Friday Afternoon Purge
Posted on March 11, 2005 at 1:57 pm | No Comments
Time to clear the cache of all the things I wanted to mention while I was writing about Teenbeat…
Set the TiVo: Low will be appearing on Last Call tonight. Behold the power of Sub Pop.
Some proof that wishful blogging can really work…
In my best-of-2004 music post, I wrote about things I was looking forward to in ’05, and I half-jokingly hoped for the reappearance of the criminally underrated and long-dormant Minneapolis trio Arcwelder. I love ’em, I miss ’em. So a few days ago I read that Shellac is playing a few dates in April, and opening up the first show is… freakin’ Arcwelder. Hell yeah. I figure if I mention that I’m hoping for more Arcwelder shows and maybe some recordings that it might actually happen, right? Consider it wished for.
Fabchannel is, um, fab. High-quality streaming broadcasts of live shows that get archived for later viewing. Not only can you check out stored shows by Low, British Sea Power, Guided By Voices, Nada Surf and tons more, but this afternoon you can watch the Arcade Fire on stage in Amsterdam, and on April 4th they’ve got a Wedding Present gig scheduled. The site is pretty well-designed, and even has a feature that will send you an email reminder before a broadcast. Nice.
Billy Bragg continues to sell official live recordings through his website, with #4, recorded last year at the Barbican in London, on deck for release ‘any day now’. If you’re not in a paying mood, you can grab a few tracks from the 33 song set for free on his main page, or get three previous songs right here. (thanks, hold my life)
Jon Spencer (Pussy Galore / Blues Explosion) and Matt Verta-Ray (Speedball Baby) have teamed up to become Heavy Trash. Their self-titled debut is out in April, and you can check out the preview track ‘Justine Alright‘ here.
Well, this is a pretty novel event: Morrissey on the big screen. Yes, his upcoming live DVD ‘Who Put The “M” In Manchester?‘ will debut in select cities around the U.S. on March 28th at 8:30pm, including a showing here in Boston. According to the press release, the screening will include a performance of ‘How Soon Is Now?‘ that’s not on the DVD. Tickets are $10 and will be available ‘soon’, according to this site.
I love opening up my RSS reader and seeing a new post titled “EXCLUSIVE COLIN CLARY INTERVIEW!“. Hell, I love seeing Colin’s name anywhere online, but this new interview at Heraclitus Sayz is one of the best, no the best, chat with Mr. Clary I’ve ever read. Lots of insight into his songwriting and attitudes towards creating and recording music. Plus, a pretty comprehensive look at the bands he’s in and has been in. Yes, even the Flaming Hetts are mentioned. Hetts rule!
Things that everyone and their blogger brother has already mentioned but I can’t not link to…
Excellent new Sin City trailer. Not sure I could be more excited for this film. The V for Vendetta website is up. The Watchmen movie site has been updated a bit. Battlestar Galactica podcasts to listen to as you watch new episodes. The best use of podcasting power yet. Sorry, I mean ‘blogcasting‘. We really need to get the apple out of that buzzword. It ain’t just for ipods, people. The new Star Wars Episode III trailer is now available via bittorrent. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is being adapted into a 9-issue Vertigo comic series by Mike Carey and Glenn Fabry. It’s not out until June, but an 8-page preview will be in next month’s issue of Bill Willingham’s fantastic Fables series. Speaking of which, the fifth Fables trade paperback collection, ‘The Mean Seasons‘, is just out, and I’m so picking it up after work.
This show is already listed on the left, but it’s worth pointing out… The Lucksmiths are returning to Boston, playing PA’s Lounge in Somerville on May 7th with Ladybug Transistor. Cannot wait to see those Aussies again.
Boston-based mystery author Robert B. Parker will be making a rare reading appearance at the Brattle Theater on March 24th. Check out Exploit Boston! for details.
On my teevee screen lately…
The small-town football film Friday Night Lights, which was far better than I expected. Rent it just for the perfectly utilized score by Explosions in the Sky. Wow. Wong-Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Restrained, deliberately slow paced, and entirely mesmerizing. Pure genius. Carnivale’s stellar second season on HBO is building to what may be a second climax, after the already huge payoff a couple episodes back. Anyone who stopped watching after the semi-frustrating unanswered questions of the first season is really missing out on some killer storytelling. I’m completely sucked in. I just finished watching the entire seven season run of Deep Space Nine in syndication on Spike TV, and it’s easily become my favorite of all the Trek incarnations. Ron Moore proved why he was the perfect guy to spearhead the revamping of Battlestar Galactica. The last couple seasons of DS9 proved just how lacking Enterprise has been (despite it’s near-non-suckness in the past few months… too little, too late). If you’ve got a TiVo and missed out on DS9, they just started showing it again from the very beginning.
Hey, Bostonites… I’ve got a bunch of extra passes to an April 6th preview of Stephen Chow’s new flick Kung Fu Hustle. The guy’s nuts, his films are pretty out there, usually damn entertaining. I loved God of Cookery, but missed out on Shaolin Soccer (it’s in the Netflix queue), so I’m psyched for this. If you wanna join me, drop a comment.
Speaking of Netflix, are there any Almanac readers out there who use it and love it? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll add you to my Netflix Friends page. I’m always into seeing what other people are renting.
Wow, has Blogger been biting the big one lately, or what? Terrible performance over the past couple days, intermittent trouble over the past couple months. Not sure if their user growth is outpacing their server space, but yeesh it’s been frustrating. My last Teenbeat post was delayed about a day, and the glitches have forced me to never click ‘publish’ or ‘save’ without first copying all my post text into a notepad document. Otherwise, I’d have lost way too many words. I think Google needs to throw some of the extra stock-funded cash toward a bunch of new servers, some extra techs, or at least some customer service to keep users updated. The Blogger status page is completely worthless. (perfect irony: as of right now, the status page isn’t even up!) I’ll be lucky if I’m able to post this entry before I leave work today.
And last, but very far from least, I’m obliged to do some personal plugging so you can plan your weekend accordingly…
I’m making my long-awaited (well, by me anyway) return to my seat behind the drum kit on Sunday night, playing in the band Charlene at TTs. It’s been a hectic couple of weeks getting ready for this thing while I test my new bandmates’ patience learning songs that they already know by heart. I think I’m almost ready, though… just in the nick of time.
We’re on at 10 o’clock, that’s Sunday, March 13th, playing just after the wonderful Broken River Prophet (who have a brand new website. arrive early, don’t miss ’em!), and just before Hood, on tour from the UK. If you end up going, say hello. I’ll be the nervous guy drinking hopefully just the right number of beers.
Teenbeat’s 20th: Night Three Redux
Posted on March 10, 2005 at 2:24 pm | No Comments
It was late 1992, living in Vermont and inhaling independently released music faster than air, when a stylishly designed 7-inch from upstart Boston label Pop Narcotic caught my eye at the record store. Two songs by a band I’d never heard called Versus, ‘Bright Light‘ backed with ‘Forest Fire‘. The a-side was rockin’, super-catchy, energetic, and sung by a guy, the b-side was female-fronted and hauntingly beautiful. It sounded like two different bands, both damn good, and I was hooked. I spun the thing to death, tracked down their other earlier 7”, and waited patiently for the self-released ‘Let’s Electrify‘ EP to come out the next year.
But my Versus obsession peaked in mid-94 when Teenbeat Records released their first full-length, ‘The Stars Are Insane‘. It was my summer soundtrack, I played it incessently, and imagined seeing them on stage. It would be years until I did, and while I loved pretty much everything they did in the meantime, it was that first album that lodged itself forever in my brain. (and I’ll never admit that I fell for Amie ‘cuz she had a copy of it on her cd shelf, although it certainly didn’t hurt.)
While I’m a big Unrest fan, it was the prospect of a Versus reunion that really sold me on a trip to DC for the Teenbeat 20th Anniversary shows. I’d last seen them in 2003, so they hadn’t been out of commission all that long, but for my money they’re one of the most dependable live bands out there. Though they’re not offically broken up, the prospect of another record happening anytime soon, while not impossible, is fairly slim with all the other active projects they’re involved in (Patrick & James in Plus Minus, Richard’s Whysall Lane, and Fontaine in The Fontaine Toups). So I needed a full-on Versus fix, and DC was the only place I was gonna get it for awhile. Hell, if I was really lucky, maybe they’d even play something from ‘The Stars Are Insane‘…
Well, they played the whole. damn. thing.
Yes, Versus played the entirety of ‘The Stars Are Insane‘, start to finish, note for note, from Thera through I’ll Be You. I’m still in shock.
But more on that later. Just had to get it outta my system.
So this third and final night started off with a slight letdown, as many were expecting an opening live performance by Trevor Kampmann, aka hollAnd, but instead got an on-screen projection of the DVD that comes packaged with his ‘I Steal and Do Drugs‘ disc. Not sure if this was planned all along or if hollAnd just couldn’t make it, but odds are it would have just been him and a laptop anyway, right?
Soon the video screen came down, the crowd moved to the stage, and the three ladies who are Hot Pursuit appeared to much applause. Evelyn Hurley (ex-Blast Off Country Style), Margaret McCartney (ex-Tuscadero, who were closing out the evening), and drummer Ginger Crockett presented us with a six song set of pretty pleasing pop. Here’s three of ’em…
Hot Pursuit – ‘Hawaii‘ (live)
Hot Pursuit – ‘Number One‘ (live)
Hot Pursuit – ‘Lucky Seven‘ (live)
Next up was Aden, a band I was only semi-familiar with, having heard and liked a few of their songs on compliations. Frontguy Jeff Gramm seemed genuinely honored to be a part of the lineup, and I really wanted to get into their set, but something just seemed… off. I knew the songs were there, a couple really stood out as excelllent, but I gotta say, hopefully without sounding too mean, I was pretty darn distracted by the guitar noodling of the long-haired gent on stage left. His amp was too loud where I was, and his meandering lines sounded straight out of the grateful dead-zone. Not really my thing. (case in point: I once took a few guitar lessons, and as soon as the instructor said with a smile that “the first song you’re going to learn to play is ‘Casey Jones‘ by the Dead!”, I walked out and never came back). Admittedly, I enjoyed going through my recording of the Aden set more than I did that live experience… they sound much better than I remembered at the time…
Aden – ‘I Knew You Would Go‘ (live)
Aden – ‘Pop Song‘ (live)
Aden – ‘Dear John‘ (live – with Evelyn Hurley)
And then came my biggest musical discovery of the entire event… Flin Flon. I’d until then missed the Flin Flon train, but I’m happily on board after what I saw that night at the Black Cat. They physically moved me, their amazing rhythm section barreling along with a dancey Joy Division-meets-Six Finger Satellite feel, Teenbeat honcho Mark Robinson peppering the songs with his familiar voice and guitar notes. The crowd was way into it, and I was right there in the middle. Listening to the recordings reveals to me just how much you need to see this band live… the audio is not enough, doesn’t capture quite what we got hit with. But it’s a start…
Flin Flon – ‘Swift Current‘ (live)
Flin Flon – ‘Black Bear‘ (live)
Flin Flon – ‘Kamloops‘ (live)
Now I just need to pick a Flin Flon disc or two.
At last, my personal main attraction… the quartet that is Versus. They started out with a simple ‘This set is for Mark’, dedicating it all to Mr. Teenbeat, the very man who released their first album. Three songs later I realized they were going to play every freakin’ track from that record, and I don’t think I stopped smiling until well after they left the stage. Like I said, it was a little dream come true for me. Here’s the first half of the set, the first half of that brilliant album…
Versus – ‘Thera‘ (live)
Versus – ‘Circle‘ (live)
Versus – ‘Fallow‘ (live)
Versus – ‘River‘ (live)
Versus – ‘Mirror Mirror‘ (live)
Versus – ‘Be-9‘ (live)
… and I’ll be posting the second half of them on Monday. Their whole damn debut album live, songs that are over a decade old, every single one. Can you tell I was a little excited? What a gift, and we actually have Mr. Robinson to thank for it. He asked the band if they’d do it, and whaddya know… they obliged. So cool of ’em. Again, just… wow.
It’d be kinda hard to follow that up, right? Well, a reunited Tuscadero did their best, closing out the celebration with a thirteen song set of their hook-filled bubblegum-poprock. I’d seen them a couple times when they came up to Vermont and played the Burlingtonitus fest, and while they were never the most exciting live band, they were pretty together for having packed it over five years ago. The crowd ate it up and sang along to many of their familiar songs, getting just a little louder during their ‘Centerfold‘ cover. Here’s five for ya…
Tuscadero – ‘Mt. Pleasant‘ (live)
Tuscadero – ‘Tickled Pink‘ (live)
Tuscadero – ‘Nancy Drew‘ (live)
Tuscadero – ‘Hollywood Handsome‘ (live)
Tuscadero – ‘Centerfold‘ (live – J. Geils Band cover)
So that’s it for my Teenbeat anniversary posts, at least until I post the rest of that Versus set on Monday. And a reminder, you can find a bunch more pictures from the shows in this Teenbeat Flickr set I pulled together, along with other peoples’ pics when you click this Teenbeat Tag search link.
Thanks, Teenbeat. I had a blast.