On The List :: Stornoway @ Bowery Ballroom [12.02.10]

This review runs live and in color on The House List. It was written by occasional 32ft contributor Noah Davis. It's unclear why he's writing this intro in the third person. Thanks to Ronnie Zizmor for hooking up the guest spot and Geoffo for being able to schedule himself properly.

The loudest ovation for Stornoway came after its quietest song. At the start of the encore, Brian Briggs asked the Bowery Ballroom audience if it was OK to play acoustic. “It’s going to be about this loud,” he said quietly from the front of the stage before he and his band—accompanied on strings by Rahul Satija and a member of the opener, Franz Nicolay & Major General—launched into “The End of the Movie.” After the music faded and the explosion of applause died down, Briggs wondered if they’d played loud enough. He’s genuinely considerate in that way a lead singer is when he can’t quite believe this many people are paying attention.

The unstated conclusion of “Could you hear OK?” is “Because last time we were in New York, we played to 50 people at Union Hall.” And while Stornoway has graduated from performing at venues in Brooklyn basements, the quartet certainly hasn’t forgotten its recent past. This is still a band that buys a saw at a hardware store to convince its drummer to play it with a bow. “Rob has been learning to play the saw,” said Briggs before launching into a song in which the drummer struggled valiantly to tame his unlikely instrument. Who knew a toothed implement of destruction could be so charming?

To close the night, Briggs asked if we wanted another unplugged song. This wasn’t idle chatter; our wish was his command. So we responded in the affirmative, and the quiet half of the crowd shushed the louder half as Stornoway began the jiggish “We Are the Battery Human.” “We’ve got the whole world at our fingers/ We’ve got the whole world in our hands.” We could hear Stornoway just fine.

On the List :: LCD Soundsystem @ The Fillmore [6.3.10]

James Murphy is an unlikely rock god. We've been here before, along with seemingly everyone else, but it's shocking every time. A chubby dude, wearing a white tee shirt and 100-watt smile, gets the kids moving. Granted, most San Franciscans spend their waking hours boogieing to the music only they can hear, but some of us don't. And yet, we're all bouncing up and down to LCD Soundsystem. A friend who categorically doesn't dance, is dancing. This is the Power of James: the venue changes, the results don't. Groundhog Day The Musical?

Murphy and the gang are, understandably, tiring of the shtick. After weeks of touring, the set list has gotten repetitive. They are tight, but not as tight as they were a fortnight ago in New York. They work the crowd into a fevered pitch during most songs -- although "Get Innocuous," "All I Want," and "Pow Pow" never take off -- but their energy lags between each effort. They catch their breath. We follow suit, eager to start again. For us, it's our one chance to witness Murphy; for LCD, it's another gig in another city.

Set closer "New York, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down" remains a gorgeous, poignant duet between the lead singer and Nancy Whang, but just like the band tonight it's missing... home. Murphy wrote his best song about the misery of being on the road, away from his friends. Halfway through the show, he yells "where are your friends tonight," scans the crowd, and sees a seething mass of happy faces he doesn't recognize. It must be a bit disconcerting.

You can take LCD out of New York, but you can't take New York out of LCD. Or something along those lines. (Yes, they recorded most of This Is Happening in a Los Angeles mansion, but it's more Gotham than Batman.) But dancing, that resonates across the country.

This show, like every other one, becomes a night of simplicity.

On The List :: Yeasayer @ The Fillmore [4.17.10]

Urban legend holds that Led Zeppelin used 12 guitars to record "Stairway to Heaven." Inevitably, live versions of the song feel a wee bit lacking. It's impossible to replicate the studio feel onstage. Jimmy Page, for all his immense talent, can only thrash one axe at a time.

Odd Bones, Yeasayer's sophomore effort, plays as a lovely, layered, lushly orchestrated album. It's the product of countless hours spent working mixing boards until they emitted smoke. It is, inevitably, irreproducible live.

Yeasayer is also tired. The quintet played a show at Coachella the previous day and look drained from the sun. Chris Keating says he and his mates are genuinely happy to play the Fillmore, and we believe him, but their energy remains lost in the desert.

The set, front-loaded with mellow songs, starts slowly. The crowd wonders why they sound better on the album. There are moments when the momentum builds, but then it disappears. We grow restless.

Then "2080." Off of 2007 effort All Hour Cymbals, it's a simpler song, translating seamlessly from album to stage. It also happens to feature a perfect band/audience bonding moment: "Yeah, yeah. We can all grab at the chance to be handsome farmers!/Yeah you can have 21 sons and be blood when they marry my daughters." And we're off.

Keating, refreshed, asks "Are we ready to get serious?" before launching into "O.N.E."

"Because I like it when you lose control," he sings while the Fillmore's springboard floor turns into a trampoline under the stress of 1,000 dancing feet. "Ambling Alp" closes the set and Yeasayer disappears stage left.

They return for the encore. Keating grabs a digital camera a girl in the front row set on the stage. He improvs, "Leave the camera on the stage and it gets taken," while taking pictures of his band and the audience. "What do you think this is, your bookshelf?" he asks with a laugh before returning the Canon. He's having fun. So are we.

Don't give up on me, and I won't give up on you, k?

Listen :: Yeasayer - "Ambling Alp"
Listen :: Yeasayer - "O.N.E."

Interview :: Rebecca Bortman of My First Earthquake [2.3.10]

Rebecca Bortman, lead singer and cheerleader of My First Earthquake, looks exactly like she does in her band's videos. This, probably, shouldn't be surprising, but it is. She's chatting with a fan at the merch table before the San Francisco group's pre-Noise Off show, all dyed hair, bubbly, and happy. Minutes later in what passes for Du Nord's Café's green room, she answers our questions in exactly the same manner. We are not being filmed, but nothing would change if we were.

In one band photo you're wearing soccer cleats. Is that a fashion statement or a practical choice?

I have passion for bargains and I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where people don't know about fashion the way I like to know about fashion. All these big companies send their excess products to the suburbs of Pittsburgh. They can liquidate their stock without diluting the brand because no one knows about their brand there. So companies like Nike send their really cool gold soccer shoes to places like Gabriel's outside of Pittsburgh. I go visit my parents and spend hours digging for $5 Nike shoes and I'm like, "Fuck yeah, gold shoes." But cleats. I'm like Jackie Joyner-Kersee."

Does that get dangerous?

It gets a little clicky-clacky. They aren't metal. It spices up my step.

Does San Francisco have a sound?

San Francisco has a sound, and it sounds like people living the good life. I think that's why you see more bands come out of little small podunk towns because there's nothing else to do. I think San Franciscans have this general laid-back nature that things will just come to them. I'm guilty of it too, but you have to fight against the laidbackness.

Are you succeeding?

I hope so. Our second album is a fight. It wants to be mellow and low key. It wants to just hang out in Dolores Park on the weekends, but we have to be like, "Fuck no, you have to start the party, album." That's been our fight. I think we were successful in our first in bringing the energy, but we've gotta keep the volume high.

Describe the band in a haiku.

Ruckus jamming, yeah.
We make you sweat puddles.
And you like it, lots.

I was a poetry minor in school.

That's pretty good for on the spot.

You know, all of our lyrics are on the spot. That's how they are written. I will improvise some of the lyrics tonight.

For any specific songs?

Well, once they make it to an album they are kind of set in stone, but until they do they're all kind of flexible. Everything we haven't recorded yet is still up in the air. Some of them I have a rough idea. I know I'm going to sing about in this verse, but a lot of it is off the top, which was the name of my improv group in college.

(A day later, Bortman emails us: Like any good poetry minor, I've done a revision to my haiku:

Enter our electro

Chasm of spasm. We spice

Songs: racy, tasty.)

Band name. True story? I was thinking it would be a great metaphor of sex.

Yeah, I think my mom thinks it's about sex. Or she actually thinks it about childbirth. She likes to refer to me as her first earthquake. Her first and only earthquake. Let that be an indication of my birth order. But I will tell you -- and you may not believe me -- the first time Chad and I got together to make some music was my first earthquake. I didn't come up with the name until several months later, and then I had to convince him that it wasn't a preschool toy.

Did you feel the earthquake?

Yeah, it was substantial. Probably the biggest one I've felt since I've been here.

On the List :: My First Earthquake @ Café Du Nord [02.03.10]

If one chooses to apply a literal interpretation to a couple couplets, some boys decided to throw Rebecca Bortman out of a band at some point in the relatively near past.

This was a mistake.

The lead singer of My First Earthquake dominates the stage at Café Du Nord. The type of girl who's ballsy enough to "join a band on a dare," she bounds around while screamsinging the lyrics to "Outta the Band" despite fighting off a weeklong cold. The 100 second-long ode to being ditched highlights the last set of the venue's pre-Noise Pop show.

The song comes immediately after Bortman, Chad Thornton, Dave Lean, and Andre Salcido power through "Cool in the Cool Way." During the middle of the Downstairs' single, the singer does her best Stepford Posh Spice impression. Her bandmates add enough backbeat to make a robot dance throughout.

The set progresses, and My First Earthquake integrates a couple new tunes. They are rough, but there's something undeniable about them.

Bortman found a better band, and we're all better for it.

Listen :: My First Earthquake - "Cool In The Cool Way"

On The List :: The Dodos @ SF MOMA [1.15.10]

It's clear from the line wrapped around not one, not two, but three sides of the block demarcated by 3rd, Minna, Montgomery and Howard Streets that 1,000 of our closest friends will be joining us on the list tonight. More accurately, a great many of SF MOMA's good acquaintances also received an invitation (+1!) to opening night of the 75th anniversary show with special guests including Jackson Pollock (deceased), Dorothea Lange (deceased), and The Dodos (alive; on stage).

We couldn’t care less about The Dodos. We don't really care about the art (although the show turns out to be excellent. If you'd like to go, you can borrow our membership card.) We are here ostensibly for the potential of meeting girls but honestly for the certainty of free drinks promised by the invite.

By the time we navigate the line, however, tickets entitling one to a free glass of Korbel are no longer available at the door. Dewar's, however, is only six bucks. We settle.

Two choices present themselves: Upstairs to the art, where no drinks are allowed, or right into a hot room where The Dodos, accompanied by The Magik*Magik Orchestra, play.

The triumvirate of Scotch, rocks, and music triumphs.

The band fits the role of local favorite well. (We later learn one of them lives within a couple blocks of us and held a Halloween party where he played drums while wearing a purple dress. This anecdote, while having no bearing on the content of this review, seems worth sharing.) The front few rows dance as much as they deem appropriate given the setting. The rest of the crowd oscillates between paying attention while trying hard to look like they are not and enjoying themselves while attempting to look like they aren't paying attention.

We pay attention. Almost immediately, The Dodos remind us of The White Rabbits. Tribal drumming and a singer who resorts to a strained voice will do that. (See "Men" for further proof.) The San Francisco version favors leading with a guitar and letting the drums take over, while the boys from Brooklyn launch into the skins from the get go, but the distinction is simply semantics. They are brothers from a different coast.

The Dodos play two sets, of which we catch probably seven songs. (At some point, we feel obliged to wander through the galleries upstairs.) At 10:30, they finish, SF MOMA begins to shut down, and we leave.

But the beat goes on, da da dum da dum da da.

Listen :: The Dodos - "Fables"

On The List :: Rural Alberta Advantage @ Bottom of the Hill [12.16.09]

The show at Bottom of the Hill plays like a celebration for The Rural Alberta Advantage. Every band has an "I think we made it" moment, and the Canadian trio seems positive its came here in July. Touring in support of Hometowns -- re-released by Saddle Creek -- RAA found itself far from home, a couple days into its first major U.S. tour, and enjoying the presence of genuine fans.

Five months later, the followers have multiplied. While staring into a packed house, Nils Edenloff acknowledges this much before he and the band launch into their first song, "The Ballad of The RAA." It is, appropriately, a song about leaving home.

After blowing through tight versions of "Rush Apart," "Don't Haunt This Place," and a new song, memories of the July show return. Edenloff asks the audience how many people were present. Maybe a tenth of the room's population slowly raises their dominant hand. To an outside observer, this seems like an honest response, one that's very much in line with the ethos of the band.

Calling The Rural Alberta Advantage "honest" or "genuine" or other adjectives commonly associated with Canada is stereotypical and unoriginal.

It's also true.

There is no pretense on stage. Even to an audience of one, Edenloff would risk throwing out his voice (which he does near the end of the set during a new tune), Paul Banwatt would kill his drum set -- fast forward to 1:06 of "Drain the Blood" -- and Amy Cole would brilliantly fill the gaps with her voice, her xylophone, her enthusiasm, and her tambourine. On this indie rock occasion, appearances don't matter (Peronis as two out of three beverages of choice?); the music does.

These songs were written in the vacuum of Alberta, Canada with no guarantee they'd ever leave home. Then they did. "None of us thought, when we were coming up with this song that we'd have 300 people singing along in San Francisco," Edenloff says after watching a sold-out venue do exactly that.

We all, invariably, leave the prairies.

Listen :: The Rural Alberta Advantage - "Don't Haunt This Place"
Listen :: The Rural Alberta Advantage - "Frank, AB"

On the List :: The Airborne Toxic Event @ Walt Disney Concert Hall [12.04.09]

"Welcome to this big room," Mikel Jollett offers, marking the beginning and the end of the evening's understatement.

The Airborne Toxic Event lead singer is speaking to the seated crowd at the luminous, $240 million, Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. His band just finished "Wishing Well," a song Jollett sung from somewhere offstage in, one assumes, a well-intentioned effort to let the music, augmented by the Calder Quartet, shine.

The ploy worked, but now, it's Jollett's show. He runs on stage, briefly takes in the scene, makes his one brief introductory comment, and leads his band into another perfectly overwrought song.

For ATE -- accompanied at various points by a troupe of Mexican dancers, the Guerrero children's choir, and the Belmont High School marching band -- the show marks the end of two years on the road. Back within a gallon of gas of their Los Feliz neighborhood, they are here to celebrate in ornate fashion.

To the band's credit, they don't seem overwhelmed by playing in a setting better suited for Vivaldi "Four seasons" than verse-chorus-verse. Crowd favorites "Something New" and "Gasoline" take on a new significance when fused with the chamber's perfect acoustics. After dedicating a cover of a Magnetic Fields song to his recently deceased grandmother ("Play me a song, but not one of those Airborne ones with all the yelling," she requested as she lay dying.), Jollett does a reasonable impersonation of Stephen Merritt's unique bass voice. During "Sometime Around Midnight," the strings of Anna Bulbrook and the quartet bounce hauntingly around the hall. Indie rock can hold its own.

The night ends, as most of these concerts do, with "Missy." Jollett comes onstage without his bandmates, and perches himself on riser with an acoustic guitar and the children's choir as his only accompaniment. Eventually, the song will build to a celebratory climax with members of the Calder Quartet on piano, the dancers on twirling, and the marching band on, well, marching, but for now, it's just the lead singer and eight students. He sings "Just as long as I'm never alone," and the sweet young voices chime in as backup. Jollett leans back, looks at the kids behind him, smiles, and launches into the third verse.

The Airborne Toxic Event fills this big room quite nicely.

On the List :: Julian Casablancas @ Regency Ballroom [11.17.09]

(A brief introduction: Hi, I'm Noah. You probably don't remember me from such productions as "32feet gets impressively drunk on SPIN's dime" and "Good god, that's the Futurehead's music," but I was there. Now I'm writing here. We're taking this thing bicoastal. From San Francisco, with love.)

The Messiah -- happy, sober, and dressed entirely in black -- is bathed in white light at the front of The Regency Ballroom stage. Julian Casablancas traded his four horsemen for an impressively well intentioned if not always perfectly executed solo album and six new bandmates. Two guitarists, two keyboardists, and two percussionists are arranged in a semi-circle behind the once and future(?) lead singer of the Strokes, symmetrical through the Y-axis. They will barely move throughout the entire set, stuck inside their individual Casblancas-created Calling Bubbles.

The Chosen One, however, wanders freely around the stage. One earns this privilege after one's first band saves rock and roll. To his credit, "Phrazes For The Young" simultaneously builds upon and moves away from the music of the group that wrote the No. 1 album of our dying decade, a fact that's clear in concert. The choice to open the set with "River of Brakelights" -- whose backbone is the lyrics "getting the hang of it/timing is everything" -- hints perhaps at the novelty the singer experiences when he's alone as the centerpiece, but this thought fades minutes later when the chorus of "Left & Right In the Dark" explodes, driven by, dare I say, peppy keyboards. Casblancas can sing about stumbling in the dark, but he knows exactly where he's going. We, of course, will follow.

Julian, it seems, is enjoying himself on stage, becoming less posture and more human with each song. He increasingly interacts with both the crowd and his bandmates. Pretense washes away in a sea of well-orchestrated lights. During the set's one cover -- The Strokes' "I'll Try Anything Once," chosen, I have to assume, because a fan in the front row held up a homemade cardboard sign with the song title written on it -- he forgets the line "everybody was well dressed." (Accidental symbolism of mental departure from previous band known as time went on more for their clothes than their music=high.) Later, Casablancas announces that the group on stage at The Regency will play a b-side: "We'll probably ruin it, but shit, we're gonna have fun no matter what." By the end of the song, he's proven prophetic on both counts. The song is a wonderful disaster, ending with a wall of noise created by seven musicians playing their instruments, hard.

Being the Music Messiah is lucrative -- how else can you explain half a dozen band members in addition to a three-piece horn section that supports two songs? -- but I suspect it's not that much fun. The Strokes imploded under the pressure, splintering and going their separate ways. The band's lead singer doesn't want to save us again and, quite frankly, we don't need him to. But damn, it's nice when he walks among us.