So Many Konzerten

In the week before last, I went to see:

Thursday night: CSS, Tilly And The Wall, The Holloways
Friday night: Yuksek, Monochrome, Iskra
Saturday night: The Hold Steady
Sunday night: Deerhoof, The Blow, The Noisy Pig

Will I now provide reviews of all these bands? Of course I will. I'm particularly looking forward to panning Monochrome.

Okay, so let's go chronologically:

CSS was playing at Maria. Going to see CSS was a no-brainer, despite the fact that I had to catch a 5:45 bus to the airport the next morning to go to Switzerland (the most beautiful place on earth, but screw that -- let's talk about bands you already know about!!!).

Venue - Maria
To get to Maria, I had to take my first ride on the S-Bahn, which is Berlin's above-ground subway. Not to be confused with the U-Bahn, Berlin's below-ground subway, which also goes above ground a lot. To get down to the club, you have to go through a weird gate that looks like it should be keeping people out of a sketchy warehouse or something. Whereas Magnet and Knaack are both divided into distinct spaces, Maria is one big continuous space. And the stage there is probably at least twice the size. Magnet = Echo, Knaack = just the floor portion of the Troubadour, Maria = The El Rey?, and Festsaal (where I saw Deerhoof) = the crappy gym where I used to attend Boy Scout meetings.

The Holloways
Listening to the Holloways, the natural reaction, at least for me, was to start asking yourself, "Do these guys actually sound too much like the Arctic Monkeys, or do they just have the same accent?" I think the answer is that they don't actually sound too much like the Arctic Monkeys, but they do sound sort of like a bunch of other Brittish bands, sort of including the Arctic Monkeys. I'm not going to pretend to be qualified to decide which ones among this Brittish bands are actually being original, so instead, I'll just say that if no other bands sounded like these guys, I'd probably be claiming to have discovered the best band ever or something. But since other bands do sound like them, they're not really that big of a deal. But definintely check out the track "Generator," which is the song that The Grates would have written if they were a bunch of Brittish dudes writing songs for the bus ride to summer camp. And check out the track "Dance Floor" to decide if you think there's any hope of you wading through the whole album (a thing I still haven't actually done yet, but plan to do).

Tilly and the Wall
I'll get right to the point. Instead of a drummer, they have a tap-dancer who dances on something that makes it sound sort of like there are drums. In fact, at one point early in the concert, I was like, "Wait, where is the drummer?" Then I figured it out. I'd say maybe it's worth seeing them live if you have the chance, especially since they'll probably be opening for someone cool or the tickets will be pretty cheap. The one missing ingredient in their formula? Good songs. Until they get some of these, they'll be a bit of a side-show, I think. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, though. And the songs they have now are fine. None of them stuck out as being particularly memorable, though. They're from Nebraska, so they have sort of a "neo-farmhouse-porch" vibe. There are moments when it feels a little like a ho-down or a church group sing along. Like the moment when you notice that the guitarist's guitar is sort of a beat up accoustic and that his shirt has seen better days. Some members of the band have lots of tatoos.

CSS
I'm not sure whether to be charmed or bored by the fact that I remembered most of Lovefoxxx's banter pretty much verbatim from the previous time I saw them at the Echo ("This is our rap song...", "This is our R&B song", etc.). I guess I'm pretty sure it's more charmed than bored. One of the things I really like about CSS is that they're slightly unprofessional. Like, Lovefoxxx bounces around to the point that she drops stuff and knocks over microphone stands. Or she'll try to do a weird somersault that doesn't quite work. And in the middle of Ladytron's set, the dude in the band sometimes hucks a beer bottle into the crowd. They don't teach that kind of charm in band school. In a similar way, there are probably critiques one could make about CSS's music, but it doesn't matter because it just makes me happy to listen to it. For people who are out of the CSS loop, I guess a good song to listen to is "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above," right? Or "Off the Hook" or something. I don't know. I like all of it. Maybe "Art Bitch" is not a good one to start with, but once you work your way into it, it's a very charming song and a crowd favorite. When I played CSS at work one time, that was the song that finally turned heads and made people ask me what the hell we were listening to.

So, the concert wrapped up, I hopped on the S-Bahn, then got stranded at Alexanderplatz, as the U2 line was out of service at that point. (A huge bummer about Berlin is that the subways close a little after 12 on weeknights.) So, I walked back to the hotel. 19 hours later, I'd been to Switzerland and was at Magnet for my second installment of "Aargh Club" which I guess is what they call it when there's a dj-like headliner? I don't really know how the konzert/party naming scheme works yet. In general, when you go to a venue, it's either a konzert or a party, and it will be listed as such in 030 magazine. (This is a free print magazine. I haven't actually been able to find the concert listings on their site).

Iskra
One way to describe Iskra is that Andrea Zollo (of Pretty Girls Make Graves) placed a clone of herself in a cryo-freeze chamber when she was like 18, and waited until early 2006 to thaw it out and start feeding it Weight Watcher's meals. After a year or so of training, diet and exercise, the lovely (but still edgy-looking) young Zollo clone is finally ready to release a demo that sounds sort of like what you'd imagine a 2007 Pretty Girls Make Graves demo might sound like. Unfortunately, the band that Zollo surrounded her young protege with didn't practice enough. So, when you go to www.myspace.com/iskra3, don't expect it to be that great. It's not. But they sounded way better live than they do on MySpace. And Flicke, the Andrea Zollo clone was particularly good, I thought. Sadly, they're from Hamburg, so we may never hear from her/them again, and we will be left to assume that she was killed in one of those stand-offs where some sort of law enforcer has to kill the clone and isn't sure which one is the real Zollo. If I am there, I will tell him: "The skinny one." That way he'll mistakenly shoot the real Andrea Zollo, thereby paying her back for letting "Elan Vital" and the PGMG in general be such a disappointment. I like PGMG and "Elan Vital" fine, but I was hoping I'd end up liking them way more. Here's a picture of clone Zollo.

Monochrome
There's no way for me to do my hatred of these guys justice. I mean, I've seen plenty of bad bands and usually just let it pass because I don't really have a problem with bands being bad. At least they're having a good time, and maybe one day they'll be good. For some reason, Monochrome pushed my buttons, though, and seems worthy of pure hatred.

Perhaps another picture is worth a thousand mean words. That picture pretty much sums up everything that's wrong with this band. The points it leaves out are covered here. First off, only a band as full of itself as Monchrome would post carefully-posed pictures of themselves at this resolution. What a bunch of dicks! Oh, and guess what they chose to do in Photoshop? Desaturate. Wait, but the name of the band is "Monochrome." Oh, now I get it! Five bucks says that for at least a few minutes, they were planning to just make the images gray-scale.

After these digital offenses, there's the deliberate fashion statements. Clearly, they sat down and were like, "Okay, how should our band dress?" Then they brainstormed for ideas and went with all of the hackiest bad ones. And I should point out that the band was dressed exactly like the second photograph at the concert. If they were actually stylish, they would have worn different clothes in the same style. Not the exact same outfits.

But frankly, I find it hard to believe that a group of people can all be as lame as this band is. Instead, I have to believe that at least 95% of the lameness is originating from the lead singer dude. Evidence: 1) He dances around over-emotively and has no sense of what's going on with the rest of the band. 2) He sings loudly, but really badly, which is what un-self-aware jerks do. (Whereas the girl sings quietly, but well. Really the band should be all about her.) 3) He just generally seems like an asshole. Like if Santino from Project Runway started a band, but wasn't aweseome in any of the ways that Santino is awesome.

Here is a little sketch I wrote in my head while listening to them:
Dude from Monochrome: Hey, Girl from Monochrome, look at this necktie I found! You absolutely have to wear this necktie.
Girl from Monochrome: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I guess I should get like a button-down blouse or something then, huh?
Dude from Monochrome: What?!? No! You just drape it over yourself. Like this!
Girl from Monochrome: Oh, okay? Like this?
Dude from Monochrome: No!!! This is a rock tie! So you have to wear it like a rock tie!
Girl from Monochrome: So, like, put the thick side on the left?
Dude from Monochrome: Ugh. I can't even deal. Here.
Girl from Monochrome: Oh, so the tip should be a cm lower. I see. I think I'm starting to understand your aesthetic.
Dude from Monochrome: Hey, check out the band logo I made. It's the word MONOCHROME saved as a 4252 pixel wide jpeg.
Girl from Monochrome: Couldn't we just send people the font you used? Or maybe we don't even have to. I mean, that's basically just Arial Black in all caps.
Dude from Monochrome: You so don't get my aesthetic. Can't you see that the M's are pointy!?!

Musically, that one dude really pretty much ruins everything. On most of the songs, he does a lot of the singing and the girl sort of just backs him up. Go to their myspace page and listen to the song "Gegenstuck." For like 30 seconds you're like, "Hmm... this isn't so bad." And then the dude starts singing and just completely ruins the song. On the song "Who Me," the female vocal is even more prominent. And that song is fine, I'd say. At the very least, it's not super annoying in the way that any songs with the dude singing are super annoying. But when he does sing for the little back-up parts he has in that song, he's sort of off-key and sounds like crap. Listen for the part where he sings "We're better off alone" by himself. Bad.

Yuksek
I don't know DJ stuff at all, so this is all new territory. But this guy was the reason I decided to go to Magnet in the first place. And I'd say he totally delivered. The mixing was danceable, but not overly simple and boring the way so much house musik is. I liked it a lot. The next time I have to pretend I know a lot obout DJ stuff, I'm going to talk about Yuksek. I mean, it's probably not something I'd listen to in my car, but when you're at a club or you're throwing a dance party, this is probably good stuff to have on.

The Hold Steady
I almost missed this concert because they started so early. I'd read that they were staring at 10, which I assumed meant that an opening band would start at like 10:30, and The Hold Steady would start at like 11:30 or something. Instead, there was no opening band and they started at 9:45. Also, I was probably the youngest person there by as much as 8 years. I.e., everyone else looked like they were at least 35. And it was pretty easy to size up the crowd because there weren't really a lot of people there in the first place. I guess The Hold Steady has only just recently released "Boys And Girls In America" over here, and they haven't released any of their previous albums yet. So, maybe that's why nobody knows about them? Or, maybe Germans don't like music that's about Americana. But somehow that seems really unlikely.

The performance itself was really great. Craig Finn makes a lot of weird gestures and says words that you can't hear when he's not singing. And at the end, they pulled a bunch of people up on stage and were like, "You're the Hold Steady. We're all the Hold Steady." It made you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The feeling lasted all the way until they didn't have my size in the shirt that I wanted. One thing about their live performance is that I found the backup vocals to be a little off. They have this pretty awesome keyboard dude, Franz Nicolay, who looks sort of like "La Bamba" from the Max Weinberg 7. He was good in general, but his backup vocals were a little jarring. A little too much vibrato or something. Anyway, if you're not already into The Hold Steady, you'd have to be sort of a jerk not to be sucked in by songs like Chips Ahoy! or Chillout Tents. Since the concert wrapped up so early, I made may way up to the karaoke section of Knaack and sang Editors - Bullets. Afterwards, a German dude tried to ask me who the artist was in German. People like Editors, it seems.

Venue - Festsaal
Whereas a lot of the other venues I've been to have been sort of elaborate with multiple spaces, Festsaal is a lot simpler. It's basically one space, with a courtyard in the front. There's a very minimal stage inside, that stayed pretty well lit through all of the performances. (Though at one point, Greg Saunier, the Deerhoof drummer, put out one red stage light, pointing up along the back of the wall.) Around the stage, there's a balcony. And there are a few chairs and couches around. When I first arrived, I was pretty sure I saw Hold Steady lead singer, Craig Finn. But I'm not 100% sure. It could have just been a dude that looks like him. I definitely didn't see anyone who looked like La Bamba.

The Noisy Pig
Man. I really don't know where Deerhoof found this guy. He basically just stood on a box with a bike helmet decorated with papier mache to look like a pig head and made weird noises for 3 minute spurts. The quote on his myspace page is "i am a riot grrrl but i like cock rock!" He wore some sort of crazy clown pajamas that looked like they were supposed to be overalls or something. Jesus, Deerhoof. Jesus.

The Blow
We got gyped a little bit, as only the singing half of The Blow was there, Khaela Maricich. So, all the beats and instrumentation were pre-recorded. I think sometimes it's sort of more interesting to see a band out of its element, though, even if it means the music won't be quite as real or as good. For example, it was really interesting to see The Unicorns/Islands side project, "The Corn Gang," even though the music was pretty terrible. And then it was really gratifying to see the formula they had started finally come together with Islands' track "Where There's a Will There's a Whalebone."

I haven't been to an actual "The Blow" concert before (though I will Monday), but I'm guessing that this concert probably had a little more storytelling than a normal concert. The whole set was mapped out as a story from Khaela Maricich's life. Pretty interesting. And the atmosphere was extremely intimate. Parentheses is still the best "The Blow" song by a pretty large margin, but I also really enjoyed "True Affection." I liked the rest of the songs too, but those two still stood out as being more catchy.

Deerhoof
The Deerhoof drummer did most of the talking, and did so in German. But it was the type of German you speak 10 years after you took a little German in high school. That was good, though, as it meant I could understand what he was saying. Mostly, he'd say "Danke." Also, at one point, they explained that the wine bottles they were drinking from were "wasser" not "wein."

I don't know what else to say, except "Deerhoof is really awesome." Does anyone know what the deal is with the drummer's high hat? It's all gnarled and broken. I assume they intentionally don't replace it, but for a while it really looked like a huge chunk of it was just going to break off. According to this guy, the story is that he found it next to a garbage can. Somehow, this still leaves me wanting some further explanation.

If you're the sort of person who doesn't like Deerhoof's music, perhaps you can appreciate that they posted signs all over the venue saying "Deerhoof Request - No Smoking." If I haven't mentioned it already, Germans smoke a ton. So going to concerts and other crowded places is always a little bit miserable. This was the first time I could comfortably breathe through an entire concert. I saw plenty of Germans point at the signs and shake their heads, sadly. Kudos on the bold move, Deerhoof. My lungs and ears thank you.