Austin Psych Fest Preview: Lotus Plaza
Lockett Pundt dreams so you don't have to
Bradford Cox gets all the press from Deerhunter … and, I suppose, deservedly so as he fronts a great band and his side project Atlas Sound is quite the achievement as well, but Lockett Pundt, Deerhunter’s lead guitarist, is no slouch himself. His other band, Lotus Plaza, is rather impressive in its own right. As of this morning, I was completely ignorant of their 2009 gem The Floodlight Collective and now they’re one of the acts I’m most eagerly anticipating at the Psych Fest. While, I wouldn’t necessarily call Lotus Plaza psychedelic, they might very well have mind-expanding properties. There’s a cornucopia of influences on display from shoegaze and dream pop to post-punk and even a little Motown. There’s something about this band, though, that makes such labels seem innocuous and painfully beside the point. Call it what you will, the music causes the world around it to pop … and perhaps there’s nothing quite so psychedelic as that, after all.
Lotus Plaza – What Grows – MP3
Song of the Day: Everyone sing “Don’t tell me you don’t want my love”
Chuck Prophet – The Left Hand and the Right Hand – MP3
On Chuck Prophet’s new song “The Left Hand and the Right Hand” the chorus goes, “Don’t tell me you don’t want my love / Don’t tell me you don’t need my love.” Despite being a double negative, “don’t tell me you don’t want my love” is a pretty great line, so great a line that I figured it surely had been uttered before. And, of course it had. “Is this What I Get for Loving You?” was written for the Ronettes in 1965 by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. It only reached 75 on the chart and was considered a failure by the standards of the time. Such is the price the Ronettes would pay for trying to be me “adult.” While the band would open 14 dates for the Beatles in 1966, they were essentially done.
Marianne Faithfull covered “Is This What I Get for Loving You?” in 1967.
Marianne Faithfull – Is This What I Get for Loving You? – MP3
Is there anything worse than being told that your love is not wanted? Well, yes actually. There are those that just take your love and bend it to their will. I imagine Phil Spector did that with Ronnie, who he married after the Ronettes broke up. By all accounts, her years with Phil were a nightmare. Due to Phil’s jealousy and violent insecurity, she was essentially a prisoner in her own home. I suppose she can consider herself lucky not to have been shot in the face.
Ronnie was allowed out long enough from her domestic stockade in 1969 to record the telling, “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered.” Apparently, Phil was so happy to be compared to Julius Caesar that he failed to recognize that the tune really painted him as the irrepressible douchebag that he most surely was.
Austin Psych Fest Preview: Bombino (!)
There’s nothing the world craves so much as the authentic man. The genuine article. The real deal.
Enter Bombino. His life story is so amazing there should be an exclamation point at the end of his name: Bombino! People will be inevitably screaming your name in rapturous shivers of ecstasy.
Bombino’s website says that he is known as the one of the greatest guitarists in the Sahara and Sahel region of Africa. I dare say his biographer is being modest. I personally have heard no one greater from that storied land, so in my book Bombino is the best.
Hailing form the Agadez region of Niger, Bombino came from a family of nomadic herders. Existing just beyond the grasp of the civilized world, his family’s life was interrupted by the first Tuareg rebellion when he was 12, so they fled their native land for Algeria. It was there that Bombino first saw a stringed instrument and he was immediately smitten. In 1993 he and his family returned back to Niger and even though guitars were forbidden, his uncle got him one. Like outlaws, he and other Tuareg musicians played in the shadows, avoiding the Taliban-esque anti-music zealots.
Link Wray's recording studio: a palace compared to a river wash in Niger
Only once peace returned to the region was his band were able to play publicly. A few years later, his first solo album was recorded in a dry river bed in the Niger bush – which makes Link Wray’s series of recordings produced in his legendary “three track shack” in the middle of rural Maryland sound like a product of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. While this observation may initially sound like a bit of a stretch, but perhaps Link Wray and Bombino aren’t so far apart after all. From the unexplored deserts of Africa to the rural outreaches of America, the neo-psychedelic soul lives on … Behold Link Wray’s “Alabama Electric Circus” here :
Is it wrong to say that Bombino is the bomb? Yes it is. Very much so, in fact. (But that does make it an less true.)
You can hear Bombino’s new album here.
Austin Psychfest Preview: Wooden Shjips
The Lonesome Beehive will be traveling to Austin at the end of April for the 5th Annual Psych Fest. In the meantime, the Beehive will endeavor to profile as many of the bands as possible. It seems only right to embark on this voyage with San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips.
While these guys were formed in the epicenter of psychedelia’s birthplace, they’re all from the East Coast. Their new album West is reportedly about striking out to California in pursuit of the American Dream. Certainly, their propulsive rhythms and hypnotic drone would make for a fine soundtrack on a latenight stretch of highway. Although no one is going to accuse them of laying down a fresh slab of asphalt, the Wood Shjips make the old road sound new again with their neo-retro blues-infused psychedelic chug. They hit the sweet spot for me in many ways. If anything, it is the addition of the hazey, droning organ that sealed the deal.
On a side note, when it comes to ships making their way across vast stretches of land, it’s hard not to think of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s film chronicling an obsessed man’s desire to build an opera house deep in the Amazon. Naturally, in order to achieve his ambitious plan he must first secure financing by striking it rich in the rubber trade, which can only be accomplished by enticing the local Indian population to drag a 320-ton steamship up a hill.
In the great tradition of pranksters and free thinkers the Shjips inspire similarly unhinged notions. Their tunes are dense instrumental explorations and when they do utilize vocals they hanging in the background like aural hallucinations. It’s the kind of music you can get lost … and found in.
Their deliciously fuzzed out guitars recall not just the 60s but also the distorted bliss of the Jesus and Mary Chain. “Motor Bike” is clearly an homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “The Living End.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Wooden Shjips – Motorbike – MP3
The Jesus and Mary Chain – The Living End (LP Version) – MP3
A full 22 minute performance from the world’s greatest radio station KEXP is after the jump:
Why is live music making me feel dead inside?
“If my senses fail, stay with me ‘til they go because I don’t want to be alone.” – Blake Sennett Greetings in Braille
The Elected – Greetings in Braille MP3
That song guts me every time. We all want to connect, to not be alone, but it seems so impossible to make that leap. It is a sentiment that is one of the deliciously bittersweet ingredients of pure pop bliss. A lot of The Elected’s songs are like that. They’re a great, overlooked band and after a seven-year hiatus they’ve got a new album.
They played The Tractor in Seattle a few weeks ago. I should have gone, but I didn’t because I was pretty sure that as much as their songs may leave me emotionally reeling, I didn’t think that connection would happen in their presence.
The fact is, I just don’t enjoy live music as much as I used to. While it’s tempting to reduce this emerging trajectory to the cliché calculus that the older I get, the less appealing live music seems to be; the real question is why?
It may be that I’ve set the bar too high. All I’m asking for is transcendence. I want to lose myself. I want to be part of something bigger than myself. I want to be in the moment. These are the effects of live music that I crave, but are becoming harder to achieve. It still happens (The Black Lips just last month), but more and more I’m left cold. Songs that I love on the stereo leave me checking my watch when I’m at the show. Sometimes it’s the performance, but sometimes it’s just me. I’m easily distracted. The chatter in my head is harder to muffle. How is that I can go see Leonard Cohen and be unmoved, yet be brought to tears from watching him on YouTube? While mellower, less rocking tunes still work their magic on me when I’m by myself, frequently when performed live, they lose their allure. It seems the louder the music, the more drenching the guitars, the better chance I have of forgetting myself and surrendering to the present … but then someone like Gillian Welch slays me with her sweet, slow Elvis Presley Blues (like she did last week in Seattle) and I’m back where I started.
On this self-imposed exile in the Puget Sound, live music seems so far away – a three hour round trip to be exact. I really need to be motivated to go (although I’ll never pass up a chance to see a baseball game, even if the Mariners are the worst team in the league). With my baseball affliction in mind, perhaps it is unfair to blame the limitations of time and space on my current musical malaise. It already started when I lived in Los Angeles. Just a short walk from Spaceland, a premium independent music emporium, I’d frequently stay home and listen to the headlining band on the stereo instead. Now, I am willingly caged by the trappings of domesticity. I’ll tell myself it’s almost too beautiful to leave; these dogs that surround me are too hypnotizing. Look! I can listen here, in a chair and watch the ferries pass by through the trees. I can have it all! Why deal with the messy mechanics of leaving, of being somewhere else?
I’m grateful for my life here on this island, but at forty-three, fifty feels like it’s coming on like a Sam Peckinpah bullet … it may be in slow motion, but there’s no doubt where it’s going to land. While I am surrounded by a lot of space, the walls of life are closing in (and I’m letting it happen). Live music used to be an escape from my insular tendencies, but now it only reinforces them.
So many of The Elected’s songs seem to be about wanting to escape. About starting fresh. About leaving and the impossibility of going back home. But where to go? Their narrator never seems to get release and while their music hits the emotional notes I crave, I tell myself that maybe it works its magic best in the comfort of my solitude. I tell myself that The Elected is a band that speaks to my failures; they bring artful, buoyant relief to the clouds of a sad day. They sing of the people who slip out of our lives, people we loved, who don’t give us a thought when we’re gone. Maybe it’s just best to enjoy them alone.
Most of my life has been geared toward avoiding the slow grind to maturity, so the fact that live music, such a fundamental element of my youth, has become less and less enjoyable is an alarming and depressing development. On nights like when I didn’t go to The Elected, I’m torn: I want to escape the seemingly inevitable fate of the downward slope, but I feel like I’m swimming in warm cement (it’s almost comfortable as it solidifies). The gnawing notion that any given show won’t be worth it becomes worse than a self-fulfilling prophecy. It becomes an excuse to not go at all.
I was just looking for a video of The Elected to spice up this post. I suppose it is fitting that there is not a good one to be found. Perhaps this is really a band where it is best to use your imagination, to close your eyes and let the music take you where it will. At least that’s what I told myself before I went to sleep that night, well before they took the stage.
lonesomebeehive 