Last Tuesday I was thinking of going to see Daniel Johnston but ended up joining some friends to see a band I knew nothing about, Phosphorescent.
They were a suitably bearded Brooklyn-by-way-of-the-South alt-country kind of band. I liked them at first — they reminded me of a better version of onetime DC hipster/country band Canyon and I was totally digging the steel guitar sound. (I never tire of quoting John Peel saying that “if God played an instrument it would be the steel guitar.”)
I found a youtube vid below — dark but you get the idea:
Around mid-set, though, the band started to lose me. They did a bunch of Willie Nelson covers, which is fine and all, I dig Willie. But they were less interesting than the early part of the set.
When the singer (the internet tells me he is named Matthew Houck) came back for an encore — a rarity on the Backstage at the ‘Cat — I’d had enough, and my friends and I left while he was still performing. Solo, he was repetitive and boring. It was like a vastly inferior version of Songs: Ohia. I am not saying I could do better, but I have seen enough weepy singers in my time that I knew it was time to bail.
Still I think these guys have potential; Houck had a nice voice for the style of music the band played. But more country atmosphere, dude, and less solo singer/songwriter stuff!
I’ve been wanting to check out Buildings, a.k.a. BLDGS, for a while, so was pleased to have the chance to check them out at Haydee’s Restaurant in Mt. Pleasant — close enough to home that I could make it on a banged-up knee that has been keeping me away from shows.
Plus at Haydee’s you can sit and drink mediocre margaritas. You don’t get margaritas at the Black Cat.
I first heard about Buildings sometime several months ago, maybe in the spring, and when I listened to them online I was quite impressed. They play good instrumental rock, some of it pretty catchy, and it’s more original than you’d think. Based on their recordings (what I’ve heard of them, anyway) I think they are one of the most interesting bands around DC right now — accessible enough to keep it in the realm of pop music rather than experimental music, but experimental enough to make it exciting.
Anyway never having seen them, I had the impression they were gonna be the opening band at Haydee’s, on a bill with a band called Make a Rising, and was a little disconcerted when the first band started out with chanting. I was all like, this has to be the other band, right? but wasn’t sure for a while. Make a Rising were decent, though. They sounded to me like a cross between Deerhoof and Tortoise (do tortoises have hoofs?). They wore costumes (someone at my table asked, “what’s that Donnie Darko guy playing?”) and sounded pretty good, occasionally incorporating some unusual instruments into the mix.
Haydee’s was a strange venue to see a rock show and it was kind of weird to be sitting at a table a ways back from the band, drinking and eating tortilla chips during a psychedelic rock performance. I think both bands would have been more interesting in a different venue.
By the time Buildings went on it was getting late and I was getting deeper into the margaritas, but they did a good job of living up to my fairly high expectations. They played in front of a goofy video projection that reminded me of watching one of those video-game tv channels, or an episode of Liquid Television. You can see it in this bad cell phone snap:
Hope these guys achieve some success, I’ll try to spread the word and support them when I can. The friends I took to Haydee’s seemed to enjoy the show. I was wondering if they would have merch for sale — their new EP is on sale via iTunes but I never buy anything from iTunes normally. Maybe I’ll have to break down. Anyway go check them out — here is their myspace.
So I think S PRCSS are pretty great. Last time I saw them I compared them to Lungfish. This time they also reminded me a little of Fugazi, what with the two guitarist/singer line-up. It is fun to see bald dudes playing jagged post-hardcore again. I have been waiting forever for a renaissance of this kind of music and I can’t wait to hear their next album.
I feel bad that I missed opener Hume. I have been wanting to see them and my friends told me they were good. I am screwing things up at the Black Cat lately, the shows are going on earlier than I expect. Maybe it’s just the backstage that starts fairly early? I swear I will try to see Hume soon. Because I think they are part of something good.
S PRCSS is sort of a band from nowhere at this point, DC/New York/elsewhere? So it is a stretch to call them a DC band. But I think they — along with Hume — are part of a pretty exciting time in local music. It seems to me that sometime in the early oughts the local music scene got super boring. Partly this has to do with me getting older and out of touch, and also I left the city for a while there and didn’t know what was happening. But. In the late-’90s to turn-of-the-millennium, here were some of the local bands playing around town: Fugazi, The Dismemberment Plan, Ted Leo, Burning Airlines, Flin Flon, The Make Up, Faraquet, Dead Meadow, Quix*o*tic, Crom-Tech/Orthrelm, Frodus. There were even lesser bands like Canyon, Pines of Nowhere, Bluetip, El Guapo, Q and Not U, the Rondelles. It was pretty astonishing. DC has a reputation for its music scene of the ’80s and early ’90s but I think the late ’90s were also fantastic.
By, say, 2005, though, what did we have? Medications. Edie Sedgwick. A few other leftovers from the ’90s. Mary Timony and Bob Mould moved to town. But the young crop of indie bands just never impressed me at all. Lots of boring post-Pitchfork, post-Postal Service, earnest indie bands. It felt like indie music appropriate for LNS-style socialites, not a real scene. Of course this is my own fault as much as anyone’s — nobody was holding me back from doing more with my own modest musical talent.
Luckily, though, it feels like things are picking up, and that other people are not being as lazy as me. There are bands like Hume and Imperial China and BLDNGS and semi-local bands like S PRCSS going strong. There is a thriving experimental scene that is spilling over into interesting rock music. I’ve really been digging the folks at Sockets Records and highly recommend their stuff. There is still a bit of a Dischord-related scene (I still want to hear the new Aquarium songs). Frodus is back together. It’s exciting!
I don’t want to go back to the past, I just want a reason to support local musicians again. These are the folks doing it…
So this is turning into quite the summer for legendary British metal. Two Judas Priest shows and then Motörhead! Motörhead!
I’ve been grumbling for years about how metal bands hardly ever play in town, thanks to JAXX out in Springfield (and also lots of Baltimore clubs). Motörhead at the 930 Club makes sense, though, if partly because Lemmy and crew have a pretty substantial hipster following. I am no expert on the band, but it seems to me like they flit comfortably between a few different musical worlds, touring with metal bands one time, dirty hard rock bands another time, punk bands still another time. Currently they’re touring with the Reverend Horton Heat and Nashville Pussy, both interesting choices. It was a good line-up and a solid show.
First up were Nashville Pussy, a band I’ve been aware of for ages but had never much listened to. They were a lot more metal than I expected and I liked them a lot. The lead guitarist — Ruyter Suys — was super rad and bassist Karen Cuda was tough and hot. I have actually heard more stuff by singer Blaine Cartwright’s earlier band Nine Pound Hammer than I have Nashville Pussy, but I’ll check them out more. I am on a serious metal kick (my new favorite DC band is Rattler) and Nash. P. satisfied that itch more even than Motörhead did.
Up next was the Reverend Horton Heat. Now, the Rev and me go way back. I’ve seen them 2 or 3 times before, though not for many years, and I like them a lot. The Reverend himself is one of the better guitarists I’ve ever seen and I really like his confluence of styles. Every now and then he goes off into a little too much of, say, a lounge-y swing-y direction, but generally he nails the surf/punk/rockabilly thing amazingly well.
This is a good excuse for me to dig through some old photos, because I have some shots of the Reverend Horton Heat doing a record store signing at HMV in Georgetown from like 13 years ago. As if I need to prove my bona fides, here is my friend Mike with the 1996 line-up (same as today’s except for the drummer):
Though I would say I’m a pretty big fan, I haven’t heard any new Rev. H.H. stuff in quite a while and wasn’t entirely sure how the show would be. In fact, would I even like it anymore? My musical tastes have shifted a bit since the Rev.’s heyday of the mid-’90s.
I needn’t have worried, it totally kicked ass. Heath is almost as much of a badass as fellow 50-year-old Nick Cave. In fact it is pretty exciting to see musicians of this generation, those around 50 who grew up on rock and roll and also experienced punk, grow older. There is a lot of fire left in some of these pentagenarians.
Here are a couple of clips of the Reverend:
“The Devil’s Chasing Me” (brief clip)
“Psychobilly Freakout”
So finally after two great performances we got to Motörhead! Rock on, right? Well, yes and no.
First off I don’t know Motörhead incredibly well… I probably have about 20 songs of theirs in my collection but no actual CDs or anything. I didn’t really get into Motörhead until I was older, after my metal fandom had been filtered through layers of grunge, punk, indie, and experimentalism. So I think they are rad, but I don’t feel a special bond with Motörhead the way I do with, say, Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. So I didn’t end up knowing many songs during the show.
But that wouldn’t have mattered. The main problem with Motörhead was the “oh my god it is too fucking loud” problem that I have experienced before on very rare occasions. I love loud music! I find it cathartic. I find beauty in loud music that many folks would run away from in terror.
But I knew from the moment I saw the wall of amplifiers on stage that Motörhead were gonna be maybe too loud. The last band I saw that was so crushingly loud was Dinosaur Jr at the Black Cat and I didn’t really like the Dinosaur show much at all (though I love their music!). Some things are just too brutal to enjoy, and the decibel level for Dinosaur really destroyed all my interest in ever seeing them live again.
Same thing with Motörhead. I stuffed my ears with paper and rocked out as best as I could, but it was just too loud. I know that’s kind of the point. And I dig it to an extent. But I am getting pretty damn old myself and just have to bow out of this kind of thing at some point.
Now — unlike that Dinosaur Jr show — I could still enjoy Motörhead’s performance and definitely had a good time. (I am guessing Dinosaur was significantly louder.) I was amused by Lemmy’s indecipherable commentary throughout — was it his accent or the ringing in my ears that made him impossible to understand? The music rocked and I found out via this last.fm review that the drummer was an emergency replacement.
Here’s a taste of some Motörhead — you don’t actually need earplugs for music on the internet:
So yeah it was an awesome performance, and a legendary performer, but it will not go down in my memory as a favorite show just because I can’t handle the volume levels anymore. Sucks but it’s true. But all power to Lemmy & co… hope I am still rocking and rolling for decades to come.
Here is the most famous Motörhead song as I go rest my ears:
Bit of a downtime for rock shows here… I have made an effort but to little avail. I went to the Black Cat last week to see Zomes but stupidly got there too late. I went to Lamont Park a couple weeks ago to see Hume and Janel and Anthony but the show was cancelled. So instead I have mostly been biding time until finally seeing Motörhead this week. I’ll discuss that shortly.
But while clearing out photos on my phone thought I’d share a picture and a couple comments about some random live music I saw last weekend in New York. First the photo:
One of the things I like about New York is the sheer number of talented people everywhere. I was in a random bar (Otto’s Shrunken Head) on Sunday night and heard live music coming from the back room, and eventually went to check it out. There was a diverse line-up of bands and musicians, of which I saw the last couple. The final band was introduced as “Acid Rays” but I asked the guitarist afterwards to confirm the name, and he said they “used to be” Acid Rays but changed line-up and dropped the singing so it wasn’t a definitive sort of thing. Anyway they were pretty good for a random 1 a.m. band: acoustic guitar through effect pedals, a cellist/violinist who played electric cello and electric violin (and I have never even seen an electric cello before!) and a drummer. Good stuff.
I was thinking of the line from the back of Yo La Tengo‘s Electr-o-pura where, among various absurd notes for each song, they say: “One of My Favorite Instruments-The Electronic Flute.”
Judas Priesttwice in one summer! And my hometown heroes Kix! Ha! It’s always great to have old-school metal to fall back on when indie rock starts boring me to tears.
Going to see Priest again was a pretty random, last-second decision, and I probably would not have gone except that an old friend was kinda interested, and I have always sort of wanted to see Kix. Priest had been on tour with Whitesnake for much of the summer, but I never really gave a damn about Whitesnake. So I was pretty excited that David Coverdale had laryngitis and dropped out of the tour and Kix somehow got tapped to open up at least at the local show.
I’ve already talked recently about Judas Priest — and the show at Merriweather was superior in most ways to the show last month in Milwaukee — so I will talk a bit here about Kix, and ’80s metal in general.
So, yeah, Kix. Wow. What a band! I find that I can’t think about Kix without experiencing the same mixture of pride and shame that colors my discussions of my hometown area — rural western Maryland. On the one hand, I deeply love the band yet on the other hand I cringe with embarrassment at some of their antics and words. Same thing with the rural Marylanders/West Virginians I grew up with! Kix are basically exactly like the people from my hometown, in fact they practically are from my hometown; their wikipedia entry talks about how the singer met the others in Ridgeley, West Virginia; they were somewhat based in Hagerstown. They were really popular in western Maryland when I was growing up in the ’80s.
But let me describe the show. Kix were pretty good! But my god they looked old! Or anyway, sleazy frontman Steve Whiteman looked old! I have tracked down some old videos on youtube of Kix in the ’80s and I am not sure he was ever such a looker… and since some of his lyrics are predominantly about lovin’ the ladies, his skeezy look was sort of a distraction. The jumbotrons didn’t make them look any better. Also, physical appearance is semi-relevant since Kix songs are none too subtle, with songs like “Sex” and the following semi-hit, during which the friend I went with was asking “Blow my what?”
A lot of Kix songs are superior to the standard hair-metal canon, and though articles on the web often compare Kix to Poison, I think they are more similar to harder-edged pop-metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Ratt. On the other hand I believe their biggest hit was a power ballad, “Don’t Close Your Eyes” :
The band sounded great and seemed to be having fun. Whiteman talked about how they were doing some more local reunion shows where they could play a longer set, but it seemed like plenty to me, they must have played for something like an hour and 15 minutes, maybe even an hour and a half.
My favorite two songs were “The Itch” :
and also “Cold Blood” — there is a video of the ending here. “Cold Blood” is a great song, actually, and if there were any justice in the world, Kix would still be getting nice royalty checks from it, or at least it would be a popular Guitar Hero track.
So ok, those are the Kix highlights. But of course there are some low-lights too. I don’t actually care about the physical appearance thing, but there is a vibe to Kix that I have always been uncomfortable with, and I have spent 25 years being annoyed by Kix’s fairly revolting date-rape anthem, “Yeah Yeah Yeah.” (Here’s a clip from another recent Merriweather show if you’re not familiar.) I guess it is all meant to be fun, but honestly this is the kind of stuff that my old rock heroes Cobain and Vedder were railing against. The casual misogyny of party-metal is one of the main strikes against it (along with its general meat-headedness, casual homophobia (“In 1989, [Sebastian] Bach was heavily criticized for wearing a t-shirt on stage that a fan had thrown to him before he could read it, with the slogan “AIDS Kills Fags Dead” emblazoned on it … Although he made light of the incident in his original apology, Bach has since repeatedly apologized for and disavowed the statement” – via wp), conservative politics, bizarre anti-internationalism, idiot fans, etc, etc.) There is a pretty clear line — of correlation, not causality — connecting dumbass lyrics by the likes of Steve Whiteman and the rapes-to-Limp Bizkit of Woodstock ’99.
Sorry to go on a P.C. tirade but I am a P.C. kinda guy. (I have similar issues with misogynist hip-hop lyrics too. Somehow can’t get the humor in violence against women, I guess I’m just a total killjoy.) But the Kix song “Yeah Yeah Yeah” has bugged me for ages, with its “quit throwing up, don’t tell me no, tell me yeah yeah yeah!” Check out the lyrics and decide for yourself, I guess. (And by the way what was the deal with quaaludes? I was too young to ever catch that scene…)
It’s weird, I have no problem with vile lyrics coming from the likes of Cannibal Corpse, and am kinda amused by songs about necrophilia and cannibalism. I also am not against graphic sex in song lyrics, though it doesn’t seem like there are many good examples, aside from some rap songs. So maybe part of the reason I’m uncomfortable with frat-boy style lyrics about sexin’ it up has to do with the particular dudes who are singing. I mean, it’s one thing for Mick Jagger to beg for some action, or David Lee Roth to be hot for teacher. But then there are the Steve Whitemans and Vince Neils of the world, who are in a whole ‘nother category. You can pretty easily believe that a Steve Whiteman would lure a woman back to his trailer for Jack Daniels followed by comatose sex.
And yeah, I said “trailer,” here I am being snobby about my own people. I guess my thoughts about my hometown, and my thoughts about Kix, go like this: out in the boondocks, there are a lot of good people, despite a decent-sized contingent of slobbering racist assholes; there are also a lot of basically good people who are thoughtlessly racist, sexist, homophobic, and politically loony. Just because they are good people doesn’t mean I can’t condemn their racism, sexism, etc.
Ok time for a break from the rant; I really did enjoy Kix overall. So let’s look at some Judas Priest videos. Here is a montage of videos and photos from a youtuber who caught K.K. Downing’s guitar pick! I’m jealous :
Here’s a video of “Metal Gods” :
The highlight was probably “Victim of Changes” (not a super great video):
And for good measure here is “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” :
As a last bit of sociopolitical commentary, somewhat relevant to a Judas Priest show, my friend and I had a conversation at some point during the show about the homosexual subtext of heavy metal fandom. It’s totally there. There were some shirtless dudes near us, who were constantly grabbing each other amidst their headbanging. Other metal dudes, happy and screaming, locked forehead to forehead, eye to eye. I was doing some quick web searching (wonder how many other google scholar searches there are for terms like “gay heavy metal”) and couldn’t find much about the topic, surprisingly. I am sure it has been studied, that dissertations have been written about this. (If not maybe I have a new thesis topic!)
(Coincidentally, the City Paper’s Sexist blog today discusses the top 5 gay metal icons and I disagree about Doug Pinnick, I think he is pretty damn metal…)
The whole Rob Halford being gay thing was a total non-issue to me when I found out about it. I didn’t even think about it the last time I saw them; why would I? Based on the fans — and I’m now a veteran of two Priest shows and counting — it seems to be a non-issue to everyone. I would say the shirtless headbangers seemed at least as open-minded as a typical hardcore punk mosh pit. (Maybe I could do a comparative study! More thesis ideas!) Anyway it’s nice to see. I guess it’s possible that the rabid homophobic metal fans just avoid Priest, but I think more likely this is progress of a sort.
So on the one hand, I can’t stand punctuation in band names, and the main singer of Los Campesinos! was annoying as all hell, and the members of the band all go by the last name of “Campesinos!” Yuck. On the other hand I can’t really hate a band that does decent Pavement covers. So I will let the Campesinos slide. Also, for all their wry cleverness, I myself just wrote a song with the tentative title of “Summer Haze (Winter Version)” so I can’t really criticize them for such bon mots as “2007 The Year Punk Broke (My Heart).”
I didn’t know this band at all, but a friend had an extra ticket, so I was up for checking them out; it helped that I was mildly interested in seeing Girls. (I think it was dangerous for my hearing, though, going to another show just two nights after Mogwai.) Overall I thought they were decent. They reminded me a lot of the Arcade Fire though the Campesinos are a little more rooted in old-fashioned indie rock compared to the Springsteen/Bowie pop stylings of Arcade Fire.
They seemed very current, very well-aligned with their young fans who probably tweet excitedly about them during their shows. (Good lord, the band even blogged about the food at the 930.) This isn’t really my thing — I miss the days when people weren’t checking facebook during concerts — but I can see the appeal.
The photos remind me that the band had a trio of attractive women, including the super-cool looking bassist. Guess that is kinda irrelevant but it was nice to watch folks other than the singer, based on his annoying-ness, as mentioned at the beginning. A good singer, but annoying. Anyway.
Girls were ok. Honestly, the friend I was with wasn’t into them and so we left after a few songs to go drink at a cheaper establishment for 45 minutes. I got the gist of their music and thought they were fine, nothing special. I really like their one song, “Morning Light” which sounds almost exactly like Slowdive; their other songs (from what I’ve heard) are a little more, hmm, Brooklyn-sounding. They reminded me a lot of Love as Laughter — hippie-damaged indie rock. I liked them well enough but am not sure they are going to amount to much, though I think they signed to Matador.
Here’s their only really rocking song, “Morning Light”:
As I get old and curmudgeonly, I fine myself both looking down upon young musicians and bands, and becoming skeptical about old favorites retaining their strengths. I think the right term for this is “jaded.” I am a jaded music fan and rarely expect much even from my favorite bands. Maybe that’s why my reviews tend to be positive — actual live music can transport me out of humdrum world-weariness, or even make me euphoric. Somewhere deep in my mind I know this, and keep showing up to see live music, and that half-hidden recess of my mind is what made me certain to go see Mogwai again for, geez, I think the 5th time. And the last time was just last winter! Because if any band can shake me up a little and get me feeling the music and feeling alive, it is the Scottish Guitar Army.
There’s not a lot to say about Mogwai that I haven’t said before. So I think I’ll repeat myself: I said here:
I’ve seen a lot of swirling distortion bands, noise-rock bands, experimental droning aggressive bands, and I’ve never experienced noise like a Mogwai concert. I don’t know anything about physics, but I swear that when you go to see Mogwai, the sound becomes so insanely loud and powerful that it becomes solid and tangible. It feels like I’ve left those shows with bruises; I imagine that the MI6 has been scoping out Mogwai shows, trying to figure out a military application for this mysterious, primal power.
I’ve also written about Mogwai more academically, spinning a ridiculous, complicated, but reasonably well-argued case for considering extreme pop music to be a form of religious experience.
So yeah, I like Mogwai a lot. They were the first instrumental-only band to really mean much to me, ever since I saw them ten years ago at the Black Cat (HOLY CRAP CHECK THIS OUT OMIGOD I LOVE THE INTERNET) and they blew my mind and eardrums away. I went out the next day to DCCD (RIP) and bought Come on Die Young and Kicking a Dead Pig. But in recent years, like over the course of their past 3 albums or so (though I liked Mr. Beast more than the others), I have sometimes found them a little inessential. For one thing there are so many other bands that sound just like them; also I think some of their newer work gets a little too ambient and effects-heavy, neglecting to really rock (for example the crowd last night was excited about “Hunted by a Freak” but I find that one to be pretty sleepy/dull). But most importantly, I feel like Mogwai perfected their sound right at the beginning of their career, and everything afterward was just a minor variation on the same (gorgeous, stunning) theme.
So during the show Monday night, I spent about half the set thinking about how, despite my love and loyalty, I wasn’t having the Mogwai experience that I wanted. I was reflecting on their role in rock music over the past decade or so, about how they compared to the rest of the post-rock pantheon, about how from time to time you could really hear their avowed Slint influence, to such an extent that they are sort of distant musical cousins to other Slint-followers like Pinback.
Then, just as I was getting mildly disenchanted with the sedated Scots, they kicked it into gear and closed the show with a stellar set of their best material: my personal favorite Mogwai song “Ithaca 27 θ 9″ followed by one of my other all-time faves, “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong,” then “Glasgow Mega-Snake” which is one of their most rockin’est songs and one of the best of their newer albums. It’s the one that makes me think maybe these guys really do listen to death metal, as they claim.
Then came the encore and it was “My Father My King” which I have heard them play only once, many years back. Awesome. “MFMK” is pretty much perfect and I hadn’t even listened to it in a long time — blame it on the mp3 era where I rarely listen to 20-minute epics — so I was super excited to have the ending coda come back to me as they played it. Closed with minutes of squalling drone, as usual, and I stood and enjoyed it. Happy, renewed in my faith in rock and roll (at least for one night), I found myself whistling “My Father My King” while biking home afterwards.
Oh and here’s something else interesting… maybe I am late discovering this, but apparently you can tag flickr photos with a last.fm event and then the last.fm page has the photos. (Wonder if there is something similar for youtube or another video site?) Anyhow this is the flickr link for the Mogwai show. Here’s an example, borrowed from Slowcult:
A few years ago I went to the Black Cat’s Run for Cover event (where a whole bunch of local musicians put together one-night-only cover bands for charity) and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I had wanted to go back ever since. But this past Saturday I was less impressed. It wasn’t bad, but I was tired, annoyed by the Bon Jovi cover band, and left before seeing the last two bands (one a Weezer cover band, the other doing the Bee Gees).
From what I saw, there were two main highlights — the Runaways cover band which was pretty hilarious, as they did “Cherry Bomb” and then, since there were no other Runaways songs to play, a set of some Joan Jett hits preceded by Lita Ford‘s “Kiss Me Deadly.” And I totally LOVE the song “Kiss Me Deadly” so I was jazzed! They also alluded to doing “Close My Eyes Forever” and I think I would have died happy if they’d had an Ozzy-clone come out and do that one, but oh well. “Kiss Me Deadly”! Such a classic! I was also kind of hoping the real Joan Jett would come out and join them at some point, but I liked the faux-Joan Jett too.
The other highlight was a Cure tribute. The Cure seem pretty easy to cover if you can find someone who can approximate Robert Smith’s voice. The dude was good — here’s a clip:
But, sigh, Bon Jovi. I think I would not have minded them much at all, had I not seen a Bon Jovi tribute band just a month ago. That’s it for Bon Jovi tributes for my lifetime, I think. I mean, Bon Jovi were ok, but there are so many better bands in the same genre… the tougher bands like Crüe and Ratt, the heavier bands like GnR, the amazing party-dude/guitar god mashup that was old-school Van Halen. But Bon Jovi? Just a boring party band, but one that takes themselves more seriously than Poison did. If it was up to me I would’ve tried being a Tesla tribute.
I also liked the Guided by Voices tribute though I don’t know GBV very well. Maybe I should delve into it some more. Here’s a clip:
UPDATE 8/6/09: Just stumbled upon a clip from the “Cherrybombz” — very short but I wanted to acknowledge it since I thought they were rad:
A couple days before this show, I got a contrasting pair of emails from friends with extra tickets to 2 concerts the same night: M. Ward and Tool. I had never seen either one, and like both, though I know Tool a lot better and like them more. So my inclination was more towards seeing Tool, but the relative price of tickets and choice of venue led me to choose M. Ward instead (didn’t really feel like hauling my way out to GMU for Tool; besides I have seen enough big-name bands for the summer).
Anyway I made it to the 930 in time to catch some of the opening act, and lo and behold! There on stage was none other than Ian Svenonius! I had no idea he was performing — wouldn’t have guessed he’d open for M. Ward. He was with a new-ish band that I knew little about, called Chain and the Gang. If I had known, of course, I would have gone earlier. I’m definitely a fan. The last time I saw the sassiest boy in America in performance was probably around 4 years ago with Weird War. I thought Weird War were great; I was a little less sold on Chain and the Gang but want to check it out more. Ian told some typical amusing stories and I dug the last song, all about deathbed confessions and tying them into various conspiracy theories.
I can’t find video from the show the other night (or the Friday night show with the same line-up) but here is a youtube rendition of “Deathbed Confession” from a few months back. Not super quality, but you get the sense of it. And here is their myspace.
So for M. Ward, I was a little unsure what to expect. I had only listened to him here and there, a few downloaded songs, internet radio stations, etc. Honestly I wasn’t expecting to like him that much — I’m predisposed to dislike everyone these days that has blog hype, hipster cred, and is a singer-songwriter. I mean, ugh, singer-songwriters. I have also been eternally leery of his going by “M. Ward,” rather than “Matt,” finding it sort of pretentious and a rip-off of M. Doughty. ALSO: Zooey Deschanel?
But it turned out to be a great show. The music wasn’t especially innovative or anything, and I thought that Ward (should I call him “M.”?) didn’t really utilize the band enough, but everything was thoroughly enjoyable. They did covers of “Rave On” (highly rearranged) and “Roll Over Beethoven” (more like the version we all remember); when M. played piano it reminded me of old-fashioned Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock and roll. I have been into that kind of stuff lately so was pleased to hear it. I guess overall the performance seemed to me like a cross between ’00s alt-rock (i.e., Wilco) and Jerry Lee-style ’50s/’60s rock and roll. This is a good combination. There maybe was a little tiny bit of Tom Waits in there as well.
(On the other hand, I was reminded of how dull it can be to watch a rock musician play the piano. I think the reason piano mainly dropped out of rock and roll is that it is not interesting to watch a guy play piano and croon. I mean, compared to playing guitar. It’s more interesting than a laptop, though…)
The crowd was pretty pleased and the reviews were good. It didn’t really change my impression of M. Ward too much, but it was a solid, fun show. (Of course I was in a pretty good mood after unexpectedly seeing Ian S. perform…)
The 930 Club made a special point that night about “no videos, no flash photography” and I can’t find much of anything in the way of videos from the show. So I’ll wrap up with the weird official video for “Rave On”:
