EMP Sound Off! Round 2

After an epic week 1 of the EMP Sound Off! battle of the bands I was wondering if week two could possibly top it. Unlike week one, when all the bands were new to me, I'd seen Thee Samedi before so I had a suspicion that just maybe week 1 could be topped, but it was going to take some pretty dang good bands having very "on" nights to do it.

The luck of the draw really figures into Sound Off! placing: it's very tough to win from the first slot. The crowd is cold, and by the end of the show the judges and audience will remember the last acts best.

Still, somebody has to go on first and for round 2 it was Manatee Commune. Troy Nelson introduced him and Manatee Commune took the stage with his guitar. He started with electronic and synthesized or sequenced music, rapidly changing settings and interacting with a touch interface app on his tablet.
The music was spacey and electronic, with fairly dense layers of sequenced and pre-recorded material whirling around. After a few songs he played guitar on top of the atmospheric synthesized music and got some more intensity into the performance. He also switched over to a violin which had a nice interaction with his loops and sequences.
Manatee Communion warmed the crowd up and played interesting music, but his focus down onto the devices and button pushing and knob twiddling gave the set a more remote atmospheric vibe. Coming from the lead off slot, Manatee Commune was going to have a hard time winning.

After rocking out at round 1 of Sound Off! the prior week and then aching pretty badly afterwards I was wishing there was somewhere to sit down between acts. I got lucky - I volunteer at the Vera Project, and they are tabling at the Sound Off! and sent out an email asking for assistance with tabling. Which involves sitting behind a table. Sitting. I responded quickly: "I'm already going, I can table before and between bands!" and the volunteer coordinator was happy to have the slot filled. Score! All I have to do is talk about one of my favorite volunteer run non-profits to anybody who's cool enough to come to the Sound Off! and hasn't heard about it yet, or has heard a little and wants to hear more. Well! If you know me, you know I kinda like the sound of my own voice. This show went much better for me as I was able to sit down and rest my feet and legs between acts and let my vocal chords do the work.
We're tabling through round 3 and the finals too, so I'm relieved. Man, I have got to get into better shape before Bumbershoot arrives, I can only make it through 4 acts in an evening and then I need a day to recover. That's not going to cut it for a 3 day festivel with 11 hours worth of bands and a pile of walking needed to see as much of them as possible.

Sorry, I digress. Back to the second act at Sound Off! round 2: the Onlies.
The Onlies are three high school students who've known each other since grade school with a classic blue grass instrument lineup: guitar, mandolin, and fiddle.
They proceeded to put on an awesome old school bluegrass show. I grew up on this stuff, often listening with my dad to the live KRAB bluegrass show on every Saturday night back in the seventies. The Onlies played their instruments well, and when they launched into beautiful three part harmonies on top of it I was into it and so was everybody else in the audience. From fast and flashy leads and party songs to romantic laments they nailed it. They passed leads back and forth and switched up the instruments some, swapping the mandolin for a second guitar and then a banjo - the most dangerous instrument in the world. Their between songs patter was good too.
They were cute as heck which is a horribly patronizing thing for me to say I suppose, but they enjoyed the music and the audience and each other and made me happy just by being so upbeat and amusing as performers. When you add in all the technical chops and harmonies where they get that beautiful blend going, I was beyond happy. The audience responded and was loud, and the music got me moving some and sweating - and sadly enough, my sweat is a rough figure of merit for shows. The more I enjoy the show, the more I move. The more I move, the more I sweat. Hence the more I sweat, the better the show. This was a hot and bothered show, but they weren't on long enough to get me to the sweating through my clothes state.

Another great band with another completely different approach, and another great set. They had the bluegrass showmanship down: their hands were always occupied making music, yet they moved their instruments and moved in relation to each other and kept things lively and physically dynamic while always staying within 2 or maybe 3 feet of the centrally placed microphones so that the instruments and voices came through the PA clearly. The crowd ate it up.

Next up in the penultimate slot was Nabii Ko$mo, a hip hop duo with a live drummer.

The dude on the left handled most of the leads with the duo jumping on words and phrases to add some punch. The live drummer was a definite plus, giving the show a dynamic feel as the hard cadences of the raps lined up with the rhythms from the drums, increasing the rhythmic power of the performance. Hip hop music with rap leads uses rhythm, word play and rhyme without much melody to get it's message across, so the organic feel of the live, on the fly rhythm and the interplay between the drummer and the vocals stands out for me. Nabii Ko$mo put on a hot set and got the audience going, working us hard with arm raises and waves, call-outs and responses, engaging us more fully in the show. Another sweaty set that basically made you move, totally the sort of experience I get off on. Thank goodness we got to sit down and table for the Vera Project to recover, the bands were just too good and my feet and legs were paying the price from all the dancing.

The final act was Thee Samedi, the first band I've ever seen at Sound Off! that I'd already seen. They were nice enough to come in and play for free at a Veracity show show for us. And I DO mean put on a show. Their lead vocalist Noah Fowler is a committed performer who put an amazing amount of energy into the show and the band plays hard crunchy guitar oriented rock played loud - right up my alley.

As you can see here Noah had some sort of fuzzy shawl like wrap and something red spread across his chest - and the shawl is about to come off. The band smashed through their songs, playing loud and hard, with Noah wailing away and using the mic in unusual ways and the crowd just exploded. The security staff had to move to the edge of the mosh pit to try to keep things a little calmer, and pretty soon the foolish stage dives started - at least two times somebody leapt out and pretty much missed everyone, splatting to the floor. Good thing they were young resilient flexible kids, if I tried something like that I'd break things and end up in the hospital. The mosh pit was more than enough physical abuse for me!

The guitarist in particular had a great smile as he faced right into the writhing crowd and banged his way through the power chords that just got us all writhing even harder. Noah start writhing around on the ground and stuffing the mic into his mouth and screaming away, classic stuff.
I didn't quite see how Noah did it, but he managed to knock himself in the face a bit. As the blood trickled out of his nose onto his upper lip the audience just lost it's shit. Noah eventually noticed it when he got blood on his fingers and then he rubbed it all over his chest on top of the ketchup or whatever the heck it was that was already there. For some interesting effects he rubbed the mic back and forth across his chest until you couldn't tell if he had smeared the earlier red stuff or the blood, or maybe had just made the skin red from irritation.

We had ourselves one heck of a mosh pit. I ended up in bouncing from nearly up to the stage back to the line of security folk holding down one end of the mosh pit, fending off the flying maniacs, redirecting and catching the staggering kids to avoid falling and pileups, getting a hand or a hip on the frenzied sideways pogo fanatics before they managed to nail me or someone else with an elbow or a knee, taking the occasional elbow or knee anyway, riding the surges of frenzied kids back and forth and back and forth. We managed to only have 2 major pileup/tramples and no fights, so it was a good clean bruising mosh pit in the best Seattle tradition. Nobody was bleeding in the mosh pit, although at least one tee shirt got shredded. As far as I could tell, all the blood was on the stage.

As Thee Samedi wound down their set and left the stage with a triumphant strut I staggered back to the Vera table so I could sit down. They pegged the sweat measurement: all the way through my shirt over most of my chest and lower back. My feet and arms were sore too, so it felt good to relax and sit down. The judges weighed in with their decision and Thee Samedi came in first and is going to the finals.

As I recovered from the show physically I was still on an emotional high and I realized another one of those odd correlations I enjoy, this one's a painful correlation. It's not just sweat, pain is proportional to show intensity too. The awesome shows whip us into a frenzy that leaves me a bit beaten and bruised and sore.

I'm getting somewhat old for this, yet the pure intensity and transcendent joy in the collective experience makes it worth it every single time. I only hurt badly after a show if it was an awesome show, and I'll take that deal every time. I just need to remember to get a certain amount of time off of my feet to recover every so often, then it works well. Well enough anyway; I can't wait to go back next week for part 3 - Eduardo's band Fauna Shade is playing, and so is K Sneak, so next week I'll set a personal record and see 2 acts that I've seen before in a single preliminary EMP round, along the two bands that will be completely new to me. I'm also looking forward to getting to see the finals, the 2 bands in already put on a great show, and the wild cards are good as well. It's been a great Sound Off! already, and the shows are only half done. Lots of good music left!

BTW I want to thank Charles for the excellent photos from both rounds. You can click through to his flickr photos from the blog and check them out if you want.

EMP Sound Off! Round 1

For no good reason I haven't made it to the EMP Sound Off! events in a few years. This year I got tickets and rounded up my friend Charles to take pictures, and I'm glad I did: the first night of the Sound Off! was impressive. Troy Nelson from Young Evils (he also has a Saturday DJ slot on KEXP) was our MC.

First up was Tommy Cassidy. Just like Charles the photographer, Cassidy is from the Tri-Cities and went to Hanford High School. That plays a part in his message and we'll get to that, but first some details about the man and the band. Cassidy raps in front of a live band with horns. The band is fun and loud and has a women with a strong voice singing leads, alternating with Cassidy's raps and occasionally backing and filling during them. This band cooks along, and when the horn section comes in for some backing it's cool. When they run through some leads on the trumpet it's even better, and they even had some cool old school muted trumpet stuff giving a completely different sound and feel to one number.
Cassidy varied his approach in different songs, using a slower back-off-the-beat approach which somehow gave almost a visual quality to his raps, and also using a rapid fire intricate aggressive intense flow in another number that was visceral and powerfully emotional. Cassidy's range and lyrics and patter connected with us - his comments about being from the nuclear Tri-Cities and feeling like a stranger in his hometown resonated with everybody who's been a teenager.
Cassidy drew the first slot which is pretty much impossible to win from. He took a cold audience and warmed it up, did great work and impressed us, but then 3 more acts got to go on and distract us from the first performance, and they got to start with a warmed up audience. Cassidy showed he's more than capable of opening a show and I expect him to move up the bill quickly if he can make it to Seattle very often.
Quite talented and tight, Cassidy and the band got the crowd warmed up and into it.

Next Sophia Duccini took the stage with a violinist/fiddler and a backing vocalist. Duccini plays guitar and piano and sings, and the group gets an interesting range of sweet to haunting sounds and songs out of the lineup. The vocals stand out, with Duccini's strong leads carrying a good portion of the songs and the gorgeous harmonies reinforcing and ornamenting the songs and emotions. Duccini and her band cover a range of styles from piano based pop in the older sense to guitar and fiddle instrumentation with a folky Americana feel. Interesting music, I tend to think of it as small scale and a little quiet but Duccini instead made it introspective and recursive and filled with a different meaning each time they hit a repetition. It engages you and pulls you in without having to pound on you, it's almost a more hypnotic approach in some cases and more conversational in others. Getting the audience to connect to the music and get enthusiastic without that bottom end - no bass & no drums - is challenging but Duccini pulls it off, her music drives when she wants it to and she easily carries the rhythm on the guitar and piano, switching back and forth between songs. Already I'm torn between the first 2 performances, both groups are ridiculously talented and skilled. At this point I'm thinking the decision is between these two acts.

Next Laser Fox takes the stage. I've got to admit, the name is brilliant. It works really well in a chant - wait, I think that's a spoiler. Laser Fox kicked it off with a singer, drummer and two dudes at keyboards, one using an analog (or emulated analog) setup, and one of the two (couldn't tell which) filling in the low end so you had a good base line. It might have been sequenced or prerecorded bass, it's difficult to tell.

The lineup varied a bit from song to song, here one of the keyboard players is playing the bass guitar and the vocalist has taken over at the keyboard. The singer is the focus in this band. On a few songs he played a hollow bodied electric guitar and sang.
Laser Fox looked good, sounded good, and they sounded like they felt good. The crowd started getting into it and dancing and moshing, and the vocalist started strutting around and gesturing as he sang. The dude had charisma to spare and was totally pulling it off with the mosh pit getting bigger and more intense and just eating it up: we loved him. Laser Fox knows how to put on a show, and the pacing and slot (good hot hip-hop to warm up, internal and relationship songs (some were both) to whet our appetite, now a big loud testosterone filled performance - in a nice NW way, we are after all a polite Scandinavian influenced culture topped things off nicely. We were already having fun and then that danceable electronic music hit and we started moving, and the vocalist was moving with us and dancing and dropping and totally thriving on the attention. They got that feedback loop going where the audience intensity feeds off of the band's performance and then the band feeds off of the increasing audience intensity. Hot stuff, we were bouncing around and sweating and moshing.

I was sweaty and sore, and normally I'd expect a let down after 3 acts this good. On the other hand, a buddy had spoken highly of Dames. Dames plays a largely guitar driven sound with keyboards and (judging by the Macs) either sequenced or recorded bits too.

Dames brought their audience with them and turned in a rocking set, keeping the energy level high and making us sweat and bounce even more. The guitarist lead vocalist was the focus through much of the show and his voice held the songs together and felt very personal, like he was talking to you and a few friends, not to a few hundred sweaty fans bouncing around in the mosh pit.

The mosh pit was bigger than ever and fun, filled with smiling people bouncing around and surging off of each other. All the thrashing fans in the mosh pit showed an innate politeness and niceness, and those are not terms I usually use to describe a mosh pit. Seriously, it was the nicest, sweetest mosh pit I've ever been in. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't lame or low intensity at all, it was full of people flying around and surging forward and to the sides and sweating and thrashing, your typical intense mosh pit. Nobody was in studs and leather, no really big dudes who like bruising people, and none of those boneheads who like to cover their faces with a bandanna then do spin moves with feet flying, putting everyone nearby at risk. I was happy not to run into any of that, it made being in the mosh pit after more than 5 decades on this Earth much more manageable.

Dames also had the most elaborate set - they put up a vinyl goose. OK, not terribly elaborate, but probably the best I've seen since The Lonely H did the light sabre duel in the way back in the 2004 Sound Off - they came in second. Not only did Dames bring the crowd, they were great to mosh with and their joy in the performance was infectious and the night ended up being a sweaty dance party on top of a rocking show - and that's one of my favorite things to experience.

I'm amazed at the level of talent on display at the first weekend of the Sound Off contest, every band was great and did something completely different and unique. Laser Fox ended up winning, and they arguably put on the best show. Dames was the runner up so they have a shot to make it as the wild card band and for once the judge's selections seem pretty solid. In the past the judges always seemed to reward the weakest bands, so this was refreshing. I shouldn't be surprised, the judges included Hollis and Marco Collins and I respect them both for their musical taste - Collins helped form or should I say update my taste a few decades back when he was a DJ on a local Seattle radio station and Hollis performs and contributes to some of my favorite musical stuff at a ridiculously high level - you can't nail that many things that well without having exquisite musical taste and judgement. Definite hat tip and high fives all around to the judges for representing and choosing awesome dynamic performers to advance.

I've discovered that the mosh pit is a time travel device. When I get into the mosh pit, my age decreases by a decade or more: I'm much younger and more energetic, and it's a fun and occasionally joyous experience. Then I get out of the mosh pit and go into the cold outside air, and the missing decade comes back from his smoke break, and he's got another couple decades of his buddies he invited over, and I feel SO OLD. I shuffle back to the car lifting my sore feet with my sore legs, sweat evaporating and cooling me off rapidly.
While the end of the evening is a little painful, there's a tautology here that guarantees that it's always worth it. I was sore because I had been dancing and moshing, and that's a spiritual experience to me. At the best shows the music takes you out of yourself and engages you in every way. You move and respond to the music physically, just as you react and respond to it emotionally. You're sharing this experience in a fellowship with the rest of the crowd. Good lyrics engage your intellect too, and emotionally charged writing often fires off associations and memories.

It's a wonderful and intense experience, and I'm always happy to be introduced to more bands that are figuring out how to engage and move a crowd, how to create and present their art and entertain and thrill us. Here's to four new to me bands that are all worth keeping an eye out for and going out of your way to see. All of these bands know what they are doing and I look forward to watching them progress, and yes to, some day saying "I knew them when..."

Mudhoney plays the KEXP Friday in August Mural Amphitheater show

I managed to wander by and catch Mudhoney rocking out at the Mural Amphitheater. Awesome set, mosh pits breaking out here and there; the Clark bar samples were good too.

Mudhoney was in great form with powerful guitar riffs using distorted sustain to ring and growl, and the rhythm section more than keeping up their end of the sound with the bass frequently anchoring the melodic core of the song and always driving the tempo and the drums consistently playing hard, loud, fast and tight. Mark Arm's vocal's were somewhere between sung and screamed, plenty of attitude and power. Loud thrashy obnoxious feedback filled rock and roll on the Mural lawn on a nice Friday evening in Seattle - buy yourself a few microbrews in the beer garden and you've got the "it doesn't get any better than this" beer commercial. As I wandered off to catch the bus and looked at the sunset over Elliot Bay and the Olympics on the way home, it actually was a little hard to imagine life getting all that much better.