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NEW GOSSIP EP, CURTIS GETS CASH AND SINGLEY SINGLED OUT.
Kill Rock Stars announced that it will be releasing a remix EP from blues-punks the Gossip on Aug. 22. The EP will include remixes by Le Tigre and Arthur Baker, as well as an Aaliyah cover. The band also plans to release an enhanced edition with a DVD that will include concert footage of a recent Wonder Ballroom performance. Who knows, maybe there's a zoom-in shot of your sweaty face in the third row! >> The Curtis Salgado benefit concert that took place at the Rose Garden June 13 has been proclaimed a huge success in raising a big chunk of the money the blues legend will need to pay for cancer treatments and a liver transplant. The show, which included performances by Steve Miller, Everclear and Taj Mahal, raised $150,000 of the estimated $800,000 needed for future medical bills. >> PDX Pop Now! will be having a CD release party for this year's compilation at Berbati's Pan on July 13. The band lineup is yet to be announced, but Dave Allen (of Gang of Four fame) will be DJing. >> Last week, the Associated Press website included local psych-poppers Alan Singley and Pants Machine on their "downloads of the week" feature. The AP picked "Highways of Our Mindz," proclaiming it the strongest track on the band's latest record, Lovingkindness. We disagree. Anyone with a half a heart knows that "Watersong" is far superior.
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DJ Wicked Wednesday, June 28
DJ Wicked snaps out of his radio daze with Fuck the Radio: Volume 1.
[HIP-HOP] When I moved to Portland two years ago, I didn't know anything about DJ Wicked except that he had recently released Got MILF?, a mix of re-worked '80s pop and R&B mash-ups that I couldn't stand. Every time the disc came on, I thought "Oh, that track is so played out!" Little did I realize that I was completely missing the point. A veteran Portland DJ, Wicked picked obvious summer jams and old-school club cuts to elicit an "aww naww" reaction from his listeners; the mix wasn't meant to advance dance music or enlighten the listener, but rather, it was meant to act as an audio time-capsule, a collection of radio hits preserved for nostalgia's sake.
Fuck the Radio: Volume 1 [self-released] is the anti-Got MILF? Here Wicked selects tracks that were hardly blips on the national radar when first dropped. Nonetheless, selections like Abstract Rude's "Got It Like That" are as catchy as they come. Last Emperor puts his favorite emcees up against superheroes on "Secret Wars," and Busdriver flaunts his lightning-quick flow on "Imaginary Places," which culminates in an incredible scratch-off from Wicked that matches Busdriver's own intensity and speed. The DJ takes an active role in the mix, calling attention to particularly clever turns of phrase by re-cuing them multiple times. He scratches almost constantly on Fuck the Radio, keeping things lively and bringing listeners as near to the live turntable experience as plastic allows.
Every few minutes, an underground emcee like Planet Asia or Abstract Rude shows up to verify Wicked's undergroundedness, throwing a personalized "fuck the radio" into the ring as well. Even without the testimonials, though, Wicked deserves props for a solid and lovingly mixed summer blockbuster, one that probably—and this is just a shot in the dark—won't make heavy rotation on 95.5.
—CASEY JARMAN.
DJ Wicked hosts Wicked Wednesdays every week at the Greek Cusina. This week he performs with Himself, Debaser, Risky Star and Ms. Su'ad. 10 pm. $3. 21+. DJ Wicked will also perform with DJs Professor Stone and Rascue, Friday, June 30, in the Minoan Lounge at the Greek Cusina. 9 pm. $5. 21+
Parenthetical Girls Thursday, June 29
Zac Pennington hands us his Safe as Houses tragedy. Dare we ask for more?
[INDIE POP] "The author is dead."
That is a key principle of criticism—rarely applied to pop culture—meant to create a wall between the artist and the art. Viewed through this lens, the work—the song,
the poem, the painting—loses the limitations of history and gains independence.
I keep the above aphorism at the fore when I'm writing about music, except in rare moments when, say, album X was recorded on a sinking ocean liner or off the squeaking bed springs of "actual fucking." Or when, as is the case with Parenthetical Girls' latest, an album is so emotionally charged that it provokes the question: "Is this for real?"
The album, Safe as Houses, is, in itself, a beautiful work, grounded in dense, swirling symphonic rock arrangements played by Dead Science members Sam Mickens and Jherek Bischoff and highlighted by P Girls' trademark xylophone leads. The greatest improvement over P Girls' debut LP, (((GRRRLS))), is found in leadman Zac Pennington's suddenly very capable vocal, now a wavering falsetto à la bandmate and Dead Science frontman Mickens or Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart. But the true weight of the album is found in its lyrics. Basically, this is an album-long nightmare narrative, the tale of an unwanted child whom the mother likens to self-destruction: A suicide by procreation. Years later, that child, a girl, dies beneath a train, sliced unrecognizable. She is survived by a brother, equally unwanted, who is raised above his sister's grave and beneath the somber clouds of his mother's guilt.
Sitting with Pennington recently, I couldn't help asking, "What of this is real?" and the kicker, "Is this autobiographical?" I asked as if it would make a difference, already fully knowing the answers: "Some of it," and "I'd rather not say."
Toward the end of the interview, Pennington apologized, saying, "I'm sorry if I seemed evasive before." I then realized that my infolust had gotten the better of me, and it wasn't a matter of whether or not Pennington wanted to give up something so personal to a weekly newspaper (a rival of the former music editor's past employer, the Portland Mercury). The author of this music refused to explain, because to do so would be to neutralize the electricity of listening. In that case, Safe as Houses would be as dead as a news abstract. Sure, the music stands on its own, but to strip Safe as Houses of its interpretive possibilities would be to kill the art. And that is an aphorism I cannot stand by.
—MICHAEL BYRNE.
Parenthetical Girls play with Imaad Wassif and Wires On Fire at Towne Lounge. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
Dykeritz Sunday, July 2
Jordan Blum's weirdo pop vehicle re-emerges a transformed band.
[ELECTRO-COLLAGE] As recently as last fall, Dykeritz was a promising pop band. Led by the elusive Jordan Blum, the band released Purple Switzerland and wowed a small listenership with weirdo pop that managed to place oddly anthemic choruses in the middle of songs clustered with synths, rattling percussion and manic guitar lines. Live, the band included an amalgam of some of Portland's better left-field pop talents, including Lucky Madison Records' boss Ryan Feigh, Please Step Out of the Vehicle's Travis Pants, Quiet Countries' Leb Borgerson and (for at least one show) some drunk kid with a giant blue ball for a head doing interpretive dances. Overall, Dykeritz was a band that seemed to be going somewhere, blindly rolling down an unmarked road toward possible greatness, its whistling, spitting, hiccuping chaise being driven by something of a pop genius. Then, at the end of 2005, Blum decided to dismantle the entire thing.
Six months later, a new Dykeritz album (as well as a number of live shows) has appeared, quelling fears of the band's demise. But that album, Snowing Windy Peaches, reveals an entirely new Dykeritz. For one thing, the band has shrunk to include only Blum and Feigh, and the instrumentation has become more specialized; most of the sounds here come from synthesizers, drums and sampled snippets.
The 17 tracks on Snowing Windy Peaches rarely veer into pop territory. Much of that is because they lack the time to build into full songs (seven of the tracks are two minutes or shorter), but mostly, the lack of verses and choruses is due to a willful sonic experimentation that prefers sound collages of field recordings, brightly bubbling synthetic riffs, ambient washes of sound and short bursts of thumping dance music. But this isn't frustratingly heady music. Bright, melodic themes abound (and mutate, as in the clustered track "The Victorian Age," which revisits a dance beat in three equally infectious variations), and Blum's beautiful orchestrations are up front and center (the short piano piece "Yellow Vase" recalls pensive Radiohead).
For those who need more than scraps of music to feed on, Dykeritz has included two verifiable pop songs. The first, which introduces the first true vocal track, nine minutes into the album, is "Q," a strummy tropicalia-inflected pop jaunt with dreamy boy-girl vocals that makes room for a rattling breakdown featuring some simple scratching. The second, "11 in the P.M.," is pure white-boy soul paired with a heavily filtered female vocal that sounds lifted straight from a mid-'90s Euro dance track. Weird? Yes. Beautiful? Definitely. Dykeritz? I guess so.
—MARK BAUMGARTEN.
Dykeritz opens for Rogue Wave at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $8.
Janet Jackson Tribute Night June 23 at Holocene
Portland's electro-hipster set gather and jerk it to Janet.
[ELECTRO TRIBUTE] "So, are you down with Janet?" I asked.
"Shit, man," the hipster replied. "I think I might have masturbated to her."
I had only landed on Planet Janet 10 minutes prior to this exchange, on a mission to find the essence of Ms. Jackson in the mess of hipster irony that crowded Holocene for the Janet Jackson Tribute Night. Yet it seemed far too soon to have unearthed it here in this young gentleman of the short-shorted, white-clad crowd that packed the Southeast club Friday. Regardless, I pondered its significance, as well as whether or not he meant that he masturbated 10 minutes ago in the lads' lav, after watching the continuous stream of Janet videos playing in the front room, or as an adolescent. No matter: Jerking to Janet is jerking to Janet.
On the stage then was MegaDome, a.k.a. Liam K. of the SnuggleUps, rapping badly, decked out in shorts, and a wide-open flannel with nothing underneath. It wasn't hot, but a little bit funny. I had missed his SnuggleUps bandmate Brett W. performing as CoreyCorey, which I can only imagine is a reference to the power-duo of Feldman and Haim, solidifying the idea that Janet Jackson Tribute Night has less to do with honoring a single artist than illustrating the absurdity of the '80s. Dianna Joy challenged that assumption, staying true to the theme of the night by blowing up "Black Cat" with a creepy "avant-garde" homage based around a looping station and a single cymbal. Then Do N' Dudes reaffirmed my doubt by stripping to drag, then to skin while doing a Madonna cover. Surely Ms. Jackson would be mortified. This is when the essence of Janet seemed to wane. Sure, there was dancing and sweating and hotness, but Janet was lost in the mix. Then, toward the end of the night, a woman's voice came from the crowd, its tenor filled with conviction, "She came here in 2002 and I didn't get to go. I'm pissed!" Still? Four years later? For much of the crowd at Holocene, Janet was little more than a joke, but in this young lady I found, last Friday night, the essence of Janet.
—MICHAEL BYRNE.
WWeek 2015