It’s Like You’re Not Even There

Currently concussed.  Got to reading The da Vinci Code – yeah, I know, I know – and the writing’s so awful I’ve been pounding my head against some hard, flat surface at least once/page.  Here, a sample; context is unimportant:

Langdon stared at the picture, his horror now laced with fear.  The image was gruesome and profoundly strange, bringing with it an unsettling sense of déja vu.  A little over a year ago, Langdon had received a photograph of a corpse and a similar request for help.  Twenty-four hours later, he had almost lost his life inside Vatican City.  This photo was entirely different, and yet something about the scenario felt disquietingly familiar.

This is on page eleven.  Eleven.  Dan Brown’s editor had already stopped caring.  This has been read (well, bought...) by FORTY (thud) MILLION (thud) PEOPLE (thudthudthud).  Didn’t anyone notice anything wrong with pages, oh, one through (so far) 250?

“Thriller writing doesn’t get any better than this” cries a blurb on the back cover from a hopefully since-fired critic at the eminenty flammable Denver Post.

Anyway, while the swelling goes down, here are a few things that’re only half there...

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The Album without a Band:

There was once (1999-2005?) this really great Toronto band called “Newfound Interest in Connecticut.”  They must have started out all emo – their name is taken from a slightly-relocated Get Up Kids song – but their CD Tell Me About the Long Dark Path Home is worlds beyond that.

I suppose two things can happen to emo bands that survive – because their balls have to drop sometime, right? – they can boil off the fat, get back to basics, become the pop or punk or folk outfit that hid behind the tears, before; or they can get complicated.  NICT got Slinty, mathy, proggy.  Post-emo?  Whatever.  Their label’s(?) press(?) materials call Long Dark Path “the last words of a band always slightly unsure if they were just speaking to themselves.”

Which is a pretty whiny, emo thing to say.

But they weren’t.  Just speaking to themselves.

I know this because they stuck their songs in a bottle and sent them adrift on the net (OMG, the emo, it’s catching).  You can download, legally, all of NICT’s stuff.  And you should.  Not only is it good, it feels like a missing link of sorts.  When I first heard the Most Serene Republic, there were some obvious Arts & Crafts influences – a lot of Stars, here, a little BSS, there – but now that I’ve found this old, dead band... well, it sounds like NICT might have been speaking to Adrian Jewett & Co.

Here, map the progress:

• Get Up Kids – A Newfound Interest in Massachusetts (mp3) (buy)


• Newfound Interest in Connecticut – It Sings for Itself (mp3)


• Newfound Interest in Connecticut – I Can Hear Your Footsteps Just Outside Camp, Sah, Sah, Sah...(mp3)


• Most Serene Republic – Where Cedar Nouns and Adverbs Walk (mp3) (buy)

You can download all of NICT’s work here; according to their Pure Volume site it’s a “present for being great.”  Great.  The band apparently played its “last ever show” in March of last year... but who knows what a little newfound interest might do?  A couple former members of the five-piece seem to have landed – after passing through groups like Viking Club, Germans, Broken Wing – in some somethings called Underpin Collective and DD/MM/YYYY; another maintains (sort of) this blog. 

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The Pop Star without an Album:

Ah, Lily Allen.  A full month of test shows at YoYo’s ended with one shit gig and one brilliant one.  Music Like Dirt was at the shit one, and penned a review (here are some words from her opening act).  He also took some nifty  pics.  Love the cigarette...

...though it looks a bit like she’s in A Beautiful Mind.  Or (there’s no escaping it) The da Vinci Code.  Or some other abominable Ron Howard production.

No testimony from the “brilliant” outing, though there’s a bit of a fare thee well on Club YoYo’s myspace:  “During the last month, she’s gone from YOYO regular and general DJ pest to an Observer Music Monthly front cover girl, Radio 1 playlisted, Top of the Pops recorded summer festival booked bad gyal of SUPREME proportions.”

Get that record out, Lil’, before the clock strikes fifteen.

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The Concert without Tickets:

Now this is an interesting experiment in scalper-proofing:  Tickets for the June Guns n’ Roses concert in London will be sold via cel phone; receipts will be texted back and will include a bar code that’ll be scanned upon entry.  I hope they’ve tested it on a smaller scale; sounds like it could be a nightmare at the door.  Keep those batteries charged.

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The Showman who Refuses To Show:

Though any delays at the door will probably just count against Axl’s mandatory waiting period.

The following comment from “eva” crept up over at Vegan’s place in reference to their Madrid show:

I was in Madrid too. 14 hours waiting in the line, 2 hours more... Where he was? He neither said sorry. 13 years without playing anh he really thinks he is the old star?. He must gain people again, not to make wait people for more than two hours. People did not enjoy... throwing him beers in the concert and insulting him... He could be an artist but he should learn who to be a person first.

Which reminded me I never quite finished my sixty-three page thesis on the first Hammerstein Gn’R show.

Let’s do that now:

It’s unconscionable to make a paying audience – even a non-paying audience – wait for 70 minutes... but Rose has beaten his fanbase down.  As the evening yawned on and beer sales escalated, people stared at each other with the sort of we-asked-for-it despair you see in shoppers’ eyes in the checkout line on Black Friday.  Or every day at the DMV.

Through what could’ve been an entire second band’s act, a rather able disc jockey – we’ll call him DJ Testosterone – took a very narrow range of music and assembled a smart, sardonic set.  The K-rock (well, when they played music) fodder was well-mixed, the playlist well-planned.  He mocked us with anthems of faux-rebellion, had the crowd fruitlessly yelling along with Rage Against the Machine (“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”), Metallica (“Master of Puppets”), and Twisted Sister (“We’re not gonna take it, NOOOO!”).  After almost an hour of taking it, the tone became – depending on how you look at it – either more openly therapeutic or critical of the absent rock star.  Green Day’s “Longview” (“I’ve got no motivation”) went into Hendrix’ “Manic Depression,” which melted into Nirvana’s “Lithium.”

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This One's Got Everything:

Action, adventure, intrigue.

Below is a bootleg video from a Local H show –there’s no date/place info on YouTube, but judging by the length of singer/guitarist Scott Lucas’ hair, it’s a couple years old.

Yeah, I don’t know about the sportcoat, either.

All I can say is:  Make sure you’re watching around the 1:20 mark.  I love how drummer Brian St. Clair doesn’t seem to realize anything’s happened, how Lucas takes care of business quickly and jumps back in without missing a beat.

"Fritz' Corner."  Good stuff.  It's been too long since they've been here.

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And unrelated to anything else here (well...):  It has warmed the cockles of my cockles, this week, hearing respected media outlets hiss the phrase “Gas Rage.”  As if that weren’t enough to keep my inner Beavis occupied, the fine folks at happynews.com have dished up this little treat:

tags: axl rose  guns n roses  davinci code  most serene republic  ticketless concert  get up kids  lily allen  local h  da vinci code  

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