
For the FF, that means making songs with the scraps of ephemera found in audience members’ pockets, otherwise known as their "Democ-Rock" project, launched in honor of the 2008 election season, which the ever-prolific band will record in the near future, and a funk companion album to last year’s ’70s-rock-esque Widow City (Thrill Jockey). It’s all grist for the mill, agrees Matthew, although Remember will stand as the document he feels the most emotional about. "It’s the story of my life in the last few years," he says, laughing. "It sounds like me trying to work hard and do something nice." *
THE FIERY FURNACES
Thurs/29, 9 p.m., $15
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
WINKING AT REM
REM’s Peter Buck was a proto-indie-rock guru of sorts back in the late ’80s day — thanks to his impeccable taste and his way of shining a light on then-unsung predecessors like the Velvet Underground. So it wrecked my head to hear back in 2001 that he was charged in an air-rage incident with allegedly assaulting flight attendants and smashing up a first-class British Airways cabin, all of which he was later cleared of. Anger, however, has its uses, as his band has found on their new, energized CD, Accelerate (Warner Bros), a recording that tackles the tension between REM and its enraging world, rather than creating an otherworldly realm for the listener à la their early works. "I think it’s kind of hard to live where we live, at the time we live, and not be a little frustrated with the way the world is and the way our country is run," Buck says with a sigh, from his Seattle home. "I have to say, I don’t really trust people who aren’t angry about life in general or particular issues."
REM
May 31, 6 p.m.; June 1, 5 p.m.
$39.50–$89.50
Greek Theatre
UC Berkeley, Berk.
Jello turns 50 with toasts from the Melvins, Triclops! and others
This just in from Alternative Tentacles: honcho Jello Biafra will be celebrating the big five-oh with two nights of shows including the Melvins, Jelvins, Triclops!, Drunk Injuns, and a new (unnamed as of yet) Biafra project.
“Legendary singer of the Dead Kennedys and head honcho of the highly influentual punk label Alternative Tentacles, Jello Biafra, has no plans on fading away soon. The outspoken, controversial Biafra has been active as a spoken word artist for quite some time and also performing as Jello Biafra and The Melvins, or just Jelvins. On his 50th, Alternative Tentacles celebrates with a show showcasing Jello’s new band, reunited skate-punk legends Drunk Injuns, and latest crop of exciting bands such as Akimbo, and Triclops!.
“The newly hatched Biafra band (as yet unnamed) is Ralph Spight (Victims Family, Freak Accident, Hellworms, etc.) on guitar, Billy Gould (Faith No More, Cool Arrow Records, etc.) on bass, and Jon Weiss (Sharkbait, Horsey, Tonnage, etc.) on drums. Coady and Jared of the Melvins are recording the new Big Business album in June, so the Jelvins bassist this round will be Andy Coronado (Wrangler Brutes, White Shit, Skull Kontrol). The emphasis will be on new music, with the occasional nod to the past evil doing. To open the shows, the Melvins reach back to their original ’83 hardcore days with King Buzzo on guitar, original drummer Mike Dillard and Dale Crover manning the bass.”
“BIAFRA FIVE – O”
June 16-17; 8 p.m.; $22 per nigh, $40 both nights
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Weekend warrior
Phil Spector may or may not have been the first to use layers of overdubs to convey the widescreen-aspect ratio of teenage emotion. Nonetheless, he certainly carved a niche. Adolescent euphoria be thy name: Brian Wilson, "Baba O’Riley," Bradford Cox, and now Anthony Gonzalez on his new M83 album, Saturdays=Youth (Mute).
"I have such good memories of my teenage years," Gonzalez confesses over the phone from his native Antibes, France. Saturdays=Youth wraps wasted youth in nostalgia for 1980s pop, and it’s a dangerously fun tonic. "John Hughes was my main influence on this album," Gonzalez said, and the proof’s in the overheated lyrics, the sun-struck portraits, and the quick changes between subgenres, which resemble so many high school cliques. Saturdays=Youth is no less ambient than Brian Eno’s chilliest scores, but instead of Music for Airports, it’s Gonzalez’s "Music for a Molly Ringwald Movie."
When Gonzalez first emerged with his massive, bright synth rainbows on earlier M83 albums like M83 (Mute, 2001) and Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts (Mute, 2003), he came off as a post-shoegaze Enya. The crucial change on Saturdays=Youth is first apparent after the marching chorus opening "Kim and Jessie" drops out, leaving space for Gonzalez’s verse. Instead of coasting on an endless climax-loop, the song makes effective use of a traditional pop structure — choruses, bridge, and masterfully diffused outro — to convey the simple exuberance of two teenage girls sneaking liquor in a patch of woods. Gonzalez downplays revisionist favorites like My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain here in favor of shinier surfaces descending from groups like Simple Minds and Tears for Fears.
M83’s dips into catchy new wave ("Graveyard Girl"), Hot Topic goth ("Skin of the Night") and electro-gospel ("We Own the Sky") are smoothed by the album’s high definition gloss. After only working with sound engineers in the past, Gonzalez opted to collaborate with two different producers on Saturdays=Youth. Ken Thomas’ long résumé makes the album one degree removed from Gonzalez favorites Cocteau Twins, while Ewan Pearson is known for his sleek dance tracks. "The combination of these two producers brings something interesting," Gonzalez muses, and the songs do seem to sway between velvet reverie and intense ear candy.
"My older brother used to lend me his VHS, so I used to watch with my friends," Gonzalez said. "A lot of horror movies and a lot of the teen movies. When I was watching the John Hughes movies, I was 13 or 14. I felt really close to the characters." At its best, Saturdays=Youth slows these generational markings into a ritualized ghost dance. The album is certainly a simpler, less troubled nostalgia piece than something like Donnie Darko (2001). What of the fact that this heavily marketed teenage paradise was borne of American conservatism? Gonzalez doesn’t have the answers, but his transporting music makes you feel silly for asking too many questions.
M83
With Berg Sans Nipple
Wed/21, 9 p.m., $16
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
Cluster luck
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Lünenburg Heath is a vast, moorland-like tract in northwest Germany, between Hamburg, Hanover, and Bremen. Its low-growing vegetation, gnarled shrubs, and dry soil form the scar tissue left by medieval deforestation. SS leader Heinrich Himmler was secretly buried there. And despite its springtime swatches of wildflowers and family-friendly theme parks, it is a landscape whose beauty stems from its air of desolation.
"Don’t get lost on Lünenburg Heath," intones Brian Eno in a nursery rhyme monotone atop a cortège of synth chords. They are the only words sung on Tracks and Traces, a 1997 Rykodisc reissue of a 1976 collaborative recording session between Eno and Harmonia, the veritable ’70s German supergroup composed of Neu! guitarist Michael Rother and kosmiche godfathers Cluster.
I have always pinned Cluster as the dark stars in the krautrock universe, based on the drifting, feverish, synthesizer-rich improvisations of core duo Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. So I can easily imagine their protean music whistling across Lünenburg at dusk, haunting the ears of daytrippers — a strange and seductive admixture of sprightly pop and forlorn ambient improv reflecting the landscape’s more recent transformations and less-than-sunny history.
Having regrouped in 1997 after a decade-long hiatus from working together, Moebius and Roedelius are once again touching down for a rare series of US dates, including a May 23 trancefest at Henry Miller Library in Big Sur and a May 25 show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. And despite Eno’s cryptic warning, it’s hard not to lose one’s way amid the hazy vistas and plaintive melodies of Cluster’s music.
Their expansive discography — which includes a recombinant cast of regular, notable collaborators such as Eno, Can bassist Holgar Czukay, and überproducer Conny Plank — provides a few signposts. Roedelius and Moebius initially teamed up with fellow electronic musician Conrad Schnitzler in 1969 as Kluster, releasing three explosive documents of improvisation that rapaciously incorporated elements of 20th-century classical music, jazz, and rock. Important Records’ recent release, Vulcano: Live in Wuppertal 1971, paints a vivid picture of this early period.
Schnitzler left the group in ’71, taking the hard "k" with him. From then on, Cluster recalibrated its keyboards toward a more subdued and, at times, even pretty and poppy aesthetic. Improvisational jams gave way to shorter songs, and the lurking menace of 1972’s Cluster 2 (Brain/Water) was followed by the double about-face of drum machine confections on Zuckerzeit (Brain/Lilith, 1975) and the pastoral miniatures of Soweisoso (Sky/Captain Trip, 1976).
Still, dark patches are a consistent hallmark of Cluster’s terrain, even when they choose to let the sun shine through. The superficial pleasantness of their two collaborations with Eno released at the time, 1977’s Cluster & Eno (Sky/Water) and 1978’s After the Heat (Gyroscope), belies the affective force — what could be described as a low-simmering melancholy — of certain songs. The slow progression of blue notes that form the woozy melody of "Für Luise," from Cluster & Eno, linger long after they have decayed into the Gershwin-like piano of "Mit Simaen." Cluster & Eno‘s cover photo returns us to a field — though not Lünenburg. A lone microphone stands at attention against a faint mother-of-pearl sky, which ends at the smudge of shadowy foliage at the bottom of the frame. It’s near twilight. Cryptic and evocative, meditative and inexplicably sad, the image provides a visual analog to Cluster’s chimerical output. The visual is also suggestive of Moebius and Roedelius’ openness to the chance encounters and unforeseen possibilities that arise from improvisation, as if to say: if you find yourself lost in a dark wood, just stop and listen. *
CLUSTER
With Wooden Shjips and Arp
Fri/23, 7:30 p.m., $22
Henry Miller Library
Highway 1, Big Sur
(831) 667-2574
Also with Tussle and White Rainbow
Sun/25, 8 p.m., $19–$22
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Crudo
PREVIEW The first time I saw Mike Patton I was 10. It was a sticky July afternoon and here’s this long-haired guy on MTV gesticuutf8g and rapping to distorted guitars. It freaked me out — not the lightning-shooting eyeball embedded in his hand or that flopping fish inciting the ire of PETA activists — but the man himself. He inspired a major uh-oh feeling, and my understanding of the universe was eternally compromised.
But that was 1989. Since those early, badly dressed years with forever-fighting Faith No More, Patton has spearheaded many beloved projects on the noisy melodic fringe, from the haunting Fantômas to his recent pop-wannabe project Peeping Tom. Now with Crudo, he’s teamed up with Dan the Automator, a.k.a. Daniel Nakamura, the Bay Area producer on the forefront of groundbreaking hip-hop, including Gorillaz’s eponymous putf8um-selling debut album (Virgin, 2001) and the Handsome Boy Modeling School with De la Soul’s Prince Paul.
"Crudo" may be Italian for raw, but this isn’t the dynamic duo’s freshest collaboration — in 2001 Patton and Nakumura worked together on Lovage: Songs to Make Love to Your Old Lady By (NicheMusic.com Inc), a fun if challenging listen. Crudo’s MySpace page gives a single one minute, fifty-six second glimpse called "Let’s Go," a poppy tease that makes me dance, but not much else. There’s no official word on a new album release date, but rumor in the blogosphere is 2009.
To bide time, Patton and DTA fans won’t want to miss Crudo’s debut appearance at Great American Music Hall, a practice run for Washington State’s Sasquatch Festival two days later. Fulfill your Crudosity. Personally, I need to see if Patton still creeps me out. I hope so.
CRUDO With San Quinn. Thurs/22, 8 p.m., $21. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com
Rhyme and reason
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER "All rap is, like, ‘I’m rapping like a brain-damaged grandpa.’ All this ‘I’m so rich and ate so much. I’m not running on this beat, even if I have to.’ It’s arrogance — that’s the style these days. Y’know, savvy and wit still show up once in a while in this modern rap, but, uh, style, discipline, such things, are fucking gone."
Best to just jump out of the way of the barreling train o’ thought when the engineer is Adam Drucker, a.k.a. Doseone, a formidable, motor-mouthed MC in his own right — Subtle semiotician, Anticon collective co-padre, and a legendary freestyle battle rapper who went up against the then-raw Eminem at Cincinnati, Ohio’s Scribble Jam all of a decade ago. Add more descriptors to that ‘shrooming list of credentials: teacher, mentor, succorer of aspiring word-slingers.
When I called Drucker last week, he was thwack in the middle of evaluating the freestyle rap class of Oakland kids at Youth Movement Records. Drucker went in a couple months ago to talk about rap. "I didn’t really have an idea if I was gonna be, like, a white man coming in with a lot of unusable knowledge, because if they weren’t even in touch with recording equipment there wasn’t a lot I could tell them except funny stories about rappers they don’t know because they’re too young," he told me. Instead he walked in, and, he says, "I’m like, ‘Uhhh,’ while the guys who run this thing are trying to talk to me, and the whole time I’m looking at the cipher and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, I wanna go rap!’<0x2009>"
All right, then. As Drucker confessed, "freestyling is a zen thing — you can’t really teach it," but he’s quick to add that "it will take these kids from rap writers to vocal personalities." YMR, at the very least, teaches the kids Reason software, how to make beats, and even better, records them. And in addition to his critiques, Drucker handed each student a "pivotal rap record to take home and memorize for the summer."
He was particularly psyched when one of the kids, a promising rapper and vocalist, started singing "5 O’Clock Follies," word for word, from the Freestyle Fellowship LP he gave him: "I was like, ‘Wow, there you go.’ I did one good thing, that’s for sure."
Even as Drucker is effecting change, his main project Subtle has been going through switch-ups of its own: take, for instance, the group’s new album, Exiting Arm (Lex), the latest installment in the mythical adventures of Drucker’s alter ego, Hour Hero Yes, which displays a softer, gentler, dare I say, even cunningly subtle side of Subtle, with Drucker doing more singing than slanging.
"It likes you, this record," he said happily, before quickly qualifying that thought. "Actually this isn’t a pop record. I’m not singing out about making out with three girls in one night on this motherfucker. There’s more doors and windows to a song. Things seem simpler. The tempos are more accepting — you’re not behind all the time."
Even Subtle survivor and onetime Amoeba Music hip-hop buyer Dax Pierson has weighed in positively on the new recording, reported Drucker, saying that it’s the happiest Pierson’s been with a Subtle record since the accident that left him a quadriplegic. Drucker said Pierson took control of "Gonebones," playing autoharp, creating basslines, singing, beatboxing, and programming drums.
Still, with Vanilla Ice back in the news and Mariah Carey at the top of Billboard‘s R&B/hip-hop charts, it’s hard not to follow Drucker’s choo-choo concerning the dubious state of hip-hop — just ask the Oaklander about Nas ("He talked about the streets and being gangsta, and he was on the verge of becoming a rapping man’s rapper, five mics, rap incarnate, and then he had to choose and he became the lesser of the two. He became the guy in the Versace pants."). But his disillusionment hasn’t stopped Drucker from continuing to apply the core hip-hop tenets — contrived or no — that he forged as a young fan to his music.
In case you were wondering, those beliefs include: (1) the thing where "you were always in the dark in a park and you hafta be ready to fucking fight for the meat on the hide — this battle mind," (2) "You can’t do the same thing twice — that’s for old people and studio gangstas," and (3) "Steal, steal, steal. But you do it with fucking respect — you want to be accountable for that shit, and you want to be able to see those people and somehow possibly say, without feeling like a douche-bag, ‘You inspire me. I made music out of your music.’<0x2009>"
Hell, Drucker added merrily, "It’s just a large-form steal. There are no boundaries. Unfortunately it’s a little annoying sometimes, but mostly all’s fair in love and hanging out with me."
SUBTLE
With Facing New York and Clue to Kalo
Wed/7, 9 p.m., $15
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
HITTIN’ TOWN: METAL BON MOTS AND ELFIN FOLK
BLOODHAG
Hell Bent for Letters (Alternative Tentacles), indeed. The combo issues short, sharp metal bons mots to their beloved sci-fi and fantasy writers. Fri/9, 9:30 p.m., $8. Eli’s Mile High Club, 3629 MLK Jr. Way, Oakl. www.oaklandmilehigh.com. Sat/10, call for time, free. Dark Carnival Books, 3086 Claremont, Berk. (510) 595-7637. Sat/10, 9 p.m., $10. Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. www.anniessocialclub.com
POI DOG PONDERING
With a new album in paw, the Hawaii-Chicago transplants puzzle over the folk-rock good times once again. Sat/10, 9 p.m., $21. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com
FERN KNIGHT AND EX REVERIE
No, there is no Fern. Philly combo Fern Knight nurtures Margaret Wienk’s acoustic-electronic musings. Having transitioned from death metal to elfin folk, Ex Reverie’s Gillian Chadwick turns in a gorgeous The Door into Summer, released on Greg Weeks’ Language of Stone imprint. With Mariee Sioux. Sun/11, 9 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
Church lets out with Marty Willson-Piper
By Todd Lavoie
Marty Willson-Piper, “Questions Without Answers” (1989)
What a treat! Singer/songwriter/founding member of Aussie atmosphere-masters The Church, Marty Willson-Piper, is doing a special solo-spotlight show— backed by the alluringly-named Mood Maidens— at the Great American Music Hall on Sunday, May 4th. As far as I remember, the last time he played here in the city was back in the summer of ’06, with The Church, at the same venue. Ah, what a show that was— ever-genteel bandmate Steve Kilbey joked about spearheading an “Elizabethan Rock” movement, and Willson-Piper obliged by bringing delicate, graceful guitar-dexterity to Church slow-burners and ambience-anthems such as “Under The Milky Way”, “Chromium”, and “Metropolis”. No word yet about whether Elizabethan Rock is still on the front burner for the band, but the charming, quick-quipping guitarist/big-hit-with-the-ladies does have a new album out— entitled Nightjar (Heyday Records), it’s a gorgeous collection of warm-textured folk-rock pushed along by some of the most delicious six string jangles since, well, the last Church album, really.
Is an introduction to The Church necessary? Probably not, so how about a reminder, then: ever since releasing their debut Of Skins and Heart (Arista/EMI) back in 1981, the band has released well over a dozen albums and EP’s matching (frequently) melancholy neo-psychedelic atmospherics with mystical subject matter, and Willson-Piper has, along with lead singer Kilbey, been a constant in their two-decades-deep career. Much of their success should be attributed to his ability to float just the right color of aura to their formidable mood-making; it’s tough to imagine the smoldering majesty of Church classics like 1985’s “Myrrh”, 1988’s “Antenna”, or 2003’s “Sealine” without Marty’s sublime textures. Then, of course, there’s the perennial crowd-fave of “Spark”— the taut, sneering Mod stomper from 1988’s Starfish (Arista) gave the band’s usual backing-vocalist a truly inspired turn at the lead mic. Two particularly fascinating recent-additions to the band’s catalogue— 2004’s El Momento Descuidado and 2007’s El Momento Siguiente (both Liberation Music)— both offer exquisite “unplugged” revisits to career-highlights, and here, free of feedback and pedal effects, one can gain a whole new appreciation for his intricate guitar-work. Perhaps they also had an effect on the recording of Nightjar, as this new solo jaunt seems to share a kinship with the lush folk ambience of both albums. Granted, the disc does indeed have its electric moments— it even occasionally rocks out in that slow purposeful grind associated with latter-day Church recordings— but it’s easy to imagine Nightjar as a younger, rougher-around-the-edges sibling to the Momento twins.
Cover me
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Cover albums — critics stuck on music-maker-as-auteur theories, singer-songwriter elitists, and band-as-prime-mover rockists have long believed them the easy way out. Cat Power has succumbed twice, Dirty Projectors once, Scarlett Johansson completely surrendered to the mix of her forthcoming Tom Waits covers long-player — only to be upstaged by the production of TV on the Radio’s David Sitek. Still, despite the presence of so many tuneless, karaoke-jacked wannabes ready to grab their 15 minutes, even the talented are tempted to linger in the shadows of giants, bringing their own ideas and sound to a few of the many great, perhaps forgotten, songs and stories swirling in the ether. Why look down on the cover disc?
San Francisco songsmith Andy Cabic, who plays Great American Music Hall with his band Vetiver on May 6 for the first time since August, dusts his shoulders of such snobbery. "I don’t know why there would be a critical bias against cover records," he opines outside Sacramento at the Hanger studio where he’s three days into the next Vetiver album of original numbers. "Maybe a critic should try to do a covers record and see how good it comes out before they say there’s something wrong with it."
Cabic’s not ashamed to point out that "throwback is all over" Vetiver’s new collection of offbeat covers, Thing of the Past (Gnomonsong). The retro album art depicting a pretty girl studying old vinyl was shot at Cabic’s Inner Richmond flat, highlighting just a fraction of his impressive stash of records — and the music was made by the band a group of old friends from North Carolina that Cabic assembled to tour Vetiver’s To Find Me Gone (Dicristina Stair, 2006).
Wasn’t it Bob Dylan and the Beatles who triggered so many critics to privilege songwriters over interpreters? "I was just having a conversation with someone about what caused it," Cabic says. "I think you’d have to attribute it to Bob Dylan. The Beatles’ first two records had covers. I still love those records that were put together by the whole machinery of an A&R person, a singer, and songs by the great writers of that moment. But I chose songs that weren’t of the moment — songs that were timeless or not easily heard today, songs I thought we could do well." Well is an understatement: Thing is a lovely, tenderly rendered amalgam of the band’s distinctive sound, Cabic’s hushed voice, unusual covers — which run the gamut from Biff Rose’s "To Baby" to David Brock and Hawkwind’s "Hurry on Sundown" to San Jose mystery songwriter Dia Joyce’s "Sleep a Million Years" — and guest turns by underground folk luminaries like Michael Hurley and Vashti Bunyan. "The interesting aspect of doing covers is that there’s a mixture of restraint and freedom in doing them," Cabic muses.
Another recent notable cover project is Shelby Lynne’s sensuous dust-up with Dusty Springfield’s catalog, Just a Little Lovin’ (Lost Highway). Lynne, who plays the Fillmore on May 1, has caught her share of acclaim for this spare collection — sans the plush arrangements of Springfield’s versions and teeming with Lynne’s tremulous, haunted soul. So why covers, apart from the fact that Lynne’s chum Barry Manilow suggested it? "I think people want to hear good stuff," she says from her Houston tour stop, with sharpshooter directness and the twangs of a tempestuous girlhood spent in Alabama. "Not a lot of good out there. I’m talking about if you wanna listen to classic music, you always reach back."
What Lynne loved about Springfield was "the song selection — and she was a great honest singer. The production I love — it was Jerry Wexler and the Memphis sound," though she quickly adds, "I was trying to stay away from that. That’s why I left it bare."
The woman who played Johnny Cash’s mother in Walk the Line isn’t a vocalist to be trifled with. A survivor to the core (her father shot her mother and then killed himself when she and sister Allison Moorer were teenagers), she may have been, in her words, "too young to understand the heaviness" of duetting with George Jones on the same mic when barely 19 with producer Billy Sherrill behind the board, but she does know "it doesn’t hurt to have a Grammy," as Lynne says of her 2001 Best New Artist award.
And she knows she doesn’t want to collaborate with her sister — yet. "We have two very different kinds of things — I tell her maybe when she’s an old lady," Lynne drawls firmly. So listen closely to her turn on Springfield because next, Lynne says, "I’m gonna be writing songs. I’m not going to be doing covers again for a long time — if ever. This is it. I think you should be allowed one cover record per career." *
SHELBY LYNNE Thurs/1, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.ticketmaster.com
VETIVER Tues/6, 9 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com
PETER BJORN AND JOHN’S PETER MORÉN BREAKS FROM THE PACK
The Last Tycoon, the title of the new solo full-length by Peter Morén, one leg of Peter Bjorn and John, is only that — not a way of life, despite the omnipresent whistle of the group’s "Young Folks" last year. Morén swears that he’s no mogul — he just wants to gently mock the solo project conceit while referencing the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. "I thought it would be funny to have a grandiose, pretentious title for a homey album," he tells me from Montreal. Tycoon, which Morén describes as "low-key and folky," came about when he brought a song, "Le Petit Guerre," to the rest of his longtime band. "The other guys wanted to take it in a more German kraut-rock direction, but obviously with the French refrain I thought it should be more melancholy, chanson-like, dreamy, like it is on the record now. That’s what started the project." And the rest of the band approved. "I needed another outlet," says Morén, "because I’ve been playing with the boys since I was 15. So it’s nice when you have to make all the decisions yourself, even though it can be a little bit scary."
PETER MORÉN With Tobias Frobert and Big Search. Thurs/1, 7 p.m., $15. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com
Unlock your Sons and Daughters
Raw, skin-glistening sensuality and brooding, lip-curled menace — ah, what a combination at the club. There’s something to be said for straddling the edge of a knife like that, simultaneously titilutf8g and unsettling those witnessing the spectacle onstage. When my partner and I first caught the fearsomely hot ‘n’ bothered Scottish quartet Sons and Daughters at a music-shop appearance in their hometown of Glasgow back in 2005, we were spellbound, rendered immobile in a mighty glue of arousal and trepidation. It felt wonderful.
Despite the bright lights and merchandise displays, the foursome had cloaked the room in lurid, late-night basement ambience: nothing but broken bottles and dark-corner encounters to be regretted the morning after. Force-of-nature vocalist Adele Bethel brandished the mic cord like a whip, lashing away at the floor like a bedroom punisher as her bandmates stoked rockabilly wildfires behind her. The powder keg at their core, shrapnel-blues guitarist Scott Paterson, provided the perfect sparring partner for Bethel’s tales of scary love and lusty violence, his soulful baritone bellow and spiked riffs further elevating the drama. Then there were the rhythms of drummer David Gow and bassist and occasional mandolinist Ailidh Lennon — alternating between deathly lurches and full-blown Sun Records shuffles on speed, their purely primal, low-end grind hit squarely between the gut and the groin. We were transfixed. And so the love affair — sordidness and all — began.
To locate the first strokes of desire, one must consult Sons and Daughters’ 2003 debut, Love the Cup (Domino), for answers. A seven-song collection of murderous urges and dirty romances, the mandolin-blazing mini-album threw fevered glances in the direction of X, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and as the song title "Johnny Cash" would suggest, the Man in Black himself. Offering both sweltering come-ons and skin-burrowing creep-outs, the highlight arrived with the ominous chug of "La Lune," in which Bethel offered some small comfort for listeners’ inevitable sneaking feelings: "The fear’s making sense."
The courtship blossomed with 2005’s The Repulsion Box (Domino), a continuation of the Glaswegians’ frenzied rockabilly trawls through id territory. But my head officially tumbled over my heels with the arrival of the recently released This Gift (Domino). Produced by former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, this third outing is an immense leap forward, heaping compellingly glamorous levels of reverb-heavy drama to the band’s more tightly focused explorations of the dark side of the pleasure principle. "Living’s so dangerous / Try to conduct yourself," Bethel counsels on the twisted soul rave-up "Darling." But somehow I have to wonder whether Sons and Daughters follow their own advice. Meanwhile, I seem to have fallen a bit deeper.
SONS AND DAUGHTERS
With Bodies of Water
Fri/2, 9 p.m., $15
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Les Savy life lessons
› duncan@sfbg.com
When I call Tim Harrington, he’s in a meeting. It’s 6 p.m. in New York, and for some reason, I guess because he’s Les Savy Fav’s vocalist, I assume this is some kind of band meeting or rehearsal. When I call back in an hour, he’s still in the meeting.
"Do you want me to call back tomorrow?" I ask.
"That’s OK," he says. "I have just declared my professional day over." His professional day, it turns out, ends in a meeting room at VH1 headquarters in Manhattan, not in a practice space in LSF’s native Williamsburg. In addition to doing graphic design at VH1, he’s pushing for "interactive TV-type things," like e-cards you can design online and "schedule times you want them to be on TV so you can tell your friends, ‘Tune in and see that I’m breaking up with you.’"
The job isn’t what I’d expect from a manically animated frontperson, but Harrington, who attended the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design where the band formed in 1995, could give a fuck about giving people what they expect. After three long-players and an EP of dissonant, angular, twin-guitar rock with pop sensibilities and cutting, insightful lyrics — culminating in 2001’s Go Forth on bassist Syd Butler’s French Kiss label — the group took six years to release a new album, last year’s Let’s Stay Friends. The declaration of an official hiatus in 2005 led fans to believe it might be the end.
Instead they opted for restructuring: "It was really hard to explain without sort of tearing the whole thing apart and putting it back together again."
Gone are the incessant van tours; in their place are what he calls "guerilla touring": fly out, play a few select shows, and return to Brooklyn and "real life," which, for Harrington includes a wife and a son, Benji, who’s not yet two. "It’s the best way to tour," he says, "but totally unprofessional."
The outfit’s "unprofessional" attitude, coupled with Harrington’s interactive ideas, led to an online video contest for the Let’s Stay Friends track "The Equestrian," a fetishistic pony-play barnburner: "How many times did you think you could canter past my house / Before I called you to my stable for a little mouth-to-mouth?" In between shots of My Little Pony make-out sessions, the winning video — chosen by YouTube viewers — showcased a pink-haired eight-year-old named Bunny rolling around on the ground and dry-humping a stuffed horse like a prepubescent version of "Like a Virgin"–era Madonna. Was it weird having a little kid lip-synching such an overtly sexual song?
"I love that kind of complicated double energy — the tension of two things competing with each other," Harrington says. "In our live performance that happens a lot." Live, the singer runs around the stage, bearded, bald on top, a little chunky, and manically energetic — often shirtless or changing costumes during a song, perhaps into a sequined cape, while the band plays calmly around him, seemingly oblivious, all the while cranking out fierce squalls of noisy rock that are clearly the force driving the madman in their midst. "I think that people who don’t like us, don’t like us because they’re like, ‘I like one side of it or the other, but I can’t understand how they both can be happening simultaneously.’"
Harrington is not at all the picture of your typical floppy-haired waif of an indie impresario, embarrassed to be on stage and kicking the mic stand. He’s open and enthusiastic on the phone, sounding slightly out of breath, like he just remembered "one more thing" to say. He uses the word "passionate" a lot, and it’s clear that feeling is the key element in his art.
Without taking away from the rest of the group, it’s the cognitive dissonance Harrington creates with his stage presence and lyrics that make Les Savy Fav so powerful. Let’s Stay Friends opens with a track about an only partially fictional band called the Pots and Pans, "who made this noise that people couldn’t stand." Despite their audience’s protests, the unit sticks it out, realizing on some level that they know what’s good for the listeners.
Harrington doesn’t particularly care what you expect, yet he’s not simply adopting a world-weary pose. Instead he’s exhorting you to want more out of music — and out of existence. Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in the album’s final track, "The Lowest Bidder": "We’ve been bought and we’ve been sold / They try but they can’t keep hold / We burn, but we don’t turn to coal / We’re hills all filled with gas and gold / Take the trigger from the lowest bidder / Take the bargain back again." Don’t settle for less.
Listening to Let’s Stay Friends reminds me that there’s more to life than the quotidian world of work meetings, parking tickets, and paying the rent. "Music is the food of love, but reality is waiting for the bus" is a Subhumans lyric I can never seem to forget. For Harrington, reality is passion and waiting for the bus. "An area of interest for me lyrically," he explains, "is to be able to address whatever the harshest and most negative elements are in life and society and defy that, not with a pie-eyed optimism, but with a really cold-hearted optimism.
Don’t expect the world to change. Change yourself. Change your perception of it."
LES SAVY FAV
With the Dodos
Sun/27, 8 p.m., $18
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com
Sonic Reducer Overage: Her Space Holiday, KUSF, Raconteurs, Pre, Basia Bulat, Night Marchers, Man Man, and so much more
Man Man, oh, man.
Man, there’s too much to do – you can blame it on Coachella for luring so many interesting acts westward.
MAN MAN
Beards, stuffed animals, and the sound of Philadelphia – this is what Man Man shows are made of. Man Man’s new album, Rabbit Habits (Anti-), has also been touched by facial hair. Count on much instrument passing, a palpable sense of humor, and fever dreams revolving round cheesetofu sandwiches. With Yeasayer. Wed/23, 9 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750.
RACONTEURS
A pretty fun rockin’ time was had by all at the supergroup’s last show at the Warfield. Consolers of the Lonely sound like the combo are up to their mad, sad old tricks. With Birds of Avalon. Wed/23, 8 p.m., sold out. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. (415) 474-0365.
HER SPACE HOLIDAY
San Mateo rising! Suburban savant Marc Bianchi is back from holiday with a new album to come on Mush Records – and his first children’s book, The Telescope, which was released in Japan. With Lymbyc System and Head Like a Kite. Thurs/24, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.
Here, my Dearie: Jacqui Naylor knows Blossom Dearie
By Johnny Ray Huston
SFBG When was the first time you saw Blossom live on stage? What impressions or favorite memories do you have from her performances?
Jacqui Naylor I first saw Blossom with my vocal teacher, Faith Winthrop, in 1997 in San Francisco at the Great American Music Hall. I fell in love with her unmistakably sweet voice, quirky delivery and unmatched style.
Blossom’s voice was small and large at the same time and she used her nice range to tell the story of a song with sincerity, rather than over singing it, sometimes with a little sweet vibrato at the top and sometimes with an almost speaking quality in her middle and lower register. I appreciated that she made the most of every lyric, especially with such a diverse repertoire, everything from lovingly sung ballads to wit-filled swing tunes and songs that she wrote. I was also struck by the fact that she was selling her CDs herself and taking the time to sign them for people. I have a few that I cherish from that evening. She is the only artist from whom I’ve felt compelled to get a signature.
SFBG Did you know Blossom?
JN I saw Blossom on a number of occasions in New York and met her through my distributor, John Nustvold, from Ryko/Warner. He is also a big fan of her work and was hopeful to get her music out to more people. We dreamed that maybe there were even some unreleased tracks that we could help bring to market.
I should say here that Blossom not only inspired me musically but also in her business savvy, since she was one of the first artists to own her own label, Daffodil Records. It was great to meet her and tell her how much she had affected me, inspiring my own Ruby Star Records and my determination to find a sound that was uniquely mine. It is because of her that I stopped worrying about whether I sounded like a traditional jazz singer and instead focused on telling the stories of the songs I chose to sing in a ways that felt true to me. Because of her, I also began to imagine bringing humor to my music and shows by reinterpreting the idea of modern cabaret songs, and by writing songs that might inspire people. Many of the songs Blossom chose to sing touted words of spring, birds, love, flight, and yes, blossoms. And even when she sang the most cruel and humorous cabaret song, she did so with a sense of compassion, humility and good fun. Famous for refusing to sing unless her audience was quiet, Blossom did so politely and without malice. A true talent with a lot of grace and charm.
Blossom Dearie sings “Surrey With the Fringe on Top”
After the jump: Schoolhouse Rock, grape-peeling appeal, great live clips, “Blossom’s Blues” and Dearie’s musicianship,
Tift Merritt takes on ‘Another Country’
By Nathan Baker
Tift Merritt is giving something away. It seems delicate but could be strong as steel, a gift from a solitary place but one that she openly shares. It is Another Country (Fantasy). When Lost Highway Records broke things off with the Grammy-nominated songwriter in 2006 she retired to a room in Paris to put down this portrait of a spirit that is at once resilient and vulnerable. “Sometimes you fall up these stairs,” Merritt sings on “Tender Branch,” bruised but not beaten.
If there is a bit of the expatriate in this record it is not the decadent self-destruction of Papa Hemingway but the anxiety and awe of a stranger navigating a mysterious place. In “Love is Another Country” her sentiment is simple and perfect: “I wanna go with you.”
Produced by George Drakoulias, whose clients include the Black Crowes and the Jayhawks, Another Country both reflects and refracts country music. “Tell Me Something True” and “My Heart is Free” illustrate what all the Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams comparisons are for, but mostly Merritt’s is an Americana of the mind – the vernal pleasures Saint-Sulpice, a pastoral stroll along the Seine, the silver needle of a Parisian clothier pushing through a linen summer dress.
TIFT MERRITT
With Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek
April 14, 8 p.m., $16
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Bob Mould and punk that ages gracefully
By Todd Lavoie
“Growing old, it’s hard to be the angry young man/ Turn away. Turn and walk away” – so observes the discernibly less-vexed Bob Mould on his recently released District Line (Anti-), and the line is as good as any in summing up the mood shift we’ve seen in the guitar-wielding singer-songwriter in recent years.
With his latest, Mould still continues to stare down a demon or two, but he appears rather content to do so. Dare I say it? Oh, why not – there are moments on the disc in which he even could be described as sounding downright upbeat. Bully for him, I say, and double-bully for crafting such an engagingly diverse collection of songs. See the new Mould for yourselves Wednesday, March 26 – that’s when he and his band take to the Great American Music Hall stage, folks. Me, I’m already agog over the possibilities of the set-list, considering the breadth of his quarter-century-plus career.
Since the guy brought up the subject and all, it’s worth a little pondering. Ah, the angry young man thing: we music obsessives tend to really tighten our focus on this supposed issue, don’t we? Holding our heroes to high standards is one thing, but denying them the same inevitability that we all will eventually meet – growing older – has always struck me as absurd. Worse yet, we often insist on freezing them in time, keeping them bottled and bathed in piss ‘n’ vinegar and then carping away if they fail to deliver the same blister and bluster of their early to mid-20s.
Poking Silver Jews: Why’s Yoni Wolf on jogging for self-esteem and on nudging David Berman
Why?’s “Dumb Hummer.”
Yoni Wolf of Why? is a card – and full of great tales of adventures here and away. Here’s more from his interview; for the first part, see this week’s Sonic Reducer. Why? also performs tonight at Great American Music Hall.
SFBG: How did you get into jogging? And where do you jog?
Yoni Wolf: I jog in the hills behind Piedmont Avenue usually.
SFBG: What about Mountain View Cemetery?
YW: Everyone seems to know about that shit. I’m not telling anyone exactly where I’m jogging because I look like a fucking idiot. Actually my ex-girlfriend told me an incredible story. This is the girl that a lot of these songs are about and shit.
Why?’s “Rubber Traits.”
Keeping it raw
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Who took the sex outta my rock ‘n’ roll? You gotta wonder, watching the Virgins — looking all of 12, collectively, and working the style and charisma of boys whose mothers still dress them — who played a Noise Pop show March 1 at Mezzanine. Sure, the New York City combo can write a good song — far better than those by the old-enough-to-know-better Gutter Twins, who were messing with almost two-decades-old, decayed grunge tropes across town at Bimbo’s 365 Club that same night. But they weren’t kidding when it came to picking a name: far be it from the Virgins to be mentally undressed. They looked like they were safely tucked into fresh, clean underwear — no holes bitten through by groupies — much like those other hotties in prep clothing, Vampire Weekend.
Where to find lusty, lascivious pop? Even Mariah Carey is giving brain cells top billing with her upcoming album, E=MC2 (Island). When it comes to the once-squeaky-clean Jacksons, "Don’t go there" Michael tops "Yeah, that’s sexy, sexy, sexy" Janet with his 25-year-old classic Thriller (Sony) — despite the former’s hopes in picking up where Control (A&M, 1986) left off by focusing on the dance floor with her likable, pillow-talking Discipline (Island). Sex? There are no bejeweled nipples in sight — and as for Jacko, the gloves are off and Neverland Ranch has been foreclosed. And the Vampires and Virgins definitely aren’t providing any.
Perhaps it’s time to turn to more wholesome pleasures like, say, jogging. Yoni Wolf of Why? — a self-proclaimed member of the Bronson Pinchot Fan Club, Anticon stalwart, and stealth heart-rate-raiser — will turn you around. "I can tell you right now, if you don’t know the power of endorphins, it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing," raves Wolf, 28, on the line from his Oakland abode. "I’ve never been a jock because I’m not coordinated. But to jog, you just have to move your legs around. You don’t need to catch a ball or hold a ball and get knocked down. I don’t even remember why I started doing this — probably ’cause I got a little gut and I gotta knock this off. Yeah, eat a midnight snack … "
Yep, it’s funny how passion plays out. Why?’s new disc, Alopecia (Anticon), returns to the lost love pined over on Why?’s last album, the breaking-through-after-breaking-up Elephant Eyelash (Anticon, 2005), and settles happily into its own sense of resignation — or as Wolf puts it, "hopeful frustration" — about that girlfriend and about life. Honestly, Wolf bedazzles with bared-belly, gutsy rhymes about jerking off in museums, "blowing kisses to disinterested bitches," a childhood fear of that ShowBiz Pizza bear, "eating pussy for new fans," "sucking dick for drink tickets at my cousin’s bar mitzvah," and "using Purell till my hands bleed and swell" — and that’s just in one track ("Good Friday").
Working with Why? cohorts — brother Josiah and Doug McDiarmid — as well as Fog’s Andrew Broder, Mark Erickson, Thee More Shallows’ D. Kessler, and ex-Beulah-ite Eli Crews, Wolf has stripped off the stray mustaches he’s been hiding behind to fully expose his pungent, punchy, stream-of-consciousness rhymes. Highly specific, yes; weirdly sexy, uh-huh — right down to the CD title, named for the mysterious disorder in which hair follicles halt production.
"You don’t suffer from alopecia?" I venture.
"What are you trying to say, I’m hairy?" jokes Wolf. "I’m a monkey? I actually suffered from it for a minute — on my penis."
Nah, nah, nah, the vocalist actually had a coin-size patch of affected skin for two years: "I have a theory why mine started happening — the hand of god came down and touched me on this one spot — no, I stepped on a bottle in a river and I got some sort of infection." It lingered throughout the period that Why? wrote, recorded, and mixed the new full-length, like an uninvited sweetheart. "It was looming and ominous and weird. At first I thought it was a fucking STD," Wolf says.
Slug of Atmosphere ended up setting him straight at a show in Baton Rouge, La., Wolf continues, and in the end, the bald patch "symbolized that period of my life for me, the creation of this record. For me, it was this little patch of honest skin: honest flesh with no covering or pretenses of an attempt to cover itself up, a little patch of baby skin that was really soft. That’s what I was thinking, a return to the raw." Oh, and it’s a tad sexy: "It’s a pretty word," Wolf adds. "It sounds like a flower." *
WHY?
With Dose One, Cryptacize, and DJ Odd Nosdam and DJ Jel
Thurs/6, 9 p.m., $13
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
DOING DAMAGE
MINMAE
The Portland indie-psych outfit love them some land of the dead — and some Robotech. Thurs/6, 9 p.m., $6. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. www.thehotelutahsaloon.com
WILDILDLIFE
SF’s Crucial Blast ambassadors resurrect classic rock, post-punk, and sludge for giggles. With Old Time Relijun and Tea Elles. Thurs/6, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
HEAVENLY STATES
Libya rocks — thanks to the Bay’s Heavenly States, who invest a whole lotta soul into their forthcoming Delayer (Rebel Group). With Citay. Fri/7, 9 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
XNOBBQX AND TOMES
The atonal Aussie Siltbreezers eschew bone meat, instead cutting to the ‘core with militant vegan deconstructo-noise. Opening as Tomes, Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson delve into the dark, dank folk flip of Thuja. With Curse of the Birthmark. Sat/8, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF.
Toot-toot, Noise Pop: Port O’Brien, Delta Spirit, Okay, and friends whoop it up
Okay! All photos by Brandon Joseph Baker.
Photographer Brandon Joseph Baker checked out the Feb. 29 Okay performance at Bimbo’s 365 Club and the same night’s Blacks opening set at Great American Music Hall, and the March 1 Port O’Brien and Delta Spirit co-headlining show at Cafe du Nord.
Elastic band
After struggling to settle into a listening routine with Dig That Treasure (Asthmatic Kitty), the sprightly debut from Bay Area trio Cryptacize, I decided to take the recording for a walk. Buoyed by the sudden spring weather, I floated down Harrison to the candy-striped fuzz of "Heaven Is Human," and before long, found certain street noises complementarily weaving their way into the track. "Bells are ringing / Gates are singing," Nedelle Torrisi coos on "Cosmic Sing-A-Long," before bandmate Chris Cohen joins to harmonize on the gentle rallying cry, "Every note is an unfinished song."
Cryptacize’s numbers are arranged as twisty medleys, their frequent stops and starts redolent of the impressionistic fragrance of melody. Torrisi and Cohen previously explored similarly horizontal song structures together in the Curtains, but the addition of percussionist Michael Carreira — who plays drums as if he were painting — and proper duets lend Cryptacize a markedly easygoing, domestic air. Sharp melodic inversions and time changes are softened by Torrisi’s and Cohen’s disarmingly sweet voices and a general balancing of tunefulness with cacophony.
As with Cohen’s earlier band Deerhoof, Cryptacize strives for the development of a private musical language rather than the typical filtering of influences. "We never really jam," Cohen e-mails from his Oakland home, "but some songs are sections designated as free tempo so we [just have to] follow each other’s movements out of the corners of our eyes. There are also parts where we improvise on a specific theme or riff, but these moments are built into a song." This kind of programmed free association is especially evident on more mosaic pieces like "Heaven Is Human," but instead of resulting in free-jazz confusion or Deerhoof density, Cryptacize’s wide-eyed stitch often seems like the score to an imaginary musical.
Part of this stems from the album’s isoutf8g production, in which the multiplicity of the compositional elements plays against a sparing sound. The overdubs are few and far between, and the silences many. "Hearing parts separately was important to us for this album. We wanted the listener to have lots of empty space," writes Cohen. Even on thicker-sounding productions like "We’ll Never Dream Again," the two guitar tracks are panned to either side, emphasizing the song’s moving parts on headphones.
One can be forgiven for picturing a stage while listening to these wide expanses. It’s there in the plaintive opening of "The Shape Above," the pitched mood swings on "How Did the Actor Laugh?," contemplative confessionals like "Water Witching Wishes," and the outstretched verses of "Stop Watch." When I ask Cohen about it, he fills me in on his and Torrisi’s youthful exposure to musical theater and sings the praises of Leonard Bernstein. "Mike actually isn’t a big fan of show tunes, although we did turn him on to our favorite, West Side Story, when we were on tour in October," Cohen e-mails, before explaining the theatrical roots of the disc’s inviting title: his father, an aspiring collegiate composer, cowrote a musical review of the same name. He lent the title to Cryptacize "cautiously," Cohen continues, "warning us that his cowriters might sue us!"
Legal proceedings notwithstanding, Cryptacize has all the qualifications to reinvent the rock opera. In the meantime, the band is readying Dig That Treasure‘s prismatic pop for the road, angling for bewitchment. "Since we don’t exactly bombard the audience with volume," writes Cohen, "Nedelle has developed a set of hand movements to hypnotize them."
CRYPTACIZE
With Why? and Dose One
March 6, 9 p.m., $13
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
Noise Pop: Fuck yeah
Most articles and reviews about Holy Fuck begin with some comment about whether the band’s music did or did not make the writer exclaim, "Holy fuck!" So insert your own exclamatory joke about the group’s name here, and let’s move past the moniker and go on to the music.
Holy Fuck straddle the rock and electronic divide: they mash together techno beats, dirty lo-fi electronics, and loud kinetic-rock rhythms. It’s a perfect of-the-moment sound — the type that indie rock kids love to dance to, balanced with enough chaotic experimentalism to appeal to noise rock and electronic fans. We live in weird times, and this band gets the times.
Perversely, as bad as the war and the economy are, kids are having a great deal of innocent fun these days. You can catch a sweaty, spazzy groove to the not-so-faux-naïf, party-starting sounds of Video Hippos. Or you can bang your head to Holy Fuck’s embodiment of that dance-party spirit.
The songs on their latest record, LP (XL), drive forward kraut rock–style, but the dirty layers of electronic noise on top of their propulsive rhythms have a purer rock vibe: they’re raw, primitive, and energetic. On my MP3 player, "Choppers," the last track on LP, fits snugly up against my next loaded disc, a Can anthology. The sound of Holy Fuck’s recorded output lies somewhere between Trans Am and Suicide, although they don’t stake out the confrontationally icy ground of the latter nor cloak themselves in the distancing self-awareness of the former. Instead, onstage a few weeks ago at the Great American Music Hall, Holy Fuck bopped around unselfconsciously, with quick-change mixes, effects-pedal tweaks, and keyboard jams. It’s a friendly, accessible show, performed by a band dedicated to making electronic music without laptops or sequencers. In fact, not only will you not find a laptop on Holy Fuck’s stage, but you’ll also discover instruments that come with a junkyard aesthetic: film modulators, and a Casio mouth organ.
The group has emerged from a Toronto scene with a vast and supportive music community, one that embraces many genres and in which most performers have more than one musical project going. Although Holy Fuck don’t want to be perceived, as the group’s Brian Borcherdt puts it over the phone, as "hippie lovefest" musicians, their writing process has been somewhat loose, improvisatory, and collaborative. The band has also included a rotating cast of Toronto musicians, which has led some to dub the ensemble an "evil supergroup," Borcherdt says. Still, regardless of what they play and whom they play with, Holy Fuck remain an exciting live band — though I’m still not going to use the easy exclamatory.
HOLY FUCK
With A Place to Bury Strangers, White Denim, and Veil Veil Varnish
Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
Noise Pop: Tossers
I want to live the Scott Reitherman life: from his harmony-soaked, listener-baiting songwriting to his skittering, synth-driven zeal, the Seattle multi-instrumentalist seems to be leading the pack in Throw Me the Statue through perfect days at the beach year-round.
Since Reitherman’s college days in upstate New York, he’s been hammering out a surplus of catchy, experimental pop recordings like a regular Robert Pollard. The fruit of his toils finally found its proper release when Reitherman issued TMTS’s debut, Moonbeams, on his Baskerville Hill imprint last summer. Since then TMTS has become an overnight buzz sensation in the blog community, a feat that caught the ears of several larger record labels before Reitherman decided to partner with Secretly Canadian for last fall’s rerelease of Moonbeams. Abounding with pinging beats and foamy electronics, "Yucatan Gold" could be Reitherman’s love poem to Stephin Merritt, while "Lolita" glows with chiming allure and sun-rich resonance. A full band will accompany Reitherman for this tour, so expect an engaging, magnified performance. (Chris Sabbath)
THROW ME THE STATUE
With Stellastarr*, Birdmonster, and the Hundred Days
Feb. 28, 8 p.m., $18
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750