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DID YOU HEAR THAT TALKDEMONIC WON AN OSCAR?
Blitzen Trapper has just been tapped for a new-folk compilation being put together by an English fella named Rob da Bank. Mr. da Bank boasts his own radio show on the U.K.'s biggest radio station, BBC Radio 1, and this comp boasts some heavy hitters in the new-folk field, including the Animal Collective, Mi and L'Au, Vashti Bunyan and Vetiver. The comp, featuring "40 Stripes" off BT's 2005 release Field Rexx, will be released by Sunday Best later this year. >> Rumor has it that a couple of members of San Diego post-rock extravaganza Tristeza are living in Portland now, working on a mysterious side project. >> There is a thin line between irony and nonsensical lies. Take the recent news that Talkdemonic won an Oscar for sound mixing on the film Crash, as posted on www.tinymixtapes.com. True? No. Ironic? No. Funny? No. Confusing? Yes. Truth is, Talkdemonic never did any work on Crash, but the band does have a foot in the Hollywood door. A Talkdemonic drum track contributed to the local Bridgetown Breaks compilation is featured in the film Thank You for Smoking. The film, which stars Aaron Eckhart, Adam Brody, Katie Holmes and other good-looking people, hit screens last Friday. >> Sam Soule reports that Danava has scored a record deal. More info coming, but for now, Soule says, "All I know is that there's a van involved."
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Pure Country Gold Thursday March 16
The whole room benefits from Pat Foss and Jake Welliver's singular focus.
[GARAGE-PUNK] Every guy who has ever been to a show is well aware of the mysterious and beguiling charms of that girl—the one in the footlights, moving alone to the beat of the band.
So when singer-guitarist Pat Foss got together with longtime drummer pal Jake Welliver for their first-ever jam session, his appeal to inspiration was clear.
"I told [Jake], 'Picture that girl dancing at the front of the stage,'" Foss recalls, "'and if you start playing something that's going to impress a guy, get it out of your head—we just want to keep that girl dancing.'"
One year later and that girl dances at her own risk. Foss and Welliver's Pure Country Gold rolls with enough good-time, hard-shuffle exuberance to flatten a house party. And, as such, the band is currently the toast of the local garagey punk-rock community. Girls and guys are bobbing heads and tapping feet, trying to keep time while holding on to the floor—lest they be blown away by PCG's wall of raw melody and rousing backbeat that create a momentum that threatens to topple itself.
"I have to keep it in mind all the time to pull back," explains Welliver, a self-taught drummer well known for his continuing rhythmic work in aggro post-punkers Quarry to the War. "It's a bizarre challenge.... [Pat's] half guitar player, half bass player, and I'm half drummer, half bass player.... There's nobody else there."
Despite their Mutt-and-Jeff appearances—Foss the reserved yet affably worn cherub, Welliver the rabidly F-bomb-dropping beanpole—the men of PCG are remarkably in sync. Yet they dare to dream of someday expanding their lineup.
Foss, who has been enjoying a renewed sense of songwriting freedom after the 2004 breakup of his former band, the High and the Mighty, sees horns, strings, and lots and lots of studio time in PCG's future. "This vision in my head is so mind-blowing," says Foss.
However, both men are in agreement that Pure Country Gold "Phase One" is working, and to tinker with their obvious chemistry would require extreme caution.
"It's really going good the way it is now," says Welliver.
Foss agrees. "For someone to step in, it would have to be 150 percent perfect."
Yes, it would.
Because as far as that girl goes, Pure Country Gold has got her dancing. What else do they need? SAM SOULE.
Pure Country Gold plays with the Moneychangers, the Weaklings, and Diamond Tuck and the Privates at Dante's. 9:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Dead Moon Friday March 17
Portland's garage-rock institution won't stop till death does them part.
[GARAGE PUNK] In an age where Ozzy Osbourne reads his lyrics off of a teleprompter and Keith Richards is essentially propped up on stage, it's remarkable that Dead Moon is going strong. Even with two-thirds of its members past the half-century mark, the trio still plays long, rowdy sets, dousing their drum kit in beer so it splashes on the band and the first few rows of fans with every stroke. Despite a stage show that makes bands half or even a third their age look lazy, and releasing two new albums since 2000, rumors of Dead Moon calling it quits have been floating around for quite a while now. WW got on the phone with Toody Cole, the bass-playing half of the band's husband-wife vocal team, to see if there are any signs of dawn for Dead Moon. JASON SIMMS.
WW: Every time I see Dead Moon in the press, there's a mention of the band coming to an end soon....
Toody Cole: Well, you've gotta realize that next year it will be 20 years that we've been playing together. We took about a whole year off last year because I got tendinitis really bad in my wrist, and we just started playing again, so that fueled the fire as well.
So you don't have a plan to split up?
No, we don't. In May we're going to play a festival in Austin and another one in Chicago, and we're also lining up a full-on tour for Europe in the fall. Our last show will come sometime, but we probably never will know which one it's going to be.
You'll just stop whenever one of you can't do it anymore?
Either that or one of us'll die. Till death do us part. This band is a marriage—no d-i-v-o-r-c-e.
How do you keep things fresh for Dead Moon?
Well, Fred [Cole] is writing new material right now. But we've got over 200 songs, and we pick 20 on any given night. Fred and I talk about this a lot: How cool is it that we're not a band where we've got one or two songs that people want to hear and they put up with the rest of it until they hear that song? For us, it's just completely the opposite: We could play for hours and somebody's still gonna be goin' "Hey! Play this!" And we've done that before.
Dead Moon plays with Diving Rods and 8 Foot Tender at Sabala's at Mount Tabor. 9:30 pm. Cover. 21+.
PDXpress.net and kingbanana.net
Two local sites give Portland punk fans the before and after shots.
[OMG! PNK] The Internet might seem the exclusive realm of the hip, marketing-savvy indie-rock band. But remember that the same DIY spirit that empowered all those bands vying for hipster ears was born of punk. While the punk set might be rough around the edges in Web design, it is present, notably on two local sites.
If you've ever seen a 35-year-old man with one leg taking pictures at a show, you have seen the machinery behind local website www.PDXPress.net in action. Jim Reynolds, who runs the advertising-free website out of pocket, wishes he had more photos from his punk days in the '80s. So when his two teenage children began to go to small, all-ages shows at places like Food Hole, he decided he'd go along, with his digital camera.
Reynolds shoots two or three shows a month, and there's an occasional gem in the 30 to 50 shots of each show. Though many of his pictures aren't perfect, the website succeeds in capturing the raw spirit of the shows, as it did with the Briefs' CD release last fall. Reynolds says he is excited about expanding a small political-activism part of the site, because he would like to help shift the focus of the current punk scene from partying to the political side of the music—something, he says, that needed to happen in the '80s as well. In an effort to help realize this goal, the site sponsored a two-day benefit for Oregon Books to Prisoners last month. Since the show sparked a controversy between queer activists and one of the performers (see "Punk Rock Faggots Come Under Fire," WW, March 8, 2006), Reynolds hopes to host another benefit shortly, this time for a queer charity.
Another URL bookmarked across town is www.Kingbanana.net. Jeff Urquhart, a.k.a. Jeff Banana, runs the site and eponymous promotion company for essentially no pay, and with only occasional help from friends. He recently enlisted the help of a couple of pals to create a very professional-looking layout for his website, which serves as a nearly comprehensive listing for all punk and metal shows in the Portland area, listing gigs up to four months in advance (although the site does tend to miss some big shows). In fact, its near-comprehensiveness may be the calendar's only weakness: It's tempting to rely on it, but you're bound to miss a good show or two if you do.
Banana started the calendar in the late '90s as part of his AOL profile, which he forwarded to friends and people he met online. It now gets 500,000 hits a month (seriously) and hosts a message board and classifieds page which, though comprising only a few posts a week, can also be a good place to weed out the nu-metal freaks and washed-up has-beens who plague this town's other musician listings. JASON SIMMS.
QUASI WHEN THE GOING GETS DARK (Touch & Go)
[INDIE ROCK] When Quasi first played cuts off its latest, When the Going Gets Dark, a few weeks back at Holocene, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "Thank god I don't have to write about this." Trapping that live Quasi explosion in words would be akin to snapping a photo of a H-bomb blast with a drugstore disposable. The record, with its (as it turns out) disposable lyric sheet, seemed a hell of a lot safer on first glance.
Hardly.
The opener, "Alice the Goon," immediately goes off in a hot white flash of furious drum blows and discordant piano pounding, setting the album's theme in the space of a breath (a theme that feels perhaps closer to Sam Coomes' Blues Goblin side project than to older Quasi). Fortunately, that burst steals the show enough to distract from the track's nonsense lyrics, which collapse into the Popeye theme-song refrain. Good thing. I never thought Quasi was exactly hot shit with words, but Jesus. Sans any poetry, politics or originality, the lyric sheet on this album should have been trashed, perhaps replaced by a synth programmed with Coomes' dirty, breaking voice spitting nonsense. Such a setup would have worked well in place of the "Merry Christmas/Happy New Year's" refrains that cloud a seriously cool arrangement of reverberating drum artillery, splintering piano and "just chillin'" guitar riffs later on "Merry X-Mas."
When the Going Gets Dark is, indeed, further proof of how key Coomes' voice is to Quasi, even above Weiss' polished and pretty replies. "Death Culture Blues" has the Portland old-schooler reminding us again that he's a really good guitar player. And even if the songs are over-the-top politicking ("Death Culture Blues," "Peace and Love," "Poverty Sucks"), it just feels good to hear a real live imperfect human through your speakers. Coomes' strained throat is a call to arms against music-machine radio bullshit, more than the words it carries could ever be. MICHAEL BYRNE.
Quasi will celebrate the release of When the Going Gets Dark at Jackpot Records Downtown. 6 pm Tuesday, March 21. Free. All ages.
Blitzen Trapper March 11 at Food Hole
BT leaves the whiskey at home, but no one at Food Hole's missing it.
[INDIE POP] Word is that Food Hole's getting some artwork and color soon, but right now the place still feels like a state mental hospital hallway: bare white walls, barred skylight, and, usually, the wails and clatter of whatever damaged souls are playing the tiny all-ages venue. Last Saturday, Blitzen Trapper, headlining a trio of PDX-POP faves including Pseudosix and Wet Confetti, didn't kill the joint's madman vibe in its last performance before heading to Austin for SXSW. But at least turned it into the happy kind of nuts, full of head-bob seizures, bouncing and a good-natured noise freakout led by guitarist Eric Menteer, gleefully smearing his strings against the wall. The underagers in front—an adorable cluster about six or seven strong—fell right into the music, twisting and shaking with the sloppy grins of the pop inflicted. It was enough to make this 25-year-old writer feel downright lame ducking next door to Tube between sets to fend off old-age social anxiety with a whiskey.
The show made it even clearer that, since the release of its self-titled debut in 2003, the Portland sextet has become, overall, just a damn catchy indie-pop band bent on infecting us with cute lyrics about unicorns and bumblebees—performed complete with hand motions, a pair of friendly keyboards and the affable vocals of Eric Earley. Gone are the whiskey days, the slower countrified tracks that made up the latter half of their debut and stamped much of last year's release Field Rexx. As much as show opener "New Shoes" immediately colored the stark room, I was left pining for the bluegrass/lounge melange of "Triggafinga," or the twang of "Whiskey Kisser," whose refrain "Oh. Gee./ What is wrong with me?" would have fit nicely in the Food Hole asylum. MICHAEL BYRNE.
Pure Country Gold plays with the Moneychangers, the Weaklings, and Diamond Tuck and the Privates at Dante's. 9:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Dead Moon plays with Diving Rods and 8 Foot Tender at Sabala's at Mount Tabor. 9:30 pm. Cover. 21+.
Quasi will celebrate the release of When the Going Gets Dark at Jackpot Records Downtown. 6 pm Tuesday, March 21. Free. All ages.
WWeek 2015