Jackson wrote about this show below. Here is another take.

“It’s really hard to sustain a note on a full stomach because I’m afraid I’ll burp into the microphone,” Sharon Van Etten said to a packed house of queer couples, single ladies in flannel button-ups, and groups of middle-aged hipsters at Neptune Theatre Sunday night.

Opening for the petite Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter with a booming, grainy voice was Philadelphia band the War on Drugs—four gentlemen with a swarm of echoing synthesizer sounds that, combined with constant blue lights overhead, made the Neptune feel like a fish tank. Adam Granduciel (lead vocals/guitar) and Robbie Bennett (keyboard) sported trendy Jesus-length haircuts, and all four had a great sense of humor. Granduciel began to tease David Hartley (bassist) about his family in Seattle. “You’re from around here, right? In Poulsbo?” he asked Hartley. The bassist (along with half the crowd) scoffed at Granduciel’s geography skills. The War on Drugs played for a good hour in their bizarre, aquatic way before Van Etten finally took the stage.

Apart from her intimidating vocal power, Van Etten is otherwise downright adorable. The 31-year-old giggled and palled around with her bandmates and the crowd and, though she’s been performing for most of her life, appeared almost nervous on stage. “Like I’m supposed to remember all my songs?” she joked when she forgot the set list three songs into the show. Her guitarist climbed over two amps to whisper the next title into her ear.

Van Etten’s good-natured, awkward demeanor was endearing and instantly won over the crowd as she answered the questions folks shouted from the audience. For example:

Random person: “Do you like cats?”
Van Etten: “Cats? I love cats.”
Same person: “I love you!”
Van Etten: “I love you, too, beautiful stranger.”

At one point, a fan pushed his way to the front and set a flower onstage. Van Etten stopped playing to go pick up the flower and slide the stem through her guitar strings. “This song is now for that guy,” she said before continuing with the swooning, mesmerizing voice and gut-wrenching lyrics of her latest album, Tramp.

Van Etten’s drummer is the tallest man alive. Even seated, he towered over Van Etten’s tiny standing frame. Part way into the set, her lead guitarist pulled out a violin bow and continued to play his guitar without missing a note. But the real treat was the lady sharing the stage with Van Etten, who switched from back-up vocals to guitar to bass to keyboard to the occasional tambourine, and the two fierce female voices took over the audience. Their harmonies swelled and swayed, particularly on songs like “Tornado” and “One Day.” Together, they wooed the crowd long into the evening.

Probably everyone else in attendance saw this coming, but one of the night’s biggest surprises for me was simply seeing the War on Drugs on the bill. They’ve been touring with Sharon Van Etten across the country, but due to their upcoming Sasquatch appearance, it looked like they’d be unable to play in Seattle. The tea leaves became easier to read once I saw the Neptune’s website the day of the show, and there it said “SPECIAL GUESTS: The War on Drugs.” Slave Ambient, their latest release, has been on high rotation for me since it came out, with equal parts majestic instrumentation and poignant lyrics (my personal favorite that was performed on Sunday was “I Was There” with its biting refrain of “I thought I had you by the hand / Only had you by the glove.”) Adam Granduciel and company seamlessly brought their Highway 61 Revisited by-way-of Loveless jams on-stage, but another influence was made apparent that I hadn’t heard in their music before tonight. Introducing what Granduciel called his favorite song ever written, the band launched into a cover of the Scottish-big-music-makers Waterboys’ “A Pagan Place,” and it was good to see further examples that they aren’t wholly beholden to Americana forebears.

There was a telling moment during the tail-end of Sharon Van Etten’s set that seems to describe her music to a T. While introducing “All I Can,” she told the crowd the song was about mistakes, and that if she had a diary, big bold letters on the front would merely read “mistakes.” Over the course of her three albums, Van Etten has written a lot about mistakes, and not merely the incorrect-usage-of-cover-sheets-on-your-TPS-reports variety, but the life altering kinds, like staying with someone who makes your life a living hell, but that you can’t imagine being without. I’ve thankfully found myself bereft of friends who are in on-and-off relationships, but I know Van Etten will soundtrack a lot of drunkenly weepy ‘guys nights’ if the time comes again soon.

Tramp, her stunning new album, manages to sound more triumphant than her earlier output, even as her lyrics can still largely read as pleas to a damaged significant other. Much as been said about the guest appearances on the record (production by a dude from the National, Zach Condon of Beirut sings on two songs, and there’s also Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner jamming on “Serpents”) but while playing live Van Etten, without all those people on stage, was able to reiterate that these songs are her own. By the end of the night I had violated one of my formerly-resolute concert norms of never yelling anything aloud ever, but when Van Etten announced she was playing her last song, I began shouting for “Don’t Do It,” both as a request for my favorite song of hers, and as a way saying “hey, I’m not ready for you to go yet.” She kindly replied “Oh, I’m gonna do it” and played a wistful song that I didn’t recognize. For an artist whose body of work largely speaks to doing the wrong thing that feels right, of shutting out everyone in your life who tells you just to dump the asshole/bitch already, I couldn’t think of a more proper ending to the night.

In just one weekend I went to both Women Who Rock at the beautiful and awesome Washington Hall, and also the Northwest Women's Show at the gigantic and temporarily hot pink carpeted Century Links Events Center near Century Link Field.

• Kelly O
• Alice Bag, WWRP Keynote Speaker

Women Who Rock seemed to be a conference, pretty true to their mission statement:

Women Who Rock Research Project (WWRRP) supports, develops, and circulates cultural production, conversations and scholarship by cultural producers and faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across disciplines, both within and outside the University, who examine the politics of gender, race, class, and sexuality generated by popular music. Our goal is to generate dialogue and provide a focal point from which to build and strengthen relationships between local musicians and their communities, and educational institutions.

The NW Women's Show focused on (in no particular order):

Diets, Dieting, Diet Drugs, Fitness Classes, Zumba, the JCPenney Fashion Show, Wine Tasting, Linda Evans, Olive Oil, Naked Firemen Calenders, Dave's Killer Bread Band, Scrapbooking, Cake Decorating, Scarf Tying, and Wigs

The former made me feel like it wasn't too late to learn how to play music and/or someday become President of the United States. The latter made me think I was fat and needed a weave.

More pictures after the jump...

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Well, you really have to give Madonna credit. She kept it moving along with everyone else, who were all probably half her age (No offense!). Also, the marching band at around 9:00 sounded pretty cool. Do you think that's her real hair? Seems really unnecessary for them to blow her up at then end. Is that the thing now? It's like The Gong Show, but instead of gonging you they blow you up?

Cairo was uncomfortably full on Saturday night for USF and Secret Colors, Spencer Clark, and Mark McGuire. (Regrettably, I missed the first act.) Clark, whom I profiled in this week’s issue, was dressed in a brown blazer and buttoned-down shirt—quite a contrast from his previous Cairo performance, where he donned a race-car jacket emblazoned with the Ford logo. It was almost as if he were trying to refute my opening paragraph. Anyway, he was GQ’d up along with his Portland buddy Scott Simmons (from the band Eat Skull; he also owns Exiled, one of the greatest record stores in America). Both sat down and played Casio keyboards and triggered samples.

The first long track started with a modulated duck quack and celestial keyboard drones, over which Clark eventually tickled rapid-fire healing-tone motifs redolent of Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane’s mystic flights. The second lengthy track (see video below) began with irregular bamboo percussion hits, with Clark playing more mid/late-’70s Alice Coltrane-ish notes in mercurial flurries. About 4 ½ minutes in, Simmons produced a jaunty, Nurse With Wound-like keyboard squawk, and the piece took on a bizarre processional air. The track had a rusty-hinge, pump-action rhythm to which you could dance, however sarcastically. Clark and Simmons had the crowd transfixed, and the song’s 11 minutes seemed cruelly truncated. Always leave ’em wanting more has been Clark’s m.o. for both of his Seattle shows. Let’s hope the next one happens at a more spacious venue—or a planetarium.

Following that was Emeralds member Mark McGuire, who is our century’s unassuming guitar hero. Playing both electric guitar and bass while using an array of FX pedals, he began with some plangent, Manuel Göttsching-esque strumming, summoning a kozmik cyclical motif over a staccato rhythm of choppy looped guitar, gradually intensifying the sound to swarming, orange-red waves as he went. Periodically, McGuire would switch to bass while his guitar looped. There was a passage of sparse, almost mandolin-like timbre that smoothly transitioned into meditative, pastoral plucking à la Vini Reilly or Disco Inferno.

The set climaxed with McGuire chanting into a microphone and merging the massed vocals with ethereal guitar chords to create a gorgeous hymn to space. Right after he was done, he hit a button and uptempo, tacky, ’80s dance music came on, totally destroying the spell he’d cast. LOL OMG.

[Cairo lacked sufficient lighting to see much in this clip, but the audio came in loud and clear.]

Originally published last night, but moved up because we wanted to.

• All Images Suzi Pratt

Y'know, maybe I'm just an asshole. Before last night, I couldn't get over my initial gut reaction to WTT, but it was just the context of all that's going on in the world that made that album's hype taste like shit in my mouth. OK, so maybe Watch the Throne isn't the soul-bereft masterstroke of Illuminati pop mind-control that I thought it was—maybe it’s a bleak, gothy opera, their attempt at scripting the impending doom that it feels like the world is facing today. (Hey, remember to smile!) Maybe they were just trying to show us what it's like "in this white man's world" when they're "the ones chosen." As a longtime stan for both of these guys that entered the Dome with a heavy load of skepticism about their current trajectory, I'm not afraid to admit that my faith was renewed. I think the best possible context to understand their latest album was 50 feet away from their over(and over and over and over)blown spectacle.

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