My grandpa died last week. This was the model ship he was building in his workroom when he died, and those are his glasses, right where he left them.
Silver lining?
My guitar was stolen earlier this week. While I’m obviously bummed that it’s gone, what has surprised me the most is that I’m not too bummed in a sentimental sort of way. I mean, yeah it’s super shitty that someone took it and I’m gonna probably have to spend a bunch on a new one, and I wrote a lot of songs on it, took it on my first tour and modded it a bunch, but it’s nothing I couldn’t do again with a different instrument. I kinda like the idea of a unique, one of a kind guitar that I made floating around the country. Just makes me wonder who else might end up with it and what they might do with it.
On Reviews
Since writing the review of the Best Coast/Jeff the Brotherhood show earlier this week, I have been mulling over a few personal issues with music reviews that I wanted to try tackling. Reviewing music—someone’s personal, artistic creation—felt very bizarre. I don’t know anything about the people in the group, had never heard the group before, and was planning on critiquing them in a semi-public forum. Despite my own “status” as a musician, I feel wildly under-qualified to be setting some sort of standard for the group to meet.
Jeff the Brotherhood were not terribly well received by the Seattle/Best Coast crowd. Sure, people clapped when the songs ended, and once or twice I thought I caught a glimpse of people bobbing their heads a bit, yet overall I would not go as far as to say it was a good show experience. That being said, Jeff the Brotherhood struck me as a group that sounded exactly how they wanted to sound. They started and stopped their songs on point. They either played their parts flawlessly or danced around mistakes well enough to convince me that they hadn’t made them in the first place. They moved around the stage when they weren’t singing and hit the notes they wanted to hit when they were. Against the standard that Jeff the Brotherhood set for themselves, the group was flawless.
Where, then, is the place for a music critic (I can already hear a thousand musicians screaming “six feet under”)? Should a critic set some bar that they expect all groups they review to meet (perhaps set by one of their favorite groups, which would make objective reviews impossible), or should they be reviewing the group against the personal standard set by the artist themselves?
Writing reviews is hard, and I want to write more.
Best Coast/Sushi
Last night, my girlfriend, Lauren, and I attended the Best Coast/JEFF the Brotherhood show at the Neptune theater in Seattle. I have heard Best Coast in passing plenty of times (my girlfriend hosts a beach pop radio show and holds Best Coast among her favorite bands), and though I was never opposed to the hearing the group, I also never found anything in their recordings that grabbed my attention. While I recognize that 21 year old punk/math rock fans from the dreary town of Bellingham are not exactly the target market for Best Coast, however I am also not immune to the sway of a brilliant live show to win me over as a fan after being non-plussed by a band’s recordings (Portland’s Typhoon comes to mind).
What struck me first about the show was the eclectic draw that the bands had. I saw fifteen year old girls, bearded punk dudes, bros with their backwards baseball hats still on, elderly couples, and a couple of kids who looked like a mixture of Skrillex and Tim Burton characters. After a thirty-something minute delayed start, and a personal curiosity arisen by the wall of huge Emperor cabs and Sunn O))) amps on stage, the two-piece group JEFF the Brotherhood kicked off the set and caught me completely off guard with about two minutes of incredibly loud, droning, fuzzed and phaser’d out bass riffing and drumming. Interestingly enough, I found their actual song structure and melodies to be fairly similar to the small amounts of Best Coast I have heard—both groups shared fairly simple, repetitive instrumental parts, and the singers both used a small vocal range and sang with repeated motifs for each song. JtB played for around thirty minutes before the stage emptied again.
After a forty minute wait (On a side note, what the fuck? Best Coast’s stage setup was entirely backlined and ready to go as soon as JtB was finished), the venue went completely dark and Best Coast took to the stage. I had been informed that they too were a two piece, but they were on stage as a four piece, with the singer /guitarist, Bethany, front and center, flanked by a lead guitarist, bassist, and drummer. Their house mix was anything but lo-fi (I did my wikipedia homework prior to the show, which informed me that Best Coast was “recognizable for their fuzzy, low-fidelity sound”.), and the drum sound would not have been out of place at a Foo-Fighters show. The rest of the instruments sounded just as polished, and the vocals, which I seemed to remember being somewhat washed out and painted with a fair amount of reverb in the recordings, were very present and mostly dry. The band played through their songs with minimal banter, entertaining a number of dudes who thought it would be awesome to crowd surf onto a crowd of kids who could not keep them up for more than six seconds.
About halfway through their set, something become derailed. Bethany suddenly seemed unable to hit any of the right notes. Her vocals, which incorporate lots of bends up and down to notes, slid around at random, landing on whatever notes she saw fit. If she had been playing Rock Band, she would have lost. I looked to Lauren, wondering if this was normal, however Lauren looked just as distressed as I felt. Bethany constantly fumbled around with her pedals between songs, at one point announcing “Whoops, I guess that one was off the whole show—sorry, [sound guy’s name]!”. While she messed around with her equipment, the drunk lead guitarist (who I later learned was Bobb, the other half of the original two piece), slurred some speech at the crowd about how much better Seattle was than Portland (the second-most overused line at every Seattle show ever—the first being “we love Nirvana”). After getting back to playing music, Bethany managed to start the wrong song a number of times throughout the remainder of the set, blaming her hard-to-read setlist for the errors. As the night progressed, the vocals only became more derailed, and Lauren, the reason I attended the show in the first place, asked if I would mind if we left early.
As I mentioned earlier, I was looking to this show as a chance to be won over as a fan. Unfortunately, the band instead managed to completely lose me. If you are an artist charging over $25 for a show, you need to learn how to sing your songs. You need to know when to turn on your pedals, tune your guitar, and you need to know how to make a set list you can actually read. If this were a $10 show in a small club, they would have been able to get away with far more of this. However, for a room the caliber of the Neptune theater, the band only managed to make itself look like sloppy mess.
On an unrelated note, Lauren and I went out to Umi Sake House before the show and I had some of the best sushi I have ever had in my life. Not all was lost.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
As my freshman year roommate would have put it, “this bassline is groove-tastic”. While I do not necessarily condone such language, this song rules.
It is impossible to gracefully eat an apple crumb muffin. I always end up wearing more of it than I do eating.
