So I've come to the conclusion that I'm really a horrible music writer. It actually has nothing to do with my skills (or lack thereof) as a writer. My problem is that I can't really criticize. I only go to shows that I want to see. Which means I only see bands that I know I already like, which means I'm going to like the show. Every review comes off as a fanboy review. So what follows is not a review, but a recap. I'm basically going to tell you why I like the bands I like so much.
This was a smaller crowd than my last Logan Square show. I saw Los Campesinos! with Titus Andronicus as the opener a couple months ago and the place was packed. The Broken West took the stage about ten minutes after 8:00, and the place was still half empty. Truth be told, I love the Broken West, and I think I've seen every show they've played in Chicago since 2007 when I first saw them open for America's finest live act, the Walkmen. They played a sample of the old album, but the bulk of the set came from thenew album and the first album, and it was all well mixed. The list:
On the Bubble
So it Goes
Down in the Valley
Gwen Now and Then
Auctioneer
Ambuscade
Got It Bad
Elm City
House of Lies
Perfect Games
AC Newman and band followed shortly thereafter, and I have to say, I really appreciate bands that play on time. They started shortly after nine, which is what I expect from a headliner when I see a show that's billed as an 8:00 show. Also, I have to give credit to the two females in the band (bass and violin) who were drinking wine. Rarely do you see wine consumed on stage.
Anyway, I'd say they played a typical mix of old and new. When an act is supporting a new album, you expect about 65-35 mix, and that's pretty much what we got. I think they played all but one song from the new album (honestly, at this point, I can't remember if they failed to play 'Elemental' or 'Thunderbolts'. It's been a day or so). And honestly, he played a couple songs from the Slow Wonder that I'm not crazy about (Cloud Prayer and Come Crash). But he hit most of hte highlights, and he closed with the Town Halo, which is still his best song, and is a great song if you have a violin player.
All in all a great show. Great venue, solid set, on-time, no complaints. Two bands that I really love. Hope they come back soon.
Upcoming: Destroyer (May) Doves (May) Art Brut twice (June) X (June) Pitchfork Festival (July)
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.
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.
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.
The first full length from The Broken West, once known as the Brokedown until they found out they shared the name with a Chicago band. They hold the record as the band I've seen the most in a single year. I saw them initially when they opened for the Walkmen early in the year, then a month or so later when they headlined. They came back in the summer to play the Taste of Randolph Street festival, and hit the town once again with the Whigs in late October. The nice thing about listening to indie stuff is that one can actually afford to see the same band a bunch of times in the same year.
This is simply good, straightforward indie pop/rock, and it's very impressive for a debut. And it's very West Coast. While bands like Beulah captured the San Francisco Sound, the Broken West are much more L.A. Laid back groovy pop-songs like You Can Build an Island and Slow are set among the driving pop beats of So It Goes and On the Bubble, and the almost country sounding Abigail.
There's really not much more I can say. It's not complicated. It's not groundbreaking. This album just does what it sets out to do very, very well. Here's the studio version of Down in the Valley, a live version of So it Goes, and a live version of You Can Build an Island:
Going to see the Broken West with a couple of other bands tonight at Schuba's. I think they're up second, and I'll probably just take off after their set. They will become the first band I've ever seen four times in the same year.
No one could have reasonably expected Santana to win today the way he's been going. As I've said before (and it's no great analysis), Santana during the day on the road is a recipe for disaster.
If they had taken some momentum into today's game, it may have been a different story, but Mike Scioscia, whom I can only assume was a little upset with Mike Napoli and his three run homer yesterday, inexplicably turned the ball over to arguably the AL's worst reliever this season. Predictably, he allowed the Tigers to double their lead, and predictably, the Angels almost came back, only to lose by one. And while the souls over at Halos Heaven may not like it, Vlad was almost as at fault as Bart and Scioscia, grounding into a double play with the tying run on first.
So what had the makings of nice trip has turned into a precarious journey, which now requires the Angels to take 2 of three against the suddenly not so terrible Yankees to salvage a .500 trip. And while they've had great success over the Yankees in the last 10 years, that has to end some time.
As for me, I missed today's game, partly because of work, and partly by design, as I had no desire to see Santana get drilled. And last night's game ended just in time for me to head over to Schuba's to catch the Broken West, this time headlining (they supported the Walkmen earlier). While the mix was a little too heavy on the guitar and to light on the vocals, the show was otherwise excellent. Not to sound like a music snob, but shows with less than 100 people are kind of cool to see when you really like the band, and they really are excellent.
There are bands who get on stage and lack the ability to re-create the magic of the recording studio. There are bands who get on stage and sound exactly like they do on their records, which is good, but not exactly what you want from the live experience. There are bands who, on stage, transcend what they're able to do on a record.
Then there are the Walkmen. From the opening note to the final farewell, it's pure, nonstop energy. Their albums are fantastic, but they were made for the stage. It's not so much a collection of instruments as it a cacophony of sound. It so loud, and so dense that it just hits you like a blast of wind. But amazingly, you're still able to pick out every distinctive sound present in their studio tracks. I saw these guys at Pitchfork last summer. A big open space isn't what they're best suited to. But get them in a tiny room packed with 160 people, like Schuba's, and they're really in their element.
First things first, the Broken West led the night off with a half hour of music from their new LP "I Can't Go On, I'll Go On." I'd listened to it about 8-10 times in the last week, and I was looking forward to their set. Pretty straightforward powery-pop type stuff. Pretty accessible and easy to listen to. They played (if I remember correctly):
Down in the Valley (see below)
So it Goes
On the Bubble
Shiftee
Big City
Slow
Brass Ring
It was a solid half hour of music.
Then the Walkmen came out, and I'm gonna be honest, they played a bunch of stuff I haven't heard before. And quite frankly, that would usually piss me off, but the way the night flowed, it didn't really bother me. It just cranked up the anticipation for the next song. In 2006, they released a song for song remake of Harry Nilsson's "Pussy Cats", so I'm guessing they played some stuff off of that. And let's get the negatives out of the way early: no We've Been Had; no Little House of Savages; no Emma, Get Me a Lemon. That did kind of suck, I'm not gonna lie. But what they did play was pretty amazing. Among the songs in the setlistsetlist:
Louisiana (assisted on horns by one of the guys from the Broken West, and some other guy) (see below)
All Hands and the Cook
Another One Goes By (still not as good as the Mazarin version)
They may have played Don't Get Me Down (Come on Over Here), but my memory is a little fuzzy
Wake Up
Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone
The Rat
They're Winning
Blizzard of '96
They also may have played the North Pole
Louisiana was clearly the highlight...until they played Wake Up, which was off the charts. And just when you think they couldn't get any better, they dusted off The Rat, which, well, I'll be honest. I have never stood through a better four minutes of live music than the version of the Rat that they played tonight. It's simply a song that was meant to be played live, to a small audience, with an incredibly loud mix. If I could bottle that four minutes...
On the downside, they skipped the tracks mentioned above, and they only played for about an hour. In their defense, it was 11:00 on a Sunday night, and it was their second show of the evening, and sitting through an hour, you'd wonder how they had the energy to go through that twice in one night.
The moral of the story is that if you get a chance to see a band this polished and this impressive in such a small venue, you need to do it. You won't be disappointed. Sample tracks below.
And I know they didn't play it, but I still love this song:
I'm going to Schuba's (roughly 160 person occupancy) on Sunday night to see the Walkmen with the Broken West. Here's a taste of what I've been listening to in preparation.
"Another One Goes By" is actually a Mazarin track covered by the Walkmen on their most recent album "A Hundred Miles Off". The version presented here is the Mazarin version, even though it's says it's the Walkmen version (but that's OK, because the Mazarin version is better).
And the Broken West stuff is really good too. Really looking forward to seeing them.
