LOCAL LIVE & CD REVIEWS

[June 21st, 2006]

^Blotter

MODEST MOUSE CANCELS, YELLOW SWANS BACK IN TOWN

Modest Mouse has canceled all of its August tour dates in order to finish recording the follow-up to 2004's Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Yay! to the follow-up, but boo to canceled shows , including an Aug. 9 show at Les Schwab Amphitheater in Bend and an Aug. 10 show at Edgefield in Troutdale . Refund available at point of purchase. The band plans on rescheduling all dates at a later time. >> Yellow Swans are back in Portland. The experimental-noise duo left us a couple years ago, choosing to reside in Oakland for a time. But Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman could not stay away and are now back in P-town where they belong. Welcome home, boys! >> PDX Pop Now! is looking for volunteers to help out with this year's festival, set to fill Loveland with Portland's music horde, July 28-30 . A volunteer meeting will be held at World Cup Coffee (inside Powell's on Hawthorne) on Thursday, June 22, at 6 pm. If you are interested in helping out, but can't make the meeting, email info@pdxpopnow.com.

Sate our thirst for Portland music news. Email localcut@wweek.com.

^Pink Mountain Wednesday, June 21

Sam Coomes' new noisy endeavor ignores rules...and anarchy.

[IMPROV] I will, thanks to Pink Mountain, never use the words "chaos," "bedlam" or "anarchy" again to describe improv music. Bullshit cop-outs; blithe ways of describing compositions pop music doesn't possess a language for. It just isn't going to fly anymore. The songs on Pink Mountain's self-titled debut, while flecked with rock meltdown, jazz groove and covert Eno-esque soundscape, follow the prescriptions of none of them, creating their own templates and casually burning them down before the next track.

Pink Mountain is an odd supergroup from odd realms, dividing its membership between Portland and the Bay Area. The Bay contingent—Kyle Bruckmann, John Shiurba, Gino Robair and Scott Rosenberg—is rooted in old-guard classical and jazz improv scenes spanning the country (Chicago, New York, San Francisco), while all having their own punk and rock deviations in spaz-prone bands Lozenge, Molecules and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 (respectively). For Portland member Sam Coomes, this seems a natural fit, a wide-open space to thrash about in as much as he damn well pleases, a desire almost embarrassingly apparent in recent releases from Coomes' duo with Janet Weiss, Quasi (a band not naturally spaz-prone).

And thrash he does, on "No (Yeah)," an arrhythmic freak-out of screeching guitar, throbbing bass and Coomes alternating broken howls of "NOOOOO" and "YEEEAAAHHH." Or, on "Deus Ancien," a track that begins with a fragile pattern of slow organ progressions filled with madman saxophone fits, gradually replaced by guitar seizures that eventually consume the whole song in a giant noise swell: indeed, burning it down. We find the same burning later in what could be that track's converse, "1000 Miles of Sand," which smolders in a tense wavering synth line that leaves no memory or impression to be erased or deconstructed at all. It's a provisional composition, like the rest of the disc, and that's something entirely different from anarchy.

—MICHAEL BYRNE

Pink Mountain plays with ZU, Rollerball, and The Better to See You With at Towne Lounge. 9:30 PM. $8. 21+.

^Liv Warfield June 15 at the Wonder Ballroom

Portland's R&B diva delivers the goods, but where are the takers?

[R&B] It's 9:30 pm and the mostly empty Wonder Ballroom is a b-boy's dream. I look around. Not one in sight. On stage, Syndel and Toni Hill of Siren's Echo make their way through their set without the help of a DJ. The ladies are usually more energetic than this. Hill longingly mentions summertime barbecues as she introduces the next song, and outside the sun sets without much of a fuss, behind the big blanket of grey to the west.

After Siren's Echo, the boys from QuiVaH take the stage. "You are blessed to be in Portland," DJ Papercuts says as the other musicians take their places on stage in front of a near-empty 700-capacity hall. It seems that he is speaking to everyone outside the venue, to the capacity crowd that's sitting at home in front of the television.

QuiVaH is a full band, fronted by two emcees (Qutinuum and Silent E) who share somewhat similar deliveries. The rapping is Run-D.M.C.-inspired, punchy rhymes with important words and phrases underlined by the two emcees spitting them at the same time. It's the band dynamic, though, that makes the group special. QuiVaH reveals the strings that tether hip-hop to jazz, and the Wonder Ballroom receives a subconscious history lesson.

Later, Liv Warfield's keyboardist, Sedell Jones, tingles the keys on his synthesizer. He's trying to get the levels right in his monitor. The band follows his unintentional lead right into "B 4 Real," and Warfield takes the stage in an unassuming brown tracksuit top and tight capri jeans. From the moment she opens her mouth, she has the 100-plus at the Wonder in the palm of her hand. Great R&B requires a great voice, and Warfield certainly has that. She could hold out "land of the freeeeeee" for a minute and a half (and probably has) at a ball game. What's even more impressive is that Warfield's voice acts as a compass for both the audience and her band. Subtle changes in her tone or tremolo trigger chain reactions among her backing musicians, at which point the song is completely in her hands, and you never quite know which way she will take it. That spontaneity is magical, and it requires an attentive, talented band. Warfield has that, too. If I keep my eyes to the stage, I can almost imagine being shoulder to shoulder in a sold-out crowd, with Warfield and company getting the attention they deserve.

—CASEY JARMAN.

Liv Warfield plays with Goapele Thursday, June 22, at the Doug Fir. 9 pm. $12. 21+. She will also be hosting the Donny Hathaway Tribute, Friday, June 23, at Jimmy Mak's. 7:30 pm. $12. 21+.

^Yoyodyne Friday, June 23

Portland trio hits us with a pop gun, and not a moment too soon.

[POP] Yoyodyne is vanilla ice cream in a Chubby Hubby world. As other indie/underground acts in Portland battle to out-weird each other, to create the most avant-garde sounds and lyrics, Yoyodyne appeals with a sense of familiarity, and acts as comfort food for anybody who spent their formative days in the (relatively) blissful '90s. As heard on its self-titled debut EP, the trio of Johnny Keener, Jason Greene and Emily Vidal creates happy, bouncy, fluff pop that sounds derived from the Rentals, Weezer and the Cardigans. Completely devoid of obscurity, the three Portlanders may as well be singing about their music on the EP's last track, "In My Mind," with the lyrics, "Is it weird? Strange? Oh no, its perfectly normal." That might sound boring, but, rest assured, it's not.

Short and sweet, Yoyodyne's five-song EP is 15 and a half minutes of sheer happiness. Bassist Vidal and guitarist Keener take turns on vocals as Greene holds a steady, up-tempo beat on the drums. The EP's first song, "Cakewalk" has a retro sound, a poppy, three-chord rhythm combined with a chorus of "ba-ba-ba"s reminiscent of one of those '60s bands with matching blue suits performing on the Johnny Carson show. "I Want It," the second track, is Arcade Fire on Prozac, Vidal and Keener's voices dubbed so they sound like a full choir emitting overly ecstatic energy à la Polyphonic Spree. Each song is unique, yet equally lovable. As the rest of your ultra-cool indie rock collection starts to make your brain feel like it's gonna explode from contemplating ideas like the universe being shaped exactly like the earth, or realizing that everyone you know someday will die, Yoyodyne will be there to hand you a tranquilizer.

—DEVAN COOK.

Yoyodyne celebrates the release of its self-titled EP with the Shaky Hands at Acme. 10 pm. $5. 21+.

^Nate Carson Tube Booker

Tube's new booker fills Portland's hippest bar with noise.

[NOISE] A year ago, it was difficult to walk the crowded length of Tube, the Old Town club that, at that time, occupied a space perfectly in tune with its name. Much of the time, the joint was a hipster clog, a place to be seen and rubbed against as patrons slammed Hamm's tallboys. Then came last year's remodel, and Tube actually had space, glorious space: five or six more feet in width. For a brief moment, there was breathing room, and then the powers that be decided Tube needed live music. Enter Nathan Carson, a.k.a. DJ Nate C, a storehouse of outré music and outré music contacts. Now Carson is wrangling bands for regular live music at Tube on Monday nights, and that old rubbing is back, only it's amplified about tenfold. Last week, WW caught up with Carson for a short chat about what's going down. —MICHAEL BYRNE.

How did you wind up handling shows at Tube?

I had been bugging [co-owner Mikey McKennedy] for a DJ gig for months. He kept telling me, "There's a long waiting list." Then when their Monday-night guy split town unannounced, they decided to have the new DJ book live gigs as an experiment. None of us expected it to go as well as it has. We've had very few problems and a lot of successful shows. It's so damn rewarding to see a sweaty room full of people standing on the booths and freaking out in there.

Tube has a nice symbiosis with next-door venue Food Hole. How do you see Tube's becoming a live-music venue, particularly one focusing on left-field music, affecting that?

We love Bennett [Yankey] and Food Hole and purposefully don't compete. When there's a Monday-night show planned at Food Hole, I just DJ that night. Bennett is even featured on our current live-music calendar posters in an infamous party shot—he's dry-humping a passed-out Josh Hydeman. It's very hot.

Are the shows you're booking a reflection of your own style of music, or is it something the ownership had in mind?

I've been given carte blanche to book what I want. I'm sure if I started booking rap-metal crap from Gresham, the owners would take me down to the Shanghai Tunnels for a little "talk"...but luckily that will never happen. It's turned out that the metal and noise shows have worked the best for the regular crowd I'm seeing. It's fun to see Dead/Bird making chaotic noise in a tiny hipster bar. The surreal aspect of juxtaposing these extreme sounds with such a fancy little space seems very 21st-century to me.

Next Monday, Tube hosts Drugs, Dragging an Ox Through Water, and Bird Costumes. 9:30 pm. Free. 21+. Sunday nights DJ Nate C spins at Black Sundays at Ground Kontrol. Free. 10 pm. 21+.