"We're All Going to Make it Out Okay" (Siren Music Festival 2008)

Once a douchebag, always a douchebag.

Welcome to the 2nd Annual (But Final) Year-Plus-Late Siren Festival Write-Up!  I ask you:  Where else can you go for year-old bloggy concert reviews?  Other than other blogs' year-old archives?

But this has the added value of perspective!  (At this point it's more a matter of tradition and an opportunity to dump a couple pics out before the Flickr account gets closed down.  I've little to say about the concert itself.  And am feeling ornery.  I apologize retroactively in advance.  Let's go!)

When the day started I was still on the non-douchebag side of the barrier, the audience was still thin enough that folks could wander over from the boardwalk and look and loo without being crowded out by dedicated freeloaders.  When These Are Powers (myspace) started playing, two guys near me looked at each other.  One said, "Oh.  It's that kind of free concert."  They walked away.

Parts & Labor - Fractured Skies (mp3)(buy Mapmaker)

Parts & Labor - Nowheres Nigh (mp3)(buy Receivers)

Dense enough to get lost in, hooks to pull you out.  I need Parts & Labor (myspace) to do a better job reminding me that they exist.  Maybe they should manufacture an endless series of unnecessary non-newsworthy events -- patch together modestly budgeted single-idea stunt videos; give boring answers to dull questions in bloggy e-mail interviews; compound their content by recording "exclusive" unoriginal content for others, inviting and compiling inferior remixes, collecting clips from late night talk shows -- and clog up fans' Twitter feeds and spamboxes with announcements re: all that.

But then they'd be just like every other band.

The Dodos - Fools (Miller Chill Anthem)(mp3)(buy)

That's Meric Long from The Dodos (myspace) in the foreground.  Apparently his songs are about lime-flavored beer.

And here seems the best place to amend last year's post:  I am off Team Matt & Kim.  Not that I could ever be a fan of their music, shrill amateur-hour spew that generates more charity than love.  The goodwill got gone once they became the poster children for corporate sponsorship.  Some of that has been for a good cause!  But there's been so much of it!  Converse and Virgin Mobile and Mountain Dew and Bacardi and some Philips thing where they flew in junket whores and, fuck, I don't know, Powdermilk Biscuits.  So much that I suspect that in their little single-idea stunt video they're not blurring out boobs and schlong, they're covering golden arches and a big throbbing swoosh, I'm shocked that when they strip down their bodies don't look like goddamned stock cars.  (What gall that the vid tries to sell the band as pure innocents against the most famous advertising backdrop in the world.  Maybe the most execrable and empty statement in the form since this piece of shit.)

They rationalize these mounting alliances by noting that no one buys records any more (I still buy records, could never envision buying a Matt & Kim record) and say that it keeps the cost of concert tickets down.  Because adjusting the five-dollar ethos for inflation and encouraging direct patronage is so much harder than grafting brand name hard liquor to your work and shoving your all-aged fanbase's face in pee-flavored soft drink.  Seriously, they come off as sweet kids, and there are a lot of people out there struggling to figure out how to make a living based on music that isn't particularly good.  It is a shame that there are no longer local hardware stores to sponsor little league teams.  But even if the giant multinationals don't completely overwhelm the band/brand's very-very-Ltd. -- and really, isn't polylogomy better than branding yourself with a single sponsor, becoming The Bacardi Band? -- the group brand is guilty of contributing to the toxic tsunami of logofication that's displaced our history, stolen our scenery, shrunken our souls.  Pollution!  Just Do It!  Or whatever Bacardi's slogan is.

The Dodos -- a San Francisco acoustic guitar/drums duo that travels with a vibraphonist (napping dude, above) -- were touring behind an acclaimed debut album called Visiter [sic].  It took forever for them to set up.  Started to get the feeling that Long was a perfectionist and Siren wasn't the place for him.  The sound is bad, always.  Perhaps something was just wrong with his looping pedal.  Their set wound up cropped down to something like four songs, which wasn't a bad thing, because there are really only a couple memorable ones on Visiter.  The best of these is "Jodi," which interrupts its blues base often enough that it's not vaguely blues, anymore; there's an airy folk opening and a lovely light chorus and even a bit of unobjectionable Deadhead stink.

Best of all, there's a lot of pounding.  The Dodos revealed themselves live, despite their tunefulness and songwriting skill, to be a percussion ensemble.  Long attacked his guitar strings as hard as the other guy hit his kit, and even got up at one point to bang on a garbage can that had been mounted for that purpose.  It gave their music guts.

So it was a shame when, a year later, one of the other memorable songs that they had already sold their consumer base -- called "Fools," ha ha, it's always on you! -- got resold to the MillerCoors partnership as a jingle.  Hey, it's their music, they can do what they want with it!  It seems crazy in this clime to chide anyone for grabbing whatever green falls in reach.  And a lot of people will not care or notice and who knows, maybe good for them.

But some of us do care, some of us are still pissed that we can't hear "Good Vibrations" without thinking about fucking orange soda.  It's horrible when something truly great is compromised.  (I know!  Shiina Ringo!  Shaving cream!  Nail polish!  Gaaargh.).  So maybe it's lucky for some of us that there's such an overwhelming amount of insignificant musical talent.  We can shrug off so many of these bands without missing much at all.

The Dodos have a new record coming out, it's called Time to Die, it's streaming here.  If you have nothing better to do with your life maybe you can waste time wondering which track would make the best Zima jingle.

I assume The Annuals (myspace) played.  That's them right there in that picture!  Some of it's coming back to me:  I remember them being pretty okay.  I know I used the word "post-emo" when talking to someone and felt awful about that.

The band had recently been the subject of a sort of misguided essay (which I can't find now) about "blog hype" turnover that failed to take into consideration that the band had taken itself out of circulation so it could record its second CD.  So on one hand I was rooting for them, everyone in "the blogosphere" isn't so fickle, you big bad essay writer!  But on the other hand, I was never smitten in the first place.

Hands!  They're God's abaci.  Moving along.

Times New Viking - No Time No Hope (mp3)(preorder)

Times New Viking (myspace)!  I mentioned them briefly, recently.  I'm mentioning them briefly again, now.  Maybe I'll just throw up another photo.

There!

Jaguar Love (myspace), hoo-boy.  Former members of Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves came together in some sort of hard rock Chipmunks tribute act.  (The band has since pared itself down to a duo and sounds "a bit different.".)  Singer Johnny Whitney would squeal, then pace while squealing, then approach the edge of the stage and stretch his arm out and squeal.  Over and over, like he was stuck in a loop.

Shrill and heinous, Jaguar Love was so off-putting that I said aloud to the someone next to me, "I think I will go to the main stage and check out Ra Ra Riot (myspace)."  They nodded, sadly.

I was tough on those guys a couple years back.  Wouldn't it be great if, having since experienced great personal tragedy, the band had gathered itself and found the depth and meaning that had eluded it before?  I'll eat crow as long as it's well cooked.  Those birds swallow the worst stuff.

(I know.  Old picture, old joke.)

I lasted a whole song and a half.

The Sensation - Baby (mp3)(buy)

Long enough to confirm that nothing had changed, that this is shit music, that the performers are a hollow repulsive parody of a band.  Had suffered an entire set before, didn't need to shame myself here.  I'd been surprised to hear their record, The Rhumb Line, and find it only below average.  But on stage they were still, like a gaggle of tiny-bladdered QVC hosts hopped up on Red Bull and teleprompter dust, celebrating their sad pap as if they'd cured fucking cancer while giving Jesus the second best blowjob he'd ever had.  How proud they are of their inferior material!  Look Mommy we tied our shoes!  Together!

There are certain genres wherein it is acceptable to be obviously unspecial and parade that unspecialness around as entertainment.  Nobody who pumped fists along with The Sensation (assuming anyone ever did, I don't know anything about them, that track's from a glam compilation called BOOBS) thought the band was trying to do anything but get laid, and that's fine, because we make total buffoons of ourselves when we try to get laid.  Privileged Anger bands are allowed to make extreme idiots of themselves because privileged anger burns off quickly and we're all supposed to laugh at ourselves afterward.  I'll be laughing at myself right after I post this.  But if you amp your sensitive indie rock with a self-anointing obnoxiousness, as these people do, you had better be pretty fucking great.  And Ra Ra Riot is as close to greatness as my asshole is to Olympus.

Now you're saying, "Well, what are they supposed to do as they ply their negligible indie crap upon anyone with enough bad luck or bad taste to fall within earshot, are they supposed to just stand there and look constipated?"  Sure!  But first they should apologize.  They should say, "We're so sorry that for some reason we feel compelled to defile your ears and eyes and souls and insult the very notions of passion and accomplishment with our inadequate twaddle.  And we're even sorrier that some of you possess such poor judgment that you might think what we do is deserving of compliment, or even devotion; we assure you that's not the case, please go about your lives as if you'd never been forced through this.  We promise to spend large amounts of time inoculating orphans and picking up roadside garbage to make amends.  And now we'd like to pause for two or three minutes to allow you to rethink whatever decision lead you here, exits are to the rear and right, try not to trample each other on your way out."  They should say that and they should mean it.

So yeah, fuck this band and fuck their shit music, but you can't stick them with all the blame.  From what I can tell, using the self-satisfied flood of suck that constitutes the whole of this very internet as evidence, there's a whole generation that's been raised to believe every precious bit of poo they produce is a shiny golden nugget.  Why just circle the bowl when you can spasmodically dance around it, patting yourself on the back the whole way down?

The ones I really loathe are in the crowd.  The fans who conspire to smother quality by exalting the mundane, the indiscriminate mouthpieces that feel the need to praise something unworthy because they've got nothing better to talk about that day, piddly people who call everything Exceptional when they're describing The Rule.  There have always been undertalented bands making shit music, only now those are significant bands making awesome music.  I am going to start a band called Harrison Bergeron and we will be the most extraordinary amazing transcendent abysmally average pooptarded pile of inconsequence and we will be fucking consecrated by people who embrace us just because they believe the act of embracing us makes themselves special.

Keep doing the limbo with your standards you sad little indie kids.  You'll get the music you deserve.

Beach House - Gila (mp3)(buy)

Okay.  Deep breath.  I paced the boardwalk, punching the air, then commiserated with people in the comfort-free schmooze of Stillwell's backstage douchebag tent.

Beach House (myspace) seemed scheduled as a corrective to the histrionics of the most recent acts.  (Perhaps they function that way all the time back home in Baltimore for the Wham City set.)  Normally I engage the word "pleasant" dismissively, and it's true I'm not patient enough to take this band in more than tiny chunks.  But anger is exhausting.  A timely wash of golden hour light, Victoria Legrand's lean-to whole notes and obscured words (sound at Siren, bad, always), Alex Scally's smooth runs and barefoot shuffle made the duo's less-than-safe places the right kind of shelter.  Okay, deep breath.

Islands - J'aime Vous Voir Quitter (mp3)(buy)

What happens halfway through that song became the day's best surprise.

I hadn't paid much attention to Islands (myspace) mostly because I hadn't much cared for the band from which they'd sprung.  I remember The Unicorns as sort of scatterbrained and creaky, but wonder if they would sound straightforward now; your older brother's ADHD seems like foundational discipline, these days.

Islands songs feature some serious shifts, made more dynamic because the sound is full-bodied.  There were six or seven people up there, two of them drawing from a standing tower of bowed instruments.  Their presence is off-balance, sometimes off-putting:  Part awkward arty pretentiousness -- lead singer Nick Thornburn came out wearing a dented garbage can (the one from The Dodos' set?) and a fake blood-spattered sleeveless t, sorted though a progression of eyewear, lit sparklers and held them on either side of a guest rapper's head -- and part cock-rock theatricality.  Even the viola player wagged his tongue and raised devil horns.  It's a talented and ambitious bunch with a front that makes it easier to be interested than involved in what they're doing.

Perhaps that's for the best.  It's refreshing when they lighten up and air things out and whoop whoop whoop, but it's a trick they pull at least a couple times over on Arm's Way, and I don't want to think of that joy as a familiar trick, I want to keep it a surprise.

It had been a while.  Two years!  The last Broken Social Scene (myspace) show I'd attended had been a dispirited, underfilled benefit in Prospect Park that left me wondering if the band had run its course.  This appearance, headlining a festival that supposedly draws 100,000 people, seemed an afterthought for them; they didn't bother bringing a female singer along, no Emily or Feist or Amy or Lisa or Lizzie.

But love conquers all, you know?

A woman named (I think) Aubrey (after the Bread song, maybe?) who demanded they play "Shoreline" was invited to come up and sing it herself.  The look on Kevin's and Brendan's and Andrew's and Gentleman Reg's (and that guy's and that guy's) faces when she started in seemed to say that they'd just been reminded they'd been making Everyone's Music.

I was listening to You Forgot it in People the other day, was re-impressed by its quality.  Game changers, landmarks, someone else sort that all out; this is a record of more than craft and care, it's a record of ability and necessity.  There is something very personal and very damaged at the heart of this band, you can hear that on both their proper records, and there is something about making music in a giant familial collective that heals that damage.

(Not sure I even want to read the book (though I'm sure I will) because the particulars of the process are secondary to the sound of the celebration.)

It was a real treat to end this day pressed up against the stage, listening to music that I love, thinking that these guys -- these guys with their often soft groove and indefensible showboating and incoherent banter -- could probably tour behind those two records for the rest of their lives.

tags: bread for fucks sake  siren  siren music festival  ra ra riot  broken social scene  beach house  islands  times new viking  concert reviews  the dodos  matt and kim  parts and labor  chillax bro  jaguar love  punctuality crisis  

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