9 posts tagged “washington d.c”

With one foot stuck unapologetically in the past, a review of what I've been listening to lately:

• What: Come Back to The Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee
• Who: Benjy Ferree, DC local and inexplicable wig wearer. Likely frets that he was born too late to audition for Sha Na Na.
• When: Winter. On a date "of sorts." The Black Cat. CD release party. Crowd was classic DC, crippled by its own apathy. [Ed note: intentional use of ironic quote marks.]
  
• Why: Because it's your new favorite T-Rex album. Because there should be more concept albums. Because Fear and Blown Out are just great songs
• What: Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album title that could be worse. But only if you called it Nissan Pavilion.
• Who: Animal Collective, a band whose last cover art was so bad I refused to get the album
• When: A month ago, after I could no longer ignore CarrieNation's recommendation.
• Why: Twee as fuck. Makes me want to sing in rounds. Shades of Pet Sounds. Here's a great ode to not masturbating, but thinking about it anyway.

• What: 1993's Kill My Landlord (points for not pussy-footing around on a title)
  
• Who: The Coup
• When: Throw the following in a blender in the month of March: Dabysan's recommendation years ago. A renewed interest in the song "Laugh, Love, Fuck" right around the inauguration. A nice gentleman in California sending me their first two albums.
• Why: Brilliant lyrics.

• What: Middle Cyclone
• Who: Neko Case
• When/Where: DC's 9:30 Club. Friends and member of DC CockRock Club in tow. The Secretary of Education showed up and spoke from the stage, marking a weird new era in DC. Neko played with her hair lots, as she does at every show. I was not into the stagecraft. Could have done with fewer images of owls and other precious animals. It was like walking into an Anthropologie. Still, a good show for being encumbered by your own loneliness as she sings yet another song about loneliness. This Tornado is just not that into you.
• Why: Actually, I don't think this album is as good as the others. But the cover art is scary/ badass and sexy all at once. It's worth the price of admission.
  

  Middle Cyclone

  Neko Case

I dialed back almost two decades and saw They Might Be Giants perform their 1990 record Flood on Friday night at the 9:30 Club. The show was to be "bifurcated," as the well-fed John explained, with Flood at the beginning, followed by miscellany for the latter half. I'll spare you a cogent narrative and leave you with a few observations from the show because I like making lists and can't be bothered. I am lazy. Never said I wasn't.

They Might Be Giants

• There was a couple right in front of me that I was certain met during a 10th grade production of The Crucible. They were holding each other through most of the show and mouthing the lyrics to one another. They probably would make a baby to the music of They Might Be Giants.
  

• Hearing Flood live was an absolute joy. There's no other way to say this. I've written about this record's influence on my music tastes before. No need to rehash that. But let's just say there was immense satisfaction in hearing the opening "Why is the World in Love Again?" bookended by "Road Movie to Berlin." Oh yeah, touring on the success of past records is big right now.

• I think "Lucky Ball and Chain" and "Twisting" have aged well.

• I could have done without the entire second half of the show. I didn't need a song about the number 7. Or that one about the countries, as nice a geography refresher as it was.

• If they were going to do older material, it was pure balls to leave out Ana Ng and Don't Let's Start. After the show, this forced my hand to sing the lines about Ana Ng and how they're getting old but "still haven't walked in the glow"...I'm sure the patrons at Solly's did not appreciate.
  Ana Ng

• I can safely say that unless my future kids make me take them, this is the last time I'll see They Might Be Giants.

Stay Positive

The Hold Steady

Lord, how I miss the Summer of Bill. Even if he doesn't remember that there was a Summer of Bill back in the early aughties, I do.

Bill never actually told me about the Summer of Bill. I think I heard about it first from Dabysan, later confirmed by HotRod. If I may take editorial liberties here, the Summer of Bill (or SOB as we'll call it) evolved as a way for Bill, a mild-mannered fellow with a faint Southern accent, to wrestle his life away from the clutches of the same old drinking routine at a notoriously skeezy townie/jar head bar called King Pepper. This is not to say that Bill wanted to quit drinking during the SOB. But he had other ambitions that summer. Ambitions such as: buy a motorcycle. I'm not sure what else was on the list. Probably get laid and ride coasters, if I were betting.

There were occasions that summer where the phrase "Summer of Bill" got invoked without much explanation. I didn't need to know more, really. It served as an elegant short-hand for someone wanting to change his life, seize the moment or at least tick off a list of fun shit to do in a summer. Bill didn't have to say it. We all knew it. And we all wanted that for him.

Bill eventually left town, moved to San Francisco, slimmed down and became quite the looker. Not sure if it was a result of the SOB, or that he'd long been itching to get out of the town he grew up in. Still, the SOB lives on in my imagination as a good way to get off your ass and reclaim the things you love.

The summer is nearly over, and I've attended zero shows. Time to rectify that. I'm invoking SOB. No time like the present. In the next two months, I'm seeing:

1. Old 97's, July 29th at the 9:30 Club

2. Bon Iver, Aug. 1 at the Black Cat

3. The Hold Steady, Aug. 14 at the 9:30

4. Liz Phair, Aug. 28, 9:30 Club

5. Bob Pollard, Sept. 28, Black Cat

6. Dressy Bessy, Sept. 30, Black Cat

My life falls into a pattern where something can be in front of me for a long time, but I never really see it. And when I finally notice it, I'm left wondering whether I'm walking through the world with blinders on. But better to see it late than to never see it at all, right? That's why "discovering" the band Unrest has been one of the best parts of this craptastic week.

Several months ago, a package arrived in the mail from some lovely kids in Ohio (thanks P&N if you are reading this) who burned me several albums worth of tunes they thought I'd like. At about the same time, I had purchased a lot of new music, so I didn't have adequate time to really sit and listen to each album. I trended toward the familiar and shuffled around on the bands I didn't know anything about. But this week, I made my way down toward the latter half of the alphabet and found Unrest, a D.C. band led by Mark Robinson, founder of the beloved TeenBeat record label. How could I have missed this band? Seriously? Why did nobody tell me?

This song, Cath Carroll, is tribute to the the British journalist/musician by the same name. That's a picture of Cath as taken by Mapplethorpe.

035 Cath Carroll

Unrest

On this day, in celebration of our nation's independence, I will:

1. Play all the Billy Bragg commie songs.

2. Contemplate the brilliance of the lyrics "Killers in America work seven days a week."

3. Listen to the Clash.

4. Answer a text message from my friend in Malaysia, who remembered our Independence Day. Even though I lived there briefly, I can't for the life of me remember theirs. This, unfortunately, is what it means to be an American.

5. Drink for every time someone declares "freedom isn't free" or attempts to be wry and calls America "Murica."

6. Remember that my father threatened to hang the Union Jack from our house every 4th, but never did.

7. Do the thing that all people who actually live in the District do: avoid the Mall at all costs and hang out on a friend's roof in Northwest, safe from the great unwashed masses downtown.

8. Recall one of the best lines from the movie Dazed and Confused: "This summer when you're being inundated with all this bi-centennial, fourth of July, bru-ha-ha just remember what you're celebrating. That's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning aristocratic white males didn't want to pay their taxes."

9. Eat some sort of dip that probably has mayonnaise as a prime ingredient. Renew dislike for mayo, firmly entrench myself in the mustard camp in the age-old mustard vs. mayo wars.

10. Think about why I find this cover art so compelling. Something about it just feels lonely. Go listen to some Pernice Brothers.

Yours, Mine & Ours

The Pernice Brothers

I wish I didn't have to tell you this, but the wretched Late Night Shots crew is setting its sights on the ladies who hang out at the Black Cat after determining that the women who hang out there are "straight up better looking than just about any female you would run into out in Georgetown..."

Well, yes, we are. But that doesn't mean we want you here. I think I speak for all when I say:

A wise soul once said, “there’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” If that’s the case, Ween has made a career of dancing precariously on that line, as evidenced by their show at DAR Constitution Hall last Wednesday.

I’m not a Ween fan. I haven’t thought much about them since the mid-90s, when anyone who watched MTV’s 120 Minutes was bound to hear that annoying ditty about “pushing up the little daisies.” But a relationship is about compromise. This was retribution for many an indie rock show Yo Han has suffered through.

Ween say in interviews they want to be taken seriously, that they’re not a “joke” band. There are those who would compare Ween to perennial gimmick band  (and an old favorite of mine) They Might Be Giants. But they would be wrong.

They Might Be Giants appealed to nerdy, tubby band kids who liked clever wordplay and got beat up with some regularity. Ween appeals to the people who beat up those kids. Ween is the inner 12-year-old in all of us. They are the “obnoxious, funny, true and mean” guy Liz Phair sung about. I must hand it to the nitrous balloon dealers who lined the streets before and après show: they knew their target market. To wit:

I admit that I’m pre-disposed to dislike most of what I see at DAR. I’ve decided that seeing a show at that venue is a little like having sex at a B&B. A good time can be had. But there’s something off about the atmosphere. I find sex near lace doilies and pink floral wallpaper unsavory. Similarly, I find the plush seats, crown molding and theater attendants at DAR ill matched for a rock show.

The Opposite Of Sex

Still, the crowd managed to transcend the shitty venue. After all, Ween are amazingly competent musicians, with a very loyal fan base that dates back. A line of well-mannered women who couldn’t have been any younger than 55 sat politely in the row in front of me and mouthed the words to almost every song. I wish I didn’t have to witness this, but one pumped her fist in the air in solidarity to the line “she’s gonna get her Master’s Degree in fucking me!”

Almost a week later, I still can’t wrap my mind around the weird incongruities of that show. Maybe I’ll chalk it up to the duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir. Or maybe that’s just Ween.

NekoCase

You know what would be great?

If a certain ginger-haired lovely will wear a shirt that says "Neko Case, make red-headed babies with me!" to the 9:30 club when we go see her sold-out show this Thursday.

You know what would be better? If the message is crudely scrawled in marker on a rumpled, dirty T-shirt.

And funnier than that? If the words "Neko Case" are crossed out and replaced with "Jenny Lewis," and he wears it when she come to D.C. with Rilo Kiley in October. 

At press time, Hot Rod is waffling on my proposal that I'll make him such a shirt to wear for the show. But I plan on gathering photographic evidence if it does happen. And you know, they would have the cutest kids. Until then, here's a nice live version of her song "Teenage Feeling" from the Sound Opinions show. Click here.

Saw the regional air guitar championships last night at a packed 9:30 Club show, where 24 contestants took to the stage to mime playing electric guitar, and in one case, electric violin.

People compete from all over the country at these regional events, and the winners go on to a national competition in New York. The winner of that competition represents the US in the international air guitar championship in Finland, a place that kinda makes sense to host it when you think about the fact that people from cold climates disproportionately seem to like scary metal music.

The three-judge panel at the 9:30 was composed of one dude from Satellite Radio (who put off a Chuck Klosterman vibe), one of the members of local DC band Army of Me (who bore a striking similarity to that Bam guy on Jackass) and some other band dude (who resembled Justin Hawkins from the Darkness to the point where I think it might have been him.) Contestants were judged on skill, showmanship and some undefinable quality called "airness," which the host kept reminding us was like porn: We'd know it when we saw it.

Dabysan, Hot Rod, Nikki and I didn't stay for the entire night. But it provided excellent entertainment for 2 hours, which was just long enough to see our fellow Washingtonians, many of them wearing spandex, suffer some fantastic humiliations. The sad thing was that the club was packed tighter than it might normally be on a Wednesday night when people are playing actual instruments. But as Daby rightly pointed out, our generation exists to be wry. There were more than a few hipsters wearing Iron Maiden shirts ironically. An air guitar competition is kinda like the Super Bowl of spectator events for the permanently-arched eyebrow set.

What's really been bothering me is that the competition was a passel of penises. Nary a women could be found on stage. At one point, I was shouting loudly about this injustice, and another woman turned to me, in equal mock outrage, to say that she might enter the competition next year. But I saw the look in her eye. We both knew she wasn't going to enter next year.

I've been contemplating why women generally don't "play" in air guitar competitions. And if someone has an answer, I'd certainly like to hear it. Best answer I can come up with now is that somehow this is right and necessary for the survival of the species. Former Washington Postie David Segal sorta explored the question (but about actual guitar, not air guitar) a few years back. But the answers weren't really satisfying.

Until I figure it  out: