Show of the Month

Bumbershoot

Seattle Center

Seattle, WA

August 30 - September 1, 2008

Bumbershoot, Seattle’s annual adios to summer, seems to have been taken over by the comedians these last couple of years (and the sponsors), but that doesn’t mean that the musical acts have lost any of their pull.

While national heavyweights like Beck, STP and Death Cab dominated the Main Stage, local acts were not hard to find over the course of the Labor Day weekend. The very first to grace the Rockstar Stage, Throw Me the Statue began their set with frontman Scott Reitherman pounding tribally on a tom and snare drum while singing wistfully over a cushion of twinkling keys. As a handful of brass-wielding warriors joined him onstage, TMTS’ sound became huge with orchestral horn explosions and tightly wound group harmonies, Reitherman’s voice delightfully congested at times and ringing out clear and gorgeous at others.

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, one of Saturday’s Rockstar Stage highlights, shared their mellow, poppy rock with a relaxed crowd. Though the band’s sound was new to many of the families in the audience, most were dancing and grooving along to the beats.

Those who tracked down Nada Surf’s “secret” acoustic show caught a truly special event. Broadcast live on KEXP, the trio demonstrated its experience and expertise to the intimate crowd (only 200 people were admitted), crafting lyrically brilliant delicacies without smoke, mirrors or special gadgets, and flawlessly executing each song. !!! followed for the next KEXP broadcast. Fortunately for radio listeners, it was actually possible to hear Nic Offer’s pelvic thrusts and teeny short shorts through his sarcastic and sultry deliveries, which he spat with a velocity and somehow sexy disdain.

EMP’s Sky Church hosted highlights of the Seattle scene throughout the fest, like Kinski, The Maldives, Thee Emergency and Feral Children (more on them later). Ironically, one of the standouts was an ex-Seattleite, PWRFL Power, who strutted his stuff Saturday afternoon, playing his original blend of wry observations and wicked guitar riffs. His rise to relevance has come largely because of festivals like Bumbershoot and the Capitol Hill Block Party, and he seems to bring his “A” game every time he plays for crowds who hardly know him.

On the Main Stage, Band of Horses delighted a stadium of over 100,000 smiling onlookers with their indie rock ballads, affectionate words and loving enthusiasm for their former home. Ben Bridwell’s melancholic and introspective musings rang out with studio-caliber clarity through the Emerald City sky. Later on, Portland songsmith M. Ward played much of 2006’s Post-War during his evening set at the Rockstar Stage. The biting social criticism of the album was a perfect way to close out the day, and his energy kept the crowd awake.

On Sunday, arguably one of the slower days of the festival, Seattle’s Canary Sing spit impossibly quick socially conscience hip-hop verses over funk and soul instrumentals with a level of confidence appropriately proportioned to their skills. The performance was charged with energy as the infectious charisma of these talented up-and-coming emcees bounced and ricocheted off theater walls in the form of dance moves, dramatic stage quarrels and expert DJ scratches and cuts.

Saul Williams followed with more of a dialogue than a performance. Calm, confident, informed and articulate, Williams provided an interesting environment of openness while he mused about the universe, explained elements of his past, spoke of his music project Niggy Tardust! and answered questions from the audience. With his thoughtful sense of humor and natural mastery of words, it’s clear why Williams has received recognition as the father of slam poetry.

Rocking the Rockstar Stage, Blitzen Trapper’s Monday afternoon performance was highlighted by the sextet’s odd stage banter (“We just arrived on a boat … from Portland”) and a chunk of songs from their brand new full length, Furr. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv’s Monotonix made Bumbershoot history over at the Exhibition Hall, their incendiary performance lasting only 10 minutes before being shut down by the fire marshal. Probably breaking every single contractual obligation, the band opted for the floor instead of the stage and began its set by pouring water over the snare drum and splashing the surrounding onlookers. In the following maelstrom, singer Ami Shalev crawled all over drummer Ran Shimoni, dumped a trashcan on his head, crowd surfed in said trashcan and proceeded to pull the drum mat forward into the tumultuous crowd. At this point, security was nonplussed by the dirty blues guitar and occasional screaming leads pounding from the eye of the hurricane, and frantically tried to regain control. Shalev crowd-surfed his way to the barricade, jumped over it, sang a cappella while pouring sweat, then turned around and exposed his bare behind to the onlookers as the band’s power was pulled.

That evening, new Seattle darlings Feral Children made their own mark on the EMP Sky Church stage. Equipped with dual drummers and yelping vocals, the group played an energetic and precise set that had the audience nodding in approval. Jim Cotton used his axe as a versatile tool, sometimes surging with air-raid siren intensity and sometimes punctuating with grimy distortion and stomach-dropping pitch bends. Their tasteful blend of experimental and dirty ultra-pop solidifies Feral Children as an exponentially infectious group of musicians, determined to leave their mark on the underground music scene.

Following Battles’ set, Minus the Bear closed out the Rockstar Stage on Monday with their unique brand of post-grunge, filling the Seattle night sky with the hooks and rhythms that have made them a recognizable group both locally and nationally. Their performance managed to ward off the end of the three-day music gorge.

-Review by Rob Bergquist and Evan “The Bug” Williamson; photos by Robby Neighbor

Why/Tussle

Great American Music Hall

San Francisco, CA

August 9, 2008

Nearly six months to the day since their album release/tour kickoff show for Alopecia, WHY? returned to the Great American Music Hall this past August after near-continuous touring. Their road-tested set had gotten mumps, seen both coasts and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Finally back home in the Bay Area, this Friday night show served as both a homecoming and another tour kickoff for the Oakland band who would leave the following week to do it all over again (hopefully without the mumps).

Joining WHY? on this momentous night was Tussle, a local four-piece celebrating the release of its new full length, Cream Cuts. The band created distinct stations onstage: up front and center were two souped-up drum kits, positioned face to face and serving as the heartbeat of Tussle’s sound; behind them stood bassist Tomo Yasuda, also part of the circulatory system; then manning the synth hub at the back of the stage was Nathan Burazer, the head of Tussle’s nervous system. Together, reverberations from these four posts converged to create a living organism of sound, the division between the songs, the performers and the crowd completely blurred. Even drummers Jonathan Holland and Warren Huegel shared one continuous gaze, their psychically connected drumbeats acting as narratives in Tussle’s warped, post-techno instrumentals. Though the lineup of this long-running band has been as fluid as its twisting tunes (Yasuda of Hey Willpower and Huegel of Citay the newest additions), its current chemistry is unshakable.

After setting up their own intricate stations, WHY? introduced Becky Wolf, kid sis of Yoni and Josiah, to say a few words before their set. Capturing the audience’s attention with the proposition of “Alopecia: the Musical” and singing a few lines from “The Hollows” Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-style, Becky proceeded to treat the crowd to a wonderfully shameless standup routine full of Olympics-inspired gossip and family stories about growing up a Wolf. Unfortunately, the sold-out room was too impatient to appreciate it. Battling their heckles, Becky eventually called on her older brothers for back-up, Yoni putting the jerks in their places. This set a very tense tone off the bat, but things loosened up after a few songs and Yoni soon admitted it was nice to be back.

Though WHY? shares Tussle’s badass percussive properties, the band’s strength is in its poetic lyrics. Witty rhymes and sharp-tongued imagery guide the colorful instrumentation as each of the four players onstage trade off instruments, some incorporating two at once (see Josiah). As lines like “Kisses or stitches, no mitt for these pitches,” “Yours is the funeral I’d fly to from anywhere,” and every word of “Good Friday,” “Yo Yo Bye Bye” and “Gemini Birthday Song” were echoed by the audience, it was actually one of Yoni’s comments that reverberated most: “Stay out of the Tenderloin, Bon Jovi!” Ending with “Fall Saddles” and “By Torpedo or Crohn’s,” Austin Brown (now off his crutches) summed it up best by lying down onstage and playing his bass with closed eyes as the final song’s ending chorus, “While I’m alive I’ll feel alive,” repeated. It was an exhausting night!

-Review and photo by Katherine Hoffert

Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival

Golden Gate Park

San Francisco, CA

August 22-24, 2008

When the Bay Area concert promoting juggernaut Another Planet Entertainment announced the first annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco’s beautiful Golden Gate Park, everyone wanted to know the same thing: How? It smelled like a money-driven disaster, especially in contrast to the charming Treasure Island Festival, which was a welcome surprise and thoroughly planned out.

Outside Lands did have its fair share of hiccups – picnic tables were trampled and metal fences were smashed like paperclips as 150,000 crazed Radiohead fans were packed into a bottleneck path about 30 minutes before the band was scheduled to play. This massive horde, along with the sound problems that ailed the seminal rock band’s headlining set, undoubtedly put a damper on the proceedings. Thankfully, most of the glitches bunched up on the first day and the next two days of music made concertgoers quickly forget the initial madness.

With plenty of great big-name music to go around (specifically Radiohead, Beck, Regina Spektor, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Wilco), it was easy to lose sight of the fact that about a quarter of the weekend’s performers were local. And Saturday’s revelry brought quite a few local gems to the stage. Highlights included San Francisco’s Rupa and the April Fishes who melded French chanson music and gypsy bravado. The accordion and string waltz of “Maintenant” swayed in a drunken stupor where “Poder” featured a rousing trumpet and chorus for the large crowd assembled.

Oakland’s The Coup hardboiled homegrown funk and hip-hop at The Avenues Stage as Devendra Banhart’s band wriggled through some of his freak-folk standards at the Sutro Stage in the festival’s Lindley Meadow area. Later on that day, Laguna Beach’s resident soul-rocker Donavon Frankenreiter moseyed through his laidback set at The Avenues.

Sacramento’s Cake put on a rousing show, singing “Rock and Roll Lifestyle” and “Stickshifts and Safety Belts.” They also gave a baby live oak to a fan after he correctly guessed what kind of tree it was based on a couple clues. The stipulation of the gift was that he plant it and take a picture of himself next to it every few years, sending these photo updates to the band so they could observe the tree’s growth too. Rounding out the night on the main Lands End Stage, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers seemed especially fresh from touring around the world after their Super Bowl appearance. Launching right into “I Won’t Back Down,” Petty then told the audience that he had a lot of songs he was going to try to play for them before the 9:55 p.m. curfew. He tackled everything from “Free Fallin’” to “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” to “Breakdown” (and all that fell in between) to the audience’s delight.

Sunday washed away any niggling problems from the beginning of the weekend as Wilco reinstated its potency as a touring outfit, putting naysayers to shame and disproving that the band is growing tired of playing its recent catalog. Bon Iver didn’t fair as well – even with the aid of a horn section, his lush vocals seemed lost in the loud environs. Sila and the Afrofunk Experience kept the spirit of Fela Kuti alive at The Avenues earlier in the day, though. And Culver City Dub Collective jammed in the hazy summer light at the Panhandle Stage over (far, far away) in Speedway Meadow. It was a perfect distillation of reggae dancehall grooves like “Big Long Gun.”

As Outside Lands came to a sleepy close on Sunday, it felt like it was about the music after all – or at least about pummeling enough fences to make it so.

-Review and photos by Kyle Lemmon

The Union Trade / Elephone /
One Becomes One Hundred

Bottom of the Hill

San Francisco, CA

August 27, 2008

On an unsuspecting Wednesday night, Bottom of the Hill and Tricycle Records presented an epic show with three amazing San Francisco-based bands: One Becomes One Hundred, Elephone and The Union Trade. It was an especially important night for the former and the latter, as they released new albums to the welcoming public.

One Becomes One Hundred opened the night with their own brand of frenetically driving rock, unleashing tracks from their debut, They do if you know. Lead singer John McCoy sang eyes-closed with an anxious grit and drone in his voice, creating a consistent layer of 16th notes with his SG. Smooth bass slides filled the lower frequencies as steady drums guided them forward. A soaring, reverberated Les Paul saturated their sound and added a grandiose quality to the mix.

The crowd thickened when Elephone, the second band of the night, arrived on the scene. With explosive charisma and casual sex appeal, the five-piece exuded energy with an ease even more established bands would envy. The most notable characteristic of their performance was the impressive vocal interplay between keyboardist Sierra Frost and guitarist Ryan Lambert. Vocal parts jumped between the two, ultimately coming together in pitch-perfect harmony. While Lambert offered a low grit and strength, Frost exhibited lighter characteristics with a hint of punk angst. The chemistry was exceptional as bassist Dan Settle moved about the stage, playing on keys and banging drumsticks on the floor. Their grand finale was filled with controlled chaos, an energetic end to a great set. Said Frost, “If you like it, you should buy the CD. It’s just like that, but better.” It was already pretty damn good.

The night concluded with The Union Trade presenting a headlining set that grew from a four-piece to a six-piece with the inclusion of additional vocals and keyboards. A nice contrast to Elephone’s upbeat rock, The Union Trade successfully recreated the emotive post-rock exhibited on their new Tricycle Records release, Everyday Including. Their heavy-hitting somber sound filled the room as they swayed listlessly in place. A projected light cast colors and images onto the band and its backdrop, giving the performance an ambient glow. Setting scenery exemplified the visuals already established by The Union Trade’s controlled use of feedback, and an E-bow draped a hauntingly sustaining wail over the jagged vocals and pulsating rhythms set by the band’s aggressive drummer and bassist. The conclusion was calmer, featuring a chiming quality illuminated by changing lights lit like fire.

If there’s one thing Tricycle Records is known for, it’s creating a strong show with bands that act less as a convenient collective but more as a family. Each band tonight displayed a genuine graciousness for the venue, the crowd and each other, and the audience reciprocated in kind.

-Review by Keane Li; photo by Anthony Gordon