Earlier this year, I covered the South by Southwest Music Festival for the Los Angeles Times’ Brand X; since Brand X has since been wiped from the Internet (and since I’m starting to think about next March already), the photos are now here. You can find shots from my unofficial Waynestock party with TwentyFourBit (and Sondre Lerche, Pepper Rabbit, ARMS, etc.) in the recap post.
Marling in 2008 / Photo by Bex Wade via Flickr
My dad still remembers seeing Joni Mitchell. (It helps that he still listens mostly to the albums that soundtracked his college years, which I suppose dooms me to trying to explain Sufjan Stevens to my kids while they listen to post-post-chillstep on their Apple iEars.) I’ve never listened to Miles of Aisles so I have to imagine what it must’ve been like, to see the best folk songwriter of her day at the height of her powers. It was probably not unlike last night’s Laura Marling show, which was both as triumphant and intimate as any concert’s likely to get this year.
Openers Alessi’s Ark, fellow U.K. folkies and members of the same revivalist scene that’s also spawned inferior (and coincidentally, male) acts such as Noah and the Whale and Mumford and Zzzz, played to a previously unfamiliar audience and won them over completely. (The girl who mouthed every lyric to “Wire” should consider herself the coolest person in the room.) Alessi Laurent-Marke’s voice is deeply breathy and almost free of vibrato, rendering her notes fine and pure enough to be white sand from some undiscovered beach. (Or, uh, drugs, if you want to go there.) Her songs, mostly from the very good new album Time Travel, were charming enough, though they tended to slip into repetitious one-chord-per-bar strumming — a limitation she recognized when she stopped one song to note, “It just goes on and on like that for a while.” Good as she was, her banter was even better, cracking jokes about her father’s fondness for California fish tacos and the state of the Troubadour (“It’s very wooden”). Alessi Laurent-Marke was born in 1990, which made her self-assurance — and talent — very nearly jealousy-inspiring. Read the rest of this entry »
All photos by David Greenwald
Due to a miscommunication over my press tickets (the kind of miscommunication I seem to only have at the Troubadour, but so it goes), I had to catch this show while my fiancée waited patiently next to scribbled portraits of the Mad Men cast and forgotten ’50s actors at the bar of the Palm Restaurant. So you’ll have to forgive me for skipping the openers in favor of steakburger sliders and bowing out in the middle of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.’s otherwise totally compelling set.
I think they’d understand — dudes are gentleman. The Detroit band came equipped with an on-stage “corporate lounge” for their most fervent fans and plenty of energy for the rest of us, growing heated enough to drop their jackets after the first song or two. The band’s very good debut album, It’s a Corporate World, has only the unfortunate weakness of following last year’s flawless Horse Power EP, but the Technicolor synth-pop of newer songs such as “Morning Thought” felt fresher from the stage. The sold-out show, by my count the band’s third pass through L.A. in the last year, drew both bottle blondes and a bro in a Bon Iver shirt; if that’s any indication, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.’s made it. Hopefully LP2 takes their economic themes to their logical conclusion and includes a Curren$y collaboration titled “Warren Buffett Green.”
Previously: New Music: “Morning Thought” | Video: “Simple Girl”
All photos by David Greenwald / taken with my old Canon A720, unfortunately
This year was my first FYF Fest. So if it felt more like a mini-Coachella than the embattled D.I.Y. gatherings of years past, that wasn’t so bad. There were water fountains, toilets, beer gardens, food trucks and booths aplenty, as well as brief security lines and reasonable crowds for the stages. The sound was good, or at least as good as the performers providing it. All for $40, fees included — I probably spent more on food and drink during my 10 hours at downtown’s Los Angeles State Historic Park. So the partnership with Goldenvoice worked out, logistically, a worry that may have kept the event from selling out (I hear it fell just short) after last year’s dust-bowl, multi-hour line debacle.
So that’s the big news out of yesterday’s events, as it was from Coachella this year: functional! Not a total disaster! Presumably next year we can turn our attention back to the music. Let’s get a head start. Read the rest of this entry »
Seapony / Photo by David Greenwald’s phone (sorry)
Perhaps the greatest irony of the modern music industry is the reversal of the performing-recording continuum. The Beatles labored in Hamburg clubs long before they could afford to give up baseball stadiums for studio sessions; when Steely Dan declined to tour at all, it came at the height of ’70s record company excess. 40 years later, bands have little choice but to play their first shows after crafting entire discographies in their bedrooms, rebuilding their sound for the live arena instead of struggling to translate its intensity to tape. It’s created what often seems like a greater divide between recording and performance, long two different animals that deserve to be judged as such. (Readers of pop criticism who too rarely recognize that a critique of a band’s show does not necessarily extend to a judgement of their records — much less their work ethic, generosity of spirit or how badly really they deserve this! — are at least partially to blame here.)
That schism was on display at the Echoplex on Sunday night, as a trio of bands attempted to bring their Internet anthems to life. Read the rest of this entry »
On some level, it ought to be criminal that Eleanor Friedberger, the Fiery Furnaces member and certifiable Indie Rock Celebrity, had to sell her own merch at the Satellite last night and suffer the further indignity of going on first, at 9, before an Australian band that’s never earned a Best New Music. At the very least, it should be criminal to not announce set times early enough for me not to miss 40 minutes of the Friedberger set, but such is life. In the handful of songs I caught, she played Last Summer standout “Early Earthquake” and some yet-to-be released numbers that were just as good, alone with an electric guitar and immaculate elocution. Given that she’s playing a pair of free in-stores today and tomorrow, maybe she prefers it this way; she seemed happy enough to huddle into a corner of the venue and preside over her t-shirts and CDs.
Cloud Control, who followed, were a pretty convincing argument for nostalgia. The Australian act tapped into the ’00′s fascination with African rhythms, ’90s melodic sentimentality and ’80s guitar tones; at times, they sounded like the Smiths covering the Proclaimers. It was fantastic. One song offered two minutes of textbook C86 before diving into a gloriously wanky Dinosaur Jr. guitar solo, blinking, and jangling onward as if nothing had happened. It was funny without being embarrassing, the kind of moment that reminds you that rock music’s always better when it stops trying so hard to be Art.
Should enough people see them live, the band should be the next Pains of Pure at Heart: they’re equally catchy, better performers, much more interesting songwriters and floppy-haired/bangs-bearing enough. Their recordings, a debut album that’s Australia/U.K.-only for now, is just O.K., only a shadow of the enthusiasm and electricity they displayed on stage. Don’t hold it against them, or their “There She Goes” cover — the band took pains to introduce it as a La’s song, not the (more well known?) Sixpence None the Richer version, but it sounded like a future Hypem No. 1 either way. They should drop it on a 7″ b/w “Kiss Me.”
Eleanor Friedberger photo by David Greenwald’s phone
I suppose you could call Bill Callahan a traditionalist: at last night’s Troubadour show, he commanded the stage draped in a seersucker suit, a harmonica around his neck and a nylon-string guitar resting like a baby in his hands. Perhaps he meant homage to Wolfe, Dylan and Segovia. But as he demonstrated over a 90+ minute set, Bill Callahan is very much himself.
Over the years, Callahan has pruned away the wild tangles and unwanted thorns of his music to achieve, over a series of transcendent post-Smog solo records, folk songs at once dryly deliberate and wet with emotion. During songs such as “Riding for the Feeling” and “Jim Cain,” the pragmatism of his granite rhythms dueled against the improvisatory hopefulness of his two-man band, a lead guitarist and drummer who were as much voices in the performance as Callahan’s resolute baritone. On “America!” and elsewhere, they grew briefly louder before turning back, like a summer storm suddenly emptied out.
The band encored with songs from the Smog era, but it was clear from the trio of recent classics he mostly drew upon (A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, this year’s Apocalypse) that he feels he is still — or, I believe, finally — at his most vital. Riding, riding, riding for the feeling.
My photos from the third and final (phew!) day of Coachella 2011, featuring Kanye West, the Strokes (pictured), the National, Duran Duran, Best Coast, CSS, HEALTH and MEN are on Brand X. As are my shots from Day 1 and Day 2.
I also wrote about:
* Kanye, the Strokes, The National, Duran Duran, Best Coast and drugs
* HEALTH, CSS and MEN
* Jenny and Johnny, the Radio Dept., Here We Go Magic and free ice cream
* Lauryn Hill, Cut Copy, Sleigh Bells and Robyn
* Moving Units and Native American headdresses.
The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas photo by David Greenwald
