Morning Mix 12/2/2009

Sausage Fest today:

• Billy Liar - the Decemberists
• Come Together - Spiritualized
• Jackass - Beck
• Morning Bell (version from Kid A) - Radiohead
• Planet of Sound - the Pixies
• Something So Strong - Crowded House
• Slash N' Burn - Manic Street Preachers
• Juicebox - the Strokes
• Begin the Begin - R.E.M.

The Pixies/Crowded House back to back was an interesting change of pace. I think the Spiritualized song is the best song on this list, but Slash N' Burn is what got me interested in Manic Street. See the video below.

Morning Mix 12/1/09

First one of December.

• Quick Canal (w/ Leatitia Sadier of Stereolab) - Atlas Sound
• All of the Things That Go To Make Heaven and Earth - New Pornographers
• The One Who Got Us Out - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
• Futures and Folly - Blitzen Trapper
• Cracking Up - the Jesus and Mary Chain
• High and Dry - Radiohead
• Let the Serpent Sleep - Elf Power
• Run - Spiritualized
• In the Flowers - Animal Collective

The last song serves as a good reminder that year end lists are coming up. Animal Collective will likely be featured prominently. Here's Run, from Spiritualized. Originally released as the first song of the second movement of Laser Guided Melodies, it has also been released as a single in its own right.

More Spiritualized

I'm trying to think of the best way to describe J. Spaceman and the various incarnations of Spiritualized since the dissolution of Spacemen 3 about 2o years ago or so, and I think the best description came from either Greg Kot or Jim DeRogatis in the episode of Sound Opinions where they reviewed "Songs in A&E".  Spiritualized basically has three styles:  Straightforward rockers, ethereal/ambient ballads, and, well, spirituals - real gospel type stuff.  

Occasionally they overlap a bit.  You can hear hear tinges of gospel stuff in their rock songs.  Of course, a quicker, pithier explanation is from Pinko Punko, in which he termed Spiritualized 'drug boy singing about drugs'.  I can't honestly dispute that.  The endless allusions to drug use and the effects thereof are unavoidable.  But hey, music's gotta be about something.  So here are the three phases of Spiritualized:

Ambient:

Rock:

Spiritual:

And that, in a nutshell, is Jason Pierce and his professional output. And it's pretty amazing live.

Checking back in

Couple of things I'd figured I'd post.

UCLA

I know I've been light on the UCLA stuff of late, primarily due to my laziness, and also due to the fact that they just haven't been much fun to watch on the football field this year. But Basketball season starts tonight (unofficially), and after reading the updates from Brian Dohn, and this piece on Ben Howland in the Times, I'm pretty pumped for hoops season. For UCLA the last few years, this has been one of the more fun parts of the season. They've been pulling in such excellent talent that it makes the first five games or so, when we all get introduced to the new recruits, very exciting. And with the nation's top class taking the floor, this year is no exception.

Illinois

Not sure what the basketball season will hold this year, but early reports are mixed on the optimistic side. Supposedly the atmosphere around the team is much better, with some seniors who maybe weren't the best teammates having moved on. They add a little talent when Alex Legion returns next month. Both Jamar Smith and Brian Carlwell have left, so hopefully the distractions from that incident are gone from the Assembly Hall for good. The real talent influx starts with next year's recruiting class.

Speaking of the Hall, I spent some time in its parking lot this weekend as I was down in Champaign for the Illinois-Iowa football game. Interestingly enough, before Saturday, I'd been to two Illinois football games since graduating, and both were played at the Rose Bowl. This was the first time I'd been in Memorial Stadium since the upgrade, and it's pretty nice. They need an extra video screen, and they need to be a little larger, but generally the facility looks pretty decent, and it's always nice to be back down on campus. Better yet, I saw the Illini win, something they failed to do in the previous two post-graduation games I'd seen. They made it more exciting than they should have, and Ron Zook showed the country that he's not quite sure how to handle time outs, but a win is a win, and fortunately it pissed off the douchebag Iowa fan that was sitting in front of us.

Spiritualized

Just an update to my Spiritualized post from a few days ago, you can listen to a full set from their last tour at this link. It doesn't quite capture how amazing it was in person, but even if you don't want to listen to the whole thing, the first two songs are worth 10 minutes. They're the best back to back openers I've ever seen at a live show.

So Remember When I Used to Blog Here?

Man, it's been a while, huh? Nice long break. Anyway, with basketball season ramping up, I'll probably have UCLA stuff to post about soon. And we should be moving into some good off-season stories for the Angels, so activity should pick up again soon.

In the meantime, here's some Spiritualized. These two songs, in this order, led off the their Pitchfork Festival set, which I wrote about here. This isn't a perfect facsimile, as this version of 'You Lie You Cheat' doesn't descend into the three minute maelstrom at the end like at P4k, which then led into the gorgeous opening of 'Shine a Light'. And this version of 'Shine a Light' cuts out the first verse. But this is arguably the best back to back opening of a concert I've ever seen. It was even better when they they played the Metro a couple months later.

'Shine a Light' was really pretty perfect. It's a song with an album track that must be incredibly difficult to duplicate live, so they don't bother trying. The lyrics are given some relief in the life version, whereas they flatten into background noise on the album (Lazer Guided Melodies). The guitar/sax becomes simply guitar, and is amped up. And it's a really powerful moment at about 3:25 when the backing vocals kick back in. Enjoy.

Recent Concerts

So I haven't really been doing concert reviews or recaps lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been going to shows. August was a little on the slow side in the wake of the Pitchfork Festival, but September has been picking it back up. In the last week or so, we had three really great shows.

Spiritualized @ Metro - 9/8/08

I finally saw J. Spaceman for the first time at P-fork, and that show was essentially the hour long outdoor version of their regular show, so the set was pretty similar, only about a half hour or forty minutes longer. Most of the extra time was taken up by older material, which I particularly enjoyed since I didn't see any of the shows in support of those albums.

The P-fork set made appearances here and there, mostly in a good way. He again opened with 'You Lie You Cheat', which devolves into noise, then cuts beautifully into 'Shine A Light', from the Laser Guided Melodies album. He finished the set, again, with 'Come Together' from Ladies and Gentlemen.... which segued into the old Spacemen 3 tune 'Take Me to the Other Side'. Added in along the way were some new songs (Death Take Your Fiddle), some Spiritualized classics ('Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space', 'Lay Back in the Sun') and another Spacemen 3 number (either 'Walkin' With Jesus' or 'Sound of Confusion', depending on what album you have). He ended the night with a rousing rendition of 'Lord Can You Hear Me'.

Their live set, at least indoors is very loud and engrossing. You've heard the phrase "wall of sound". Well, this is an ocean of sound, and you're drowning in it. It just absolutely engulfs the entire venue. The pacing was pretty good. The two songs that start this set really draw you in. There's little to no crowd rapport, not even a "thank you" between songs, though I think he said it on the way out. It's really quite an experience. An excellent live show, and one I hope I get the chance to see again.

You Lie You Cheat


Take Me To The Other Side (Live)


Grand Ole Party opened. I saw them open for someone earlier this year as well. Three piece band with a female drummer, who also handles lead vocals. She's got quite a voice. Entertaining act.

The Walkmen @ Metro 9/12/08

This is the third or fourth time I've seen them in the last year and a half, so it's been interesting to see them go from supporting "A Hundred Miles Off" to trying out some new material, to eventually supporting that material, most of which appears on the new album "You and Me". It's an album that didn't really grab me at first, certainly not as quickly as the last one, but after five or six listens, it's really grown on me and might be my favorite album yet.

The set lasted a little under an hour and half, which is probably the longest set I've seen them do. The set was heavy on the album, and light on everything else. They played the classics. 'Wake Up', 'Little House of Savages', 'Thinking of a Dream I Had'. They played some songs that are much better live than on the record, like 'All Hands and the Cook', and 'What's In It For Me'. The new album has a lot of horn parts, so they were able to play 'Louisiana'. And they proved again that 'The Rat' is the best four minutes of live music on the planet.

But the new album really made up the meat of the show, and fortunately, it's a really good album for a live show. It's got some slower tracks that help round out the pacing, but the standouts from the album were the standouts in the live set. 'Donde Esta La Playa', 'On the Water', 'the Blue Route', 'Canadian Girl' all delivered. The crowd seemed fairly familiar with the new material, as loud cheers went out upon hearing the opening strums of 'In the New Year', the first single and a real highlight of the show.

As usual, the Walkmen, more than any other band I've seen a bunch of time, are more than worth the price of admission. Along with the Super Furry Animals, they're probably may favorite act currently in existence, and their live shows are really terrific. The opening acts were pretty interesting too. Ezra Furman and the Harpoons were kind of a straightforward pop-rock four piece with a funny frontman, and klezmer-rock six piece Golem were, well, something I wouldn't expect to see at a rock show, and something I'd even less expect to like, but they put on a very entertaining set. No complaints.

In the New Year


On the Water



The Broken West @ Schuba's 9/15/08

Small crowd, but Monday night shows aren't typically heavily attended, especially for lesser known acts like the Broken West. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a great show. I saw these guys open for the Walkmen last year, and I've seen them another four times since, and they always put on a good set. They released a new album last week, their second, so the set drew heavily from that, but they worked in some favorites from the first album as well. This is the type of show where you can hang around and chat with the band afterward, so that's kind of fun. I try to wait to buy albums at shows if possible, because I think they get a bigger piece of the pie. This is an L.A. based band, around Silverlake I believe, so it's nice to support local acts from my hometown.

A band called the Builders and the Butchers opened for them. They're kind of folky, but really heavy themes. Lost of death and afterlife sorts of stuff. Like if the Decemberists were a little harder and sang a lot of dirges. But the music is really engaging. I usually need to listen to an album a few times before it connects, but I was digging their debut on first listen. I was wearing a t-shirt from the Moose's Tooth, a pizzeria and brew pub in anchorage. The lead singer saw it started up a conversation about Alaska. Turns out half this band is from Anchorage, and a couple went to the school where my brother used to teach. Small world.

Down in the Valley

Transcendent

Three years ago, while the Wrens and AC Newman were the big interests for me at the Intonation Festival, at the time curated by Pitchfork, later to become the Pitchfork Festival, it was Broken Social Scene that really blew me away. I owned "You Forgot it in People" at the time, but it wasn't until I saw them at that show that it really clicked for me, and that set was the highlight.

Two years ago it was the Walkmen and Destroyer that piqued my interest, and both were excellent, but when all was said and done, it was Ted Leo that made the biggest impression on me. He was someone I hadn't listened to very much at the time, and I left the park a big fan, and immediately bought Shake the Sheets and Hearts of Oak.

Last year, I'm not gonna lie. The lineup mostly sucked. And the people I usually go with couldn't make it. So I had tickets that went unused for Friday and Saturday, but I showed up for a couple hours on Sunday to hear New Pornographers play a few tracks from their, at that time, unreleased new album Challengers.

This year, Sunday was the big draw, with Les Savy Fav, the Apples in Stereo, Spoon, etc. But for the first time in four years, it was the one band that I really wanted to see that delivered the best performance, and easily the best set I've ever seen at a festival setting, leaving me hungry for a show at a more intimate, or at least indoor venue. Spiritualized delivered far and away the best set.

I'll admit that I came to the show expecting to hear a stripped down, mostly acoustic, mellow set of material off the new album. Most of the shows that J. Spaceman played since his return to health were of the Acoustic Mainline variety (a take off on the Electric Mainline - Pure Phase album). But to my surprise, he showed up with two awesome backup vocalists, and a fully plugged in five piece setup. And while they did the mellow stuff at times, they simply blew doors when they wanted to. He played a few songs off the new album, most notably Sweet Talk and the first single, Soul On Fire. He also reached back to Amazing Grace for Cheapster and She Kissed Me (and it Felt Like a Hit).

But the highlights came early and late. They opened with You Lie, You Cheat off of the new album (Songs in A&E). As that faded out, the band slowly worked it's way into downright numbing version of Shine a Light, from Lazer Guided Melodies. If you've got a copy of the track handy, fast forward to about the 11 minute mark, picture the sax is a guitar, and imagine that the wall of background fuzz is about 100 times louder than you'd expect, and you'll get the idea. After working through the rest of the set, they finally launched into Come Together, the one song my friend wanted to hear, and for me, that was set to be a real highlight, until they segued out of the song, into some distortion and reached back into the Spacemen 3 catalogue for arguably my favorite Pierce associated track ever, Take Me To the Other Side, which was a really terrific way to end the set. If I weren't a Spiritualized fan before the show, I would have been on the way out. It really was transcendent, and it was probably one of the five best live sets I've ever seen, regardless of setting. I'll try to link to some videos as soon as P4k puts them up.

This should be a link to their set for streaming via audio. If it's not, then enter the time and date (July 20, 5:00 pm) and it should work.

Most Anticipated Album of 2008 - for the time being

At least, now that the new Raveonettes album is out...

Spiritualized gets a date for the U.S. release of "Songs in A&E". This is really a reminder to myself more than anything. Here's some older stuff from J. Spaceman.