*Hanging out at the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern this past Saturday night for the Wussy, Unsparing Sea, and Good Touch Bad Touch show, and people were still talking about all the sh*t which went down during the Black Lips show earlier in the week. Let’s just say, the truth as to what really happened may be much closer to the anano comment in my original post than the official explanation from the band’s management.
Still, I’m torn about how I feel about all this fan/band interaction. Look, I’m all for a good old fashioned, rowdy Rock ‘N’ Roll show. Indie rock has become too proper, polite, and pretentious this decade. Yet, for fans, being an a**hole is not included in the price of admission, and bands, like the Black Lips, have to know when not to cross that line, and know when to send out security to take care of the dirty stuff. Now I’m hearing there was a second case of what I’m calling fan/band interaction which occurred towards the end of the set between Cole Alexander of the Black Lips and a separate fan. Someone call security.
*Back to Saturday night’s show, and as always seems to be the case whenever I got out to enjoy a rock show and leave the notebook in my pants, I end up being thoroughly impressed by one band’s set. Wussy, they did as Wussy always do in Cleveland, which was they delivered another great sampling of rustic Ohio Rock ‘N’ Roll, punctuated by the honest interplay between dual leads Lisa Walker and Chuck Cleaver. Yet, the band who really left an impression on me was Cleveland’s Unsparing Sea. Generally, I’m not one to go for bands whose instruments stray too far from the basic Rock ‘N’ Roll set up, but in spite of, or maybe because of a dynamic line up which included a cellist and a multi instrumentalist playing everything from glockenspiel to accordion to saw, Unsparing Sea really nailed it Saturday night. On disc, their songs often display great depth and careful construction, but live, they showed a looser, more rocking side, one which really resonated with myself, and many others in the crowd.
*While there hasn’t been much released this year which has really resonated with the Rockometer, one disc which has been getting a lot of play of late, is F*ckbok by the Condo F*cks, aka, Yo La Tengo. On the surface it may look like just another covers album, it really is much more than that. More than the impeccably chosen track list (heavy on ’60s and ’70s garage rock and pub rock), the record’s aesthetic is one which sounds like the band just set themselves up in a garage, plugged in, rocked out, and captured everything on tape.
MP3: Condo F*cks – What’cha Gonna Do About It
*Speaking of covers albums, don’t let Pitchfork’s low grade track review of Nadja’s My Bloody Valentine cover fool you, When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV, the forthcoming covers album by Canada’s masters of everything sloooow, heavy, and massive, contains plenty of surprises. While the MBV cover may seems obvious (Make it slower, heavier, and doomier), others aren’t nearly as predictable. There’s an Elliott Smith cover, “Needle in the Hay,” which is absolutely gonna blow your mind when this disc hits April 28th on The End Records.
MP3: Nadja – Only Shallow
