All is falling…

Tried and failed to get an assignment to review the new Swans, which is excellent, but I did manage to snag James Blackshaw’s lovely All Is Falling for Blurt.

I wrote:

An extraordinarily beautiful eight-song cycle, All Is Falling continues James Blackshaw's development as a composer and arranger, as well as guitarist. Like last year's Glass Bead Game, it extends well beyond the 12-string wizardry that first brought Blackshaw notice, moving into dizzying landscapes of guitar, piano, voice and strings.

The rest

One of those “not really a video” videos of Part 3


I’ve got a new mix coming pretty soon…trying to get all the songs I want to put on into some sort of order that makes sense, though I may give up at some point and just slap it up there.

Consider the Tortoise

After a long dry spell, there were finally a couple of shows I wanted to see last week in Northampton. I already blogged a couple of times about Rangda. Here's my Tortoise write-up, which ran yesterday at Blurt.

Tortoise -- the five-person, instrument-switching, jazz-rock-fusion band out of Chicago that single-handedly launched post-rock -- has just kicked "High Class Slim Came Floatin' In" up a notch. Two drummers, Dan Bitney and John Herndon face off on kits set back to back, playing syncopated rhythms that move in and out of phase with each other, now an identical beat doubled, now two intersecting cadences that fill in each other's spaces and dot each other's "I"s. John McEntire is up on the multiple-tiered keyboard synth set, while Doug McCombs settles into a groove in the back. For now, guitar-bass-keyboard player Jeff Lewis is picking out a melody on a keyboard in the back, but don't get too comfortable. When the song's over, everyone will change places. It would be remarkable if the band's five members were this good on one instrument. Instead, they're adept at three or four.

More

Baths

Kind of a late review of Baths' Cerulean up at Dusted today. It's a fascinating piece of work, with elements of hip hop, pop, electronic music, but not really dead center of any of these genres. The album's been out since late summer on Anticon, and it's well worth checking out.

I said, "The tension often arises when Wiesenfeld’s lush, flowery melodies coincide with the hard abstraction of rhythm. His beats are slant-wise, not quite square, and prone to plunging forward then hitching back. They are, all by themselves, worth thinking about, at once physically compelling and off-putting. You feel like a surfer trying to stay on top of them. And even if you didn’t want to think about them, you’d have to, because they are presented at a dominant level, as if the piano or guitar is playing in a room down the hall, but the drums are right there next to you.


You view the melodies, then, as if through a barred window, catching little flurries of baroque ornamentation between massive beats."

The rest of the review is here.


"Plea" and "Maximallist" live

Jeremy Messersmith

I’m not even sure who sent me Jeremy Messersmith’s The Reluctant Graveyard or how long it sat on my hard drive before I got around to listening to it…but it’s really really good.

Messersmith is a songwriter out of Minneapolis, leaning towards the Beatles-pop end of the spectrum, with little hints of the Zombies, Elliott Smith, Beach Boys, Jason Falkner. This is his third album, which he is offering on a “pay what you want” basis from his website.

It’s always hard to say what makes good singer songwriter better than a so-so one -- hooks, lyrical interest, personality,that kind of thing -- but whatever it is, he’s got it. I particularly like the second song on the album, which is called “Dillinger Eyes” and a rowdier song, later on the album, called “Violet”.

He’s just made a video for “Organ Donor” which is not bad either.

Rangda, Major Stars, Sunburned Hand, holy shit!

So, after hardly going to a show all summer, I suddenly escaped my living room twice last week, first for Rangda, Major Stars, and Sunburned Hand of the Man at the Flywheel (reviewed below), and last night for Tortoise at the Iron Horse. Both really good. Still struggling with what to say about Tortoise, but my piece on Rangda ran this morning at Blurt. It begins:

We had ALL the guitars Thursday night.

Or at least that was how it seemed on a hot night in Easthampton. It was like all the guitars, all the pedals, all the guitar players had stepped onto a tilted board and slid helplessly towards the Flywheel. There were two of them in Sunburned Hand of the Man, three in Major Stars, two in Rangda (and at least one pretty famous one in the audience), and when they got going, in Sunburned's endlessly morphing drones, in Major Stars' psychedelic 1960s mayhem, or in Rangda's closing waterfall cascades of guitar notes, Sun City Girls' Richard Bishop and Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny locked together in the beautiful downward scales of "Plain of Jars," it could sound like an army. If you were looking for a guitar last Thursday and you were anywhere else, good freaking luck. You should have been at the Flywheel.

the rest

Here they are playing “Sarcophagi” in Dublin last summer.

I went to see Rangda last night

...and it was awesome.

I'm going to write about it tomorrow, but for now, a few photos.

Sunburned Hand of the Man, or some of them...there were 12 people on stage at one point, including one guy in a Spiderman mask




Major Stars...Kate Village is my new hero



And the really incomparable Rangda...if you get a chance, go see this.

Go see Tortoise this week.

I’m going to see Tortoise next Monday in Northampton, and if you live on the East Coast of the US or Europe, you might be able to do the same fairly soon. I interviewed Dan Bitney for Venus about a year ago, and you can read the piece, if you still want to, right here.

Remember, these are busy guys, in an average of five bands each, even if you leave out McEntire who is in 25, so there aren’t a lot of Tortoise tours and you shouldn’t miss one if you can help it.

What does it look/sound like? Like this:


Dates
Thu Sep 2 Buffalo, NY Soundlab
Fri Sep 3 Herkimer, NY - Moe Down
Sat Sep 4 Monticello, NY - ATP Festival
Sun Sep 5 South Burlington, VT - Higher Ground
Mon Sep 6 Northampton, MA- Iron Horse
Tue Sep 7 Boston, MA- Paradise
Wed Sep 8 Philadelphia, PA - World Cafe
Thu Sep 9 Richmond, VA - The Canal Club
Fri Sep 10 Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
Sat Sep 11 Raleigh, NC - Hopscotch Festival
Sun Sep 12 Washington, DC - Black Cat
Mon Nov 15 London, UK- Koko
Tue Nov 16 London, UK - Koko
Wed Nov 17 Paris, France- Elysee Montmartre
Fri Nov 19 Amsterdam, Netherlands - Paradiso
Sat Nov 20 Berlin, Germany- Admiralspalast
Sun Nov 21 Vienna, Austria - WUK
Mon Nov 22 Prague, Czech Republic - Meetfactory
Nov 23 Dresden, Germany- Beatpol
Wed Nov 24 Katowice, Poland - Ars Cameralis Festival
Thu Nov 25 Leuven, Belgium - Het Depot

I'm going to see Rangda tomorrow, too. Very psyched.