March Retrospective

March is winding down and spring is here, the days are getting longer and we've actually had some sun. Plenty of rain and wind too. While it's warmer than Winter, early Spring evenings are still best spent indoors, and watching live musical is one of the best ways to spend time indoors.

One of my New Years resolutions was to see lots of bands and blog about each and every one. Going to several shows a week and writing about each takes a level of creative discipline and consistency I haven't achieved before. I'm not even claiming to write good or interesting blogs, but I am getting the photos and videos uploaded, backups run, blogs written, edited and published and promoted, repeat as needed, so I can claim to be writing and publishing pretty frequently, even if it's only self publishing on a free blog that not many ever notice. The creative discipline and efforts of writing about the shows are good for me on many levels. I try to be more open to the musicians and the songs at the shows, looking and listening for interesting bits to comment on, seeing if I can find any themes or patterns between the bands at a show. Trying to be both in the moment living through the show and also in the collective space of ideas, metaphors, allegories, concepts and correlation to recent and past examples. I feel like it stretches my cognitive and writing mental muscles in a way that can only be good for me. I get a glow out of volunteering and creating on multiple conscious and unconscious levels that brightens my outlook and gives me many fond memories. I hope any readers out there get even a fraction out of this blog of what I get out writing it, and thanks for reading!

This March I managed to see 25 bands. Adding that to the first two months I have now seen 60 bands/sets/performances, 49 for the first time. Duplicates were PWRFL Power, My Parade, Kinski and the St. Marks choir performing a capella.

Highlights:
Playing with my new Nikon digital SLR at shows.
The Lonely Forest pumping out great song after great song sounding like they might be positioned to break out to national awareness.

Marnie Stern shredding, singing and bantering, so many good performances like Marnie and Tera Melos and Kinski - all in one show.

My Parade setup on the floor again, no hierarchy for them,
the haunting impact of Knowmad's the River Runs Deep.

Several shows with packed houses and the occasional sellout like the Knowmads kept things lively. The grace and the spiritually centered and comforted feeling granted to me at Ash Wednesday mass and the sense of coming home it kindles in me.
Yet another great Veracity show, best attendance yet and a variety of talented bands with several (most, 3 of 4) using horns.

Diamond Rings and PS I Love You on stage together with that surprisingly low voice from the lean and lanky young fashion icon adding some low end punch to the guitar riffing and wailing high end falsetto vocal coming from the big shambling hairy guitarist as the drummer smashes his way through the beat underpinning it all, I wish they did a full set as a supergroup!


The creative wacky Magmafest show with my first Skype-in and PWRFL Power on stage for the first time in years.


Pogo-ing until my feet hurt, and then pogo-ing some more at the Ex show.

Great volunteers dealing with messy customers professionally and well, noticing that my example gets some of the kids to get a little more focus and polish - mentoring and volunteering are very positive for my self esteem!

Conclusion:
Good music exalts us just a little, taking us out of our little internal rat races and exposing us to some corner of a larger collective creative universe in an immediate and sometimes powerful and urgent way. When the creativity somehow spans the audience and feeds back to the band with the positive energy flowing and the creation - to steal a beer company motto: life just doesn't get any better than that!

Lonely Forest, The Oregon Donor and The Violins at the Vera Project 3-3-11 - Anacortes Invasion!

I had a great time at the Lonely Forest show at the Vera Project on Thursday. I volunteered, but since there were plenty of volunteers (9, a little unusual for a weekday show) I ended up signing up to take out the trash. Since you don't take out the trash until the show is pretty much over, you get to watch the show and maybe help out here and there, but mostly just watch the show. That worked out well, because it was a great show.

I think all 3 bands are from Anacortes, and at least the Lonely Forest is. Anacortes is a smallish town up North about 10 miles South of Bellingham, on the mainland at the North end of Whidbey Island. It's on the salt water and has beatiful views of Padilla Bay and the San Juan Islands. Consequences of Sound has a nice post that includes the Lonely Forest doing "Turn Off This Song and Go Outside" and Anacortes is featured prominently. They also note that the Lonely Forest won the Sound Off contest at the EMP in 2006, I hadn't realized that. I enjoy the Sound Off, although I haven't made it in the last few years.

Apparently the Lonely Forest was recording the show for a live video and they encouraged the audience to record it and share their videos with the band so that they can use those in their video - a crowd sourced live video, I love it! I'll have to participate, I got nearly 50 minutes of footage of Lonely Forest at the show. I'll also have to keep an eye out for the results.

First up was the Violins, who've renamed themselves from Caulfield and His Magic Violin. Certianly easier to remember and type the new name, anyway.

They pounded out some fun catchy rock, not sure what the violin has to do with anything though. They did some interesting things with changing tempos and dynamics, here's 90 seconds from one of their early songs that does a sudden half speed change towards the end:


The audience was large for a weekday, with around 300 attending. One of the volnteers who went to high school in Anacortes said that a large contingent of kids from AHS were attending the show, and I can believe it. The audience knew most of the material and really enjoyed the acts.

The next band up was The Oregon Donor - I enjoy the silly play on words in the band title. Once again I'm not sure what it has to do with anything, but it's certainly memorable.


The guy in black in the middle with the back strat did most of the singing, although they also included fairly long instrumental bits in songs like this:

The 90 second clip just barely gets to the beginning of the vocals. I liked the interplay of rhythm between the guitars and bass, solid and interesting grooves and beats on many songs. These guys put on a good show and had me swaeting a bit - I kept bouncing up and down. Good performances do that to me.

Next the headlining Lonely Forest took the stage.

As you can probably guess from the arrangment, the lead vocalist/guitarist in the middle also played some keyboards, and he also played the floor tom you can see behind him while the drummer pounded out a beat for an intro, giving them a bass/beat/rhthm heavy sound for the intro.

They had the crowd into it, dancing (well, quietly dancing, for some reason modern hipster crowds listening to indie acts rarely seem to really get dancing all that hard - pet peeve of mine) and even singing along a bit.

Their songs tended to be longer, 5-7 minutes, and mildly complex. Time changes, dynamics both up and done, sudden and slow, coordinated pauses, different movements, not just simple verse choruse verse approach of mainstream pop - not that they're far out of the mainstream or anything, they just craft slightly more complex songs. Unfortunately that means that my recordings are mostly too long to even post onto flickr, so I only have one available. I could go through and pick a 90 second section from one of the interesting longer songs, or even several consecutive 90 second sections, but I'm much too lazy to bother. So here's a 90 second bit from the only Lonely Forest song I managed to upload to Flickr:

They definitely know their audience and it's young - they thanked us for coming out to the show late on a school night, not a work night, and the crowd ate it up. The crowd knew them as well, occasionally cheering when favorite songs started. They also had one technique down that I've noticed on occasion: they start the next song and play an intro while one band member tunes their guitar quickly, then joins in as the song gets going. I like the way that avoids long boring pauses for tuning that break the momentum of the show and distract you. Nice technique!

I enjoyed the songs and the patter, I'll definitely keep my eye out for more opportunities to see these guys, they put on a fun show!

I had to sneak out in the middle of the show to make a business call to India (the middle of the night is the beginning of the day for India) and I also had to get up early the morning after, so I ended up pretty tired today, but it was well worth it. Hopefully the Magma Fest show tonight will be rocking out hard enough to keep me awake. We'll see...

Upcoming shows in March

I'm not sure how many shows I'll make it to this month since it's a big birthday month for my family (3 of 5 family members have birthdays in less than 20 days) which always keeps us a little busy.

I think I'll do pretty well, though. Already I plan on seeing The Lonely Forest, The Oregon Donor and The Violins tonight and then the Magma Fest show tomorrow night with Tender Forever, Spurm, PWRFL Power and several other bands, and Marnie Stearns with Tera Melos later in the month.

There's another Smoke Wreck Kings show I'd like to make it to, and I'm sure I'll pick up a few more shows by the end of the month. I probably won't get to all that many, though, as things will probably be too busy.

My scheme to get into Sasquatch Fest (all 4 days! Reggie Watts, Death Cab, and on and on) is coming together, but that won;t pay of for a couple of months, so the rate should really start picking up by May and through the Summer.