Live and CD Reviews

[July 26th, 2006]

^Blotter

WHAT YOU'VE BEEN MISSING AT LOCALCUT.COM.

Bright Red Paper begins its Local Cut tour diary with stories of auto-mechanical failures in the Mojave Desert. >> Michael Byrne delivers an exclusive, extended interview with veteran PDX electronic guru Solenoid. >> To kick off PDX Pop Now!, Pseudosix, the Minders and Quasi played a free show at City Hall to a crowd of over 500, and Jason Quigley took some beautiful photos. >> Portland super-producer and DJ Ohmega Watts has unleashed a bunch of tour dates and a new single.  Recent Lincoln High School graduate Keith Brown spearheads an effort to memorialize fellow alum Elliott Smith with a bronze plaque in their school's hallway.  Lauren K. Newman announces her first show, at the 9th Avenue Public House, since a nasty fall down some stairs landed her in the hospital sans insurance.  Blackbird Presents and Yeti magazine unveil a super-tight two-day festival called "Halleluwah: A Festival of Enthused Arts" at Disjecta, Sept. 1-2, featuring the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Deerhoof, Jackie-O Motherfucker, White Rainbow and many other Portland luminaries. >> In Cut of the Day, Local Cutters serve up free MP3s from Smoke, Swimmers, Laura Gibson and Glass Candy. >> In a Live Cut correspondence from the Warped Tour at Columbia Meadows, Jason Simms brings us his new favorite band, the Super Geek League.

Go to www.localcut.com to keep up and send tips to localcut@wweek.com.

^TARA JANE O'NEIL Friday, July 28

A pairing of re-released EPs proves O'Neil has two sides, and they're not so far apart.

[SINGER-SONGWRITER] To Trace a Raveling, a vinyl-only split release of Tara Jane O'Neil's Tracer EP and her most recent EP, A Raveling, is a confounding little combination. A Raveling is nearly what its title suggests it is: a small loose thread in the collected works of one of our city's best songwriters. It is as consistently stripped-down as anything I've heard from O'Neil: Here we hear four songs of naked guitar humility and a voice that is, as always, as clear and unshakable as it is fragile and personal. Anything extraneous to that—spare strings, sweet melodica drones—is, well, extraneous. The collateral moments of experimentalism that marked her last release, 2004's You Sound, Reflect—the extended pulsing tone that opens "Take the Waking" or the discordant strings that open "Love Song Long"—are hardly missed here. O'Neil is saved from the Natalie/Sarah/Tori pile of overpolished songstresses simply by that uniqueness of voice, and just plain old good songwriting.

Yet, the experimentalism is here—in marvelous form—on the record's flip side, Tracer, which is, essentially, one devastatingly beautiful song in three movements. It opens with chiming bells and barely formed guitar melodies that come together in disparate moments of pure song before dissolving back into extended dissonance and resurfacing again in simple vocal melodies. The folks at Mississippi Records deserve massive credit for putting these two otherwise import releases together on one record, perfectly illustrating the diverse capabilities of Tara Jane O'Neil. As abbreviated as it is, this pair leaves us wondering where she will go next. Above that, it leaves us wondering what the line is between experimentalism and bare songwriting—and the hope that they're, in the end, not that different after all.

—MICHAEL BYRNE.

Tara Jane O'Neil plays with Nick Castro & the Young Elders at the Towne Lounge. 9 pm. $7. 21+.

^Sam Adams

The city commissioner heats up the city's tepid support for local music.

[POLITICS] Last Wednesday City Commissioner Sam Adams helped introduce about 500 music fans and three local bands (Pseudosix, the Minders, Quasi) to City Hall during a late-afternoon concert in front of the municipal building. The concert, put on in conjunction with the PDX Pop Now! Festival, was promoted by Adams and fellow commissioner Erik Sten as an outreach to a community that might not even know where City Hall is. Adams, Portland's arts and culture commissioner, has also reached out by inviting the local music community to comment on his website (commissionersam.com). WW sat down with an exhausted Adams the day after the concert to see what gives.

—Mark Baumgarten.

WW: How did yesterday end up happening?

Sam Adams: When I was chief of staff to the mayor, I always thought City Hall seemed more like a mausoleum than a people's hall, so when I was fortunate enough to get elected, I tried to get appointed the arts and culture commissioner because I really wanted to combine the two and really make this much more of a place...where people feel welcome.... So Jesse [Beason, Adams' senior policy director] had a connection with [PDX Pop Now!]. So, it's great weather, let's do something! Jesse made the connection and found the music and got the mayor's support.

Is there more to it than that? You've also asked for suggestions on how the city can help the music community.

Did you know we're 24th in public funding for the arts in the United States? We have far more arts and culture here than we deserve, given how little we give to it. We're the number one location for in-migration in the United States for 18- to 34-year-olds, and I want to build on a reputation as a great place to live, as a great place for artists and culturists to want to live, and to find affordable spaces and venues for practice and to create a live music district.

But shouldn't it be survival of the fittest? Should crappy bands be able to live comfortably?

That's not my point, to artificially decide what's popular or not; that's not my business. My business is...to provide that infrastructure for that cycle, that survival of the fittest.... The biggest problem we have now is that we have many people who are very talented or very good—I think we saw some of them last night—and yet they struggle here, in part because we're not the most populous place in the United States. I still think we can do a lot better.

For the full interview with Sam Adams, go to localcut.com and search "Sam Adams."

^Benefit for the Nightmare Collective July 21 at Parliament; • Kitchen Sink July 22 at a House in St. Johns

Rock and art melt on the hottest weekend of the year.

[DANCE ROCK] There are 3-foot towers made of eggshells blocking the toilet when I rush, bladder full, into an event called Kitchen Sink that took place last Saturday at a house in St. Johns. I laugh—the fat, rounded icicles of white shards are the strangest thing I've seen since last night, when I was watching Swimmers play a new song about riding a bicycle-powered zeppelin over Austria when a guy in a Speedo and a cape, followed by what appeared to be space invaders, entered the Southeast warehouse-gone-artspace called Parliament.

Plus, it's 105 degrees. Am I losing my mind?

No, it just so happens that two rock/art shows coincided with the hottest weekend of the year. Friday's benefit for the Nightmare Collective, an all-encompassing DIY art space that is planning to relocate from Forest Grove to Portland, reached its absurd peak as the aforementioned space invaders took the Parliament stage, calling themselves Here Comes a Big Black Cloud. The eight-piece dance-rock band features Ben Applebaum playing a theremin as the lead, producing punctuated staccato notes during "Scrilla" that were right on pitch, a difficult thing to do on the antique electronic instrument. Maryann "Boots" Calhoun, who occasionally sings but mostly dances so the audience isn't afraid to, led the packed house of about 80 in a split-room chant of "Zap!...Pow!" accompanied by a dance named after the song "The Gamma Ray."

Flash forward about 17 sweaty hours to Kitchen Sink, an event being held in a house in St. Johns, where each room has an art installation, including a room filled with Fun Noodles pool toys, and another with irregularly shaped wooden blocks precariously stacked to the ceiling. By dark, electro-funk two-piece Dat'r led four or five dozen sandaled and bare feet into literally dancing up a dust cloud while a fog machine covered the band in the back yard. Occasional old-school instruments like live cymbals kept the performance raw, as did Paul Alcott's ability to vocally match an extremely high-pitched, electronically generated squeal, breaking away from his gadgets to shake a leg with a mic whenever possible.

As the night began to show signs of cooling off, Team Evil, featuring Skyler Norwood and Victor Paul Nash of Point Juncture, WA, set up on the rug that separated the band from the dry, thin grass. The trio's sound is not so far from PJWA, with looping guitars and moments when Norwood and fellow guitarist Jordan McCann (of Prime Meridian) would make eye contact with drummer Nash to coordinate a building climax just right. As Norwood strummed jazz chords during "Energy Crisis Solved," a thoughtful lullaby that saw the band at its least poppy, the first breeze of the night gave the captivated 30 or 40 people who were sitting, still sweating, a sign of a return to balance.

—JASON SIMMS.