Friday Music Notes

Been a while since I've pulled out this trick... the Friday Random Ten! But that alone is excuse enough.

1. Of Montreal - Gronlandic Edit
2. Kings of Leon - Genius
3. Beatles - Polythene Pam
4. Mars Volta - A. Part I
5. Johnny Cash - Long Black Veil
6. Ramones - Cretin Hop
7. Dinosaur Jr. - Cats in a Bowl
8. Replacements - Mr. Whirly
9. Merle Haggard - Mama Tried
10. fIREHOSE - Too Long

Meanwhile, on the broader music front - I did indeed attend the second concert in three months, seeing 6 Organs of Admittance, along with Thalia Zadek and Mick Turner. An enjoyable evening. Zadek was good - I've seen her a few times through the years, with Live Skull back in the day, with Come - this time, she had a piano player and violinist along, which gave her act a decided Nick Cave flavor - not a bad thing... Mick Turner played an improvised set, playing along with a slide show of paintings and landscape movies shot from the windows of buses and off the decks of boats: playing little guitar figures over loops and such... he's good at it, though it seemed to me to fall between the audio-visual poles... the projections were blank and repetitive, there, it seemed, to give the musicians something to play against - except the music felt like it was there to support the visuals... both sound and vision seemed to be pointing to the other, with neither quite clicking.... Though it was well done....

And Six organs of Admittance: Ben Chasny played a handful of songs alone, acoustic, then brought Elisa Ambrogio out to abuse an electric guitar. She can make a dreadful noise, no doubt - I don't know if she can actually play a lick on the guitar, but she knows how to get a racket out of it. Chasny stuck to singing and playing fairly straight, leaving the noise to her... in some ways, they're a bit less interesting than they are on record - Ambrogio's brand of guitar wanking is a bit flatter and less interesting than what gets put on his records, and the songs definitely miss the arrangements - the acoustic raga sounds, the percussion, with the occasional electric wigout... But I must also say - I like bands that reinvent themselves, and Chasny's performances seem to reinvent his material constantly... playing 1000 Birds, say, as an almost straight garage rocker.... it's good: they were quite enjoyable.

Anyway - here's Chasny droning out - we didn't get much of this: he left the noise to Ambrogio...



And the two of them, doing 1000 Birds (in a completely different style to how they did it in Boston) - you can't see much, but it sounds good: