All To-more-oh's Pah-tees

Woah, it's that time again already? The hell, man. All Tomorrow's Parties 2010 came outta nowhere. Partially because I hadn't planned it 4 months in advance, partially because the line-up was a smidgen weaker than last year, but all that aside, it was a stellar weekend as always.

Brief note from the editor: I kind of struggle with the idea of a festival review because all in all, it's a bit pointless. Concert reviews as a whole are also of limited use, and this is especially true of concert reviews in the blogosphere wherein the writing is more or less there to convey a sense of I was there and you were not, sucker. Plus, more often than not, it seems to slip into "my god, this was absolutely [pick one: life-changing/-affirming, transcendental, the show of a lifetime, an "experience"]" and general fanboyism turning from review into, y'know, fanboyism. Besides, of how much practical use is a live review? An album is a singular experience, more or less the same for everyone outside of personal set/settings. A concert, however, is subject to a million different x-factors: your state of mind that day, your physical condition, the conditions of the venue, technical issues, et al. The best I can do for you now is tell you "yeah, this show was very good, you should uh... have been there, because it will never, ever happen again".

The Scientists playing was apparently a Big Deal, and I wish I could've cared more, but honestly, by 6pm Friday night I was toast after working all day Thursday and then taking an overnight bus to NYC (and then another 2 hours on the bus to get to Monticello). I was asleep on my feet for most of their set. I also don't care about Mudhoney at all. Yeah, we're off to a good start here.

But hey, goddamn, were The Stooges a wake-up call or what. Iggy Pop is still one of the greatest frontmen ever, even now that he bears a striking resemblance to an actual mummified corpse. Pits were moshed, claps were clapped, choruses were sung along, you wouldn't really know that this material was some 35+ years old. Phenomenal set, spot on.

But really, just look around and look at the black tshirts and overgrown neckbeards: it's Sleep that are the band of the night. And boy do they ever uphold their reputation as metal's most blunted, with a solid 2:1 ratio of amplifiers to band members, moody green lighting and a background projection that looks like the most stoned glacier you've ever seen. Hell, even the attempted-but-failed classical guitar interlude was probably conceived in a pre-show session. Snafus aside, it was pretty flawless stoner doom, with resin-thick guitar tones and pitch-perfect raspy bellows. An absolute marathon of a set, too, clocking it at over two hours.

Beak> were a surprise highlight for me, having never heard them before and only knowing they, uh, had some connection to Portishead and Portishead is great. Really atmospheric electronic-based sort of stuff, kind of like Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead. Perfect balance of creepy moments with danceable bass grooves.

Apse had one hell of a light show, that much is certain. I only caught a bit of their set but it was pretty bizarre post-everything that probably warrants a closer listening than I gave 'em.

Everyone seemed to be all shaken as to how loud Fuck Buttons were, so maybe my hearing is just deadened at this point, but it didn't seem all that unbearable. I wouldn't expect anything less, really, because this brand of body-movin', uh, - power-drone? progressive post-techno? - demands volume.

Text of Light should've been really cool - Lee Ranaldo deflowering his guitar to avant-garde 70's film - but came off as too hyper-artsy for its own sake. There's a big deal made about the projections and such, but they're just there for aesthetics, really, because whatever unholy noise was being torn from those amps had little-to-no correlation to the visuals. And I reckon the "little" correlations were coincidental.

Another band outta left-field was Fursaxa, with her (their?) fantastically pretty-sounding folk based around drones, harp and cello. Sort of a toned-down Natural Snow Buildings-vibe, minus the viciousness that band sometimes finds itself in.

Now, when Tortoise are good, they're really damn good, but when Tortoise are mediocre, well, they're really average. Tortoise here were pretty average. Flawless musicianship, sure, but it's not exactly a thrilling live show. Maybe I'm missing something, because everyone else was super jazzed (ba-dum) about their performances.

Shellac was fucking Shellac. Shellac ruled. It was Shellac. Damn.

The Breeders were five kinds of fun. Not the Pixies, and they never will be the Pixies, but once I got past that it was solid pop. And hey, it was super neat to see 90's alt-rock staple "Cannonball".

Explosions in the Sky were every bit as cathartic as they are on record. Yeah, I could pan them a bit for being one-dimensional, but when it's as powerful as this, who cares? Even I think I'm a pretentious douche for bringing that up.

Sonic Youth aptly made up for their Eternal-heavy set from last time I saw them by busting out a setlist I only could've dreamed up. "Candle", "Hey Joni", "'Cross the Breeze", "Eric's Trip", "Cross the Breeze", "Stereo Sanctity", "Catholic Block", "Expressway to Yr Skull", "Death Valley -69", and more but you get the idea, this was perfect. Screaming fields of Sonic Love indeed.

NOW, BUILD YOUR OWN SUNN O))) & BORIS REVIEW:
Opening:

• "I had always heard that Sunn O))) were best experienced live..."
• "The lights dimmed, smoke filled the stage, and the Hooded Ones began to..."
• "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW"

Overwritten metaphor/quasi-genrefication:

• "Searing tarpit sludge assault"
• "Pangaea tearing itself apart"
• "Cosmic funeral dirge"
• "BRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIWWWWWWWWWWWW"

Conclusion:

• "Transcendental; a truly euphoric performance"
• "Merely describing it as a 'concert' doesn't do the band justice..."
• "GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNN"

I know you've read about Sunn O))) before. Yeah, it might have actually been a few of those things, but goddamn does the fetishization of this band in music criticism get a bit long in the tooth.

So yeah, all in all, 10/10. Great show. Check it out. You should've been there.

ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES: PART THREE (Sunday)

Alright, finally wrapping up this tedious and boringly written review.

This was the day of the festival I had been really holding out for. A bunch of legendary bands doing legendary things, all in the same building, and things kicked off with Japan's almighty Boredoms. Let's just get this out of the way right now: the festival could've ended right after their set and I'd've been 110% content. The building could've caved in (sure felt like it was going to). I could've suffered from post-infant death syndrome. Heart failure. Spontaneous combustion. Anything. For the 70 minutes that the Boredoms were on stage, there was 70 minutes of the most hypnotizing, enthralling, exciting music I've had the privilege to see in person. Nine drummers in perfect unison, Yamantaka Eye in the centre with his seven-necked guitar, beating, jumping, wailing, crooning, calling, beckoning, yodeling, screaming, thrashing... screw words, this was positively transcendent. Someone posted the whole set on Youtube, so get on that.

Not to be outdone by ridiculous stage-setting, the Caribou Vibration Ensemble followed, with a huge line-up of 15 if I recall correctly. Three drummers, auxiliary percussion, guitars, brass, woodwinds, and electronic fuckery courtesy of Four Tet. Very cool idea, great execution, but almost every song had the same climactic "last song" explosion feeling, kinda of dampening all the following climaxes (insert your own joke here.)

Proving that Japan is the leader of eclectic vaguely-heavy nuttery (sorry, Netherlands), Boris handily cranked out another festival highlight by playing Feedbacker in its entire slow-burning, cataclysmic glory. Flawless, really, which makes it hard to talk about. But how fucking cool is a double-necked guitar in a red-light stage fog? Yeah, thought so.

Crystal Castles are right up there with Animal Collective in the "admittedly hipster-friendly faux-indie that is enjoyable on record but atrocious live" category. Painfully loud throbbing bass combined with Alice Glass's off-key and off-time shrieks and squawks were thoroughly difficult enjoyable. Which is a shame, because I want to dig this band more than I do, really. Danceable but not obnoxiously so, and a vaguely punk aesthetic should make for a good time; then again, maybe it's more punk to go on stage drunk and kick out some half-assed jamz? Let's not talk about punk, actually. We all know where that goes.

Arguably the most legendary of the day's line-up was Bob Mould (if you are Googling this name right now I swear I will kill you) playing Husker Du songs with No Age, which is the closest many of us youngin's will get to seeing Husker Du live. What I admired most about the set was how No Age wasn't just Mould's house band for the hour. Rather, they played together, trading off vocal parts, gelling very well and playing extremely tightly. And closing with "New Day Rising"? Pants = officially soiled.

Now, here's where I lose you: I don't really care for The Flaming Lips. I don't hate them, I'm just terribly indifferent. So when my options were "watch them play until 1" or "get a decent sleep for an early departure tomorrow", my girlfriend and I leaned towards the latter. That being said, the 10 minutes we caught seemed to be the wildly entertaining live show the Lips are known for: costumes, confetti, balloons, the whole 9. Fun time, to be sure.

Ah, I really can't wrap this up eloquently. I didn't enjoy writing this. I'm sure it was awful to read too. Sorry folks, things'll pick up from here.

A Trap For Judges (& a schedule for blogs (this one (now every Monday and Thursday)

Doesn't it seem like the more "extreme" a genre gets (in any direction, i.e. extremely harsh or minimal or whatever), the more it has to do to be interesting? Noise, drone, ambient... all fairly interchangeable and indistinct, for the most part. There is simply only so much you can do with white noise/single-digit BPM/holding down a C on your Korg. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy all the aforementioned genres, but it's very easy to get burnt out and jaded with it all.

My first drone experience was, as it is for most people, with Sunn O))) (unless you're uber-tr00 and listened to Earth.) I didn't quite "get it", again, as it is with most people. Not that didn't understand, per se: I was a fan the Melvins' doomier, proto-drone, dirgey, [ominous-sounding-D-word] material, especially "Hag Me" off of Houdini. But what the fuck was with Sunn O)))? Ten minutes long, no discernible "riff", no nothin' as far as I was concerned. Admittedly, I was 15 and was much more interested in death/black/thrash at the time, so I probably wasn't in the best frame of mind.

A couple years later, when Black One came out, I (NOTE: this is not a blog about Sunn O))) and this story is indeed going somewhere, but feel free to skip this paragraph if you want to get to the meat and potatoes of this thing.) decided to pick it up and give the band another chance, especially since this album had a number of guests and seemed to be a fairly varied album. Which it actually was. Oren Ambarchi, John Wiese, Wrest and Malefic (of Leviathan and Xasthur, respectively) doing vocals HOLY SHIT. And it worked: almost every track stood out. The tremolo riff (riff?!) in "It Took The Night to Believe", the goddamn netherwordly screams in "Cursed Realm (Of the Winterdemons)", and, perhaps my favourite, the huge harmonics in "Cry for the Weeper." Drone could be more glacial paced guitar sludge, and I'm doing my best to come up with a "it only took me the night to believe in the genre" sort of joke, but I can't.

So with a newfound interest in the genre, I set out to see what other "experimental" drone I could find. Boris's unpredictable, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach; Earth's sun-baked southern doom; Asunder's monolithic funeral dirges. And, just recently, I have discovered, perhaps, the crown jewel of them all (ok, aside from Boris, but they're not really drone, ya know?): Asva.



What You Don't Know Is Frontier is absolutely massive. Oppressive, haunting, ethereal... every buzz word you use when talking about drone applies here, the only difference being these words actually mean those things now.

More than anything, it's the simple things on the album that are most effective. As I'm sure you can tell from the pictures, these are slightly more mature doom merchants, but it really does show. Take, for instance, the organ (keyboard? Synth?) in the opening title track. This is what takes it beyond most other drone. It's very basic but goddamn if it doesn't unlead this nightmare fuel.

The highlight of this album (not just for me, but for everyone, it seems, according to Last.fm , too) is undoubtedly "A Game In Heaven, Hard Work In Hell." Words aren't going to do much for this one, but let's say it starts of very droney (surprise!), builds with some eerie, indistinct female vocals before, out of completely nowhere, fucking bulldozes you with a glacier made of onyx and hate. I don't really want to ruin the track actually, because I do hope you'll shit yourself the same way I did when I first spun this record. Shit yourself with pure awesome.

I encourage you to buy this record if you like what you hear. The band, like a lot of people, have been affected by the current economic situation, and because of lack of money had to cancel a European tour scheduled for next month. Buy it straight from the band, cut out as much of the middleman as you can.

Asva - A Game In Heaven, Hard Work In Hell