News :: Upcoming Shows :: June

6/2
Dirtbombs :: Rock and Roll Hotel
Future Islands/Titus Andronicus/Okkervil River :: 9:30 Club

6/4
Stiff Little Fingers :: Blackcat

6/10
Thao and Mirah :: Blackcat
Radian :: Velvet Lounge

6/17
Strangeboys/White Fence/Heavy Breathing :: Comet Ping Pong

6/21
White Denim/Mazes :: Rock and Roll Hotel
The Spits/TV Ghost :: Blackcat
Coathangers :: Red Palace

6/23
Chiptune Showcase :: Velvet Lounge

6/25
Dinosaur Jr. :: 9:30 Club

6/26
Centromatic :: DC9

6/27
Hanni el Khatib/Bass Drum of Death :: Red Palace

Feature :: Guest Post :: Echo & the Bunnymen

Today's post was written by Mt. P's very own Duke de la Roach Fuck-O (toldja i could spell that shit).

When I was starting high school cable television came to town in the form of a telephone call to my parents telling them that our family had been the first selected in our town of 24,000 to get wired for cable, if only they could be there on a certain day. A minor rebellion broke out amongst the teens in the family when we were told that the cable company was told to come another day and that we would not be the first. That rebellion was bloodily suppressed.

But get it we did, a few days later and with it came something known as mtv. Back then it was not the home of teen soaps, game shows about tv, spring break marathons or anything else. It was music video after music video with only commercials and breaks for the vjs.. These were J.J. “Triple J” Jackson, Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, and the mainspring of cool, Martha Quinn. And since there were few american bands doing videos, we were treated to the best of the british in the early 1980s with a smattering of near-independents, such as DEVO.

The music and look—spiky hair, synth, it was nothing like rock radio—if you liked it, you were on the outs, baby. Like it I did, though, through multiple trips to the aptly named rave-on musuc in the neighboring suburb, the source of anything worth having in life.

And the suburbs were the only existence we knew. Life was like John Hughes film, Hughes was basically filming the lives of the million-teen occupied-collar counties of chicago. It was like the movies were made about me, my friends, and enemies.

And those bands on mtv? I loved them all, Joy Division, New Order, the Cure, and most importantly, Echo and the Bunnymen. They got me on to the high school radio station, got me into life and music.

Echo and the Bunnymen originally consisted of a store-bought cassette tape of Crocodiles, which ran past the play head of a yellow “Sports” walkman, and into my unbelieving ears. These three-chord charlies with the jarring guitar, the bouncy, wry lyrics suggesting immediate disaster and pain, why they were high school personified. They completely understood my isolation, my need for the girls to notice me, my need to be something other than the two poses offered by midwest whitebread high school existence. Maybe they didn’t know it, being, you know, british and all, but they got me straight on. But you have to give a band credit when they have the cojones to call their fourth album “the greatest album ever made” without batting an eye.

Echo has lost some members to motorcycle accidents and attrition, but the core is there, McCullogh’s cigarette-soaked voice and Will Sergeant’s jangly single-coiled soaking wet reverbed-out delay. You’d either be a fool or plain broke to miss them.

Kelley Stoltz :: I Don't Get That

Echo & the Bunnymen play tonight at 9:30 Club. Kelley Stoltz opens. Werd is few tickets remain for what could be an easy way to relive the vomit-spattered nightmare that was your pretty pretty prom night.

Features :: Black Angels/Suuns (9:30 Club) :: Ticket Giveaway

You could view Austin-based Black Angels in a couple of ways: as a groove-heavy version of college rock that collectively bought a copy of VU's White Light/White Heat at Urban Outfitters, or as a generous merchant of the murky depths of a much more frightening and toxic pool we'll refer to very loosely here as neo-psych. A marriage of those two perspectives is probably more on the money: here you've got a band that simultaneously shines a light on the monoliths of yesterdays psych heroes while still appealing to the masses. And there is absolutely no harm in that. The Black Angels are smart enough (and tasteful enough) to understand their place in this lineage, as privileged torch-bearers holding your hand as they lead you into the emptiness. I see tomorrow night's show at the 9:30 Club as a sort of recruitment campaign. The Black Angels cordially invite you, with open arms, to finally let go of your dance-pop records and never look back. It's tough, I know... but the grass is always greener, or in this case, scorched and more the color of raw umber.

The Black Angels are killing it in a few weeks with the 4th annual Psych Fest in Austin. These guys are pulling together some great sounds as they curate and taste-make the best three day line-up we've seen at a music festival in years: Lumerians, Beach Fossils, Crystal Stilts, No Joy, Fresh and Onlys, Crocodiles, Bass Drum of Fucking Death. Shitting yourself yet?

Now for the main event: we've got one ticket to the show tomorrow night that we're giving away for free - or, as Dorothy Moskowitz sang in 1968: "the price of one admission is your mind." Just say something, anything, in this here comments section, and the ticket is potentially yours, if we like the way you say "please." Or, hell, if you like rules, then answer this one, smartass: who really shot JFK? You out the assassin, and we'll either send you to a show or put one to the back of your head. Fair is fair.

(We probably shouldn't have to say it, but leave us some way to get in touch with you in your post if you want to be able to claim the ticket: facebook link, twitter account, whatever floats your 21st century ego.)

WINNERS CHOSEN BY NOON TOMORROW, or really whenever I can wake up and peel my face off the lime and tequila-stained cutting board on my coffee table.

And you'd be a fool to miss out on opener Suuns, especially if you missed Clinic last year (watch/agree below).

News :: Upcoming Shows :: February

2/4: Corn Mo @ Red Palace
        Monotonix @ Comet

2/7: Bobby Bare, Jr. @ Iota

2/8: Thao of the Get Down Stay Down @ Iota

2/9: Gang of Four @ 9:30 Club

2/11: Baths, Braids, Star @ Rock and Roll Hotel
Coke Bust @ Hole in the Sky

2/12: Wild Nothing, Abe Vigoda @ Rock and Roll Hotel

2/14: OFWGKTA @ U Street Lounge

2/18: Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds @ Comet

2/20: The Beets @ Velvet Lounge

2/21: Fluorescent Sensei @ Iota

2/23: Lower Dens, Secret Mountains, Weekends @ Subterranean A

2/26: Beach House @ 9:30 Club [SOLD OUT]

News :: Upcoming shows :: January

1/9: Julian Lynch/Wet Dream @ Subterranean A

1/17: Tyvek @ Comet

1/20: Fight Amp @ Black Cat

1/21: Yo la Tengo @ 9:30

1/25: Jolie Holland @ Iota

1/27: Small Black/Bear Hands @ Red Palace

1/30: Young Prisms @ Black Cat

Features :: Pitifully Short-range Teleportation :: SVIIB

Rock and Roll Hotel, 1353 H St NW, Washington, DC
Thursday, October 21, 2010

It's been a year and a half since I first caught School of Seven Bells at 9:30 Club, opening for Fujiya/Miyagi. This night they were headlining and Active Child opened.

In concert, Active Child is really two children playing parallel in a sandbox. There's a harp (fuck me, right?) and a couple of Macbook Pros. So that's what it takes these days. It's hard to imagine what a band rehearsal must look/sound like, two twenty-somethings heatedly bouncing in front of their laptop screens, feeling rad and beautiful at the same time. I got more Top Gun-theme off of them than I'd expected, and since I was already wearing my flight suit, I figured fuckin-A, right? My main problem was with the drum and bass side of the equation. There didn't seem to be enough of either. To quote my friend Dave, and I'm not sure he expected to see his name here, " we're watching the definition of a talent differential," referring to the harpist, Pat Grossi, and his mate. But for my dollar, dance music has to be more sympathetically sexualized and less androgynous. Put another way: bump and grind, not bob and mope.

I like Active Child's recorded work, but live on stage at the Rock and Roll Hotel, the act felt a bit thin. Pat Grossi can sure as hell carry a note in both his native baritone and his falsetto, but I never found a sense of the emotional reverberations of similar bedroom-laptop artists making their way around the interweb this year, melancholy or otherwise. Where Washed Out infuses his work with a perfect sense of post-college dread--future, what future?--left behind by friends and peers, working out the meaning of things back in his childhood bedroom; Active Child sounds like he's pleading with his step-father to buy him another new Range Rover after he wrecked the first one. It's probably that Active Child just isn't what I'm looking for in my eighties throw-back bands. I need my pretty music to have a rusty edge to it. I need to know that Phil Spector's got one round in the chamber, and he's willing to wait all night.

School of Seven Bells, on the other hand, is reminding me a whole lot more of Ride from the Today Forever EP, a personal favorite. It seems like with the absence of the twin (Claudia Deheza), Ben Curtis is driving harder on the guitar, straining the already spindly notes further; and although I wouldn't brand SVIIB's new sound as shoegaze, it does send my thoughts across the pond. Ben's more confident, out front, moving around the stage, and not hiding behind attractive twin sisters and lighting effects. And I like it.

"Windstorm" has more in common with any of the tracks from Alpinisms, relying on samples, loops, and the sisters' vocals as much as any from their first album.  It's also more stripped down. On stage and on record, the band doesn't seem to be  dealing with the same vocal harmonics that were the trademark of tracks like "Wired for Light" and "My Cabal." Alpinisms feels at times like an experiment in resonance manipulation, while Disconnect from Desire seems to be veering generic for a larger audience (and not in that bad way I might usually mean).

Alejandra kept dropping her guitar (was she done with it, or was she just not playing it to begin with?) in favor of strange hand gestures that seemed to be trying to draw attention away from the music and towards her face, which I suppose is not a bad move to pull.  She doesn't quite have the range that her sister provided in the past, and somehow she seemed less compelling on this go around than the last. I already know I'm a freak for conjoined babies in a jar, so maybe this is that thing. Also, there was a drummer this time. And, god, did he sound like Phil Collins (the other Phil) hitting play on a drum machine, completely spot-on with the rhythm and totally ready to win your heart.

I can feel it coming in the air tonight
Oh Lord
And I've been waiting for this moment all my life
Oh Lord

Active Child :: Wilderness
SVIIB :: Windstorm