My ‘Best Of’ Round-Up from Sasquatch 2012

I’d been looking forward to this year’s Sasquatch Festival for a long time, and I’m happy to say it was just what I’d been hoping for. I’ll admit I got tired of the ‘festival’ part of the festival—walking through a knee-deep crush of drunk, sunburned, half-naked college kids to pay $13 for a PBR got old after about a day, but hey—I went to see a ton of good shows, and a ton of good shows is what I got. Right now, I’m in that comfortable spot in festival recovery where I have my hearing back, but my legs still insist I stay on the couch, so I thought it’d be a good time to write down some impressions from the festival. (In a convenient ‘awards show’ format, even!)

Without further ado: Charlie’s Best-Of awards from Sasquatch Festival 2012.

Best use of a huge stage: Bon Iver. The band had a well-attended set at the main stage, Sunday night, conveniently following M. Ward, The Head & the Heart and Beirut to cap a string of big-name indie-rock sets. They filled the amphitheater, and they filled out the stage pretty nicely, too, forgoing the festival’s default lighting rig in favor of their own draped sculture, which dressed the stage to the rafters and added tons of visual appeal to their light show.
Runner-up: Tenacious D, for the ‘rising phoenix’ sculpture that really, really looked like a dick. Bonus points for dressing one guitarist, at various points, as both a sasquatch and the devil.

Expectation most defied: Tune-yards. Their work has an interesting ‘post hip-hop’ leaning, in that they take inspiration from sample-driven styles of music, but perform it all live. Seeing them on stage drove that point home, and earned them a lot of respect from the crowd, including me.
Runner-up: M. Ward. Someone I closely identify with the trend towards world-weary, lugubrious hipster indulgence just happened to throw down one of the most rocking sets of the day three. My sweetheart and I were in the pit for that one, and couldn’t resist dancing to his cover of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”.

Expectation best met: Mark Lanegan. He was the top of my list of reasons for going, this year, and his set got my festival-going experience off to a great start. True to form, he greeted the audience with almost total indifference, railroading from one song to the next without so much as a ‘hello’. But the songs were fantastic. His set focused on tracks from his latest album, but mixed in a few songs from earlier in his solo career, too. The fanatical crowd that makes up the first few rows at any Lanegan show made a strong showing at Sasquatch, and Mark didn’t let us down.
Runner-up: Spiritualized. During a conversation about favorite UK bands, a campsite neighbor told me I had to catch Spiritualized’s set. I have no excuse for not knowing their music already, since they’ve been doing exactly my kind of ‘space-rock’ for over 20 years, now. My neighbor’s recommendation was dead-on, though, and their set (only slightly confused by a schedule change to fill in for Mogwai, who canceled late in the festival) was an absolute joy.

Best sound mix: St. Vincent. She/they put on an all-around great set, Saturday night, for an appreciative crowd. Much credit to the band, and to the sound crew for getting every note through the PA in a sharp, clear mix. Festivals aren’t known for great sound mixes, and there were a few stinkers at this fest (notably Shabazz Palaces, whose sound techs seemed totally unprepared,) but for the hour St. Vincent took over the stage, the mix was pitch-perfect.
Runner-up: Explosions in the Sky. Their brand of ‘pedal porn’ free-form noise rock is notoriously tricky to mix live, but the crew at the Bigfoot Stage pulled it off in aces Friday night. The fireworks going off during the end of their set were really from Girl Talk’s stage show, but you could be forgiven for thinking they made a better fit for Explosions’ set.

Most pleasant surprise: Poliça. Considering the amount of ink spilled over this band lately, it’s hard to believe they just put out their first album in February. I’m a firm believer that the true test of any electronic rock act is in their live performances, and I’m pleased to report that Poliça on stage is every bit as tight, expressive and charismatic as Poliça on record.
Runner-up: Alabama Shakes. Uniting a folkie band under the driving Motown chops of vocalist Brittany Howard, Alabama Shakes can kick out tunes that get right under your skin. I was fortunate to catch part of their main set, and their later acoustic set in KNDD’s tent, and I wouldn’t miss a chance to see them perform live again.

Most welcome trend: Popular rock finally getting back some traces of 60s bar rock, as exemplified by The Sheepdogs, Deer Tick or Black Whales, among others. It’s nice to hear that sound thriving.
Runner-up: Grown-ups on stage. One of my long-standing gripes with my fellow music listeners is our habit of tuning people out once they reach their mid-thirties. Even ignoring vets like Spiritualized or Wild Flag, the median age of performers at this Sasquatch seemed refreshingly adult.

Least worthwhile use of Michael Lerner: Portlandia. I heard a lot of griping about Portlandia’s audience-participation set on Saturday, and I tend to agree that, for a comedy set, they managed to pass the time with a minimum of comedy. But the worst part, for me, was watching Telekinesis’ Michael B. Lerner wait behind the drum kit at the back of the stage, just sitting there. I can’t help thinking it would have been a better set if Fred & Carrie had just wandered off and let Lerner tear it up.

Most surprising trend: The enormous preponderance of Gibson guitars on stage. I’m as big an SG fetishist as anyone, but I can’t remember the last time I left a festival thinking Fender had been under-represented. What’s up with that?

So, thanks for reading, and if you were one of my fellow attendees this year, thanks for sharing a great time!

What Awaits Good Criticism—An Object Lesson from SPIN Magazine

Bear with me: SPIN Magazine has a new top-100 list, headed “SPIN’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.  If you feel like reading it, go ahead. You’re guaranteed to feel a few moments of mild vindication, and a few of intense provocation. They’ve done the same thing many times before, and it’s a recipe that SPIN, among other magazines, have down to an exact science, by now. The comment thread on their website makes for a good litmus test of their success, too; every commenter found something to rage against, even if they had to resort to reading other comments. The sort of people who like arguing about this sort of thing have, undoubtedly, brought the fight to Facebook, too. But under all the comment-baiting, this is a great example of the ‘music news churn’ in operation. And I worry that it illustrates a growing trend.

The obvious criticisms are, conveniently, justified—as the “100 Greatest” list its headline would seem to suggest, the article is baffling in both what it includes and what it leaves out. But the bigger-picture complaint is that there’s actually a good idea underneath this article: as the introduction briefly hints, it’s an attempt at a list of musicians (guitarists or otherwise) who might have made lasting contributions to the way we hear guitars, in the generation since the Velvet Underground, or thereabouts. Rather than holding up technically skilled guitarists, most of the authors are out to praise new directions. (Skrillex and Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay  both place, by virtue of their use of recorded guitar tracks.) There are certainly too many chefs in the kitchen, and the text of the article regularly disagrees with itself, both in tone and in content. But there are, undeniably, good criticism and insight on display. The big idea, unfortunately, just doesn’t jive with the editorial voice.

I don’t mean to weep for what might have been, in that particular article. But it’s a better-than-usual example of a wider problem. It would be naive to say this is a sign of the times in publishing, since magazines have been running exactly this kind of piece since long before there was an internet. And SPIN is certainly just one lemming in the herd. But I do worry that the imperative to bait traffic has begun to push the balance of content more and more towards this type of article. We sacrifice an awful lot of smart criticism to create the illusion of controversy, these days, and I don’t believe anybody wins, in that exchange.

I hear a lot of political journalists taken to task for putting sensationalism above reporting, these days. But I have to think there’s more at stake, when it happens to music. As Lester Bangs put it, art is more important than politics, in the long run.

Sea of Bees’ Orangefarben is an engaging album from an authentic ‘weirdo folkie’

Sacramento-based singer-songwriter Julie Ann Bee, working under the project name Sea of Bees, has just released her second full-length album, following up her 2010 debut. In tone, Orangefarben is largely sentimental, semi-sweet music, of a piece with most of the folk-rock genre, these days. And the arrangements put very conventional guitars, violins and incidental percussion front and center. But the end result has some undeniably weird twists. Thanks in large part to Bee’s very expressive vocal performances, the album manages to be endearing without being saccharine, stay perpetually just-off-balance, and to spill over with personality. I’ve heard Sea of Bees compared to Sparklehorse, and while the music doesn’t bear much resemblance, the approach to writing and recording certainly does — this is an album full of strange, bright ideas, shot through with unflinching courage in its convictions.

Orangefarben also makes a tricky comparison to Bee’s last album, Songs for the Ravens. The new album is both less experimental and more confident, but I don’t get the feeling it’s any more conservative, really; the risks here are carefully chosen, but no less ambitious. What hasn’t changed, thankfully, is that sense of being let in on something intensely personal. Listening to Sea of Bees still feels like being a fly on the wall during the construction of these songs. It’s an exciting place to be.

On Science, Language, and Great Divides

Reading Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, among other influences, has me thinking about the relationship between music and language, lately, so I thought I’d write out a few thoughts. This is Your Brain on Music is a great read, as everyone else I know discovered at least three years ago, but if you’ve been living under the same rock I have, I encourage you to read it. Levitin brings his experience as a musician, recording engineer and neuroscientist to bear on the subject of music’s deep roots in the structure and evolution of the human mind. As a psychology student and a music geek, I experienced a lot of ‘a-ha!’ moments throughout. He speaks mainly from a perspective of neurology and psychology — that is to say, about the mechanics of human behavior around music, but connects all of his work neatly to the bigger questions.

What’s most interesting to me, in the research Levitin cites, is that music and language seem to share some mechanisms in the brain. Neurologists have some ability to examine what happens in the brain when we listen to music, now, and these experiments are informing the study of both music and language. The two fields seem to be separated by quite a wall, in science, but I think our methods are good enough, at last, that we may finally be forced into a serious conversation about where the division between the two lies.

It’s tempting to say that music isn’t language, just because it’s not a system for encoding and decoding references to other ideas. That begs the question of what music is, of course, but there’s an even more tantalizing question, to me: are we sure that’s what language is? And on this one, consider me a skeptic. We love talking about language as a tool that encodes and transmits factual assertions about the external world, but how much of our use of speech (or writing, for that matter,) actually goes to that purpose? If I described people interactively making sound for each other’s amusement, which would you guess I was talking about, and why? I have to imagine that, if we understood music better, we would begin to learn things we’ve never suspected before, about what’s really happening when people speak to each other.

I’m reminded of Ezra Pound’s line, that “the poem fails when it strays to far from the song, and the song fails when it strays too far from the dance”. If we extrapolate the possibility that the paragraph can stray too far from the poem, then what, exactly, are we measuring in all of those distances? Nice to be excited by science, once in a while.

Terry Malts’ Killing Time Serves Up a Welcome Flashback

There’s a scene in an old episode of The Simpsons, where Principal Skinner is judging a diorama contest at the elementary school. The episode revolves around Lisa’s diorama, but it’s Ralph Wiggum’s entry, an unadorned cardboard box full of Star Wars figurines in their original packaging, that brings out Skinner’s inner nerd, and takes first prize. I bring it up because, in recommending Terry Malts’ album Killing Time, I feel a little like Principal Skinner in that scene. It’s a box of seventies punk fanservice, much of it still in its original packaging. But, as the endless re-plays on my stereo in the last few weeks can attest, I just can’t hold it against them.

Everything from the sound production to the sleeve art calls back to the age of The Ramones or New York Dolls. But the album is saved from the criticism that it’s an imitation, by the plain fact that it’s such a good imitation. Calling it creatively unambitious also seems beside the point. Maybe a more fair criticism is that there isn’t much variety in the songs, but there again, I have to conclude this is exactly the album they meant to record. Check out “No Good for You” or “Tumble Down”, and you just might be hooked. With Killing Time, Terry Malts have served up a loud, hooky half-hour of old-school noise, and pulled it off with tremendous polish. I can’t wait to hear what else they can do.

I’m on Vacation

The planets/academic schedules were in perfect alignment this week for my sweetheart and me to spend a few days in Vegas. (There was a professional reason for the trip, too, but not so as you’d notice.) I lived in Vegas for most of the ‘oughts decade, so a trip here is a trip down memory lane, more than anything else, but it’s nice getting to play tour guide, knowing all of the choicest places to eat, drink and be merry around here. So, in lieu of a more substantial post while I’m gone, enjoy some photos from the Hard Rock Hotel’s collection of music memorabilia, and other destinations around town.

A lovely old Tele, connected in some way to The Rolling Stones.

One of Johnny Cash’s Martins. Lyrics from “I Walk the Line” are written on it.

Les Paul’s Les Paul.

One of Jimi’s Strats.

An old-school version of the Robot Flying V, owned by Iggy Pop.

And what rock memorabilia collection would be complete without one of Slash’s hats? Keep on keepin’ on, Slash.

The most fun attraction in Vegas, by the way, is the Pinball Hall of Fame, just a couple of miles off the strip on Tropicana. Featuring over 150 pinball machines from the 50s to the present, it’s a far, far better place to spend those quarters than any casino.

And here I am at the Atomic Testing Museum, catching up with some robots and aliens before heading into the main exhibits.

Re-Issues Bring Feedtime out of the Post-Punk Time Capsule

With the weighty new anthology The Aberrant Years, Sub Pop is shining a spotlight on the four albums Feedtime published through Aberrant Records in the 1980s. The timing is dead-on; After 20 years on the shelf, these songs can still hit the ground running. With its exhaustive explorations of some of the less-traveled fringes of punk sound, the music here feels eerily ‘of the moment’.

Feedtime’s sound is, among other things, a mesmerizing piece of cultural diffusion. The Sydney trio played with an unguarded love of old American blues-rock rhythms, but layered in some decidedly UK punk noise over it. And at heart, there’s that indulgent, ‘dare-you’ bleakness that is distinctly working-class Aussie. To say their music falls somewhere on a continuum between Fugazi and Gang of Four is to acknowledge that there are no easy comparisons—call it alternate-universe rockabilly if you like, but the ‘something borrowed’ in their effects and rhythm parts is only background to a unique and driven sensibility for songwriting. If listening to the nearly three hours of material collected in The Aberrant Years makes one thing clear, it’s that Feedtime blazed their own trails through the post-punk landscape.

Just as they sometimes reached between continents for inspiration, though, I think contemporary listeners and musicians would do well to reach across the decades and hear what they came up with. I see a rock scene today with some awkward fissures between new and old, with progressive noise and folk-rock retreating from some of the creative puzzles they share, and Feedtime offers some important insights on those puzzles. Insofar as The Aberrant Years is the ‘roots rock’ of another time and place, it has plenty to teach us about those roots.