Once upon a time, I owned more Pink Floyd CDs than CDs by any other artist — combined. I was depressed because I thought I'd never find a band whose music was as transcendently amazing or that affected me in such an emotional way. I put up posters at my school celebrating the 25th anniversary of Dark Side of the Moon. I bought or downloaded "RoIOs" (seems like only Pink Floyd fans use this term instead of "bootleg") and became familiar with tens of different performances of the same few songs. When I was a junior in high school, I once told a class that the one thing I wanted to do before I died was to see Pink Floyd live.
Needless to say, I've since set my life goals slightly higher, and Pink Floyd has slipped considerably in my list of favorite bands. Still, when I found out that The Australian Pink Floyd Show (hereafter "Aussie Floyd") were going to play in the DC area, it was with only mild hesitation that I ponied up fifty bucks for a ticket. And I somewhat guiltily slipped out of work an hour or so early — it was a late night tonight as a bill we've been working to kill for over years now is going to a vote tomorrow — to make it to the show.
When I got to the theater, 45 minutes late, the band was just wrapping up what sounded like a killer version of "Us and Them" and seguing into the finale of Dark Side of the Moon. It looked like the first set was that album in its entirety; despite my poster shenanigans in high school, Dark Side has never been one of my favorite Floyd albums and so I wasn't overly bummed about missing out on most of the set. However, to my surprise I did nearly get chills listening to "Brain Damage/Eclipse," so things were looking good.
After a brief intermission, the second set kicked off with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," much to my delight (Wish You Were Here remains my favorite Floyd album). I won't list out the whole setlist, but suffice it to say that it drew from a wide variety of albums, although the only pre-Dark Side songs were "One Of These Days" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun." The latter was godly. The live rendition was trancelike at the beginning and ending, but unlike the original, added in an absolutely crushing middle section, with a pair of white-hot solos courtesy of the guitarist and saxophonist. Easily the highlight of the show for me. The pro-shot YouTube video below is good, but doesn't do the performance I saw justice.
Elsewhere were some totally unsurprising selections like "Wish You Were Here," "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2" (with a nifty guitar solo section), "Comfortably Numb," etc. If I had a complaint it would be that there were too many songs from The Wall. The vocalists in Aussie Floyd did a decent job with Gilmour's rich vocal parts, but couldn't pull of Waters' reedy, tortured-soul vocals nearly as convincingly. In fact, overall their vocal performances, while technically sound, were emotionally a little flat. Some of the songs from The Wall (in addition to not being my favorites in the first place) suffered as a result.
An odd highlight for me was "Learning to Fly" off of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which was played in a form closer to the funkier Delicate Sound of Thunder version. Momentary Lapse is not an album that most Floyd fans would ever call one of their best, but I have a bit of a soft spot for it. It was the first Floyd album I ever heard; I stayed up all night on a long bus ride from North Carolina to the Florida Keys on a seventh-grade school trip, listening to this album over and over again. When Aussie Floyd played "Learning to Fly" — my favorite song on the album then and now — I closed my eyes and I was 12 years old again, watching the nighttime landscape zoom past under the light of the moon as a whole world of music was opened up to me thanks to an old cassette tape in a borrowed Sony Walkman.
I'm watching the Patriots-Colts NFL game this afternoon, and I swear I just heard CBS use a Within Temptation song. It was just a quick instrumental part, chugging guitars fading out just as some characteristically symphonic-metal keyboards started to play. That was weird. Couldn't quite identify the exact song right off the bat, but I'm holding the melody in my head until I can figure it out.
Tonight I saw the "Final Cut" version of Blade Runner, which is set to (finally) come out on DVD this December, but which has seen extremely limited public screenings — at a few film festivals, plus a couple theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and, very very oddly, a one-screen theater in Washington DC that's a 15-minute walk from my house. Bizarre. The changes were subtle between this cut and the previously released "Director's Cut" — the most obvious stuff was that this version is definitely a little more graphically violent. See this website for tons more info on this if you're an SF film buff.
I'm writing about it here because I've been obsessively listening to Sunset Mission by Bohren und der Club of Gore for the past few days, and it strikes me that if Blade Runner had been made in the 90s instead of the 80s, this album would have made a perfect soundtrack to some of the quiet cityscape scenes in the film. Of course, Vangelis' soundtrack is very good (but not beyond reproach — I find it a little too intrusive at times and the "Love Theme" makes me cringe), but Sunset Mission seems perfectly tailored for this kind of thing. Despite the band name, these guys play a slow, smoky kind of cinematic music, with touches of jazz in the saxophone and Rhodes but also touches of metal in the mood and oppressiveness. The cover art of this album is a photo of a wet cityscape at dusk, and the music evokes that kind of dark urban noir perfectly. Thanks to some of the folks at ProgressiveEars for mentioning these guys offhand and making them sound so interesting that I immediately went and found this OOP album on eBay. Of course, I thought I was getting Sunn O)))-style drone metal with saxophone, but I'm pretty happy with this despite my foiled expectations.
A couple days ago I finally downloaded the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows. I still haven't quite figured out what I think about their distribution method (if you've been living in a cave somewhere, they are offering the album as a download and allowing fans to pay whatever they want for it; a CD release isn't coming until next year). I decided to pay... nothing. I feel okay about that for a couple reasons: point one, these are 160kbps MP3s we're talking about here, not lossless files or even VBR MP3s; and that ties into point two, that if I like this I'll probably go ahead and pay for the CD when it comes out. Also, these guys make a shitload of money anyway and since I have the option, I'd rather invest my music budget into bands that lose money with every record and play in shitty holes in the wall for 5 fans at a time.
Kick over any given virtual rock on the Internet and you'll find a debate about this innovation in music distribution, so I won't get into that here. Regarding the music itself, well, it's okay. I probably like it more than anything they've done since Kid A, so that's great, but I'm not exactly blown away. As a tangent, I find it really amusing the way that Pitchfork likes to verbally fellate this band to a ridiculous extent, giving the album a 9.3 (I honestly thought they were going to give it a 10.0 even before they ever heard it) and running like five or six news articles and full-length features about the album, in addition to the review. Sometimes that website is just absurd. In any case, In Rainbows is definitely a solid effort, if a surprisingly chilled-out one, and I'm looking forward to listening to it some more. I don't think it'll ever rate the equivalent of a 9.3 on my scale, though. That's what, a Gnosis 14? No, I expect this one's more like a strong 10.
Maybe the most fun thing about this sucker is that there's no cover art provided, so fans have taken it upon themselves to make their own. Here's a place with a ton of covers, some of which are really, really great. But my choice for easily the best of the bunch is this one:
Got a little lull in concertgoing (there are a couple shows of interest at An Die Musik this weekend, but I'm going to take a break), so it's time to catch up a bit on the backlog. Last week, Yo La Tengo played at the Birchmere, kind of a weird venue for an indie-rock trio known for making a shitload of delicious guitar feedback noise on top of a steady, almost Krautish pulse. The reason they were playing at this venue — an intimate dinner club whose more usual fare are singer-songwriters, country musicians and aging rockers — was the nature of this tour, dubbed "The Freewheeling Yo La Tengo." The concept was basically that they would play "semi-acoustically," kicking off with a couple songs and then opening up the rest of the concert to questions and requests.
There aren't too many bands out there that can pull this off. Ideally, it requires a large and diverse repertoire of songs, the ability to play them acoustically, the ability to play any one of them on cue, a devoted and knowledgeable fan base, and the charisma to be able to sit on stage and answer questions without boring your audience stiff. I'm having a hard time thinking of any other bands that could actually do this, but Yo La Tengo managed to do it and be entertaining throughout. It helps that they're one of the most endearing bands around, consisting of a married couple (he on guitars, she on drums) and a third-wheel bassist, all of whom have been playing music together for multiple decades (okay, the bassist is the relative "new guy," having only been in the band for 15 years or so). The vibe these guys give off is one of relaxed confidence, like they've been together for so long they can handle pretty much anything the audience throws at them. In particular, guitarist Ira Kaplan was comfortably engaging and funny onstage, appropriate as it's his guitar pyrotechnics that — for this listener at least — really propel the band to their most exhilirating musical heights.
I waited too long to pen this writeup, as I no longer remember much about the questions that were asked, but the band encouraged people to ask about anything, not just music. Nevertheless, for the most part the questions (mercifully in my opinion) stuck to Yo La Tengo's music; the most off-topic it got was, "what's your favorite Simpsons episode and why?" — and even that one became YLT-related since the answer was "well, the one that we did the music for, obviously."
Musically, Yo La Tengo has a long and impressively diverse discography. I had expected them to stick mostly to the quieter stuff, or at least the poppier stuff. For the first half of the show or so, this was the case; they played a lot of their contemplative, slow-paced material, of which I generally find about half to be beautiful and half forgettable. But they did end up playing some louder stuff. It turned out that by "semi-acoustic," what they really meant was "electric, but without distortion." To my surprise and delight, they even played "The Story of Yo La Tango," which is a 12-minute epic of guitar feedback and distortion over an insistent motorik beat. Kaplan did crank up a tiny bit of distortion on this one, but far less than usual, and the effect was fascinating, more spacious if not quite as compelling as the original.
For the first bit of the show I was kind of wishing the band would stop talking so much and just play more music. But it didn't take long for me to warm up to them, and it ended up being a really neat experience punctuated by some great music. They didn't blow my mind like they did last year (when Kaplan beat up on his guitar the way Cecil Taylor beats the shit out of pianos), but it was a pleasant evening and a rare look into the workings of one of the most long-lived bands in the turbulent world of indie-rock.
Last night I saw the semi-legendary guitarist Bill Frisell, which was curious because I've never been a huge fan of his. He was playing in a trio with Jenny Scheinman (I do like a lot of her work, but have never really been able to get into the album I have with her as a leader, 12 Songs) on violin and Greg Leisz on lap steel and pedal steel. The overall sound of this trio was extraordinarily chill, occupying a space somewhere between bluegrass, Americana, jazz and classical. They opened with a piece that lasted around 45 minutes, which featured some really beautiful melodies, but when Frisell was doing his exploratory solos I quickly lost interest. He has a certain sense of melody that I find difficult to follow; it's fractured in a way that doesn't appeal to me all that much. He spent a really long time playing those fractured semi-melodies, in his clean-as-a-whistle undistorted tone, using a lot of looping and some pitch manipulation, and when he was noodling away I was mostly bored. But when the band came together — man, they were beautiful. Scheinman tended to dominate the obvious melodies, and her playing was immaculately tasteful.
The highlight for me, though, were the moments when Leisz — the only one of the three musicians with whom I was not familiar beforehand — took the spotlight. Like Frisell and Scheinman, his playing was invariably low-key and tasteful, and his lap steel playing was just beautiful. Whenever he was in the lead or playing any kind of lyrical melody, I felt like I was listening to soundtrack music to an old black and white western. Just really evocative stuff. These moments were more frequent in the three pieces they played after that one 45-minute piece, perhaps because those pieces were more composed with less emphasis on improvisation (though to be honest at many times I had a hard time telling what was written and what was played on the fly).
Not a transcendent experience, then, but I wasn't expecting one. I went mostly because I really wanted to see Scheinman, and while I was lost for a little while, there was enough there to keep me pretty happy. That's actually kind of surprising in and of itself, considering that my taste in jazz runs almost exclusively to the energy-jazz side of things, and this show was pretty much exactly the opposite.
An appreciative farewell to Stylus Magazine, which for a while now has been one of the several music websites I check daily for insights into new listening fodder, and which is closing its doors today. Sometimes I found their writing a little too meandering and personal, but overall I enjoyed the site a lot and particularly liked some of the offbeat lists and features they came up with. It's always sad to see a source of good music writing disappear, and Stylus follows in the footsteps of the likes of Progweed, Splendid and Paris Transatlantic in terms of online publications that I've been sorry to see go, and continue to miss.
