Friday Fix: Tallest Man on Earth, John Vanderslice, Grizzly Bear, Evangelicals

The Post-Rockist’s weekly Friday Fix tries to provide you, dear reader/listener/music lover, with a few great tracks we’ve recently loved, in the hopes to turn you on to some great new music. In order to get away with giving you tracks for free, we attempt to wrap these short 3-4 song samplings around a theme. We want to draw out unique connections between songs, formulate theories upon how random songs, grouped together, might become more meaningful as a unit rather than alone on their own.  We wish to novelize, hypothesize, and deconstruct in the hopes to birth new, flourishing, bright-eyed, and boisterous meanings. We want you to love this stuff as much as we do.

But sometimes, we’re uninspired, barren, our minds run ragged by the drudgery of the work week. Sometimes, we need to find an excuse in order to continually post and post and post werds about muzik. Sometimes we’re lazy.

So this week, our Friday Fix has a flimsy raison d’etre.

Over the past week, Post-Rockist contributor and resident Milwaukeenne Amy went to three great shows and didn’t write about any of them for our humble website. I know, right?! Well, that’s ok. We take werds when we can get ‘em, and sometimes, other blogs get ‘em. That’s fine. But if Amy would have written about these shows for The Post-Rockist, it’s likely we would have posted these tracks. Happy Friday everyone!

Two Thursdays ago, Amy saw The Tallest Man on Earth and John Vanderslice. She wrote about it at Fan-Belt.com. Not here. Amy and a few other lucky Milsqwakeans got an impromtu post-performance performance from Mr. Vanderslice:

And after the already dwindling crowd had mostly headed home, John Vanderslice asked a handful of us to wait five minutes while he grabbed his guitar. He returned as promised, and his drummer returned with a drum, and John played us a song, his band singing the harmony lines, all of us grouped in a little knot in the back of the Hall. It could’ve been a campfire, a century ago, or someone’s basement, or even just the empty, lights-up Turner Hall, with the tables and chairs cleared away and nothing but friendship and sincerity and a good song, beautifully sung, left behind.

John Vanderslice – Romanian Names, from Romanian Names (buy)

The Tallest Man on Earth – Moonshiner

On Monday, Amy got to see Grizzly Bear, whose utilization of the autoharp and a Fender Rhodes were notable. Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest will probably be album of the year due mostly to the fact that everyone has written so many words about it already that it will be very easy to repurpose all of those words for a glowing end-of-year retrospective of the band and everything awesome they’ve done. While the album is indeed very good, some of us at the Post-Rockist have commented that Grizzly’s harmonies aren’t as sharp as everyone’s #1 last year, Fleet Foxes, and that the songs on last year’s Department of Eagles album seem more memorable and better constructed.

Nevertheless, I can’t stop listening to “While You Wait for the Others,” which differs slightly from the live version they played on Jools Holland in its studio gloss and in the sharpness of Daniel Rossen’s electric guitar playing. The studio afforded Rossen the chance to record a guitar part written to seem heavy-handed and sloppy but with artful control of reverb and pick scrapes. I’d love just 5 minutes with that guitar and that amp set up with that tone.

Grizzly Bear – While You Wait for the Others from Veckatimest (buy)

But back to Amy’s awesome adventures in outstanding audiencing. On Wednesday, Amy got to see Evangelicals (one of my favorites from last year) open for Starlight Mints (a band I’ve only heard of). Apparently, it was a sparse crowd in a big venue (Wednesday night shows tend to be that way), but Evangelicals reportedly put on a great show. Amy’s thoughts will post soon (again, on another site that is not this one) but we’ll link to it once it’s available.

In the meantime, listen to one of the most beautifully frightening songs I’ve every heard.

Evangelicals – Party Crashin’ from The Evening Descends (buy)

So that was Amy’s week in live music, indirectly presented to you by The Post-Rockist. A pretty spectacular week of live music, I must say. Hey, we’re just happy to give you just a taste of what she experienced, although we suspect that the real story behind these shows lies buried in Amy’s LJ account, which we assume she dutifully keeps up-to-date.