The Post-Rockist

If there is one thing that sucks about working for a multi-million dollar corporate entity (among many thousand other things), it’s that you have to wait till after work to blog about the shows you saw the night before. So even though I’m posting this less than 24 hours after the events you’ll find herein, this is late by www time standards. However, Whalebomb and I will be covering, to best of our blogging abilities, as much of the four-day event as we can (please see our preview) by taking tomorrow off (or at least I will).

Blowout 2008! I think it deserves an opening essay. Whalebomb, in 200 words or less, answer the question: “What does the first night of the Blowout means to me?” Whalebomb, why don’t you stand up and read your paper to the class:

“Snapping that Wristband on last night resulted in an instant headache. It’s as if my body knows. The Wristband is a trigger for a future hangover, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Not only does the Wristband act as a four day pass for the Blowout, it also acts as a four day pass to life. No one who is wearing the Wristband for the next three days is doing any work. Sure, they may be at work, but they aren’t doing any work. They are moaning. They are thinking about coming up with a game plan to survive until 2:00 a.m. tonight and do it all again tomorrow. And the next day. The Wristband is my “Be nice to me, I gave blood” sticker. It’s the beat up face from fight club. If you see the the Wristband on someone else, you know what they’re doing, and you don’t need to say anything to them. Just be kind and keep your voice down.

Someone push the reset button.”

Ummmmmmm: You get an “A.”

Well, since we are a bit late reporting, I can first point you here, here, and here. That about does it, generally. See how great a job we’re doing already! So since everybody was at the party, how about some pictures with occasional comments. Sorry I can’t get more to you, my babys–I’m running late for Thursday night at the Blowout as I type. (Continued)

Ever since the recent emergence of the “lost” Velvet Underground song “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore,” I’ve been on a huge VU kick, digging through old bootleg recordings and demos, official or otherwise, reminding myself why I fell in love with the band in the first place. I can’t think of any other band that I’d rather listen to in such a raw, unfiltered state (okay, maybe I can think of one other group), where the crackling tape hiss and muffled background chatter actually enhances the listening experience, adding to the group’s rough-hewn, subaltern mystique.

Velvet Underground bootleggers are almost as obsessive as Deadheads, and with good reason: the Velvets were, at heart, a live band but the recorded performances are rare; decent audio quality is even harder to come by; and the captured live versions of various songs are wildly diverse. For a band that reinvented themselves on every album (hell, even their official demo recordings have distinct personalities), it’s no surprise that you can dive into the bootleg repertoire of the Greatest Rock & Roll Band of All Time and come up with a different, and wholly intact, picture of the band each time. You can pick your poison: the Velvets as sadie-masie mirth makers; the Velvets as a country-western band; the Velvets as the second best jam band of the 1960s; or, as I’ve attempted in the mix below, the Velvets as guitar pop heroes.

The following is by no means meant to be a comprehensive or “best of” compilation of Velvet Underground rarities, just a quick mix of some of my favorite upbeat, parsed down VU tunes. The songs are after the jump:

(Continued)

I’m coming upon my one-year anniversary of being back in sunny Detroit, my home town, after spending four glorious years in Washington, DC, with its national erection (aka. the Washington Monument) in view for all to see and occasionally walking by Ian MacKaye in Adams Morgan or Ian Svenonius being a creep at a dance party (super amazing performer on stage, but he tried to hit on one of my lady friends who didn’t know he’s a DC-music legend. He creeped her out so badly that I had to walk her home.)

So this is my first Blowout for five years, and I’m excited to see all the bands I’ve been reading about and listening to in one swoop. Joining me in The Post-Rockist’s coverage is Whalebomb, one of Detroit’s most legendary concertgoers. He catches at least 25 shows every year and legend has it that he can instantly distinguish every single chord that a band plays, as long as that chord is either A or D. I’m not sure how we’re going to write this together–we’re just going to try to cover as much ground in Hamtramck as possible. Either way, it’ll be messy, fun, and maybe a little squishy. It’ll be a collaboration not unlike Postal Service, only, like, blogging.

It could be like this, so sayeth Whalebomb: “It’s too bad we couldn’t cover it like the auto show or something. Cause if you think about it, the Blowout is the auto show of music. You go and listen to what you’ll be listening to for the next 12 months. It’s the Electronics Convention…but without the porn convention next door. Blowout should have a porn convention next door. But anyway, how is the auto show covered? I don’t read anything. Too bad there isn’t any easy layout we can copy.” (Continued)

Photo Credit: Kathyrn Yu

The Magnetic Fields in New York City was a fragile performance by a band that seemed like they might blow away and disintegrate in the lights of Times Square if the audience all exhaled at the same time. Stephin Merritt slouched in a stool throughout the performance. The speakers were turned low. The piano was muted. The soft cello of John Woo (not the film director) was the lead instrument. And the crowd sat as still as three thousand concertgoers have ever sat.

The opening act, Interstellar Radio, was a literary performance troupe who performed a dramatic reenactment of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart. Interstellar Radio’s lead actor Adam Green performed all the characters and Rob Amesbury provided a gentle Steinway piano accompaniment with Matthew Beals providing the crisp sound effects—squeaky hinges, snapping celery broken bones and of course (with a mic under his chin) the echoing thumping that sounded more like a heart beat than an actual heart beat does. Green’s frenetic performance as the madman provided a stark counterpoint to The Magnetic Field’s subdued performance. Poe’s stories brim with men clawing at the edges of the world—either desperately trying to escape reality or searching for a scrap of reality to wrap around themselves. Poe’s unreliable narrators have to tell stories because they’re mad. Merritt’s unreliable narrators have to tell stories because they’re madly in love. A narrow distinction.

Time for a confession (not a Poe confession, and this definitely isn’t the place for a Merritt confession), I don’t know The 6ths or The Gothic Archies and I don’t even have any of the other Magnetic Fields albums other than 69 Love Songs. I? No. The Charm of the Highway Strip? No. Blasphemy to the assembled Merrittians but, in my mind, knowing 69LS and feeling those melodies constantly coiled in my heart and the lyrics perched on my tongue seemed like criteria enough to enjoy the show.

It would be dishonest to deny the centrality of 69LS in the mind of me or the vast majority of TMF fans. This 3 disk collection is the closest anyone has ever come to encompassing what it means to love someone (with the possible exception of Frank Sinatra’s version of “Where or When” from 1958’s “Only the Lonely”). 69LS covers every genre from country ballad (“Kiss Me Like You Mean It”), toe-tapping pop (“Chicken with its Head Cut Off), aching monologue (“Love is Like a Bottle of Gin”), comic show tune (“Zebra”), and everything in between (there’s even an Irish sea shanty “Abigail, Belle of Kilronan). Stephin Merritt has a unique ability to write songs that embody the beauty, zaniness, anger, hope and pain of being in love.

His characters don’t just sing about finding and losing love—they tell stories that are heartbreaking and familiar. They call to mind moments and feelings that you’re sure you’ve lived through, that you’re sure you remember but that you can’t quite place—who couldn’t have said “The things we did and didn’t do come flooding back to me now”
and haven’t we all thought “I’m in free fall. This could be love, or nothing at all.” at least once? Or, at least we want to think we have.

The Town Hall set list mainly consisted of songs from Distortion, TMF’s latest album and its first since 2004’s I, with only a scattering of older songs.

But the songs from Distortion are damn good, they show the dragon sharp wit and insight that Stephin Merritt does so well. They’re funny and touching, they sparkle and dance and could never disappoint. And they were performed without the fuzz and electricity and (perhaps) anger that led to the album title. The Distortion songs sounded just like the older songs, and just like the Future Bible Heroes songs, and just like The 6ths and so on. If Merritt sees distinctions between these albums and these projects, then they weren’t on display on Saturday night.

This could have easily been a recipe for disappointment. Walking into The Townhall I know that if they played “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” I would have danced a jig in the aisle. If “How Fucking Romatic” appeared my chest would have tied itself into a bow and if I was blindsided with “Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing” I would have…. Instead, I found new songs, new jokes and new stories told with a familiar yet brand new wink. Now I know why courtesans never cry, I was presented with a delightfully perverse list of the things that Nuns like, and I heard a lovely little ditty about a threeway.

And though I would have been happy to hear them perform all three disks of 69LS in order, the relative scarcity of them on Saturday night made them seem even more precious when they did appear. (Continued)

(I originally wrote the following review for Playback:STL)

White Hinterland - “Dreaming of Plum Trees”

White Hinterland - “Hometown Hooray”
(both from Phylactery Factory)

There seems to be an emerging trend of conservatory-trained songstresses with a penchant for poetry turning the old, stodgy, high-school honor roll stereotype on its head. As the nebulous genre of indie rock becomes more and more polished, lo-fi amateurism is left behind to spin in its own tape deck spools while professionally refined expressions of artistic grace are quickly becoming de rigueur. Whether it’s the operatic Becky Stark of the winsome indie folk band Lavender Diamond or the eccentric cabaret stylings of Nellie McKay, the up-and-coming whimsical piano folk balladeers are making the old Angry Women with Guitars staple a thing of yesteryear.

Casey Dienel is no exception. Her 2006 solo debut, Wind-Up Canary, drew several comparisons to McKay not only for her flexible, opera-trained voice but also for her strangely endearing method of storytelling and her playfully versatile piano accompaniment. But while Wind-Up Canary was a soft, introspective album, her new album Phylactery Factory with the band White Hinterland opens the field wide open, incorporating glockenspiels, melodicas, mellotrons, violins, and other accoutrements into Dienel’s repertoire. The result is one of the most vibrant and breezy records of the year; traipsing somewhere between the lilting morphine folk of Jolie Holland and the classically-tinged mythology of Joanna Newsom, all while maintaining a steady jazz heartbeat.

(Continued)