Marissa Nadler at Saint Vitus
Well now, apparently our local heavy metal mecca has a mellow side. Marissa Nadler's music is melancholy and gothick and fits quite nicely with the overall theme of the bar. Still, I'm so used to seeing metal guys rocking out on that stage (didn't LA Guns just play there?) that this was a bit of an odd experience.
Marissa Nadler is sort of the opposite of a metal guy. They both sing about love, but she sings about love which has passed, love which she wanted to last. Metal guys sing about love in the future, that evening specifically, and how long it's going to last. Some of those metal guys are silly and implausible people (see LA Guns), Marissa Nadler is neither of those things. She sounds honest when she sings about things which are just a little too painful to address directly. Despite the distancing veneer of poetry the feelings she sings about seem authentic. Her guitar and other instruments stay int he background, rarely taking the focus off those words. She adds just enough music to give her songs a heartbeat but the lyrics are the heart. Surely she is a poet as much as a musician, and she's quite good at it too.
Posted: 5/13/2013 at 8:36pm Tags: Marissa Nadler Saint Vitus
Lady Lamb The Beekeeper at Glasslands Gallery
Silly me, I just wrote something about how how hard it is to take photos at Glasslands, then I took some photos at Glasslands. Silly me. I guess they turned the lights up a bit this time? Not much, but a bit.
I was introduced to Lady Lamb the Beekeeper during her time as a solo artist. She's this little lady with a really big voice. When she sings with soul she just blows people away, and she has decent guitar chops too. Obviously quite a few people aside from me have become quite impressed with her over the years since she is now headlining at venues like Glasslands.
Seeing her with a band is a little different than catching her solo show. The fellows in the rhythm section don't sing (probably just as well) and only play on some songs. When they do join in they add a sense of urgency to the music, making it a bit less like folk and a bit more like rock. This makes the pacing is more predictable, which also makes the music less personal. You know she isn't going to draw out one particularly noteworthy lyric or stop the song to crack a joke or anything like that. With the band it becomes less of a performance and more of a show.
Perhaps that is what happens when an artist goes from playing small rooms to headlining at medium-sized venues and touring Europe. Artists have to change and grow, such is life and all that. And as a side note I don't recall seeing her play banjo before either. Of course changes like that can alienate lazy old fans who still want to see the exact thing they're used to seeing. Perhaps aware of this, Lady Lamb The Beekeeper does some songs in the old solo style, some of the new accompanied style, and occasionally does something totally different like playing that banjo. That's probably the right compromise.
Posted: 5/12/2013 at 1:16am Tags: blue Glasslands Gallery Lady Lamb Lady Lamb The Beekeeper
Dead Leaf Echo at Union Pool
About the only type of band I would try to shoot at Union Pool is a psychedelic band. The venue isn't exactly known for its lighting, but these psych bands are pretty reliable about bringing their own. It is as though they realize that however evocative the music may be, staring at four people who are mostly just standing there tends to kill the mood. And since you can't rock out all the time... fancy lighting is a very good idea.
Dead Leaf Echo call themselves an art collective, which I guess in practice means that there is an extended cast of part-time band members. I know that a fellow named Christo (ex-Vandelles) has played guitar with the group and that they have had a few drummers.
Their sound is in the introspective, MBV-influenced school of psychedelia in which the goal seems to be taking emotions like passion and despair and presenting them in an intellectualized manner. It makes sense then that the latest Dead Leaf Echo album is based on a psychology textbook. The thing is, the tension between the rawness of those emotions and the coolness of the presentation bursts out every once in a while. You can rock out some of the time, and they do. I imagine that shoegaze fans will happily bliss out to the coolness. Personally I prefer the moments of tension, but to each his own.
Posted: 5/11/2013 at 7:13pm Tags: Dead Leaf Echo Union Pool
Tweens at Pianos
Sometimes I hate writing about bands. Not because I hate the bands, mind you. Tweens are totally awesome. No, the problem is that I know what I want to write but something is missing. In this case I just can't think of a band which sounds like Tweens even though I'm sure there are plenty of 'em. See, Tweens are an actual garage rock band, which is to say an intense, slightly sloppy rock band with lots of attitude. The problem is that they just happen to be female-fronted.
Now, there are plenty of female-fronted bands under the garage rock umbrella but many of them are the reverb-heavy girl-group inspired type (a la Veronica Falls or Dum Dum Girls). Others are too low-key, only rocking out at times (The Ettes, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) or are more like a retro act (Shannon and the Clams, Cudzoo and the Fagettes) who don't exactly sound like a rock band. The Love Me Nots are close but the keyboard is such a huge part of their sound that it's just not the same. I know that I have heard music which sounds like this before, I just can't put a name to it.
I guess I just don't know enough about music. Clearly you should stop reading this website right now!
Seriously though, I like my garage rock with some punk attitude and and rawness to it. There should be more bands like Tweens and I should be hearing them more often. And I will definitely keep writing about things I know too little about because this website is about the photography. The writing is really just a little window dressing which I spend far too much time on...
The Sights at Don Pedro
The Sights headlined the very first show I reviewed for this website. I believe it was also the first show I ever shot with a DSLR. I really sucked back then, but The Sights did not and still don't.
I admit that I showed up late and missed half of their set. From what I heard in the second half they seem to have shifted away from rock and towards soul. They were always a somewhat soulful band so this isn't way out of character for them, but boy did they ever change their lineup. Adding a keyboard, saxophone and two backing singers is not a small change! They haven't become just a straight soul act, though. For one thing the vocals don't dominate the instruments (which makes sense considering how many of them there are!) It's still a lot like rock-n-roll, just with a strong flavor of something more bluesy.
Perhaps I should apologize to the keyboardist and backing singers. I don't think you can really see them in these photos. The new lighting at Don Pedro isn't bad, but the corners of the stage are still pretty dark. It's more appropriate to a smaller band, or one which moves around a little more.
Posted: 5/5/2013 at 7:07pm Tags: Cavestomp Don Pedro The Sights
