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:

Boris, Live

...or, the blogger relives his 20s. I don't think I have ever posted a concert review on this blog. That is mostly because I have barely seen a concert since starting this blog. In fact, I believe I have now seen three in the three years of its existence: one was some old college friends of mine, playing a church in New Hampshire; the other two were Damon and Naomi, supporting their previous CD and now this show, last night, opening for Boris. It was not always thus: in my youth, in the late 80s, I saw many concerts - some of my friends and I made a habit of it, frequenting the Channel, the Rat, TT The Bears - following local bands (The Zulus, Bullet LaVolta, Galaxie 500 [as one may surmise from my recent concert experiences], Buffalo Tom, The Blood Oranges, as well as national indie bands. Seeing The Feelies at least once (usually twice) a year; the Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Replacements whenever they came to town, and bands like that. I didn't see many really big acts: I saw U2 and REM in arenas (the woostah centrum - whatever it's called these days), saw Husker Du, Lou Reed, The Waterboys, a few others at middle sized theaters.... Mostly clubs.... But I stopped going in the early 90s - I started listening to jazz all the time; people got married and had kids and stopped hanging around nightclubs; the rock scene got boring - Nirvana? christ, I'd seen 15 bands that sounded like them by the time they came around - why were they the ones getting big? So now - I still go to shows once in a while, but it's either people I personally know or it's those one or two bands I insist on giving money to - Damon and Naomi; Pere Ubu and its many offshoots.

Which brings us around to last nights show. In 2004, coincidentally, David Thomas played Cambridge the very night the Red Sox won game 4 of the world series: however devoted and passionate a Pere Ubu fan I may be, I never pretended to be David Thomas growing up, and god knows I pretended to be Carl Yastrzemski from more or less as soon as I could lift a toy bat. I had some fears of the same thing happening this year - a Rocky win wold have brought on a game 5, with Beckett closing out the series - could I have resisted that for a concert? I certainly hope so.

Damon and Naomi were fine - they were touring with a kind of big band - cello, horns, Kurihara - playing most from their new record, which is okay. It's taking a while to settle in - longer than their previous couple records did, for some reason. But they were fine, more than enough to get me out on the first really cold night of the year, probably even if they were going up against Josh Beckett. But I admit - Boris was the kicker. I've been listening to them almost constantly this year: Pink began separating itself from the bunch of psychedelic hard rock prog I've been listening to over the last year or so (Comets on Fire and bands of that ilk, including Ilk) - and Rainbow, the Kurihara record, has become one of my favorites in the last year or so. So I had high hopes.

I was not disappointed. It's been a while - it was about as good a show as I have ever seen. Overpowering: as loud as I can remember, certainly the loudest band I have ever seen sober (seeing groups like Ministry, the Surfers, a couple death metal bands - Rigor Mortis! - I made heavy use of the bar....) - but what was strange is how well I could hear it. All the drones and feedback Boris uses, the overtones and guitar interplay, I could hear. I can't hear anything today, but that's life. I could hear the band. And I have to say - they hit my sweet spot. Pummeling volume, hard fast songs, epic solos, double, blended guitar parts (at least with Kurihara), a good deal of variety for all that - fast songs, slow dirgy songs, experimental songs, straightforward melodic songs - sometimes all at once.... It was bliss.

I can't resist - the wonders of the internet being what they are: here is a clip from a show in Georgia, just a taste...