S PRCSS are one of the coolest bands that I know little about. Their mysterious nature — do a web search and see how much you dig up — makes it quite rad to see them play.
I knew nothing about this band until I saw them, sometime last year, at the Lighthouse (itself a fairly off-the-beaten-path venue). Since then I have managed to piece together bits of information about the group. Seems they were a Philly-based band some time ago, but either broke up or became basically inactive, but have gotten back together at times in the more recent past via collaboration with DC’s Justin Moyer and possibly others. I found copies of a couple of their releases via eMusic and liked them, and was happy to see they were playing last weekend at Comet Ping Pong, opening up for Enon.
Based on the Comet show Saturday night, it seems like Moyer is more integrated as part of the band, including lead vocals on one song and a pretty definite musical influence on other new songs. “S PRCSS 2K9″ sounded a little choppier, more DC, more Dischord, and some of it reminded me more of other J. Moyer projects like Antelope… sort of a post-Lungfish sound which fit pretty well with the weird lyrics that S PRCSS already had.
Further cementing S PRCSS as the new Lungfish was the newspaper handed out after the set by the main singer/guitarist — what’s his name, anyway? — full of metaphysical/anarchist/mystical musings. Great stuff. I look forward to hearing new material by this line-up of S PRCSS in the future and catching them live anytime the opportunity arises. You have to keep on your toes to even know about these performances — they aren’t exactly popping up in emails from ticketmaster.
After S PRCSS I and my friends stuck around for about half of Enon’s set. It wasn’t bad but they are not really my thing; I’d seen them once before and been relatively unimpressed. But it was interesting that I saw them exactly a week after seeing the Van Pelt reunion; Toko Yasuda was not part of that reunion, and had lost her voice for the Enon show. Enon have some good songs and the guitarist has some great effects (when he plays guitar) that remind me of Seth from Les Savy Fav, who are apparently pals with Enon. (And S PRCSS are label-mates of LSF… it is all ridiculously incestuous.)
Anyhow I don’t think Enon are as good as Les Savy Fav, and I think they are way over-reliant on synths and keyboards. But when they play stuff that is less dance-y and more rockin’, I find them to be a pretty decent band, just not a very essential one.
I would have stayed for the whole Enon show but I was exhausted. And there was a late-night follow-up show downtown with Edie Sedgwick and others that I just didn’t have the energy to attend. No real loss, I think… S PRCSS was pretty much good enough for the whole weekend.
Over the past few years, I’ve become more accustomed to going to see reunions of bands I cared about in their heyday. It was one thing for me to see, say, a Black Sabbath reunion (though I totally liked Sabbath when I did get to see them), and quite another for me to see bands that actually meant a lot to me, and were around, when I was younger.
It’s weird. I can’t tell whether bands have always gotten back together like this, and I just didn’t realize it because I was young, or whether this is a new-ish phenomenon. It’s reasonable to guess that reunions are happening more often, though, partly because the internet makes it easier for fans to demand it, for bands to get the word out, etc. Seems like nowadays I can’t swing a guitar around in the air without hitting some band from my past surprisingly re-appearing.
On Saturday night it was time for ’90s indie rockers Frodus and The Van Pelt. I was a little stunned to see the listing; I’m still a little stunned to have seen the show. It made me nostalgic and it made me happy. I stood in the Black Cat thinking about the old Black Cat a few doors up 14th Street, where I saw the Van Pelt on their last tour in 1997. It made me think about the late-’90s indie rock/post-hc scene, friends in mediocre emo bands, taping CDs, listening to 7-inches, waking up with giant X’s on my hands because I was too young to drink at rock shows. I was thinking about how the Van Pelt and Frodus superficially sound a lot different, but made a lot of sense as part of the same scene. They still make sense to me as a pair of bands, though I don’t know the extent of their friendship or knowledge of each other.
Anyway, as I wandered down those dusty mental corridors, I totally enjoyed the show. Missed the openers, but as soon as the Van Pelt went on I skedaddled towards the stage to take it in. I can’t remember the last time I saw a show where I knew every song, where I practically knew all the words.
I am not sure which, if any, of the guys playing alongside Chris Leo were originally part of the band. Clearly Toko, the bassist, was not there (I wasn’t really expecting her), and Chris referred to the other guitarist as “Jason” who was not one of the original members. Maybe the drummer was the same, I couldn’t say. But this essentially-new crew sounded great. They sure looked old enough to be original members. Leo looked almost frightening, all skinny and wan, with a wild-man’s hair and stare. He couldn’t hit the high notes (could he ever? I don’t remember), but his trademark spoken-word delivery sounded dead-on and the songs held up a little better than I would’ve expected. I had wondered whether the Van Pelt might sound too dated, too emo-y and too effete, especially compared to Frodus. Also I wondered if I would like hearing those old songs as much as I like listening to Chris Leo’s more recent projects — after all, I saw the VP and the Lapse but have never seen Vague Angels.
I needn’t have worried. The band seemed loose and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Leo gave a couple interesting digressions and commentaries, talking about how the reunion came about, about how the Van Pelt recorded their first demo in DC at WGNS Studios. He had a typically erudite anecdote about Patterson, NJ, and Pierre L’Enfant (he is into this sort of stuff — I’ve read a couple of his books and they are full of thoughts about history and places and such). They played a pretty lengthy set with most of the songs I would’ve wanted to hear. I was surprised, as I listened, to realize how much the Van Pelt influenced me, musically. All the stuff I write — especially when I try to write rock songs or work with a band — is pretty much an attempt to have cascading guitars in a Van Pelt kind of a way. Anyhow, I guess that is my own digression here…
They closed with “The Speeding Train,” which the friend I went with didn’t recognize, but which I knew from the single, and from the Lapse version, and also from my memories of that 1997 show. In ‘97, in front of what seemed like a bigger crowd, the original Van Pelt played that song and someone in the audience — a friend of the band’s? — shouted out for it as “The Puppy’s Chin.” There was a nice symmetry about the whole thing… and did I mention that I am now quite old enough to drink at rock clubs? This came in handy, too, because I have often claimed that I will take “beer over nostalgia any day” and I didn’t mind getting a little drunk for Frodus.
Here are a couple cell phone shots of the Van Pelt:
I don’t know nearly as much about Frodus as I do about the Van Pelt. It’s a little surprising, actually. After all, Frodus are from DC, and I have some of their music, and I even hung out in similar social circles to Shelby Cinca, the singer and guitarist — I think we were probably at some of the same parties, probably spoke to each other before. Also, they are great. I don’t know why I wasn’t more into them, it’s just one of those things that happen.
So I didn’t have nearly as much to contemplate, on a personal level, during the Frodus set, but I totally enjoyed it. I’m not entirely sure whether this incarnation of Frodus is the same as the original one, either, but they sounded awesome. It made me laugh, in a good way, to see kids mosh and pump their fists to this geeky band. I like their style, I like the screaming, and some of the songs totally rock. As I was only moderately familiar with them going in, I was comparing them to other bands I know better like Unwound and These Arms Are Snakes and Drive Like Jehu. I love all that aggressive, snarly guitar stuff (and I noticed that the drummer was wearing an Obits t-shirt).
Apparently Frodus is really back (this is great because I was not too into Shelby Cinca’s other band The Cassettes) and I look forward to hearing more from them. In the meantime here is a video from their performance…
I’d been wanting to see Baltimore’s Double Dagger for a while… love a few of their songs, love that they were calling themselves “graphicdesigncore”, love the song titles (”I Was So Bored I Wanted to Hang Myself on the Dance Floor” is particularly good). And the last time I was at a show at Crooked Beat was to see Human Bell a year or so ago, and it was one of my favorite shows in a long, long time.
But I was a little underwhelmed by Double Dagger. It might have been the sound mix (vocals too low), it might have been the new material which I was unfamiliar with. But mostly it was the fact that I have seen so many similar bands, and I wasn’t blown away by these guys as much as I am by, say, Lightning Bolt. Nonetheless, they were pretty rad and energetic and I think I probably would have loved them more when I wore a younger man’s clothes.
They have a new record on Thrill Jockey and they joked about how they were “post-rock,” even though they had never listened to Tortoise. Ha. Have to admit they are not a typical Thrill Jockey band, but I still hold out a lot of hope for these guys.
Here’s a poster (via thatnolenguy, the designer?) –
I rarely go to big concerts to see big names at huge venues, but I find them kind of stupidly enjoyable. Ozzfest, Journey concerts, Tom Petty concerts, and such can be a blast even though they are not necessarily the main kinds of music I’m into. So when a friend wanted to see Jane’s and NIN I was amenable to the possibility. A couple of the big-name concerts I’ve seen in the past have been Nine Inch Nails and I enjoyed those shows, and I have never seen Jane’s Addiction, so it had potential to be interesting. Also I was much happier to head to Merriweather Post Pavilion than the dreadful Nissan Pavilion, where I watched Radiohead in the cold, driving rain a year ago, and where I’d seen NIN the last couple times.
Of course, no outdoor concert is complete without problems with the weather, and last night there were crazy storms and lightning that led to utter gridlock during the DC rush hour, so we missed the opener (sounded kind of intriguing — a Boots Riley/Tom Morello collaboration) and the beginning of Nine Inch Nails. It was okay, we saw enough. Nine Inch Nails are always kind of fun, but they were not well-served by opening for Jane’s. Opening at an outdoor arena is always a tough gig… people are still getting in, it is still light outside, nobody is paying really close attention. Oh well. I would’ve guessed that NIN were the bigger draw but it seemed like most of the crowd was more excited for JA and few people — at least on the lawn — were paying a lot of attention until NIN finished their set with a bunch of hits:
I like how Nine Inch Nails songs all sound kind of the same, and they all sound sort of like ’80s synthpop songs with more distortion. Nothing in the NIN canon is very far removed from A-Ha; it’s just good pop music with evil-sounding processors. A fun combination… Also fun was the mom-and-son combination I spotted in matching NIN t-shirts: a 12-year-old and his 30-something mama. Fun! What could be more American in the 21st century than a family outing to the Nine Inch Nails show? I approve.
On the physical side, Trent Reznor looked kinda old… I guess that is the danger of these dinosaur tours. Buff, but old. Perry and the rest of Jane’s Addiction looked old too, but looked good. We speculated that the Jane’s dudes, being from L.A., have access to better plastic surgeons and hair-transplanters than midwesterner Trent Reznor does.
Jane’s Addiction put on a more interesting show, too. It’s always more fun to watch a real rock band than a synthesizer-based one, and JA are definitely a rock band. Kind of the definitive rock band of their era, which was the era when I was first really getting into rock music. So I have a past with Jane’s Addiction; they’ve always been on my musical radar screen. I saw Porno for Pyros once at a festival (and I think they are an underrated band) but I have never followed all the personal-life stories about the band members, and their relapses and reunions. I read, though, that this tour was the first time the whole original line-up was back together since the early days, like the first Lollapalooza that my big sister attended.
Jane’s Addiction played pretty much all the right songs, and the audience was bouncing around, rocking out, smoking lots of pot, reminiscing over the past. My friends and I kept on saying things like, “oh yeah, I totally forgot about this song!” I felt that way about “Summertime Rolls” which was the fist encore song, and one of my favorite songs of theirs:
The secret of Jane’s Addiction is that they are not really a guitar band at all, despite being noisy and aggressive. They’re a bass-and-drums rock band that has vocals and guitars as atmospheric effects; Dave Navarro as a guitarist is the least essential member of the band. Perry Farrell provides style and stage presence. But in a way, Jane’s Addiction is not that different from a drum-and-bass act like Lightning Bolt. Even though they launched alternative rock with all its guitary goodness, it’s the bass and drums that make me wish the band had never… STOPPED:
I found out about Denali from some internet source back around the beginning of the millennium. Maybe it was a record label website, maybe it was something about DC/Virginia bands. I don’t really remember. But at some point I downloaded a couple sample songs, “Gunner” and “Relief” and they were heavy in rotation on my old laptop of the era… ah, Winamp days… So innocent, so pure. Anyhow I picked up a CD of theirs years later and also liked it. By which point the band had broken up. So I was interested in seeing them ever since their name popped up on a Black Cat schedule months ago.
It turns out they are well worth seeing. In my mind I had categorized them as something akin to Portishead, only more rocking. That was mostly a stereotype based on those first two songs that I knew by them. Live, they reminded me of other bands, too: the darkness of old 4AD goth bands like Cocteau Twins, the lush post-hardcore sound of bands like Trail of Dead, the sad metal drone of bands like Jesu. These are great influences and I definitely enjoyed the show.
Still for all those other influences, it was interesting to hear them tell the crowd that the first song they ever wrote was “Gunner” — the moody Portishead-ish song I had so long admired. My own experience is that the first songs you write with people end up being the worst… for them it was the opposite. I hope they’re enjoying their reunion and that they still like playing “Gunner” because it is one of those songs that still could be a fluke hit someday.
Can’t find youtube clips from the show, but there are some old ones floating around. Here’s a great version of “Gunner” from a show in Richmond last year:
It is unusual for me to go to more than one concert in a night. Well, I often would like to, but it is generally not possible. But the same friends with whom I went to see PJ Harvey had bought tickets to Dean and Britta for the same night. It seemed possible to go to both, since PJH was at the Warner Theatre, while a mainstage show on Friday night at the Black Cat probably wouldn’t start until like 11. So we hopped in a cab from downtown and made it to the Black Cat while the opener was still finishing up.
I saw Luna once, on their farewell tour three or four years ago, and really enjoyed it, so I have been mildly interested in seeing Dean & Britta for a while — though they tour a lot so it never seemed urgent. Also, I have been mildly infatuated with Britta Phillips ever since seeing that same Luna show… as if I needed more motivation.
As it turned out, the show was great. Dean Wareham seemed a little tired at first, and showed his age a bit when you peered too closely, but the dude could play amazing guitar riffs in his sleep. In fact, I think he may have been completely asleep for the first few songs but he perked up as the set went on. Maybe he was inspired by his gorgeous bassist/singer/wife, or maybe he had to pay attention to the drummer who apparently just joined the band that very day or something.
They played stuff from throughout Dean’s career, added some obligatory covers, and thoroughly rocked the house. It was fun to see something like a “greatest hits” type of show from someone who has never really had any hits. They played some “Dean and Britta” material too, mainly at the beginning of the set, and that was also pretty good though I am not so sure about the ones Britta belts out like “You Turn My Head Around.” (Oh who am I kidding, that woman can do no wrong…)
It was interesting to contrast the show with the John Parish/PJ Harvey set from earlier in the night. At the Warner Theatre, you had relatively successful musicians playing a carefully-choreographed show. They were drinking water, they were well-dressed, they were dignified and professional. Dean and Britta, and the other two guys on stage, were relatively unsuccessful musicians, drinking beer instead of water, looking sloppy at times, but doing what they love. Or really, in the case of Dean, probably the only thing they know how to do. It was cool. I don’t really prefer one mode of musicianship to the other, but it’s hard not to sympathize with the little guys.
I was looking on youtube to see if there were any videos from the show, and found only one. It’s interesting, though. When we saw it, my friends and I wondered what it was — it seemed to be a cover, and it sounded just like the Velvet Underground. But I didn’t think it was — listening to the VU boxed set a million times made me think I knew every Velvet song. Turns out I was wrong, it is a Velvet Underground rarity called “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore” that was unknown until the past couple years. Cool tune, and appropriate for Dean Wareham. Appropriate for me, too, at this point, and probably all the Dean and Britta fans out there. I’m not a young man anymore but it is always inspiring to see old geezers like Dean and Britta rocking out. Check it out:
I have been a pretty big PJ Harvey fan for a long time, but my attention has waned in recent years. I haven’t been super impressed with any of her albums in years; I haven’t followed the type of music news that would cover her material. I am out of the loop, I guess you’d say. But when I saw an ad for her show with John Parish I felt interested and decided I’d like to see her again.
The last time I saw PJ Harvey was a momentous evening: September 10, 2001. Nine or ten hours after the show, planes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and I didn’t really reflect on that show for a while. This time nothing so earthshaking took place in the immediate aftermath, so I am ready to do that contemplation. And my review is basically that she put on a great show but that acting as singer for John Parish is a bit of a waste of her musical talents. Nonetheless it was a very good performance.
I don’t have the new album yet, and had heard mixed things about it, but I know the first PJH/Parish album pretty much by heart and they played most of the good songs off of that one (I would’ve liked to hear “That Was My Veil” but otherwise I was satisfied). The new stuff sounded like a mix of quite straightforward rock songs and a few freaky weird ones like “Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen”:
Overall it was totally enjoyable. It helped that I had good tickets, sitting in the fifth row of the not-sold-out Warner Theatre; it helped that we were allowed to bring drinks to our seats; it helped that Polly herself looked great in her usual weirdly sexy way, dancing around barefoot in a cute black dress.
The band was solid though kind of odd… dressed in nearly-matching hats and suits. John Parish and the other guitarist also wielded identical guitars at one point. For the encore they did a single song that Parish sang lead vocals on but otherwise he was mostly a non-presence. The drummer was ace. They were all consummate professionals, and I rarely have the chance (or even interest) to see that kind of professional musicianship from such a close vantage point. So those things were all interesting.
But mostly the show was about Polly Jean, who is massively charismatic and seemed comfortable even when she was just bopping around waiting to sing. I was thinking that this must be a pretty easy type of tour for her, where she doesn’t have to do anything but sing. She sounded good and was so dynamic it was hard to keep my eyes off of her and pay any attention to the band. And anyway it was worth the price of admission just to hear “Civil War Correspondent.”
In the end, I couldn’t help but wish that, hey, while she was on stage, it would be cool if she grabbed a guitar and played a couple old songs from her fantastic early albums, but I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t. Some of the other people in the crowd seemed disappointed that she didn’t but I was mostly just wistful. It was cool, though — I had another bout of guitar rock to jet off to.
I have gotten steadily more into experimental music over the past decade or so, entering the genre via post-hardcore and Sonic Youth-style experimental rock. I don’t go to see live experimental stuff as often as I’d like, though there is a fairly thriving experimental scene in DC. For one thing, it’s hard to drag along friends to watch people make droning noises for half an hour.
Last Friday, 5/8/09, I went to the Warehouse to check out the DC Listening Lounge’s Sound Scene show called “The Human Body.” It was a good show of audio installations and experiments, with a number of solid performances. I didn’t see all the live music, but managed to be impressed by a couple performers. One was a group going by the name of Black Snake in the Daisy Patch. The promo website for the event described them as “meld[ing] acoustic instruments (guitar, banjo, harmonium, cello) and found sound samples into a beautiful and compelling musical collage.” A guitar-violin-xylophone (??) trio, with some other instruments thrown in, they reminded me and my friends somewhat of The Books. They were pretty great especially considering they apparently composed the whole thing the day of the event.
I also caught a performance by Janel and Anthony which was overdue — they’ve been playing around town for at least a few years and I have been too lazy to see them. It’s too bad I’ve been so negligent, they were great. Cello and guitar but not in a boring folky way, with some distorting effects from time to time. I liked them a lot. Check them out via myspace.
Here’s a cell phone shot of Black Snake in the Daisy Patch:
Sadly I missed the other performances. I’ll do my best to make it out to more events like this in the future…
The Kills and the Horrors both have a lot in common: generically cool band names, hefty internet buzz, unoriginal sounds, the promotion of style over substance. The former have better songs, the latter were marginally better live, but overall it was one of the worst rock shows I’ve seen in ages.
Some friends of mine wanted to see the Kills and I was not opposed. I have followed them, though not closely, for as long as they’ve been around. I liked some of their early material — “Hitched” is a great song — and I like some of their new stuff too — “Black Balloon” is the best song off their last album and they deserve some success with it. But as we watched them play, I and my bunch of aged, over-30 music-fan friends started to roll our eyes and gradually lose interest in the set. I guess using drum-machine tracks is part of their shtick, but playing at a club like the 930 a band really needs to play real instruments. I spent half the set watching the guitar guy and trying to figure out if he was really playing everything or what; trying to figure out if there was a bass track playing or what; wondering if there was gonna be an Ashlee Simpson moment or what. I don’t understand why moderately successful bands think they can play shows without a real band. I can see it when you are just starting out — it might be even pretty cool. But at a certain level of success, where you are on the cover of magazines and such, you have to figure out whether you’re playing rock and roll or singing karaoke. Apparently the Kills picked the karaoke route. Eh. Some other good bands also go down the same route, to some extent (see: Blonde Redhead, and my beloved Raveonettes), but this was the worst offense in this category I can remember. I can only say that there are good financial and logistical reasons not to have a real band, but as a fan, I feel ripped off anytime backing tracks start being piped in.
The moment when we started to file out the door was during the encore, where they butchered “Pale Blue Eyes” and we were like — “why can’t they just play it straight with two guitars, and no dumb drum machine?” It’s about the easiest song in the world, I’m sure they could pull it off fine.
The crowd seemed pretty pleased, though, I guess that is enough to keep this kind of thing happening. Nestor Diaz at DCist seemed to like it. And for what it’s worth here is a video of “Black Balloon”:
Opener the Horrors were not bad. I would describe them as “heroin-rock” — angsty post-punks. They reminded me a lot of Interpol, they reminded another friend of the Chameleons. So yeah, dark post-punk. I’ll check out some of their music sometime. They get a passing grade unlike the disappointing Kills. Luckily it was an early show so there was plenty of time to drink away the agony over at DC9 afterwards.
A friend of mine is friends with the main guy from the Foundry Field Recordings and I obligingly went along to see them last night when they passed through town. FFR are from Missouri and play pretty straightforward indie rock. They were friendly, I talked to the whole band pretty much, since there wasn’t much of a crowd on a rainy Monday night.
The main problem I had with these guys was that I had trouble (continue to have trouble) remembering their name. I keep mixing it up with Pure Prairie League.
Anyway I didn’t know anything going in but left with the whole bio of the band… basically the lead guy, named Billy, put together a new band after the other members from the past got involved in old-people things like families and postgraduate work, so his backing band was the members of another band called Bald Eagle. They were pretty great. I was even a little jealous… I used to write a lot of music in the ’90s-indie vein that FFR played, and I would love to have a band like that backing me up. Sigh. The drummer rocked in particular.
I picked up one of their CDs, not just to support the band, and listened to it at work today. They played a number of the ones on the CD at the show but also introduced material that was not yet released, and the newer stuff impressed me more. The live band made the songs punchier and a little more rockin’ than the CD versions, though both were good. The CD reminded me of the Radiohead/Death Cab era in which it was put together; the live show reminded me more of all the ’90s underground indie that I love.
Anyway… worth checking them out. Here’s their myspace page with more infos; and here’s a cell phone pic from last night:
