Heart on a Stick
Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
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seen/heard ° stream album ° buy
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seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
“We’d Like to Play Another Song, but Something Seems to Be on Fire” (Todd P’s Big Out-of-Doors Show II, 9/9/06)
posted 09/13/2006
Todd P puts on concerts I don’t generally attend. Thank goodness for him, and that.
I’m a big fan of form fitting function, and that happens, here. You have to make a bit of an effort, musically, logistically. No one’s going to spoonfeed you. The acts he books – I’m assuming he books acts he likes, or thinks he’ll like (I’m assuming a lot here, because just about everything I know about these gigs I’ve gleaned, over time, from his skeletal site) – tend to be experimental or extreme in some way. Trance and thrash, noise and nuance, art and prank. Off the beaten path, but not exclusive. There’s no velvet rope, no holier-than-thou attitude; if anything, you might be asked to help schlep.
He defines a venue as “a room with a door and somebody there stamping hands,” and realizes this is a city with a lot of rooms and doors and somebodies. For a short while he apparently had a legitimate club in Greenpoint, Llano Estacado; he may, again. But this show in East Williamsburg, for instance, was held – after the initial location fell through – at an address Google Maps doesn’t recognize, an abandoned (?) industrial space. The link on the concert page sent you to a location on the other side of Newtown Creek. The day portion of the show was in a narrow alleyway behind the building, a stage set up at each end (photo); at dusk, volunteers lugged the knee-high platforms and sound equipment to a larger area indoors (photo).
It’s important that people put on shows like these, go to shows like these. Not just because the acts are outside the norm – many of these groups can and do play other venues, of course – but because it’s a good thing, amassing a group of people who have more important things on their mind than getting comfortable.
But I have gotten old, and a bit lazy, and I’ve always had a miserable sense of direction. I’m not really built for this. This all-day sort-of-out-of-doors show, though, seemed a good opportunity to get my mind open and ass dirty.
When I came in, Roxy Pain (myspace) was working at a perpetual, off-tune cover of “Careless Whisper.” They’d already been playing it so long the lead singer’s SPF had run out – someone followed her around the stage, shading her with an umbrella – and no one could remember them playing anything else. Which is sort of a shame, as I like the mp3s they have on their site, and like the session they played at WFMU. Recently they played a show – featured on Punkcast – staged as an endurance test. There’s arguments to be made for the artistic value of such things, but it’s a pretty silly enterprise when you’ve only got a 20-minute set time.
But silly can work. The singer shared her microphone with the other band members (bass, drums, two guitars, alto and tenor saxes, vocals/sleigh bells, umbrella); not one sang in tune. I don’t know if the goal was to celebrate or destroy the Wham!ditty – that sax riff is pretty indefatigable – but ultimately it became background music, scoring a billion conversations that went along the lines of:
“How long have they been playing this?”
“I don’t know. They were playing it when I got here.”
(And if you’re looking for a cover of “Careless Whisper,” Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands is hosting the Ben Folds/Rufus Wainwright version.)
Stars Like Fleas (myspace) can’t help but make lovely music. There’s some fragile stuff that’s barely there, and occasional attempts to get aggressive and noisy, but the instrumentation – in addition to drums and guitar (no bass), there were lap steel, harp, violin and keyboards/melodica/toy xylophone at this show (it feels like a collective, so ingredients may shuffle) – is warm as hugs.
[Warm, but (to clarify) not on fire. During their set, a hot rubbery electrical stink wafted out; it didn’t seem like anyone could find the source, but the band continued, and the smell abated after their set. So there’s your mandatory “...and nobody got hurt.”]
Apparently Todd P regulars (here are some great pics from his Roosevelt Island acoustic BBQ), SLF’s opening for the similarly soothing Grizzly Bear at the Bowery on 9/26 (tix).
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High Places (myspace). Mary Pearson (below, left) has got an endearing, casual sing-song voice; she’s accompanied by Robert Barber’s generally gentle synths. It’s not too out of line to name-check Postal Service, but there’s an interesting world music current bubbling through. Really bad sound problems meant the live set got lost under the beats. Barber had a few Xiu Xiu’ish toys to bang and brush and whatever; all I heard was DOONF-DOONF-DOONF.
When a band calls itself Child Abuse (myspace) and its songs things like “Violent Utopia (Part II)” you pretty much know what you’re going to get. It’s tough for me to delineate genres once they blast past a certain decibel level. Post-thrash deathmetal? Rawrawrawrcore? Sure. The band joked – I think they were joking – that this was their first-ever gig, and they were actually a lot better than you’d think... for a band that probably shouldn’t call itself anything other than child abuse. As they’re a keys-bass-drum trio, there was the odd DFA1979 moment; there was also a teensy, happy mosh pit towards the end of their set.
Singer Luke Calzonetti (above, right) dedicated a song to “the kids” (RIP, ODB) they saw running around. There was one toddler there, early, though I’m not sure he made it all the way to Child Abuse. For the most part, the crowd wasn’t even as young as I’d thought it would be. A smattering of adult types – and, obviously, at least one set of parents – made it feel like more than some afterschool gathering.
The sound man for the concert had an affable (but not playful) little bulldoggish thing that wandered around throughout. No one dedicated a song to her.
Vaz (myspace) was the main reason I’d come. Dana’d raved about them at some point, I liked what I heard online, and I keep missing their gigs. They rock the sort of thick, dark stuff that would have felt at home in Chicago this weekend.
It was the only act whose set was way too short; they were just warming up when singer/guitarist Paul Erickson (ex-Hammerhead, aka Apollo Liftoff) chucked his guitar offstage, tossed his pedal over the chain link fence at the front of the alleyway. Erickson’s vocals are, photo notwithstanding, probably more subdued than you want to hear with this music. And though a lot of it sounds similar, it’s good stuff in which to wallow.
The drummer (I think he calls himself Bruce Museum, a great dinorock moniker) used a second, duct-taped kickdrum as a tom. Guy was nuts.
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Talibam! (not pictured) is a band with a great name and not much else. Described as “audio terrorism,” their set was basically two guys – one on synths/banjo/babble, one on drums/babble (a third member, a bari sax player, was absent) – making shit up as they go along. And they’re not very good at that. It was just really obvious they weren’t there to do anything but waste our time. Should be called A Great Time to Hit the Restroom!
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Aa (or “BIG A little a”) is synths, percussion, barking. This was another case where the sound didn’t travel well (for the most part, the sound was excellent during the daylight part of the show; comments on Brooklyn Vegan suggest the band’s responsible for this). It made the whole set sound sloppy when this sort of stuff really needs to be sharp. So, mulligan. They have mp3s for download on their myspace; that works, what, 15% of the time?
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When the show moved indoors, I moved on. Relatively bigger acts came later. Matt and Kim have gotten a following and some small notice since I saw them at the Delancey opening for Walking Concert, a while back; then, they seemed like chipper spacefillers. One of these days I’ll see (Rolling Stone 2006 Artist-to-Watch) Comets on Fire live; I tried to get into Blue Cathedral, but the only track that did it for me was “Brotherhood of the Harvest,” which sounded like Variations on a Theme from Atom Heart Mother.
Others stayed later, and said these things:
· Papermag
And I have more photos here.
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Ridiculous amount of stuff to do, Saturday night. World Party was back at Irving Plaza (presumably with a full band, this time), but I’d just seen them. Marah was at Northsix, but I didn’t feel like going all the way back up to Williamsburg. Devotchka was playing an overpriced, inconvenient show. O’Death played not one, but two shows on their first night back in the city, one at the Knitting Factory and a late show in Brooklyn with Two Gallants that sounds like it was a blast; I’ll catch up with them at one of their billion forthcoming gigs (perhaps that Delancey thing with DraculaZombieUSA).
I’m smacking myself for missing the record release show for the new, Albini-produced Made Out of Babies (myspace) CD. I’ve needed to bang my head a lot, over the past week; this is good for that.
Instead of exploring any of those options I crashed and watched six straight episodes of Lost. Because I have gotten old, and a bit lazy, and seven bands seemed like quite enough for one day. Push the button, Frank.
YES? YOU THERE IN THE BACK? (1)
1. jerry left...
09/13/2006 12:49 pm :: http://noyetidance.blogspot.com
I want some of those microphone pants. nice pics.