Iska Dhaaf album release with Don't Talk to the Cops at Neumos on My Birthday

Iska Dhaaf's CD Release Show with Don't Talk to the Cops is on my birthday! I love that lineup.
I didn't get video, just some cell phone shots.

I didn't even get cell phone photos of Don't Talk to the Cops, I was too busy dancing and moshing and having fun. I first saw Don't Talk to the Cops at Reverb in October 2011.
They had Hollis with them for a couple numbers, fun show!
I kept track and went to see them again when I got the chance like at Bumbershoot in 2012: and at Heartland last year: not to mention a few Vera Project shows.
One show in particular - at the Redmond Firehouse, a classic DTTTC show with Mash Hall overtones, great sweaty show with the audience dancing and having a great time:
There was an opening act I'd never heard of called "Iska Dhaaf" and they stood out immediately, their song "Happiness" is a haunting instant classic:
Droney guitar, up front percussive work - stripped down lineup, each instrument prominent, simple and powerful. The vocals and especially the occasional two part sections and tasty reverb and echo give it a dreamy indirect feeling. The dynamics, the transitions from the haunting quieter bit to the louder more percussion driven sections and the final bridge of happiness gives it more progression, more of a completed arc. This song slips into your emotions and memories like the soundtrack for the bit that was about happiness, but wasn't really very happy at all. You're glad it's the bittersweet echo of that feeling, better in retrospect than while you're living through it.

After the fact I read that Nathan Quiroga (I saw him quite a few times as Buffalo Madonna in Mad Rad) and Benjamin Verdoes of local indie favorites Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band are Isk Dhaaf, so they're a bit of a Northwest indie super-group, which is cool.

I was looking forward to the birthday show, and they didn't let me down. I didn't record any videos, but the show was great and we had fun, good sweaty fun.

I posted the videos from the Redmond Firehouse show a year ago and never paid too much attention after that. When I was writing this I noticed that I have 1,687 views of the youtube video from the Iska Dhaaf show at the Redmond Firehouse. I never gave it much promotion or anything, probably just mentioned it once or twice on a blog, but that's a high level of viewing - for, me at least. I only have one video with more views (Macklemore & Ryan Lewis from 2 years ago) so that's quite a few views for a fairly unknown band.

I suspect Iska Dhaaf may be breaking out quickly to regional success, and with their contacts and history I wouldn't be surprised to see national success pretty soon. Success is a fickle and unreliable thing, you never know how it will go, so I hope they're enjoying playing cool music for appreciative audiences as much as I enjoyed getting to hear it!

Shows I Didn't Blog, with Videos

In 2010 I saw more than 100 bands, but unless I was holding a Bumbershoot schedule I'd have a hard time remembering more than ten of them. For my News Year's Resolution I vowed to record videos and blog about each show, including videos of each band.

It works well as an artificial memory. Search on VirtualSoundNW and the band name, and if I saw them when I was blogging then the blog shows up. Not only did I see them, here's my notes and some video.

I managed to pull off the blogging in 2011, but I knew that eventually I wouldn't be able to keep up. I continued blogging well into 2012, but I've finally hit the wall.

I filmed Knowmads at the Vera in August and was one of a thin staff of volunteers so I just set the video up on the tripod, turned it on, and went to work steering the volunteers. This usually works out fine except that you end up with one big hour long video. Usually I'll go through that and break it up into individual songs. It's time consuming, but it makes the songs available.

When I went to turn off the video camera I noticed it had been bumped and was filming to the side of the stage. Doh! The audio is fine, but the video is lame, half of the stage activity is not visible. I posted the video as one solid 40 minute video and never blogged about it.

In early September we went to Bumbershoot and I got a pile off videos - 85 total, over the three day weekend. I uploaded them all and started figuring out who was on each, laeling and tagging and categorizing them. That was taking a long time, so after I got the first days shows figured out I started the blog for the first day and got that posted.

As I worked through the videos for the next few days, I assembled a blog post that just named the band and included a link to the video. Once I had all the videos for a day sorted in the order I saw them I added text describing the band and it's music, and anything about the experience that caught my attention.

I'm running out of gas and I barely finished Sunday. This blog finally got me motivated enough to get the last bits of that written and posted, but that still leaves Monday, where all I have is band names and videos, no text. I'm burnt out so it's not getting done, and that blocks the blogs for events after Bumbershoot. Maybe I'll get back to it, but for now I'm just posting the Monday video list as a guide to the videos, with no blogging.

That still leaves me backed up, I saw X-15 at one of the Seattle Center Fiftieth Anniversary shows, and Deerhoof, and Don't Talk to the Cops twice, once with Kung Foo Grip, and Reverb.

In order to get caught back up some more, I'm going to throw in the shows I haven't blogged before Reverb here, so the "Shows I Didn't Blog" blog (this post) will have the blog posts for most of the shows I didn't blog.

After Bumbershoot I got to see X-15 with Heather and Greg. I saw was into them when I was a young adult, so it was fun to get a chance to see them after all of this time. "Vaporized was always a favorite: The vocalist looked younger than the other band members, but he had talked about challenges going on with his throat, I hope he does OK. He sounded roughly like he did way back in the day, with that odd voice bouncing around, sounding like nobody else I've heard. One of the defining sounds of my experience in the eighties.

I went to Hawaii for 8 days with my daughters and managed to catch a performance by Mike Love at the Hilo Town Tavern while I was there:

I caught a little bit of Ryan Laplante at Balefire too: Rootsy stuff, I enjoy Ryan's playing.

Deerhoof put on a great show at the Vera Project I enjoy their sound, it's well developed and all their own. Visually they were rewarding in various ways - they had tassels on their outfits, different colors, fun to look at!

I also saw Don't Talk to the Cops twice, at the Vera Project and at Redmond's Old Firehouse. This is their Ronnie Voice guest bit, more or less Mash Hall I think. We saw a couple of the opening acts at the Firehouse, starting with Iska Dhaaf Twangy, angular, the doubled vocals are interesting, the transitions into and out of the faster bit, nice song.
Wimp played next. Fun fast and thrashy, good stuff.

Kung Foo Grip was next up, suffering from my traditional "good shows get crummy videos" rule: I really like Kung Foo Grip so I end up bouncing around and the video is pretty shaky. I'd say sorry, but I had too much fun dancing to really mean it.

Don't Talk to the Cops headlining set was great, djblesOne and emecks danced up a storm and El Mizel bounced around and they had the audience moving and sweating. Carina was dancing and enjoying it even more than I did, she loves a good hip hop vibe in a group with everyone dancing - who doesn't!

That gets me almost caught up, but last night was Reverb Fest so I'm behind by another twenty videos. Good problem to have!