As Phish’s powerful rendition of The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street defined their Halloween desert escapade, Festival 8, it was a line from the immortal songwriting team of Jagger/Richards that best summed up the drama of Phish festivals 1-7: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
It is safe to say that this year’s lineup for the annual CMJ festival was the most underwhelming in years, maybe ever. Usually there are 10-20 established acts, and a handful of showcases packed with up and coming contenders that everyone is clamoring to get into, not so for ’09.
The Mars Volta is a band of mystery. They're detached, they're impersonal…they're brilliant. It's commonly accepted that a concert should involve some connection between band and audience. By conventional thinking, this is often accomplished with a bit of friendly banter between songs or sing-along parts that blur the lines between performer and audience. But the Mars Volta is anything but a conventional band. They do things differently.
Opening for Bruce Hornsby at the FlynnCenter October 7th, The Wood Brothers won over the headliner's audience. Chris and Oliver's sly humor and understated country blues made an almost immediate connection and remained effective for the duration of an unfortunately abbreviated forty-minute set.
On the Friday night Cymbals Eat Guitars, Holly Miranda, and Delorean played the Self-Titled Magazine/Pop Mart Media Showcase in the Village at Le Poisson Rogue.
Ben Folds and the Seattle Symphony. For few musicians would I have fewer reservations about this potential pairing – and in Folds’ recent visit to Seattle, this critic was not disappointed. Folds played a magnificent set, highlighting the strength of his songwriting, giving the audience a window into the process of converting pop songs into orchestral pieces (or, at it’s called, “arranging”), and generally providing a great evening.
The intimacy of FlynnSpace lends itself to revealing the detail of a musical performance which benefited The David Binney Quartet tremendously the evening of September 26th. It was impossible not to notice how the foursome challenges itself when they play.
The Treasure Island tradition is to break out the two-day fest into electronic/hip-hop day and indie rock day, which makes for two very different experiences within the same festival vibe.
The elegant Auditorium Theatre had served as Wilco’s go-to venue for when they would play Chicago. The band played many a memorable shows at the iconic venue, but with a new album out something had to give. Could Wilco keep the intimacy of a theater show in an arena setting?
There are two things you can be sure about at a Yo La Tengo show: bored security and an odd mix of cutesy indie pop lying next to long instrumental noise jams. Ira Kaplan along with his wife Georgia Hubley and James McNew, elder statesmen of the modern indie scene, brought their “New York kitsch” to the Arizona desert for a performance at the drab Marquee Theater. Opening with the swirling rock number “Here to Fall,” the band tore into the guitar squaw workout of “And The Glitter is Gone” – two tracks off their latest album Popular Songs.
