LOCAL ALBUM & LIVE REVIEWS

[March 22nd, 2006]

^Blotter

REINVENTING THE MISS AND SOUNDTRACK BLISS

Mississippi Studios just keeps getting better under the management of Jim Brunberg . The latest move from the North Portland club is an expansion: The backyard will be covered by a small concert hall that will fit 150 seated or 180 standing music lovers. The venue will also contain what Brunberg says will be "a new concept in music marketing called 'The Filling Station '—a music downloading/record shop that [Music Millennium owner] Terry Currier and I are starting." The plans are currently being reviewed by the city. >> A song from sorta-Portland group Papillon will be featured on Sunday's episode of the Showtime series The L Word (10 pm Sunday, March 26, with reruns through the week). The song, "Patterns on Your Fingertips," is sung by former WW writer Liz Brown and is the second song featured on the show by Portland artists (Sleater-Kinney got there first). >> Last week we mentioned that a Talkdemonic track from local compilation Bridgetown Breaks will be featured in NPR's favorite feature film, Thank You for Smoking. There will actually be the sounds of more Portland skin-ticklers in the film, as one of the drum tracks contributed to Breaks by Menomena 's Danny Seim made the cut, too. The two artists are also up for soundtrack consideration, the minds behind Breaks tell Blotter.

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^Kind of Like Spitting Thursday March 23

Phil Ochs changed the career of Kind of Like Spitting's Ben Barnett. Pass it on.

"The first time I ever heard Phil Ochs, I was in the middle of having sex in a loft," says Kind of Like Spitting's Ben Barnett, sitting on the back porch of Tiny's in Southeast. "In the middle of coitus I stopped and asked my roommate, 'What the fuck is this?'"

The album Barnett heard that day, three years ago, was There and Now: Live in Vancouver 1968, recorded when Ochs was attempting to move from being a counterculture hero to a hit-writing musician. He never made it, hanging himself in 1976.

At the time Barnett first heard Ochs, KOLS was flirting with success. The band signed with Barsuk Records and toured with Saves the Day. Then something wonderful happened. KOLS didn't get the fame. And, in return, a new generation got Ochs, one of the '60s more underappreciated protest singers.

When KOLS imploded before a tour, Barnett took to the road with an incomplete band, his KOLS songbook and some Ochs songs. The Ochs songs went over well. Later, Barnett decided to record Kind of Like Spitting's first album in three years, Learn: The Songs of Phil Ochs (he's since released two non-Ochs albums).

"It was about putting Phil's music out there so kids could hear it," Barnett says.

And, according to the Portland songwriter, who uses "kids" often to refer to the whole of humanity, that's exactly what has been happening.

A new audience, which has been buying the album and requesting the songs at shows, is discovering Ochs' brilliance by way of Learn. Accompanied by a simple strum, Barnett's shaky, anxious voice breaks in with Ochs' words on opening track "Tired": "Sometimes I feel like the world isn't mine/ and it feeds on my hunger and tears on my time." Then there is this bit from "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" that lets slip the apathy all those boomers don't want to admit their younger selves shared with this generation: "Oh, look outside the window, there's a woman bein' grabbed/ They've dragged her to the bushes, and now she's bein' stabbed/ Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain/ But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game." Replace "Monopoly" with "Doom," and you've pretty much got a modern anthem. MARK BAUMGARTEN.

Kind of Like Spitting plays with System and Station, Horsefeathers, and J Blank at Berbati's Pan. 9:30 pm. $3. 21+.

^Brenda Weiler Saturday March 25

Songwriter takes stage again after a family tragedy.

[SINGER-SONGWRITER] For the past 10 years, Brenda Weiler has been mastering the art of subtle melancholy in her music. A native of North Dakota and later a dominating presence in the Minneapolis music scene, Weiler moved to Portland four years ago and brought with her a crystalline voice and knack for writing beautiful vignettes that tap into life's little losses. On Oct. 6, Weiler was confronted with a great loss when she learned that her 33-year-old sister had taken her own life. "My first reaction was that I was never going to play music again," the shaken 28-year-old says staring into her beer on a recent evening at the Savoy Tavern in Southeast Portland. "I just couldn't think about music." Weiler did eventually play a couple shows at colleges on the East Coast but, she says, didn't truly return to her music until she picked up her guitar three weeks ago. WW spoke to the songwriter about her return to the stage. MARK BAUMGARTEN.

WW: Your songs are filled with distances and people leaving. Do those songs have a different meaning to you right now?

Brenda Weiler: It seems like every song that I've been practicing in the last couple weeks is filled with my sister. It's like the songs have changed; every word has a new meaning. It's been difficult.

Are there any songs that you know you can't play now?

I really have no idea what's going to happen when I get onstage. I know that I am going to talk about her and what happened. That's what I do. I'm very open when I'm in front of people, but I have never had anything like this in my life before. That's what was so strange when I played those two shows out east. I had to just disconnect from the words I was singing. I just went into a zone where nothing could touch me. I don't know if I can handle it. But I feel like I have to do it.

Do you feel like you have to in order to deal—

I think it's the only way I can heal properly. Music has always been the way I've dealt with difficulties in my life, but I've never had anything really bad happen to me. No divorce. No bad stuff. So I don't know what's going to happen. I have written a couple songs in the last couple weeks about her, but I don't know if I can play those. I don't know if I can ever play those for other people.

Are there any songs that you know you will play?

"Fly Me Back." It's an old song, but it's about my family.

Brenda Weiler plays with Alia Farah & Dan Kauffman at Mississippi Studios. 7:30 pm. $10. 21+.

^Michael Naylor Birth of a New Day

Naylor and his spiritual sidekick lose little on album.

Michael Naylor Birth of a New Day(Self-released)

[FOLK-SOUL] During my first few years in Portland, I'd often encounter Michael Naylor playing at the same open mics I frequented. Offstage, he was a smiling, soft-spoken, supportive guy, but when his turn came, nobody could cast a spell over a room like Michael. He performed under the handle "Me and My Brother," and I gradually understood that the invisible sibling he invoked in the name was actually a spiritual presence that seemed to surround and permeate his performance. Delivering songs that sounded not "composed" so much as spontaneously generated by immediate emotional need, Michael would close his eyes and rock the same riff and minimalist lyrics over and over, his personality gradually disappearing into the atmosphere of the song until the guitar was playing him and his voice started reaching for places it hadn't planned to go. Back then, I remember thinking that the appeal of his work might not translate well to recording because it was so in-the-moment.

Thankfully, all these years later, I've been gently proven wrong. Naylor has just completed Birth of a New Day, a concise, 10-song album that, by sticking to live-in-studio recording with minimal effects, manages to evoke much of the mojo I remember. His smoky, sweet singing is as easy to listen to as water is to drink, and he still has a hypnotic way with the acoustic guitar. Listening, I'm transported—both back to those nights, and forward to somewhere I haven't been yet. JEFF ROSENBERG.

Michael Naylor celebrates the release of Birth of a New Day with Quality Name Brand Thursday, March 23, at the White Eagle. 8:30 pm. $4. 21+.

^Marriage Records Improv Night at Towne Lounge, March 13

Davis Lee Hooker saves the universe from jam music...for now.

[IMPROV-NOISE] There's some grumbling on the street right now about psych music taking over Portland's noise scene, that the Daniel Mensche disciples are being run out of town by Santana's vibe children, or, even worse, being fully converted into fans of happy swirls, megadelays, stroboscopic computer cut 'n' paste, and, ahem, jams.

And, yeah, about two-thirds through the very first Marriage Records open-stage improv night, I was cursing the apparent shift, too: Things had gotten downright Phish-y. The mixed crew had fallen into a groove, in the absolute worst sense. Adrian Orange (Thanksgiving) was involved, as was Chris Himes of Mise En Abyme and the recent Marriage castaways that play as Rob Walmart, all seemingly unaware that they had congealed, after so many promising moments, into a jam band horrorshow, repeating the same melody over and over with few variations.I nearly chucked my Marriage Records faith, but multi-instrumentalist and groove-antagonist Davis Lee Hooker (...Worms, John Henry Memorial, the Watery Graves) crawled in from the periphery and saved the evening with a few heroic squalls pumped straight in through the mixing board.

It was a night of heros and reluctant sideliners. The two-hour jam based itself around a couple of stable melodies and beats coming from a turntable, guitars, vox, samplers, keyboards, drum machine, drums and the real piano that's always lurking proplike in the Towne Lounge's shadows. The determined star of the night was Orange: The goosenecked, chain-smoking youngster couldn't sit still, alternating between guitars, drums and dead space, stumbling and rallying, i.e. "Oh, man...this is awkward," and "It doesn't matter how you play...I'll still sing." Tom Blood, Marriage's resident poet, reluctantly offered up some needed absurdity with a free-associative riff about waterskiing in Canada. And shortly after 11 pm, Honey Owens and Adam Forkner (of World, White Rainbow, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Valet) made their move, with Owens kneeling on the floor doing her creepy/sexy wail into an ultra-effected mike and Forkner jamming lazy-style on the guitar at rear-stage. At this point, it turned into a furious race to the end. Owens took over the drums, about everyone in the room had a shaker, girl X and girl Y from the crowd were harmonizing on a mike, Himes was playing piano, and, at zero hour, it all ended in a great clusterfuck, with no leaders (save for Adam Forkner repeating into the mike "all of this equipment is for sale"), no followers and no common thread, which was the perfect climax for a session that began two hours before in the middle of an ugly sound check with a disembodied voice inviting everyone present to "start listening to the music." MICHAEL BYRNE.