Saturday, August 2, 2008
 

I’ll say this, it was an absolutely exhausting weekend.  As I stated last week, Capitol Hill Block Party exploded near downtown Seattle last weekend and I was certainly on hand to indulge in all of it’s excessively sordid enjoyments.  Block Party and I have had a fairly drunken history and this year was no different.  I’m covering it for another site I write for (www.soundonthesound.net) and the first entry was entitled "What I Remember From Capitol Hill Block Party" and that’s pretty indicative of the whole weekend.  Though I still caught some pretty brilliant performances, and I’ll get in to that a little further on down the post. As always, Brain Notes is my weekly attempt at clearing out the musical cobwebs of my oft times empty cabesa. Thanks for reading!

Growing Up Grunge

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there’s a large sect of popular music existing these days that excellently treads what many would claim is the wussier side of pop-music.  You know who I’m talking about: Explorer’s Club, Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives; bands that rely on harmonization and a focus on the softer side of the musical spectrum. 

It’s taken me a while to get my head wrapped around the idea of these overtly wussy bands and up until this week I couldn’t figure it out.  When flipping through my increasingly large music collection, searching out what I want to hear next, I almost always skip over these bands and their ilk.  I mean I purchased this music, I like this music, but for whatever reason I find it difficult to listen to this music. 

And now I know why.

I grew up grunge.  Not in any like cool way, I just didn’t grow up with music that didn’t involve power chords, lengthy guitar solos or screaming, bearded men.  I owned Nirvana’s In Utero before I was 13, claimed Jawbreaker’s Dear You as my favorite album that same year, and then when grunge started to fade, I fell directly in to punk rock.  Up until I was 17 or 18 years old I refused to listen to music that I didn’t deem "hard". 

Of course this changed.  I went through a mopey singer-songwriter stage, an incredibly long and damaging hip-hop phase, and finally ended up where I am now, far more open about my musical tastes, but as I’ve recently discovered, still fairly rooted in my more hard-rock past. 

Bands like Fleet Foxes and Grand Archives sound great, but I find myself always waiting, waiting for noise, waiting for a huge power chord - waiting for something loud to get me moving and shaking my head.  There is certainly a time and a place for this slow, soft, extremely melodic variety of music, but these moments are almost always trumped by an album that has a little more, er, edge.

I find myself more drawn to No Age and Parts And Labor, and music that gives me both something to hum and something to head bang to.

I don’t have a conclusion and I certainly don’t think I’m indicative of the kids who grew up alongside me, I just thought you might want a little more insight in to why I choose to talk about the music that I do.
 

Speaking of good, hard music...

I’ve been pretty much obsessed with the newest Parts And Labor single from Jagjaguwar.  They’ve got a new album coming out in October and as always it both exceeds and belies any definition you could place on the band.  They are hard, but melodic, sharp but fuzzy, pushing the line of listenable but never too far. 

This track Nowheres Nigh is one of my favorite tracks I’ve heard from the band, and I imagine it’s because it has an almost Jawbreaker style drone to it, a fuzz factor quietly infused with the melody of Dan Friel’s voice. 

Can’t wait for this album.

:Parts And Labor - Nowheres Nigh:
 

The best band of the Block Party: The Dodos

Of all the bands I saw, and the few that I actually remember, none stands out more than San Francisco’s The Dodos.  I’ve talked these ridiculously talented gentleman up before, but after seeing them live last month and then again this weekend, they’ve quickly climbed to the top of my "Favorite Bands of the Year" list. 

On stage they manage to pump so much energy in to their, at times extremely delicate, music it almost captures this element of metal.  The big drums, the sort of repetitive, droning acoustic guitar - it all sort of becomes this rock spectacle.  This becomes even more apparent when Meric Long, the very friendly looking singer-guitarist, starts standing on his chair, doing windmill strums and possibly screaming.  

Besides The Dodos, the Block Party, in terms of music, wasn’t exactly memorable.  Fleet Foxes played a similar, beautiful but boring set they’ve played the last four times I’ve seen them, and Vampire Weekend lived up to their fairly bored reviews.  Chromeo and Girl Talk sounded great but there were so many hipsters en route to the stage that I hardly even tried to get close. 

Oh, and The Hold Steady, though I’m not a giant fan of their neo-Springsteen sound, were impressive.  Craig Finn is a ridiculously dorky looking lead singer, but good lord if he doesn’t kill it on stage.  Also, I smack myself repeatedly for missing out on Les Savy Fav, for the third time, as the brief review I read about it involved hot dogs and nudity - an amazing combination.
 

- Noah Sanders -



Unless otherwise expressly stated, all text in this blog and any related pages, including the blog's archives, is licensed by John Laird under a Creative Commons License.