Monday’s Concerts:

• For Years Blue…Older Than Their Years
• Smoosh: Sisters in Harmony
• Joss Stone Struts Her Stuff
• Reviving a Lost Art Form: John Legend Brings Soul Back to Seattle
• Night Canopy’s Bittersweet Afternoon
• The Blakes: No-Frills Rock & Roll
• Shake Some Action! Shakes, Jangles, and Pops
• Culture Rock
• Joan as Police Woman: Real Live
• Tokyo Police Club Rages and Charms at the Secret Location
• “The Sound of Ancient Voices Singing in Your Ears”: Fleet Foxes at the EMP
• Roky Erickson Delivers an Explosive Comeback
• Das Llamas: EMP SkyChurch
• The Frames: As Good as The Movies
• Miranda July: Making the Quotidian Extraordinary
• Wu-Tang Clan Brings da Ruckus, Mostly

Photo Credit: Christopher Nelson

The descent into Memorial Stadium where Wu-Tang Clan was ending their North American tour with a closing spot at Bumbershoot was almost something out of a movie, that overdone, cheesy scene of 25th Century “urban party,” lights flashing, bass pounding, and an unmistakable smoke rising up in large clouds. That was until you got down on the floor, where things were decidedly calmer, concertgoers watching attentively, but not aggressively, talking to their friends and trying to figure out where Ghostface Killah was. Method Man, who acted as the MC (as in the Master of Ceremonies) of the evening, worked the crowd, inquiring about the quality of their drugs and promising them a good show, and the audience, ecstatic, roared and flashed their Ws with abandon, but the energy that was building with each record DJ Mathematics spun was tempered by the group’s decision to, as is common but unfortunate procedure at rap concerts, cut their songs short, performing choice verses and the hook, just enough to get the crowd moving and excited before ending, rather abruptly, a scratch and stop. Thankfully for Wu-Tang, those in attendance were a forgiving bunch, so eager to see and hear the hip-hop luminaries live and in person, speaking, jumping, and rapping in front of them, that the occasional awkwardness was overlooked as they stood there anxiously waiting for the next piece to begin.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Credit: Grandchildren

In the plethora of artists out there, Miranda July stands out as an original. A woman whose repertoire includes music, fiction- and screen- writing, acting, performance art, and directing, July has created her very own empire, a world where simple events take on extraordinary meaning, where people are as equally concerned with conforming to societal roles as they are breaking them. Her two most notable pieces, the 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, and her recent book of short stories, No one belongs here more than you, present an artist whose strengths lie in her ability to communicate our idiosyncrasies understandably, to convey our patheticalness without making us feel sorry for ourselves. Her characters are flawed, and often embody the extreme — excess zeal or shyness, sexual promiscuity or deprivation — speaking at the wrong moments about the right things, excessively self-aware but too distant from their own selves to connect with others, but wanting desperately that bond. “And although I was genuinely scared about this epileptic seizure I was in charge of, I slept…I slept and dreamed that Vincent was slowly sliding his hands up my shirt and we kissed,” the protagonist explains in “The Shared Patio,” unable to do the thing that logic and sense requires, succumbing instead to fantasy, even when it is the logical move that may give her the results she desires.

Read the rest of this entry »

After years of toiling away in semi-obscurity, Irish alt-rock band the Frames finally have had a breakthrough in 2007 — correct that, their lead singer/songwriter Glen Hansard had a breakthrough, as the star of the indie romance Once, which was written and directed by a former bandmate of his. Once is not a huge success, it’s a small-scale hit, but it’s big enough to bring more people into the Frames fold — big enough to turn the Frames into the kind of respectable, well-known mid-level band they deserve. For even if they share some of the sweeping vistas of that best-known Irish alt-rock band, U2, Hansard and the Frames reject all sense of pomp, as their very good set Monday night at Bumbershoot illustrated. Like his cinematic alter ego, Hansard is sincere and open with his emotions, something that can be too precious on record but if he’s seen performing, his warmth becomes palpable. As good as he is in Once, he’s a better musician when paired with the Frames. They do not function as a faceless backing band, they give him soulful support while giving him room to roam — not just musically, but also as a comic foil. And they’re also not shy about letting Hansard bask in the glory of Once, letting him encores with the movie’s key romantic song, a tune he finds “fucking difficult” without his co-star Marketa Irglova, so he brings a girl out of the audience to sing along, then has the crowd sing in. That communal spirit is a hard thing not to love, even if you don’t love the songs.

The first thing you notice is the drums. They’re holy-crap loud, with a kick drum so thunderous that it doesn’t just hit you in the gut, it feels like something is trying to pound its way out of your chest, Alien-style. During Das Llamas’ soundcheck and show, Thomas Burke’s commanding rhythms snapped the audience to attention. While the crowd didn’t dance as much as it should’ve, the band put on a powerful show, injecting the songs from their debut album World War — plus a few others - with tons of of volume and energy. Kerry Zettel’s vocals had so much reverb on them, he sounded like he was singing from inside a wormhole, and the way he juggled singing, bass and keyboard duties made him a one-man show in his own right.

Das Llamas tore into cryptic anti-anthems like “Whoa Oh Oh” and “Wood on Bone,” which drew a cheer of recognition from the crowd. “I Got Stoned”’s surreal, paranoid collision of rockabilly, dub and punk also ignited live, sounding bouncy and dangerous at the same time. The band’s less frantic songs, such as “The Others” — which sounds a bit like something Interpol would write, if they went crazy — kept the intensity of the show’s wilder moments, which ranged from the moody-then-frenetic “Wedding Song” (which Zettel introduced as a “rap song,” perhaps inspired by Monday night’s headliners, the Wu-Tang Clan) to the epic finale, which involved an extra keyboardist and percussionist, a saxophonist, and masks and maracas that were handed out to the audience. It was a raucous and poised show, and when Zettel said “You guys were awesome! That was totally cool” at the end, the crowd was thinking the same thing.

As one of the legendary acid casualties of psychedelic rock, it once seemed unlikely that Roky Erickson would ever make a triumphant comeback, the way such other damaged ’60s legends as Brian Wilson have. Roky, of course, never completely went away, continuing to record into the ’90s and experiencing periodic revivals, but he’s never had a full-fledged, well-oiled comeback as he has this past year in the wake of the release of a feature-length documentary about his life. The Explosives, the band that has been working with him sporadically since 1979, has taken him on a tour that’s run through the European festivals and made it here to Bumbershoot this Labor Day weekend, and they certainly should take a good deal of credit for making this the hardest-rocking set heard at this three-day festival Certainly, the Explosives’ guitarist is leading the band, playing a lions share of the leads and taking over stage-patter duty for Roky, whose only words to the crowd were spirited variations on “Thank you!” This ceding of the spotlight and repetitive appreciation was enough for anybody that knew something was wrong to think that Roky might not all be there, but if you didn’t know anything was wrong with Roky, you’d never know from his performance, which was vigorous and vital. A big guy with long stringy grey hair wearing a blazing green Hawaiian shirt, he looked different from the rest of his sharp-dressed band, the only one that might have been a true refried 60s icon, but he sounded lucid and loud, belting out his cult classics with genuine passion. And it wasn’t just that he sang with gusto, he played some mean guitar, especially on a couple of crawling 12-bar blues, including a take on Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me.” There was no warming up for the Explosives — they came roaring out of the gates and once they locked into “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer” on the third song, they had already reached cruising altitude and they maintained that peak throughout their relentless set, which naturally closed with “You’re Gonna Miss Me” (strangely enough, the only tune hurt somewhat by an instrumental muff as the opening chords didn’t hit as hard as they should) and extending through an encore (rare at Bumbershoot) that concluded with “I Walked with a Zombie.” By that point, it was clear that Roky has rejoined the living and that fact is a cause for rockers of any age to celebrate.

Photo Credit: Grandchildren

One of Bumbershoot’s few indoor music stages, the SkyChurch is an oddly-shaped room in the Experience Music Project building. Its open space and large stage made it a great place to check out some of the festival’s lesser-known bands — although in Fleet Foxes’ case, “lesser-known” is a relative term. For while they’re not household names like the Shins, the way the large crowd sang along to the band’s songs and demanded more when the set was over suggested that Fleet Foxes could be on the cusp of big things.

With his wide-brimmed hat and beard, lead singer/guitarist Robin Pecknold looked like a mountain man, while the rest of the Foxes had a more straightforward indie-guy appearance. That description also applies to Fleet Foxes’ music — Pecknold has a sweet, pure, strangely ancient-sounding voice that compares favorably to indie-folkies like Devendra Banhart and Will Oldham, while the band’s music draws from folk, indie-pop and the classic, jangly sounds of the ’60s and ’70s. Their songs sound like adventures, full of rolling rhythms, sparkling melodic peaks and imagery of mountains, valleys, rivers and snowbanks.

Photo Credit: Grandchildren

In concert, Fleet Foxes didn’t sound quite as backwater weird as they do on record, but the excitement they had about playing live and their simple but affecting melodies — which sound like they’ve been handed down for generations — really shone through. “White Winter Hymnal” was the set’s most striking moment, a round with three-part harmonies that were half Appalachian spiritual and half British Invasion pop a la the Zombies, but “Oliver James,” with its a capella breakdown, was a close second. The rest of the set ranged from spooky, spaghetti western-tinged ballads to tribal-yet-jazzy rock that namedropped the Blue Ridge Mountains. This was a wonderful show from a band that is as young (when Pecknold sang about “going back to 1972,” it might as well have been 1872 from his perspective) as it is unique.

It’s clear that Tokyo Police Club was one of the hotly buzzed bands at Bumbershoot — their performance at the KEXP Music Lounge (tucked away at a secret location, as Eddie Argos is so fond of saying) was packed so full they were turning platinum passes away. It’s a bit odd that this band is so buzzed because they’re not necessarily an easily accessible band — they’re an unabashed art band with some trappings of pop and perhaps emo (it’s all a matter of semantics of what you want to call the keyboardist’s screaming). But they’re not an indulgent art band, they’re tense with energy and pack each of their tight, trim songs full with ideas, so that they provoke as much as they evoke, then they pull the plug immediately after their point is made. Unfortunately, they were plagued by some equipment problems in this special showcase gig broadcast on the radio, as the guitarist battled an ailing pickup, leaving the vocalist to battle dead air — dead air that he recognized as soon as the place went silent. A KEXP DJ helped kick start the conversation and the singer immediately showed how likeable he was, cracking wise (’you have seasoned chops’ ‘what is that, a culinary term’) and polling the crowd about the best thing at Bumbershoot, launching into a brief, mildly amusing Gogol Bordello anecdote. He, along with the rest of the band, was utterly charming, and the band seemed less like a collegiate folly than a real working band, just figuring everything out — including how to deal with botched pickups and dead air. They’ll be recording their full-length debut starting on the 10th — and even with all the mishaps, this set offered a bracing reason why this is an eagerly anticipated debut.