April 22, 2004
Nameless Number Headman / Channels / Retisonic
Nameless Number Headman / Channels / Retisonic (Retisonic record release party), the Warehouse Next Door, 4/16
We were looking for a way to celebate V.'s successful completion of her qualifying exams, and the great J. Robbins was playing a date on Friday with his new band, Channels. So off we went to the Warehouse Next Door, a teeny performance space in Northwest. The opening act was Namelessnumberheadman, a good band from Kansas City with a genuinely dreadful name. They were a three-piece -- every band we saw Friday was a three-piece -- with a drummer, a keyboardist, and a guitarist/keyboardist. The drummer and the guitarist shared vocalist duties. For an opening band I'd never heard of, these guys were shockingly good. V. and I discussed briefly who they reminded us of -- I threw out the Long Winters or Death Cab, but V. responded that they seemed to be shooting for a bigger, post-rock-ier sound. A little bit later, I think I settled on them sounding a bit like Olivia Tremor Control. They've got some MP3s up on their website; you can check them out and decide for yourself.
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January 6, 2004
The Book of Leviathan
The Book of Leviathan seems to be a collection of Sunday newspaper strips from England's The Independent. The author, Peter Blegvad, has a website, is a New Yorker, and has performed with the Golden Palominos. I know these things from the back cover of The Book of Leviathan, and that's pretty much all I know about the strip or its creator, but now I need to find out more. This is really, really good -- the best way I can describe it is Zippy the Pinhead if Zippy the Pinhead were actually funny instead of just odd. Blegvad the same willingness to stretch for a groan-out-loud pun (he makes a "bear arms/arm bears" joke, for instance), but where I think that the Doggie Diner is the best part of Zippy, I find this stuff both sweet and funny. The stories are about little Levi, a faceless baby made of aboout a dozen lines. His cat talks to him, the voice of tolerant adult cynicism. There's a family, Mama and Papa and sister Becky, who show up in some of the strips. (The book opens brilliantly, with the cat serving as Levi's guide to the hunting lodge of the dead to bring Mama and Papa back to him, Orpheus-style; I wasn't at all sure where it was going, what sort of thing to expect. It was a brilliant choice on the editor's part; the strips are generally funnier and less narratively cohesive in the rest of the book, but I was hooked.) Blegvad is an artistic mimic; I caught references to Little Nemo, Pogo, and what seemed to be Gorey and Addams riffs. The strips wobble between Duchampian surrealism and a Krazy Kat air of English gone wonky. In one strip the Godlike hand of the author, straight from a Daffy Duck cartoon, compares Levi to Henry announces that Leviathan is "the FRUIT of an UNHOLY UNION between [Dick Tracy's] "NOTHING YONSON" and J.W. Anglund's larval minx." A number of the strips are available on Blegvad's site; check them out. If this is the sort of thing you like, I guarantee you'll like this.
September 2, 2003
Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney / Scout Niblett / the Fiery Furnaces / the Hawney Troof
the Mean Fiddler, Soho, 8/14
It took V. and I a while to figure out what was different about the crowd at the Mean Fiddler. It wasn't the club itself -- despite the coat check room (and the Britishness), it was a pretty fair analogue of the 9:30 or the Black Cat in DC. It wasn't the drinks; they were overpriced just like at an American club. Eventually we got it. In England, there is a scandalously high clubgoer-to-hipster-glasses ratio. The crowd just looked slightly shaggier and less scenesterfied than it would have been in DC.
That contrast made the opening act all the more amusing; the Hawney Troof are a boy and a girl in their underwear who dance around and holler and do jumping jacks. Given a ten minute dose, it's very funny, just like the even more manic XVXRX, who I once saw play an even shorter set. V. and I were making jokes about a) Bratmobile and b) Sparky's coffeehouse in DC before we even recognized former Bratmobiler and occasional Sparky's patron Alison Wolfe. Whoops.
Sleater-Kinney was playing two shows in London, and we had decided to go to the second because the Fiery Furnaces were playing. It's nice to see someone in the great garage rock revival skewing bluesy. If the White Stripes had spent their time listening to the Stones instead of the Stooges (and had a less winsome Meg singing), it might come out like this. I liked them a lot, enough to look for their stuff the next time I make it to a record store.
Scout Niblett was, uhh, remarkable. Starting with the name, which amused all of V.'s cousin's friends. "Scout Niblett? Not really?" I liked her set a lot too, but it was a train-wreck kind of fascination. Time Out seems to be a big fan and I trust their judgment, but I thought her set was dreadful. Maybe she's better on record, but her one-woman-show act reminded me of someone who studied the stylings of late Jonathan Richman and the late Wesley Willis, and then said, "I'm a pretty girl! I can do faux naif!" She had a good voice -- a kind of Chan Marshall voice, and the Cat Power comparisons shouldn't stop there -- but seriously, the lyrics of a representative song: "Give me a T! Give me an R! Give me a U! Give me a C! Give me a K! TRUCKERS! Give me a L! Give me an O! Give me a V! Give me an E! LOVERS!" Uh-huh. And there was banging on a drum in there. I can understand why the promo sheet I got handed didn't seem to know what to say about her but instead talked about how she was the next new thing.
Sleater-Kinney tore it up. I confess that I haven't liked the last couple of albums nearly as much as Dig Me Out or The Hot Rock, but boy, the new songs are just furious live, and they seem to have given Corin and Carrie an excuse to exercise their inner guitar rock gods. During their encore, they were playing "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone", and they used a lengthy guitar solo to transition to the next. On the other hand, during their set, I discovered the other important difference between crowds in London and crowds in DC: Londoners mosh. I felt awful for the very tiny couple (sisters? lovers?), who couldn't have weighed more than 200 pounds between the two of them. It was all very foreign and exoticized to me at this point; life in DC has totally removed this possibility from my consciousness. I kept expecting Ian MacKaye to appear with a lecture about the stupidity of crowd surfing (crowd surfing!). On the other hand, aren't exotic experiences what a honeymoon is supposed to be about? Who needs Bali?
July 29, 2003
The Corn Sisters
Neko Case/Kelly Hogan/Carolyn Mark, the Black Cat, 27 July
This was officially billed as a Neko Case show, but the sexiest woman in indie rock wasn't really a solo act. Instead, the alt.country chanteuse was playing with Kelly Hogan (of Atlanta's way good, way garage-y Rock-A-Teens) and Carolyn Mark (who is, with Case, the other half of the Corn Sisters). I'm going to call this a Corn Sisters show, and to hell with it. The three only played a few of Neko's solo songs ("Look for Me (I'll Be Around)" and her cover of Hank Williams' "Alone and Foresaken", among others). Neither Hogan nor Mark can wail like Case, but that's unsurprising. As my friend Tracy noted a few years ago, Case has just an incredible set of pipes, something that really obviates the need for a band or backup singers. The girl can belt it. But the three (and Bloodshot session guitarist Jon Rauhouse) were pretty tight for a group that seems not to have practiced or toured together much, and there were some amazing three-part harmonies. Standouts of the night in my mind were a girl-group-ish "Smoke Rings" (a tune Mary Ellen informed me was most recently covered by k.d. lang) and the shiver-inducing "Look for Me". A wonderful show, even if Case didn't tap dance the way she apparently used to for the Corn Sisters; I was impressed enough that I've ordered some of Hogan's solo work.
July 26, 2003
28 Days Later
My friend Johnny says that zombie movies are his favorite because they tell the story of what happens when civilization is stripped away. Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave stripped the veneer away from three London yuppies and let them slip into a war of all against all, so you'd think he'd be a natural to make a zombie film. You'd be right; 28 Days Later is really good. The setup -- they're not the walking dead, but victims of some sort of zombifying virus that is transmitted through blood and saliva and takes effect within seconds -- means that the zombies can be something other than the shambling braineaters I know and love, and it works magnificently: the zombies are creepy as hell. The film is lovely, too; I don't normally care for feature films shot on digital video, but it looks just right for post-apocalyptic London. (The cinematographer is associated with the Dogme 95 folks, so video is presumably his métier.) The contrast between London and the bucolic countryside is handled nicely, too. The second half of the film gets a bit too man-vs.-man society-gone-mad for my tastes (a bit too Shallow Grave, in fact). Romero's best movies knew that human conflict is supposed to be the backdrop and subtext for zombie-related carnage, not the other way around, and this falls down on that front, but I still liked 28 Days Later a heckuva lot.
(Bonus: A song by Godspeed You Black Emperor! on the soundtrack. Their music makes my commute feel cinematic and sweeping; it's no surprise that it works well as the protagonist runs through an abandoned London. Extra bonus for the distaff sex: V. says that the protagonist was knuckle-chewingly hot. Extra extra bonus: There's apparently a new ending now playing after the credits; I might go back and see it again, because I am a sucker, yes I am.)
June 29, 2003
Whale Rider
If Whale Rider had been a Disney movie, it would have been absolutely dreadful; made by a bunch of New Zealand indie filmmakers, it came out as a surprisingly intelligent and effective (though certainly not innovative) family drama. The plot -- a spunky Maori girl wins her crusty, traditionalist grandfather's approval, despite not being a boy -- doesn't sound promising. But despite being every bit as sentimental as that summary would suggest, Whale Rider was a charming little movie. Part of it has to do with the lead actress, Keisha Castle-Hughes. Child actors are generally abhorrently cute, but Castle-Hughes' performance as Paikea reminded me of the child actors Jafar Panahi dug up for The Mirror and The White Balloon. She's got a very natural, winning screen presence; I suspect she's going to grow up to be breathtaking; I hope she doesn't lose her on-screen comfort. And her interactions with Rawiri Paratene, playing her grandfather, Koro, are brilliantly underplayed.
Beyond the acting (and the lovely New Zealand countryside), the secret of Whale Rider, V. and I decided, is that it was willing to make her grandfather's resistance to Pai wholly credible. Her grandfather is a tribal leader who has been awaiting a chief who can resurrect the small rural town, seeming entirely populated by Maori, in which he and his family live. Koro's relentless drive to shape a new prophet has driven his eldest son to Europe and life as an artist and his second son -- passed over by the order of his birth -- to a cheerful, beer-fueled, and inert life. Paikea is named after the mythic founder of the Maori people, but she's a girl. We know how this is going to turn out, of course, but unlike the crusty-old-men with hearts-of-gold in Pollyanna or The Secret Garden, Koro's beliefs seem to have had genuine negative consequences. Even though we see that Koro's operating within the framework that he understands, and even though he's depicted flatteringly, he's run off his two children and he's in the process of running off his only grandchild. Until a literal miracle forces him to reevaluate his beliefs, Koro is a sympathetic, nuanced jerk, and children's movies could use more of the type.
May 31, 2003
Gigantic
It was weird walking into the showing of Gigantic: The Story of Two Johns. Usually when I am at an event attended by a deeply geeky subculture, I am at least noddingly a participant in that subculture. But while I think "Anna Ng" is a great song and that the video for "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was fabulous, I'm not really an active fan of They Might Be Giants. The documentary only hints at the obsessive fandom that the band apparently inspires -- a girl bursts into tears after meeting the Johns, choking out that it's the happiest day of her life; a boy, maybe seventeen years old, says that he's seen TMBG upwards of seventy times -- but I got the feeling that every single person in the audience except me knew every lyric of every song in the movie.
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May 4, 2003
The Capricorns, In the Zone
In the Zone by the Capricorns is the album that makes the whole '80s revival kick worth it. Fischerspooner and the current version of the Faint have been redeemed by two girls with Casios. The first song on the album, "The New Sound", is amazingly catchy despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it sounds like they only half know how to play their instruments. Download it and be amazed; every person I've forced to listen to it has loved it. The hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show quality and the high school mash note lyrics remind me of Bratmobile, who I still get a kick out of, but this album is even sillier and more fun than Pottymouth. The riot grrl movement was ten years ago now, and all the lessons have been either assimilated or forgotten, making girls rocking out less a political statement (and girls who rock out less likely to be angry and politicized). Maybe that's it, or maybe it's just that New Wave should be dopey fun. It took forever for Paroxysm to send me my copy, but it was well, well worth it.
February 25, 2003
Dog Soldiers
My friend Claxy summed up Dog Soldiers quite neatly: (Night of the Living Dead - zombies) + (Aliens - aliens) + werewolves + self-awareness. Still, that doesn't mean it's a bad bad thing. Being neither as uncomfortably smart and unexpected as Night of the Living Dead nor as slick and white-knuckled as Aliens is not a damning flaw; Aliens was one of the best action movies of the Eighties, and Night of the Living Dead is one of the great horror movies of all time. Dog Soldiers is a movie about a small British Army unit conducting a field exercise in rural Scotland. I hope no readers will be shocked to discover that things go horribly, horribly awry when the werewolves turn up. Once the soliders hole up, along with a mysterious and taciturn Special Forces operative and the obligatory beautiful local, Dog Soldiers succeeds by keeping things moving. The key to great horror movies is a growing sense of either claustrophobia or the unheimlich, but Dog Soldiers is really a horror film more in the late Carpenter vein, which is to say an action film, quips and all. That's not a flaw, however: the characters are largely charming and believable, the plot suffers from no gaping holes until the very end, and the special effects are quite impressive for what must have been a limited budget. If a movie willing to sacrifice what mimesis it can get from a story about werewolves squaring off with the British Army for a cheap pun sounds appealing and the idea of a self-conscious horror movie hasn't been spoiled by Scream knockoffs, then Dog Soldiers is worth a rental. Plus, V. claimed that a number of the soldier boys were cute, and the obligatory beautiful local was awfully easy on the eyes.
February 22, 2003
Burma/Oxes
Tone/Oxes/Mission of Burma, the 9:30 Club, 21 February
Tone are playing when we arrive at the 9:30 Club. Tone consists of many, many guitar players, two bassists, and a drummer, or at least it did when I saw them last, a few years ago. We stand around in the lobby and chat. Our friend Nihar drifts by. We chat further. Everyone is amused by my $3 bag of earplugs, which contains ten pairs. Tone finishes their set and we troop into the main part of the club. Andrew has brought his Holga in the hopes of getting some good action shots of Oxes, but it is not to be; we're too far from the stage. Oxes play a very loud set. Their Shellac meets Van Halen schtick isn't quite as pronounced -- the mathy stuff is less obviously weird, and the this-one-goes-to-11 guitar solos don't seem quite as blisteringly fast -- but they've got some weird anti-charisma mojo working (the drummer announces that the tie he is wearing was a gift from his mother) and, as I've heard, take full advantage of their wireless guitars and wander around the crowd. V. declares the guitarist, zipping through the crowd on his knees, "unheimlich". I strongly suspect that the Fucking Champs don't kneehop. Despite the presence of decently-sized audience) (including Jenny Toomey, J. Robbins, and a bunch of people who will dance like loons when Mission of Burma comes on), the crowd seems kind of dead for the Oxes set.
We have a minor brush with fame when one of the Oxes apparently gives Jane a shout-out; he has recognized her as associated with her high school boyfriend. Jane bursts out laughing. Later, our friend Bob wanders by, and reports that someone over where he was standing also seemed to think they were being referred to. Jane's high school boyfriend must get around. Bob mentions both that Martin Swope is not with the band for the reunion and that Big Bob Weston is manning their tape loops instead. He also tells me that Suicide is playing tomorrow night. If I hadn't already committed to going to a coworker's party, I could have a theme weekend. We chat some more, then Mission of Burma come on. I'm not sure why it is that I find punk rock reunions less creepy than, say, the eternal touring of the Rolling Stones, the Las Vegas-ready acts of people like Peter Frampton, or Depeche Mode's camp-injected revivals. Maybe it's because they're still playing clubs of approximately the same size as when they were in their heydey; maybe it's because they peaked before I was listening to punk rock and never became overly familiar through MTV. A singalong "Academy Fight Song" seems neither creepy nor pathetic. Mission of Burma is about what you'd expect for a bunch of guys who've been playing off and on since the early '80s -- slightly flat vocally, quite tight instrumentally. They rock hard for old guys. Between songs, Bob notes how mindblowing it must have been to wander into the Rat and hear these guys in 1982. Everyone sings along to "That's When I Reach for My Revolver", and V. and I stagger out into the snow to catch the last train home.
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