Showing posts in the “Live Actions: Reviews” category
Chris Toenes ·
26 Feb 2010, 6:28 PM ·
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Mapfumo
Cold as it was last night, walking into Duke Coffeehouse’s transcendental dance vibe was wholly warming. The room filled up to a comfortable crowd, and as Mapfumo, “The Lion of Zimbabwe,” led his band in songs both traditional and fused with the funky, dancing spread from person to person like fever.
The Blacks Unlimited, Mapfumo’s current band, appeared onstage as an electric outfit, not unlike a funk band outfitted with twelve-string bass, guitars, keyboards and a Western drum kit. But a set of congas stood to one side, and buried behind the group’s front line, a sole mbira player sat. The mbira is a handmade thumb piano encased in a semi-circular wooden shell, and Shona mbira music is a cornerstone of Zimbabwean music and Mapfumo’s Chimurenga pop. It provides the beautiful undulating tones behind this band’s rhythmic base, and last night, the band’s sound was tight as they moved through those tones. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Duke Performances, Thomas Mapfumo
Spencer Griffith ·
24 Feb 2010, 1:31 PM ·
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The Dirty Little Heaters
Local 506, Chapel Hill
Saturday, Feb. 20
Plenty of bands commemorate their CD release with a special show—top-notch openers, an extra-long headlining set and a surprise guest or two. With its release party for Champions of Imperfection—five years in, the band’s first full-length—The Dirty Little Heaters did all that and a lot more.
After fellow Durhamites Pink Flag and Red Collar—whose new material sounded terrific, by the way—got things started, Magic Mike, the night’s emcee, gave a brief history lesson on the Heaters for the unacquainted. After some technical difficulties—“It’s always something with you,” singer/guitarist Reese McHenry’s bandmates chided—McHenry was joined by drummer Melissa Thomas and the duo (the original incarnation of The Dirty Little Heaters before splitting in late 2006) blasted through the raw punk of a couple of early Heaters tunes. Check “Cherry Van” below the jump.
Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews dirty little heaters
Chris Toenes ·
19 Feb 2010, 5:24 PM ·
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Dean and Britta, always a pleasure
Dean and Britta
Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010
Duke University, Durham
It could have ended up just another lesson in how the visual cannot be married to the musical easily, or vice versa. But there Dean and Britta were, with band members Lee Waters and Matt Sumrow, delicately balancing the two and winning. The project was offered to Wareham by the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and initially I thought, surely that offer was based on his experience with dreamy, atmospheric pop that might lend itself well to Warhol’s voluptuously slowed down film shorts.
Wareham has experience putting music to film: Dean and Britta contributed to The Squid and the Whale’s score, and Luna had songs in films before that. With a monstrous screen behind them, allowing the films to take appropriate visual dominance over any stage show, the band started into the set carefully, with Waters out on bass.
Then the tone was set: Wareham or Phillips gave a blip of background information, usually with a telling slice of life, for each of the 13 chosen film subjects. It made for an entirely different experience than an open viewing of these strong characters in Warhol’s circle, turning their non-performance performances into something much more revealing. So, while the Luna song “Teenage Lightning” was used for Paul America, and a Nico song, “I’ll Keep it with Mine,” was used for hers, some of the most effective combinations were less obvious. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Dean and Britta, Duke Performances, Lee Waters, Matt Sumrow
Spencer Griffith ·
10 Feb 2010, 5:50 PM ·
1 Comment
KNC, y'all.
WKNC Double Barrel Benefit
The Pour House, Raleigh
Friday, Feb. 5 & Saturday, Feb. 6
As I bemoan yet another Wolfpack men’s basketball loss (don’t laugh, Tar Heels), I’ve come to the regretful conclusion that WKNC—N.C. State’s student-run radio station—may be all that’s left to be proud of regarding my alma mater. Of course, that assumption may be colored by new memories of this weekend’s seventh annual Double Barrel Benefit, which starts another year of KNC-championed local music events: Besides blasting a heavy rotation of Triangle tunes on the airwaves, the station also backs sporadic on-campus shows and a Thursday night Local Beer/Local Band series at Tir Na Nog that offers fine bills for free on a weekly basis.
Making up for a lack of variety and marquee value, the eight-band line-up—while noticeably lacking any hometown representation—offered a solid mix of the area’s rising stars and established vets. Kicking off the festivities on Friday night, fledgling Chapel Hill outfit The Light Pines shared members (but less these days than in their previous gigs) and a sense of pop classicism with sister project The Love Language, though its songs seemed to take on a much darker tone than I remembered from the group’s brief set at the Drughorse Christmas show. Fronted by sometimes Love Language bassist Josh Pope, it should be no surprise that the Pines—which, like Stu McLamb’s aforementioned project, was birthed shortly after the demise of Strokes-soundalikes The Capulets—leans heavily on rhythm, too. I had a tough time grabbing good video, but fortunately Karen Mann pulled through. I did manage to catch some from the Christmas show, for comparison’s sake.
Up next, Carrboro duo Veelee added a surprising amount of energy to what I had previously considered to be gentle bedroom pop tunes. Vocalist Matt Park ripped jagged, crunchy riffs from his guitar—flashing some serious ’90s indie rock influence in the process—and craftily used his headstock and some well-placed duct tape to give himself an extra hand for keyboard flourishes. Alongside Ginger Wagg’s rudimentary drumming, the pair harmonized with a detached coolness through catchy choruses.
Bellafea—who had a relatively quiet 2009 while Heather McEntire and Eddie Sanchez worked on albums with Mount Moriah and Fin Fang Foom, respectively—followed. McEntire’s battle cry led the menacing trio through the sharp turns and tense twists of its tough, shifty tunes. During one particularly intense instrumental passage, McEntire faced her amp and unleashed a throat-shredding scream that seemed to hurl the band forward. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Bellafea, max indian, Roman Candle, Spider Bags, the light pines, The Pour House, veelee, WKNC
Jesse Jarnow ·
3 Dec 2009, 10:59 AM ·
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Goat head John Darnielle (Photo by York Wilson)
Adding drums to your two-man indie lit-folk thing recalls what Chekhov said about pistols hanging on walls: Eventually, they’d best to go off.
Adding a light show, roadies, a Rhodes and a shaggy-haired, blazer-clad lead guitarist—as Durham’s John Darnielle did to his expanding band The Mountain Goats during their just-concluded Life of the World to Come tour—and, well, you have something else entirely. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Superchunk, The Mountain Goats, The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers
Joe Schwartz ·
11 Nov 2009, 2:31 PM ·
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Looking for moe.rons
moe.
Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh
Wednesday, Nov. 4
Last Wednesday was the perfect night for the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh to begin selling liquor, as moe. stamped the night with its melted notes, dueling guitar solos, driving bass and a blend of lights of all colors. The crowd of glow-stick bearing “moe.rons”—some still dressed for Halloween, or maybe they were just dressed for a jam—dove into the new offerings quickly, several enjoying Jager shots along with their beers. Then, through beams of rainbow light and beer goggles, the assembled mass
witnessed two sets of one of the leading acts on the jam-band scene. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Lincoln Theatre, moe.
Byron Woods ·
11 Nov 2009, 12:37 PM ·
2 Comments
"Let that sink in for a moment: Leonard Cohen, affirming life."
Leonard Cohen
Durham Performing Arts Center
Tuesday, Nov. 3
Durham went 10 rounds with Leonard Cohen last Tuesday night. That assessment isn’t just based on the stamina the spectrally voiced 75-year-old songwriter displayed after nimbly bounding onto the DPAC stage moments after 8 p.m. and animating 24 hits, choice obscurities—and one new work he’d premiered the week before—before dancing off three hours later, just after 11:15 p.m. It also conveys the feeling of much of that time.
Perhaps the single most underreported fact of Cohen’s career is the quality that bankrupts most of the glib descriptions he’s collected over 40 years in music—the godfather of gloom, poet laureate of pessimism, even the wryly self-bestowed “grocer of despair.” If his work is so unrelievedly dour, why did a near-capacity house leave the DPAC so conspicuously … happy?
Critics and scholars before me have connected Cohen’s muse to the notion of duende, the profound Spanish aesthetic embodied in the seemingly disparate fields of bullfighting and flamenco dance and song. To the degree it’s true—and I believe it is—for Cohen, it’s not because his basement baritone suggests anything like the trembling, high-pitched cries of the classical cantaores of flamenco. Rather, we heard that quality repeatedly Tuesday night, not in Cohen’s voice, but in the beautiful unquiet of Javier Mas’ agitated, Phrygian runs on the Spanish bandurria and archilaud—most notably in the luminous solo Mas seemingly excavated, chip by chip, out of the darkness itself at the beginning of “Who by Fire.”
Rather, Cohen’s connection to the duende lies more in the words themselves and their delivery, which at times is more spoken than sung. Much the same could be said for Federico Garcia Lorca, another poet who not only probed the duende in his verse but also wrote analytically—and lyrically—about its quality in his essays. It’s a difficult concept to translate, but duende has to do with the intimate relationship between passion and absolute disaster. It articulates the risk inherent pursuing the truest, most intensely felt emotions to the end, at all costs. Duende gives us the stern reminder that when we strive for the deepest love, we must ultimately be prepared to experience the deepest pain. It confronts us, at once, with the contradictions of intimacy and desolation; sex and alienation; love and total loss.
Since duende so admonishes and threatens us, perhaps we should be clear about what side it’s on. The answer might be surprising to some. Duende, it seems, is on the side of life. So is the art of Leonard Cohen.
Let that sink in for a moment: Leonard Cohen, affirming life. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Durham Performing Arts Center, Leonard Cohen
Chris Toenes ·
6 Nov 2009, 6:43 PM ·
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When last night’s show first started, David Yow, the Jesus Lizard’s elemental front man (”singer” just doesn’t get to it,) made an early impression on one of my friends—a palm print. Yow gallivanted his way across the forest of young punk dudes and oldsters trying to get a lift, stepped up to him and slapped him straight in the face. As the guy was telling me the story, he raised his eyebrows, smiled a little, and said, “Hard.” Another friend was set adrift in “the pit,” a term destined for sounding corny these days, but there it is. Distracted in a moment when he was helping suspend Yow mid-air by supporting his tailbone, he got clocked and lost his glasses.
Thing is, last night’s The Jesus Lizard set at Cat’s Cradle was hardly a place where negativity held any sway with people. It was fucking joyous. You could not turn your head without seeing someone grinning like they were gonna soil their pants. People who didn’t know each other pulled each other up from the floor. Yow checked out every inch of the place, hanging from a fan one song, off to check the stability of some wooden staging boards the next. The band—Duane Denison, David Wm. Sims, and Mac McNeill—surged and jabbed like boxers. McNeilly pulled one of those anomalies you only see occasionally, a drum solo as brutal as their set in pace and pummeling heaviness. Denison and Sims blasted on guitar and bass what bordered on the best industrial clatter (certainly The Birthday Party is in there, always).
All this is what makes the combo of their sound and Yow’s ring-leading such a physical thing: They beat everyone up. Metal schmetal. Last night it was hard not to get punch-drunk. Skulking around like he knew no other place but that room, Yow coaxed the lot along, feeding beer to the diehards down front, twitching himself around in inhuman contortions. Continue reading »
Live Actions: Reviews Cat's Cradle, The Jesus Lizard
Spencer Griffith ·
14 Oct 2009, 5:11 PM ·
3 Comments
The Belleville Outfit and Casey Driessen
When it comes to music festivals, I’m a dabbler. Barring a few must-see acts, I tend to wander from stage to stage to try to catch bits of as many bands as possible, hoping to stumble across a surprise or two. At many festivals, that approach can be exhausting, making it easy to spend more time rushing off to see the next band than being able to get a true feel for the performers.
But thanks to generous set lengths and the close proximity of stages and tents, Shakori Hills is a sampler’s paradise. During my 13 hours at the festival, I was able to catch parts of 22 acts with enough time to actually relax and enjoy the music. I even managed a couple of cat naps. Hit the jump for minute-by-minute impressions.
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Live Actions: Reviews Chatham County Line, Lafcadio, Lost in the Trees, Mosadi Music, Shakori Hills, The Beast, The Jackets, The Never
