You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2008.
…in Hollywood. The opening band was High Places from New York City and they confirmed Lauras’ long held belief that the opening band on any 3 band billing will always suck. High Places is a duo: she sings a little, he occasionally rocks the “casio kettledrum”, but mostly they do a lot of conferring over a card table of wires and metal boxes that produce massively anonymous beats. I hate to talk shit but…uhm, they were really not good. Every song kinda reminded me of I Want Candy or Bananarama doing Iko, Iko (“…my grandma and your grandma, sittin’ by the fire…”). I do like how boring their name is, though. Almost as perfectly bland as And, And, And! from The Commitments.
K Records is one of my favorite labels but I never listened to The Blow. Jeez, what a mistake (I’m sorry ears). The Blow is, or was, Khaela Maricich, and Jona Bechtolt (aka YACHT) who’s no longer a collaborator so it was just the ghost of his beats while she held the stage alone, delivering an amazing performance piece about:
-longing
-pop lyric meaningfulness
as told through:
-unbelievably catchy electronica
-hilarious/heartbreaking spoken-word
-captivating choreography
Seeing them live was one of the most transcendent ART experiences I’ve ever been lucky enough to dance to. When they finished we were overwhelmed with that crazy kind of elation you get from being tossed around by waves.
Laura asked me in the parking lot if I was excited to see Mirah and I half jokingly quoted Shawshank Redemption: “I’m so excited I can barely keep a thought in my head.” Seeing live music is one of the greatest things about being alive and some bands have a mythical grasp on my brain. Just seeing their name-card in the record store gives me a thrill. Her name does that. But the Henry Fonda Theatre was not the best venue for her music, way too big and a large percent of the crowd that night was pretty lame. It was hard listening when all I wanted to do was shout for everyone to shut the hell up. It reminded me of something I read recently: a writer was watching Bill Evans play solo piano for an unruly and talky audience. Annoyed himself, he asked Evans if he found it difficult performing such intimate stuff for so rude a crowd. “No,” he said, “It just makes me dig deeper into the music.” That’s what Mirah did. She made no concessions to the philistines, even playing some versions of her songs more delicately than on the records till the crowd thinned down to the true fans who rousingly stomped out the beat to her final encore of Cold Cold Water.
