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July 25, 26 2009
Saturday
Jason Collette
Songs about highways and Lake Superior.
The Weakerthans
Sorry for no pictures: got hassled by security about the camera. John Sampson looks less skinny than 2003. Married life I guess...
Setlist:
Night Windows
Tournament of Hearts
Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961)
Benediction
Reconstruction Site
Aside
Relative Surplus Value
One Great City
Sounds Familiar
Bigfoot!
Plea From A Cat Named Virtue
The Reasons
Elegy for Elsabet
Left and Leaving
Confessions of a Futon-Revolutionist
Virtue The Cat Explains Her Departure
(Manifest)
encore:
My Favorite Chords
Wellington's Wednesdays
Pamphleteer
Sunday
Ottmar Liebert
and Luna Negra | | |
| At the Wonder Ballroom
June 20, 2009
Ages
Here's a theoretical question: What do you get when your seven person band could easily be trimmed down to the useful parts, which might number three or four? Some band I think was called Ages, lots of straggling harmonies and lots and lots, possibly too much auxiliary percussion. Serious, no one needs more than one tambourine per band, ever.
Cut Off Your Hands
Back in the day when bands like the Killers were burning up the charts, labels were tripping over themselves to find yelpy Brit-pop Franz Ferdinand clones to push on the masses. Thankfully the heyday of skinny man-jeans and fashion hair has seen its full wax. Or so I thought. Enter twitchy New Zealand band Cut Off Your Hands. (no, YOU cut off YOUR hands! no, you!) Frontman Nick Johnston channelled a little Morrissey, surrounded by the Skinny Twins on bass and guitar just long enough to irritate and not enough to infuriate. Interesting PDX note: Cut Off Your Hands was once called The Shaky Hands, but were forced to change to avoid legal action from another band with the same name, hailing from nowhere other than Portland. Excellent. Portland = win.
Viva Voce
I woke up to the sound of stars.
Crashing to the ground like broke guitars.
There are times when husband/wife duo Viva Voce kick so much ass it's just silly. Kevin and Anita Robinson moved to Portland a few years ago, when it was the cool thing to do, and since then have done their best to leave. But their tour van always seems to bring them back to the land of bicycles, beer, and rain. Their newest album Rose City is a sort of homage to this town of ours. It is my impression that these two used to perform their set with just the two of them, but they have recently doubled in size, adding another guitarist and a drummer to fill out their live sound. Multi-tracking in a basement can be hard to duplicate live. Ask any serious but unsigned musician you know. Their set list included tracks from three previous albums, but showcased a majority of songs from the new album. Don't keep it to yourself.
Devotion
Alive With Pleasure
Octavio
Midnight Sun
The Slow Fade
Red Letter Day
Lesson No. 1
Good As Gold
Wrecking Ball
So Many Miles + coda freakout
encore:
Rose City
From the Devil Himself
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| Paganfest at the Hawthorne
May 15, 2009
Swashbuckle
We showed up somewhat late and only caught the tail-end of this act. Which is kind of shameful. Swashbuckle somehow managed to fit different pirate clichés into every song. There were glowing inflatable palm trees and a 300 pound singer in a puffy Jerry Seinfeld shirt. Yo Ho!
Blackguard
The singer for Blackguard was some sort of irritating micromanaging ex-soundman. Things went on at soundcheck a little longer than usual, a little longer than acceptable. That is, until the band started rolling. I was awestruck. Probably the quietest, most balanced sound I'd ever heard from a band engaging in a five-man synchronized-windmill. There was the occasionally squeaky keyboard and the here-and-there crack about Portland being the most beautiful city the Quebecois band had seen all day, but take note, this band is worth seeing.
Moonsorrow
Moonsorrow indeed. Other than the drumming, the guitar parts were un-hooks, the headbanging was herky-jerky, the keyboards were bad. So bad. I sat down and fell asleep.
Eluvitae - no show
Primordial
Black/death metal from "the People's Republic of Ireland". The singer might have said this particular phrase four to five times during the band's set. I would have yelled something witty back, but his facial tattooing intimidated me into silence. Related sidenote: if you don't have tattoos on your face, maybe you just aren't ready for a career playing metal shows. Think about it. Then go get your face and neck tattooed. And I don't mean that permanent makeup business either. Reference: Kerry King.
Korpiklaani
Hooray! We made it through the bands we had very little desire to see to see this band on their sixth album tour/first American tour. It is a beautiful thing to be in a mosh pit whilst an accordion-fiddle duet lulls us into a spin ten men across. This band was as much a visual effect as musical with their bright-eyed grandpa/gnome-ish bass player to the mic stand constructed from deer bones complete with skull and antlers. The set included old favorites like Journeyman, Cottages & Saunas, Hunting Song, Wooden Pints, and newer songs like Vodka and Happy Little Boozer. Beer Beer drove the mostly underage fanpit into a frenzy. At that point I started thinking about a theme that was becoming present in all Korpiklaani tunes. But then I raised my plastic pint and forgot all about it.
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| At the Hawthorne
Tombs
This show was preceded by a trip to a brewery down the street, so we sat during the Tombs set. Which I think was okay, because the music was ho-hum, the sound was ho-hum, even the crowd was mouthing to each other "Ho-hum." Some of the riffs were decent, but the singer ruined them. He got better as the set progressed, but man, vocals are an important element in a band are they not? Even if I don't agree with the content of the lyrics, the tone is vital. Hence my new favorite black metal band: (see below)
Wolves in the Throne Room
With a minimalist stage setup of candelabras (with real candles!) and fog, WITTR brought the fast-picking wild-shrieking to the party with epic progressions and stormy atmospherics. Hailing from Olympia, WA, this band is rumored to live in a collectivist commune that has been living in a cave, or alternately keeps getting shut down by the police. Either way, they played three songs from their seminal LP Two Hunters and one other new one. We dug it.
Pelican
Holy cow, four songs? If they weren't averaging 12 minutes each, I might feel ripped off. Two songs from their early LP Australasia, one new song called Ephemora, and a cover of Earth's (see previous entry) Geometry of Murder filled the entire set list. The brutality of tuning a guitar down to C, playing a Les Paul into a Marshall stack via a TubeScreamer was first seen in the early 90s before the dual rectifiers changed metal into nu-metal forever. Pelican remembers those days. Mmmm.
| | |
| February 27 at Dante's
Sedan
Experimental drums and keyboard duo. Fairly self-explanatory, loud but decent.
James Blackshaw
One man with a 12-string acoustic. Good sound, lots of re-tuning.
Sir Richard Bishop
Another one man acoustic showpiece, Sir Richard was all acoustic bitterness and soundman-baiting. Not that the crowd was spared his barbs, mind you. It seemed he would have been more comfortable at a concert hall recital, ignoring the unlikelihood of this considering how nominal and identical his songs were.
Earth
Cobain fans will remember Dylan Carlson forever as the man who bought Kurt the gun with which he blew his life inside out. Stoner/Doom metal fans know another side; frontman in the ultra slow, lightly distorted, monstrously ponderous weight know as Earth. This man/band is single handedly responsible, with his countless imitators (see Sunn O))) for the revival in popularity of the massive physical bass sound of Sunn Amplifiers.
Sticking mostly to material from the latest album The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull, Earth was realized not only by drums and bass in addition to Carlson's trademark Telecaster, but a cellist as well.
Engine of Ruin
Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow
Hung From the Moon
The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull
Junkyard Priest (bonus track on Bees vinyl)
Rise to Glory
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