Concert Reviews

Here are the concerts I went to two weekends ago:

Saturday: The Blood Arm, some opener I forgot the name of (Mulowok or something like that) @ Lido
Sunday: Laura Veirs and the Saltbreakers, Your Heart Breaks @ Cafe Zapata
Monday: !!!, Fujiya & Miyagi, The Blow @ Maria

Fortunately, these are all venues I've already described, in one way or another, so that saves me some time. I haven't technically described Cafe Zapata, but it's in the awesome Tacheles thing I've already talked about. That's the place that's like a bombed-out building that's been converted into art spaces, bars and music venues. Zapata is pretty small. The most notable feature is the dragon sculpture that shoots fire out of its mouth occasionally. As I write that, I realize that Zapata is really awesome and I'm sort of playing it down... At one point, we went there on like a Saturday afternoon and hung out on their back patio, which is part of the outdoor sitting area behind Tacheles. There are giant metal letters you can sit on.

Okay, so on with the bands.

Blood Arm opener (Mulowok or whatever):
If one were really into finding obscure bands that sound sort of like crappy Gin Blossoms or something, he or she would have been really happy to discover this band. They were really competent at producing music that sounds "Adult Alternative" in the lame radio station sense. The fact that they were pretty good just highlights how arbitrary Adult Alternative music like that is. It's a genre shaped entirely by record labels and sold-out radio DJs, that exists for an audience that actually sort of wants it to be more real than that, but for a long time (before the Internet really took off) didn't have the time or know-how to get involved in deciding what they like. As a result, everything had sort of smooth corners for mass consumption. And now that "Indie Rock" has nudged "Alt Rock" out of the way and become the default type of music that most people like, stuff that sounds like "Alt Rock" just sounds that much more lame, juxtaposed by the more open-ended, diverse "Indie Rock." Stuff is just generally a lot more interesting now, even in the mainstream, in my opinion. I think it's largely because there's more foot room for bands to do weird stuff that you wouldn't think everyone would like. But then sometimes everyone does like it. Like, I don't think anyone expected the Decemberists to be as popular as they are. You wouldn't have gotten anything resembling a shanty on the radio in the 90's, except as a joke. Enough about these guys.

The Blood Arm
There are several main points to hit about the Blood Arm. First, they are the band that sings that song ("Suspicious Character") that goes, "I like all the girls and all the girls like me." They play that song at clubs and stuff out here. In fact, the DJ even played it at Lido about an hour after it had just been performed. Dancing to it involves a lot of jumping up and down. And they have other good songs too. Musically, I enjoyed the concert pretty well. Not earth-shattering or anything, but fun and up-beat. Like, if you were hiring a band to play at a party just to "be fun," they'd be a good band in a way that some really great acts (like Deerhoof or Built to Spill or something) would be absolutely terrible. What I'm saying is that they're very accessible. And fun.

The second thing to note is that they're all about showmanship. Like, the lead singer dude is pretty into himself. And they had an announcer guy (called "Ben Lee Handler") who came out before they started and made a big deal out of the fact that the Blood Arm was about to come out. I think if they went 30% less far with it, I would have been sort of annoyed, but instead, it was over-the-top enough to just be entertaining. About Ben Lee Handler, I have no idea if his name has anything to do with handling Ben Lee. It seems unlikely. I'm reserving further discussion of "human props" for when I describe the Superfamily performance I saw this past Friday.

At one point, the lead singer (Nathaniel Fregoso) made everyone sit down for a song. Also, he kept singling out people in the crowd and saying he was in love with them or whatever. Both girls and dudes. The first dude he pointed out was this super tall blond dude named "Jan." I remember his name because Jan was travelling with two lovely female companions, one of which my ballsier, more outgoing friend at the concert had asked if she knew the name of the first band (she didn't). Anyway, once the concert ended and evolved into a dance party (as concerts here so often do), we ended up sort-of dancing with Jan and his ladies.

It's taken me a little while to figure out how to tell when I'm dancing with people at clubs. Because it's not like you ask them to dance or talk to them or anything. Rather, you just suddenly are dancing a little more in their proximity than you were before. And in many cases, you're not sure if you are just being optimistic and it's really just you who is exclusively responsible for the closer proximity. That was the case here, and I wasn't really sure how to size up the situation until now, with a little more European club experience under my belt. (Does anyone know where the idiom "Under my belt" comes from? Is it referring to genitals?) Anyway, valid signs that you are dancing with someone are a) you're still dancing with them at least one song after it occurred to you to wonder whether or not you were dancing with them b) they're not dancing with someone else, unless it's a girl c) when you go to another room, they end up in that room pretty soon after d) they get tired of dancing and stand or sit like 5 feet away from you, waiting for you to talk to them e) they get so mad that you're not talking to them that they give you a sort of angry questioning look, get their jacket from the coat check and leave. Of course, it's usually probably better to just assume they're dancing with you around b or c. I think irreversible damage happens about half way through d.

Of the three shows, The Blood Arm was the most fun. So it gets really boring from here.

Laura Veirs (and the Saltbreakers)
It's okay that the description of Laura Veirs is pretty boring. I'm really into her music, but it's the stuff you listen to when you're trying to get in touch with nature or something. Like, I enjoy it on an evening boat ride, or a drive in the mountains. Laura Veirs and the Saltbreakers, as her band is now called, live in the Pacific Northwest. So, they're into that sort of thing. Nature. Musically, she's really excellent live. But she doesn't bring the party like The Blood Arm. Instead, she brings old people. So many old people. I could barely move because I was packed between so many olds. If oldness is measured as "number of years older than 20," I'd say this crowd was easily twice as old as the crowd at the Hold Steady show. The one good thing about old people is watching their interpretation of what you're supposed to do at a concert. Most of them are reasonably cool and just sort of stand there, but there is always a handful who have some image in their mind of head-banging and active cheering. At this show, there was a dude wearing one of those "band tour" t-shirts that lists all the locations some band played, and he would dance a lot harder than was appropriate, especially when recognizable songs came on. He'd also gesture to his old friends and nod, as if to say, "How about this?" "Isn't this great?" "Laura Veirs ROOOCKS!!!"

But the most aggressive dancer by far was this punk dude in a tank-top. He was all the way up in the front, and was dancing in a way that just fundamentally made no sense with Laura Veirs' music. All I could think was that maybe he was raised as a punk in East Berlin or something and can only understand things in punk terms. But really he just likes soft, gentle melodies about nature. Like, he loves to pet kittens, but as a result, he feels compelled to shave the kittens fur into a mohawk.

Skip this section if you already think Pitchfork is wrong a lot (or don't care what Pitchfork is):
Pitchfork gave this album a 4.7. The reviewer describes an incident where he saw them performing live, and the band put on hard-hats for a song about spelunking. At this concert, they had goofy outfits with animals and stuff sewn on them. Neither of these are particularly cool things for a band to do at a concert. But the real question is whether or not they are anti-cool in a cool way. Like, are they doing it because they think it's cool to do stuff that's lame? Or are they doing it because they think that it's a good thing to do at a concert and legitimately don't know any better? In my opinion, the latter is okay and can be charming, whereas the former is generally not okay and is pretty much always a little annoying. Having seen Laura Veirs and the Decemberists both show up in matching quirky outfits at concerts, I feel pretty confident saying that Laura Veirs' efforts seem a lot less deliberate. It's more for them than for us. So, I don't think that stuff actually spoils the act in this case.

It's like how all the songs are about nature and water and stuff. Is she doing that because she thinks an album all about nature and water is a good idea, or is she doing it because she legitimately really likes water and nature. My best guess is that it's again the latter. And on top of that, I like the music and the vocals, apart from the lyrics. Maybe the Pitchfork dude is just never around water and doesn't get it? Like, when I listen to "Lake Swimming" from the last album, I think about swimming in a lake and it makes me happy. I imagine Laura Veirs probably thinks about swimming in a lake too, while she's singing. Unless, of course, she has to focus too much on singing.

That being said, I haven't actually listened to the new album so I can't definitively say whether a 4.7 is unfair. But I'll be surprised if, after listening to it, I come away thinking anything less than a 5.5 is fair. Hopefully, I'll want to draw the line closer to 6. The album has a 78 right now on Metacritic (which is like a 7.8 in Pitchfork numbers). Meteors (for which I'd draw the line at 6.5) ended up with an 80.

Your Heart Breaks
This band opened for Laura Veirs, but the drummer was just Laura Veirs' bassist (Karl Blau, who was really awesome, incidentally), and the keyboardist was just Laura Veirs' keyboardist (also good). I can easily imagine the singer, Clyde Petersen, being a special guest speaker at an elementary school assembly, who asks you to "Close your eyes, sit back and imagine you're on a spaceship." This is probably because one of their songs ("God Speed John Glen") is about imagining you're on a spaceship. And before it, Clyde was like, "Who wants to go to space? Remember when you were kids, and you used to pretend you were on a spaceship?" Apparently, Your Heart Breaks is some sort of "collective music project," and falls in the genre category of "queercore." So, just like so many special guest speakers at elementary school assemblies, there's something a little dark and subversive about Your Heart Breaks... Not really. Musically, it's a little like listening to a slightly less messed up Daniel Johnston. I.e., I don't like them as much as Daniel Johnston. Not by a long shot. But it was a pretty reasonable opening act.

The Blow
Worst performance I've seen so far. If you read my earlier post, you know that when I saw The Blow open for Deerhoof, it was basically fine, but all the musical backing was pre-recorded. This was the same deal. But, poor Khaela Maricich had a cold. And the smoke was bothering her. And her microphone kept breaking. And it turns out that the story about her life that she told at the Deerhoof show is the same story about her life that she tells at every show, except at this show, for fear of boring people like me who had been just seen her a week before, she told the story out of order. Which meant it didn't make any sense. And unfortunately, Khaela seems to be under the impression that the songs actually require this story to be told. So, the whole audience was just like, "Why is this woman telling us so much nonsense in between songs that aren't that great?" The two songs I'd liked best from the previous show were the last two she played. This was a mistake, as the crowd was pretty much checked out by the time she got to them, and it was too late to win anyone over.

Basically, watching this show was like watching your friend pitch a baseball game or something, and seeing him give up a whole bunch of runs. It's just sort of sad to watch, and all you can do is hope that they won't be too upset about it afterwards. It's pretty reasonable to have a bad concert, especially when all the stuff I mentioned above is going against you. All the same, this concert made it abundantly clear that Khaela Maricich is probably too hung up on being some sort of poetic storyteller, and would probably do well to focus more on just trying to make some more songs like "Parentheses" and "True Affection." Save the stories about your life, and psychoanalysis for special occasions.

Fujiya & Miyagi
Exactly the same as the previous performance. Excellent, clean and cool. I feel cooler for having listened to them a second time. At one point, the singer made some sort of imperceptible mistake, and had a visible reaction. So I think it's safe to assume that for the entire rest of the show, he was never making any mistakes. Perfection. I love these guys. If you want, you can chant "Fujiya. Miyagi. Fujiya. Miyagi." through the whole concert, and it would sort of work with the beats.

!!!
I can only ever get like 40% on board with !!!. I don't know why. My friends (same dude from Blood Arm, plus some girl he met) had the same reaction, and we actually left before the encore. Not so much because we didn't want to hear any more, but because they had played forever already, and we had to get up in the morning for work. I think the reason I can only get 40% into them is that everyone else at the concert was 250% on board with them. So what would be 100% felt like 40. People can't get enough !!!. We were really excited to see them after the awesome F&M performance, and actually made our way pretty close to the front. This proved to be our undoing, however, as once the concert started, people pretty much packed themselves around us and went crazy. This was too much for me to handle, so I had to duck out to the back. And once you've done that at a hyperactive !!! show, you're pretty much out of the equation.

An interesting thing about !!! is that dorky dudes apparently love them. At least in Germany. When I saw them at Coachella, I remember there being a lot of pretty girls dancing in the audience. But here, it was just nerds with backpacks. This obviously didn't help with the whole over-crowding situation. At Coachella, I'd gotten a sort of "band geek" vibe from !!! themselves, as they seem to really enjoy indulging in instrumentation in a way that only band kids would. And the lead singer guy was sort of lame in his effortful coolness. I think both of these things are still true. And now they have the crowd to match. Like, an example of the lame effortful coolness is when the singer guy poured water on himself, then took his shirt off and wrung it out. He's not fat, but he's got sort of a pot-belly, and you get the sense that he's in denial about having it and thinks that he looks good with his shirt off.

But there's a very good reason to like !!!, which is that they play really hard and really well. Just like band geeks, no matter what you may think about them, they play music really really well. Ultimately, if I only 40% like it, it's my problem, not theirs. To continue the baseball analogy, it's like they're pitching a really good game, but I just don't care about baseball. But I can still tell that they're pitching a great game.

Upcoming concert posts:
Jeans Team, The Pipettes (they had new songs that I liked pretty well. Still in love with the brunette one), Klee
Malcolm Middleton with Strike the Colours (loved this)
Superfamily (interesting), Prototypes (super French)

Upcoming shows this week that haven't happened yet:
Of Montreal -- that's tomorrow
Rooney?

Upcoming posts about things I've done in Germany:
Swimming in the Badeschiff ("Bathing ship")
...and more