Somehow, whenever Edie Carey and Holly Figueroa get together for a show at Seattle’s Tractor Tavern, the weather seems incapable of cooperating. Such was the case for Monday’s show, during which Seattle got a wicked (to borrow from Carey’s Bostonian vocabulary) snow and ice storm, leaving the roads unto impassable.
Indie pop is amazing: it is an endless stream of music, all roughly built around the same instruments and musical structure, yet one can still find music that sounds refreshingly new, interesting, and listenable.
Comets on Fire updates the grind of the ‘70s with clean production and melodic piano noodling putting it in a context both timeless and contemporary. All this is accomplished within a framework that would please Iron Butterfly. Avatar is a great way to keep listening to old-school “hard rock” without being accused of being out of touch with the music of today.
On Skelliconnection, Chad VanGaalen offers up a wealth of musical influences, somehow crafted into a listenable, if not exactly earth-shattering, album. One hears, in his sound, hints of Joseph Arthur, Cloud Cult, and any number of Sub Pop artists. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that he is being touted as a combination of Iron & Wine, The Postal Service, and The Shins.
On their debut album No Midnight, Birdmonster has succeeded in producing a work that ought to please fans of generic indie rock – while not particularly challenging them.
If you are a fan of Citizen Cope’s music, and don’t require more than an artist to run flawlessly through their catalogue, Citizen Cope may be exactly the show for you. If you want to see an artist that will challenge, engage, or even simply entertain you, think about buying his admittedly good CDs.
To attend Bumbershoot, Seattle’s annual Labor Day orgy of the arts, is to understand all that is good about the Seattle music and cultural scene: the vivacity and seemingly boundless creative energy, the true breadth of artistic offerings, and the wide-ranging musical tastes of the audiences that support this incredible scene.
If you
Senegalese native Maria de Barros is the kind of musician to whom one can’t help but surrender oneself. Full of the joie de vivre endemic to so many performers of African heritage; the music, dance moves, and smile of de Barros clearly captivated the Town Hall crowd. They displayed seemingly boundless enthusiasm, dancing and singing along with de Barros’ music, despite the almost unbearably high temperatures in the non-air conditioned building.
