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WHAT YOU'VE BEEN MISSING AT LOCALCUT.COM...
The lineup for the third annual PDX Pop Now! festival has been announced, and Local Cut has Mark Baumgarten weighing in with a critical breakdown of the initial lineup. >> A trusted source tells Local Cut that our beloved troubadour M. Ward will soon be leaving town for New Hampshire, following his love, who has been accepted to a graduate program there. >> Noted Portland engineer Jon Cohrs announced that he is leaving town to attend Parsons School of Design in Brooklyn. >> Casey Jarman goes shopping for children's clothing at Marshall's with local emcee/Hawthorne CD hawker Brooklyn Walker. >> Appetite for Deception, a PDX-based Guns 'N' Roses tribute band, announced it will be playing the biggest bar at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally for three straight days. And naturally, Baumgarten gives them a hesitant ribbing (fearful of the wrath of bikers). >> In the week's Live Cuts, our writers peruse Portland's live-music scene, the highlight being Jason Simms' trip to a Northeast basement show, where Mustaphamond blew his mind. >> In the Cut of the Day feature, our writers offer up reviews and free streaming MP3s of new and unreleased tracks by DJ Tan'T, Scout Niblett (with Howe Gelb!), Blanket Music, Michael the Blind and more.
Go to localcut.com for these stories and more daily updates, MP3s and live reviews. Email your local music news tips to localcut@wweek.com.
Absolute Rulers Thursday, July 20
Fred Landeen pairs up with a trio of punk teens and lives the rock dream.
[PUNK] Sixteen-year-old Nick Vicario of Absolute Rulers says that the only reason his parents let him go on a two-and-a-half week, nine-state tour with his band was because they figured that Fred Landeen, the 36-year-old singer of the otherwise all-teenage band, would keep an eye on things.
AR is the only local punk band I know of that pairs a child of the eight-track age with children of the CD age, but Erin Yanke, who co-hosts KBOO's "Life During Wartime" with Landeen, doesn't see anything strange about AR: "That's how the scene is; there are people of different ages." They all do, after all, collect vinyl, and despite the fact that Landeen was mistaken for the young men's father at a recent gig in Tucson, the members of AR function very much as equals, according to 16-year-old drummer Bryan Souder, who claims that age is a "non-issue" for the band.
Landeen, who by day works at Laurelhurst Barber Shop and was named "Best Rock 'n' Roll Barber" by WW about a decade ago (pre-Bishops, mind you), might have more life experience, but he's not the band's musical veteran. AR's summer tour was his first. While his bandmates are also new to the road, both Vicario and bass player Ryan Miller have more musical experience, having performed in the very popular '77-punk group the Diskords.
Again, it's an odd combination, but one that works, if Absolute Rulers' debut 7-inch, "Live the Dream" (Vinyl Warning/Tugboat Press), is any indication. The single demonstrates keen interaction in moments like the last verse of the B-side, "Damnation," during which Miller's bass line momentarily increases in pitch and becomes somewhat frantic to accompany a similar effect in Landeen's vocal melody.
Another highlight is a screeching, bending guitar lead on the title track, which Vicario executed with even more fire live, last Wednesday at Food Hole. At that show, Landeen commented that all of AR's songs "are either sad or mad." After reading the lyrics when I got home, I decided to call him later that night, while he was hosting "Life During Wartime," to ask if "Live the Dream" was sad or mad. I was curious because, although the song is about dreams that are out of reach, the punch line, "Impossibilities, I have to ignore them to make my dreams reality/ I only want to live inside the dream," made the song seem hopeful.
"It's a song about fooling yourself, so I guess it's sad," Landeen said, "I'm old and depressed, and it's easy to write sad songs." He spoke slower and more earnestly now that a few hours had passed since his energetic set in front of an enthusiastic crowd of about 45.
I wondered for a minute, but I don't think Landeen is "fooling himself" on all accounts: For most 36-year-old vocalists, joining a young band that performs for a rowdy, all-ages audience (as opposed to a dreary bar crowd) is an impossibility. And if he is fooling himself, he's fooling me, too, because as he slam-danced and sang, I think he had the most fun of anyone last Wednesday, and a lot of people had a lot of fun.
—JASON SIMMS.
Absolute Rulers play with Mugre and Sin Orden at Valentines. 7 pm. Cover $5. All ages.
Solenoid Friday, July 21
David Chandler on bringing experimentalism to the dance floor and making political music without words.
[ELECTRONIC] David Chandler, a.k.a. Solenoid, has been making electronic music in Portland for over a decade, beginning at a time when the genre was edgier and often dismissed by the mainstream clubs and music press of what was then a very rock town. The shift—marked by the success of clubs like Holocene and Dunes, and by a solo electronic act, Copy, being named WW's Best New Band this year—has been toward the dance floor, and toward mainstream interest. Chandler's new release, Supernature, deftly bridges the gap, anchoring analog acid experiments in the mass-appeal 4/4 beats. Last week, Chandler gave up some time to answer some questions about that gap, politics in music and the dance floor.
—MICHAEL BYRNE.
WW: Supernature seems to be bent more toward the dance floor than your earlier music. What's behind that?
David Chandler: I don't know that Supernature is meant to be more dance-oriented than my other albums were. My rhythms have always been borrowing from dance-based music—just a lot jazzier and syncopated in the past. However, the underground dance scene, before it was in clubs in Portland, embraced dancing to much more difficult rhythms than people seem to tolerate in clubs now. My older music uses more electrofunk backbeats, which for some reason are not always identified right away as "dance music" the way a disco or a four-on-the-floor beat immediately is. I am using dance-music-type beats and such because it is very familiar and appealing to me to listen to, but I'm just hanging on them structurally to do other things.
Given that, how are your sets differing between your two main joints, Ground Kontrol and Holocene?
Holocene is very supportive of edgy electronic music and a luxurious place to perform and deal with sound people, etc., especially compared to rock clubs in Portland in the early '90s. They are actually quite DIY, and clubs like that don't tend to last long in Portland. For that reason, I'm willing to play to the dance floor more in hopes that the club makes some money. The Fiasco night at Ground Kontrol is meant to be like walking into an electronic music studio and seeing on-the-fly music-making in progress. Ground Kontrol is a place that celebrates a culture of machines, so it feels very natural to perform music with electronic instruments there.
You've been actively involved in the Cascadian separatist movement [which would make Oregon, Washington and British Columbia into a new country, the Republic of Cascadia]. How does an artist go about translating political ideals into instrumental music?
Instrumental music is abstractly political, but sometimes it's the only political tool that can slip by a repressive government. Sometimes overt political speech or language is too direct to engage people or is actively being repressed.
Solenoid plays with Nice Nice, DJs P. Disco and BJ & Maxx Bass at Holocene. 9 pm. $5. 21+. Check out the unedited interview with Solenoid at www.localcut.com. Search "Solenoid."
ENCHANTED 4ST Saturday, July 22
This duo's Synesthesia is squeaky clean. That's the problem.
[CYBORG MUSIC] "My enemy is kitsch." Enchanted 4ST appropriated this line from Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being for its MySpace headline, and it's got me even more irked than the fact that the phonetic pronunciation of the band's name is Enchanted "forst," not the intended "for-est," for the love of God.
See, Kundera was actually using the anti-kitsch quote in a convincing argument for kitsch: The quote comes from the mouth of a character. Kundera's grand elaboration on the meaning of kitsch in Unbearable Lightness goes far beyond the layman's definition of "tasteless and out of place." Kundera describes it as our acceptance, as human beings, of our own shit. He says, basically, that we are smelly, waste-producing organisms. He insists that shit—and whatever represents shit—is necessary in all art, as it's the one thing guaranteed to preserve art's humanity.
So, perhaps unwittingly, Enchanted 4ST's use of the quote does define Synesthesia, an album plagued by sterility, i.e., shitlessness. It supports Kundera's ultimate claim: The album is so inhuman it's creepy...then boring. Much of this could be chalked up to bad production. Everything here is flattened into a sort of monochromatic vacuum. The fine points on this disc—basically, Ilima Considine's capable violin skills and some spare moments of pop clarity ("Teleovision" has some promising guitar work, and "The Moment" has a chamber-esque passage worthy of attention)—are lost in a featureless wall. Even the voice of Jake Rose—a potentially deeper, operatic take on Sam Mickens' arrhythmic wandering—is lost. Rose's voice could easily be a focus of this band, but it's smeared into something that more closely resembles Tool's Maynard James Keenan's (save for on "Game Over," where it unexpectedly turns into a lilt).
Beyond poor production, the disc suffers from some serious conceptual pretension, from the unnecessary flourishes (firework samples on "Some People," the meandering carny organ at the end of "Game Over") to the continuous trade between organic and digital sound that Enchanted 4ST loves so much (they call it "cyborg music" in their bio). Still, the drum machine obnoxiously lords over this album, and by virtue of that (and various pointless electronic noise "tricks"), the machine wins and shit loses. The band's dubious reading of Kundera holds.
—MICHAEL BYRNE.
Enchanted 4ST plays with Phantom Power Ninja Clan and Fade 13 at Acme. 10 pm. $3. 21+.
At Dusk Sunday July 23
Post-punk trio stumbles over its words while staring at the sky.
[POST-PUNK] At Dusk specializes in the modern-day equivalent of the dueling banjo. It's a style first explored by the likes of Television, and since furthered by a number of two-guitar bands that refuse to relegate one of their guitarists to the rhythm ghetto.
The style goes something like this: One player plucks out a series of harmonious notes or just alternates between two, while a second guitarist fills the gaps left by guitarist No. 1 in a different, fluid style. The result is a tension-filled kaleidoscope of give and take, the audio equivalent of Brazilian fight dancing. After some time, the guitars come together to consummate the song, blasting out a masterful doubled-up riff, a wall of sound or, as is the case with At Dusk, an anthemic chorus.
Television, one of the most inventive bands of the '70s New York punk scene, understood this coming together and the dueling that precedes it, expertly exploring the slinky sexuality of both, most notably in "Marquee Moon." More recently, Modest Mouse has fittingly exploited the tension between the guitar lines, while the Joggers have highlighted the discord of this controlled chaos.
At Dusk doesn't possess much in the realm of sexuality or tension, despite the title of its recently released third album, You Can Know Danger (self-released). Rather, this trio tends to stare into the kaleidoscope they've created, their guitar lines snaking in a pleasant, if somewhat plodding, manner.
A few times on the album, the band nails the instrumental formula, as on the excellently played lead track, "In the Background." The chorus of the track hits with a flurry of strums and a series of head-tilting "woos," the perfect release after all that double guitar work. Another reason the "woo"s work involves the way they're recorded; sung by a multitude of slightly muted voices, they sound strong without getting in the way of the infectious guitar work.
Sadly, the rest of the album is cursed with vocal production that puts singers Cary Clarke and Will Hattman front and center, which is problematic: Their reedy voices overshadow the instrumentals; their vibrato serves as an insufficient tourniquet for brittle and broken vocals; and their striving for higher notes fails loud and clear. Which is too bad, because the instrumental work in songs like "Say that You'll Do It" (listen to those drums!) and "Forever Ago" (such restraint from the guitarists!) could survive just fine on its own.
—MARK BAUMGARTEN.
At Dusk plays with Prime Meridian and Alan Singley & Pants Machine, Sunday, July 23, at Food Hole. 9 pm. $5. All ages.
WWeek 2015