Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Homo / Drinking / Nightlife / Tonight Muffin Grubbin', Lady Lovin', Taco Tastin' Taco Tuesday!
Posted by Adrian Ryan on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 6:03 PM
Scissor me timbers! Tonight something incredible is happening. An event that's just as thrilling and wondrous and confusing as it is dancey and lesbian-rich. Taco Tuesday, at The Wildrose!
And just what in the name of Colonel Grethe Cammermeyer's mustache bleach is a "Taco Tuesday"? Precisely what you'd expect: A spicy labial jamboree! A clever, corn flavored carnival of cunning linguists! A lezboganza! It's about 1-dollar tacos (mostly just to justify the name) and 2-dollar beers (of unspecified brand and vintage—try your luck!) and sizzling, blood boiling beats spun by the very lesbianist in Seattle DJs (including HotMess star DJ LA Kendal), and catastrophically hot grrls, many that look like every adorable boy that has ever broken my heart, all dancing together and making me all confused and sad inside.
HOT!
For LESBIANS! And DYKES! And LESBOIS! And SO FORTH! (Oh, sure, regular old biological boys can maybe go too, for a minute, if you insist—just be sure to spend twice as much money, and try not to make a nuisance of yourself.)
Tonight! At The Wildrose! (1021 East Pike Street) No cover!
Dancing Bish Out With Your Bosh Out
Posted by Dean Fawkes on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 5:03 PM
Upcoming / History Reed All About It: Velvet Underground Author to Speak at Central Library
Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:54 PM
Veteran rock scribe Richie Unterberger will discuss White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day at the Central Library in downtown Seattle, Wed. June 24 (6:30 pm-8 pm). Joining him will be Doug Yule, bassist/keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist in the Velvet Underground from 1968 to 1973. The presentation will include rare audiovisual material from the VU's career.
The Velvet Underground's music will change your life—often for the better.
More info after the cut.
Video I Am Going to Watch This Forever and Ever and Ever
Posted by Megan Seling on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 3:23 PM
This is over a year old, but I just discovered it today. I'm slow. THE POINT IS! During a WFMU pledge drive last year Ted Leo, Ben Gibbard, Patton Oswalt, and WFMU's Tom Scharpling sang ABBA's "Take a Chance On Me."
How did I not know this existed until JUST NOW?
I'm in love. With all of them and everyone and everything.
News / Out of Town Johnny O’Donnell Gets in the Van Dyke Parks Studio
Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 2:05 PM
Ex-Holy Ghost Revival member Johnny O’Donnell is currently in Los Angeles recording with Van Dyke Parks, a skilled arranger/composer who’s famous for writing lyrics for the Beach Boys, providing orchestral accompaniment for Joanna Newsom’s Ys, and his 1968 cult classic LP Song Cycle.
O’Donnell also has a new album titled Hellbodies, an easy-going gem on Ggnzla Records (ed. of 200). It’s a literate, melodically sophisticated collection of drama-major rock that leaves no doubt why Parks would be interested in lending a helping hand to the suave Bainbridge Island singer-songwriter.
Last Night Boys Wanna Be Her, Girls Wanna Be Her
Posted by Gina Young on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:35 PM
Mexican wrestler masks: check.
Theremin light saber: check.
Triple-X cape and laser: check.
Flashing crotch light: check.
Go-go dancing hairballs: check.
Excess of costume changes (Nine? Did I really lose count at nine?): check.
Jay Z-sampling, Misfits makeup-wearing, twiddle-talented opening act with a Scottish-sounding English accent, wearing his own band's t-shirt: check.
Clearly, the reigning queen of electro-raunch brought her A game to the Showbox last night. You might even say that Peaches took us to school. And how did WE do, Seattle?
Well, we brought a high energy, sold out all ages crowd, fierce club kids dressed to the nines... 
and grinding baby lesbians; we didn't make Peaches a liar when she started chanting "shirts come off, shirts come off" and we also managed to provide a weird preponderance of sorority/fraternity types. (Gina Bling overheard, "Hey, there's totally a Ziggy Marley concert coming up, you wanna go?" responded to by, "Oh! When? Fuck yeah!" About which Bling opined, "I'm accepting of your different lifestyle, I just don't want it shoved in my face.") Local celebrity sightings included Artstar Andrew Jay, David and Kendall from Hotmess, Jodi Bon Jovi and the entire staff of Babeland.
Peaches cuts an iconic figure. Her look flirts with the medieval, David Bowie, heavy doses of hair metal and just plain hair. (Can you say elbow-length gloves with streaming golden locks attached? This is, after all, the sometimes-bearded woman who said "Record labels will show Christina Aguilera's crotch up close, but they won't show mine, purely because of the hair.") Peaches can command an entire room just by standing still, and older songs like "Fuck the Pain Away" and "Operate" had a particularly hypnotic effect on the audience.
Most of all though, Peaches is a role model. Her vocals might be rap-influenced and her lyrics may be pornographic, but she's a riot grrrl's wet dream of strength and attitude. Three songs into her set she climbed out into the audience, standing on sweaty, eager hands. Some douchebag tried to grab her between the legs and was rewarded for his efforts with a brutal, embarrassing head-stomping. "You wanna stick your hand in my pussy--" she screamed at the crowd, "—you ASK. Otherwise, I kick you in the face."
Amen.
photos 1, 2, and 5 by Alex Crick; photos 3 and 4 by Gina Young
News Today's Music News
Posted by Brian Cook on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:19 PM
Selling air: eMusic reexamines pricing model after striking deal with Sony
I hate the future: McCartney and Starr help unveil The Beatles: Rock Band
Lose the unnecessary exclamation point while you’re at it: Los Campesinos! lose keyboardist
They made a second one?: Arctic Monkeys announce third album
Hope for bass players: Duff McKagan writes for the New York Times
Good news for Canadian experimental metal fans: Mare announce reunion show
Song / Love Re: Mope Out With Your Hope Out
Posted by Terry Miller on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 11:59 AM
The guitar sample is from this, one of my favorite, A-ha songs: "Summer Moved On".
Morten Harket, sigh...... Best voice in pop music.
Song / Love Mope Out With Your Hope Out
Posted by Eric Grandy on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 11:27 AM
The song that's been blissfully undermining my sunny days lately, Superpitcher's "Tomorrow"*:
*Actually, it's the Kaito remix that I've been feeling the most, but I couldn't find that version on youtube.
Tonight
This Week In Music Game Shows
Posted by Megan Seling on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Tonight! The Sundown Tavern in Ballard hosts their monthly Price Is Right night—pay a buck and you have a chance to COME ON DOWN! (All the money goes to charity.) Bethany Jean Clement went a couple months ago and said this:
The show's set includes cardboard podia with construction-paper flowers where contestants stand and write their bids on tiny whiteboards. They share a pen. It's a game for the new economy, rewarding those who know the retail value of a can of tomatoes or a box of macaroni and cheese. The audience screams out prices helpfully, at times bordering on riot. People drink giant draft beers known as Hogs, which start at $4 and are so frosty, the clinking of toasts is muffled. Each glass stein's precipitation eventually creates a small lake on the table, the coaster but a sodden island.Bonus game rounds entail rolling big foam dice on the pool table, quarters, and hitting a golf ball into a tin can. The wooden Plinko setup falls off its chair, covering the contestant who catches it in glitter. The Big Wheel is handcrafted out of the face of a dartboard, backed with tinfoil mounted on a speaker stand; it spins like a dream.
Aaaaaand! Tomorrow night is Grudge Rock, Seattle's premier Rock 'n' Roll Family Feud! Tomorrow night at Re-Bar Scorched Earth takes on Skeletor and the winner walks away with ALL THE DOOR MONEY! The loser gets some prizes too. I've written about Grudge Rock plenty in the past (here, here, and here) and I'm running out of ways to explain how awesome it is. Go! Drink and cheer for your favorite team, er, band!
(And now that Seattle has the Price is Right and Family Feud, can some smart/creative person PLEASE figure out a way to recreate Press Your Luck!? No whammy, no whammy, big money!!)
News The Orb's June 15 Seattle Date Postponed
Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 11:06 AM
From the Showbox's site:
Due to personal reasons, the upcoming tour for The Orb will be postponed. All within the camp are looking forward to making their long anticipated return to the US and plan to deliver nothing less than an experience their fans deserve. With a new album on the horizon, The Orb hope to provide newly rescheduled dates as soon as possible and are excited about what is to come.
As someone with very fond memories of the Orb's 1995 tour, I hope these ambient-dub-techno psychonauts can get it together and come through Seattle. And, though it's unlikely, I hope they bring frequent collaborator Thomas Fehlmann with them.
Ticket refunds available at point of purchase.
Show Review / Last Night / Love / History Great Ghosts
Posted by Eric Grandy on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:50 AM
The last time I saw Mt. Eerie perform, I complained, basically, that Phil Elverum moves too fast and abandons old songs too quickly for new ones. This, of course, is his prerogative as an artist, to write and record and play whatever songs he wants, to not be a greatest hits machine, to let the Moon and the Blow go and leave him to his new devices. But it doesn't mean it's not disappointing for those of us who are still hung up on the Mt. Eerie/Microphones of years ago.
So, last night's show saw Elverum backed by a full band (their first show together)—dual drummers, a guitarist/bassist, and a keyboardist—performing songs from his forthcoming album Wind's Poem, which he said last night should be out in "a month or two." Before the show, Elverum mentioned that he'd been in town this past Thursday to see that black metal documentary that was showing at SIFF (his review: too insidery, not enough of a primer on the genre; he'd been hoping for a black metal film he could show his dad and have him comprehend, but this wasn't it), and last night's show made clear that Elverum's "organic/wooden black metal" leanings ares still in full effect. For one thing, the band was fully electrified last night, feedback fuzz muffling individual guitar notes into smears of sound, the drummers pounding out thunderous tom rolls, cymbal crashes, and double kicks like (relatively) slo-mo blast beats. For another thing, the songs themselves seemed a lot less interested in melody and a lot more given to heavy riffing made for slow, nodding-off head-banging. In trying to positively ID last night's songs, I ran across this link to a live recording of a Mt. Eerie solo performance at Redmond's Old Firehouse Teen Center (from the night before that performance at the Fremont Abbey), and the set list looks to be much the same as last night's (not necessarily in order, and apologies for speculative song titles): "Wind Summons," "My Heart Is Not," "Source of Wind," "My Burning," "Flaming Home," "Wind's Dark Poem," "Nothing Means Nothing," "Lost Wisdom Returns," "When Wind Speaks," "The River of Cold Wind." I think I'm probably most taken with "Nothing Means Nothing" right now, but really I need to spend more time with these songs before I come to any conclusions. I know for certain, though, that I'm still much more in love with the era of Elverum documented by Live in Copenhagen and the recently released diary Dawn than I am this new material. Maybe five years from now, I'll be pining for ghosts of this time, too. We'll see.
Oh, duh, also: the band ended with a totally burned-up, torn-down cover version of Beat Happening's "You Turn Me On."
And, if you didn't make last night's show (and if I haven't totally warned you away with my bitter and entirely subjective nostalgia for old times), you can also catch Mt. Eerie performing this Thursday at Cafe Vita, at a benefit for the Vera Project featuring Say Hi, Arthur & Yu, Shawn Smith, paintings by Ty Williams, and soup by One Pot:
Love The Art of Art
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:49 AM
This is Art Tatum:
And this is lovely writing about the Art Tatum:
Tatum is unchallenged as far as sheer musical density is concerned: He played so many notes in a given performance that just counting them would be difficult, and actually transcribing one of his solos would be next to impossible. Just listening to Tatum at full blast can be overwhelming...Yet because Tatum cast such an enormous shadow over the entire history of the jazz piano, and because he died so young, at age 47 in 1956, an odd dichotomy emerges in his oeuvre: He may have played millions of notes, yet every one of them is precious — the laws of supply and demand, not to mention physics, no longer seem to apply.
What more do we want out of genius than the ability to produce a work of art or a concept that is at once plentiful and precious, dense and delicate, vast and specific. It is more than bad eyesight that makes Tatum the Borges of jazz.
Decibel Decibel Is Happening
Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:38 AM
Says director Sean Horton, after some serious doubts about the organization possessing the financial wherewithal to keep the electronic-music/digital-arts fest afloat. And while we were in Detroit for the Movement festival, Horton mentioned that UK dubstep luminary Benga (who failed to make his scheduled Movement appearance) would be playing Decibel. Fantastic news x2. More details as they materialize.
Win It! Laugh Hole's Fourth Anniversary Is Tomorrow!
Posted by Megan Seling on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:25 AM
Tomorrow night, at Chop Suey, the People's Republic of Komedy celebrates FOUR YEARS of Laff Hole! They're celebrating in style too, with performances by Hari Kondabolu, Kevin Hyder, Emmett Montgomery, David Schmader (I know him!), and Airpocalypse, along with other guests and surprises! It should be a fun and funny night.
Tickets are on sale now for the very low price of $7, but one lucky Line Out reader (and their date!) gets to go for free. To enter, send and e-mail to freetickets@thestranger.com with "I Like Funny Things" in the subject line and your first and last name in the body of the e-mail (that part is important, I need it to put you on the guest list—I cannot put "dragonslayer" or "sPaRkLeGRRL" or whatever your e-mail address is on a guest list).
Good luck!
Dust Bin So Sad To Watch Good Love Go Bad
Posted by David Schmader on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:41 AM
Over the past decade, American critic Robert Christgau has been Eminem's most intelligent defender—he even found a way to love Encore—and in 2006, Christgau wrote the smartest thing that will ever be written about the art of Marshall Mathers for The Believer. A sample:
Part of the charm, brilliance, and power of [Marshall Mathers III]’s triune persona is the way it disintegrates. On the one hand, it’s a subtly calibrated work of psychological imagination, on the other three-card monte to sucker the thought police. Nevertheless, Eminem’s album titles—The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show, Encore, and finally (so far) the greatest-hits Curtain Call—do signify an aesthetic evolution, from persona to person to artist to goodbye to now-I’m-really-going. Once I rated Marshall Mathers over Slim Shady because I thought the debut thinned out toward the end and because, as a card-carrying mature person (it gets me in cheap at the movies), I appreciated the depth of “Stan,” “Kim,” and “Who Knew,” in all of which Marshall the person reflects on the surprising success of Slim the reconstructed id. Shifting and feinting, the debut’s “My Fault” and “Rock Bottom” have a lot of Marshall in them, but not like The Marshall Mathers LP, where the illing title track, for instance, suggests Marshall the real-life homophobe, etc. rather than Slim wilding—Slim gets his own space only in “The Real Slim Shady,” “Kill You,” and “I’m Back.” Some would include “Kim,” but the song’s moral is too powerful for Shady’s purposes. Held up by philistines, ideologues, and ninnies as Exhibit A in the case of The Good People v. Marshall Mathers, Eminem’s second excellent wife-murdering song exposes, complexly but unmistakably, the shameful and indeed unmanly insanity of jealous rage. Go after something dumber—Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” say.
All of which makes Christgau's diss of Relapse—a record that "disappointed, even shocked" him with its failures—all the sadder. (See subject line.)
Re: the alleged failures of Relapse: I'm still trying to figure out what it's trying to do, and only after that can i judge if and how it's failed. (But the would-be confessions about stepfather sex abuse are...something.)
Xgau illo cribbed from his Rock&Roll&... column (and full, highly searchable virtual Xgau vaults here.)
Tonight Tonight in Music: Beast Please Be Still, Rye Rye
Posted by Megan Seling on Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:00 AM
M.I.A. and Rye Rye live
Rye Rye, Tigerbeat, Champagne Champagne
(Neumos) Everything I've seen promoting this show bills Rye Rye as M.I.A.'s protégé—which she is, having toured and recorded with her and being the first signee to her record label N.E.E.T. But let's just take a minute to appreciate how rarely you hear that title in the realm of pop music these days. Has any pop icon since Prince really promoted a "protégé"? I can't think of one. So, Rye Rye has recorded with Diplo, Blaqstarr, and Count & Sinden. She raps with a raspy, kid-small voice over a variety of bassbin-rattling beat strains. Her songs, like "Bang," don't transcend party rap to become proper pop anthems in the way that her mentor's do, but they are at least top-quality, heart-palpitatingly rhythm-heavy specimens of club music. ERIC GRANDY
Beast Please Be Still live at the Cumulus Festival
Beast Please Be Still, Man Rockwell, Sugar & Hate
(Chop Suey) Beast Please Be Still are experimental in a way that doesn't make you want to cut off your ears and feed them to chinchillas. "Mastodon March Smilodon Smile" is a five-minute fistfight that starts with a piano riff and transforms into a Pogues-ish stomp. Most experimental music doesn't make you happy you stuck around to listen to the whole goddamned thing, but Beast's music always does. Even their quieter compositions involve accordions and other interesting instruments atypical for the genre; they create compositions, not masturbatory messes. PAUL CONSTANT
Our calendar has these shows and more listed for your convenience.
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