Some Monday FYIs

1a. According to one of our archrival local rockblogs, Pittsburgh Music Report, Interpol will be coming to Mr. Small's on June 23. Hot stuff.

1b. Carlos D. has left Interpol. Not too worried.

1c. Download "Lights," the lead single off Interpol's forthcoming LP at their site.

2a. The National's new album is awesome, and is now streaming in full on NPR and Grooveshark. Least satisfying lyric: "I was afraid I'd eat your brains because I'm evil." Buy it tomorrow.

2b. As of now, Pittsburgh is not among The National's stops on their upcoming tour. Come on.

Concert Review: Girls and Dum Dum Girls at Mr. Small's

JR: The show was decent. First, Dum Dum Girls: their set was tight from start to finish. They opened with their cover of The Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire", which they do very well. The closer was "Jail La La", as I would have expected given that is their first single off the new album. Musically speaking, the songs are mostly three-chord mashers with some bells and whistles thrown in for good measure, but vocally, I thought they were pretty awesome. The lead singer has a great voice and the harmonies worked very well, in my opinion.

Roberto: Definitely. I hadn’t been impressed with what I’d heard of Dum Dum Girls before the show, but they were very good live. The vocals in particular were really tight and sounded great, reminiscent of some early-70s gospel-rock harmonies. They have like no stage presence, but I didn't find myself thinking, "These chics have, like, no stage presence." In fact, it didn't detract from the music at all in my opinion. It actually worked with their aesthetic. Really enjoyable opener.

JR: The lead signer was also wearing some pretty awesome tights.

Roberto: Sweet tights FTW.

Girls started off great. I can't remember what they opened the set with for the life of me, but I do remember thinking it was a great starter. For the better part of the set the sound was excellent and the song selection was great. I think "Laura" was the third or fourth song in, and that seemed to be the big crowd-pleaser of the night. Not a lot of stage presence with these guys either, but that didn't seem to to hold them back. They're not the kind of band you would ever describe as a great live band, though generally the songs equaled the album versions when played live.

JR: Amazingly, the mix was quite good for most of the night, especially during the Dum Dum Girls' set. You could actually make out the vocals most of the time - not like the Deerhunter/No Age/ Dan Deacon show that we attended last summer at Mr. Small's, which was a sound engineering nightmare. As for Girls, I agree the first two-thirds of the set was great. Until around “Hellhole Ratrace”

Roberto: That really was where the show went wrong. First off, I thought it was a horrendous rendition. The drumming wasn't off beat; just off. It was almost as if the drummer had some Phil Collins pumping into a personal set of headphones right on rhythm. I found it distracting. I also thought some guitar change-ups in the song didn't work. I'm all for reinventing your own tunes, but this particular version didn't wow.

JR: I actually thought "Hellhole Ratrace" started off great, but then it turned into a wall of distortion, which would have been fine had it lasted 30 seconds - it probably lasted about a solid three minutes.

Roberto: Yeah, the feedback. Girls is not Sonic Youth, and the lesson should be learned early by any indie band that noise for the sake of noise will fail almost every time. When they finally let the feedback lead into "Morning Light" I was ready to let it slide and rock out a bit. But it didn’t let up, and there was just no control of the distortion. Some high frequency drone persisted that had a solid third of the crowd cringing and/or plugging their ears. Some were eyeballing the soundboard; I blame this one squarely on the band.

JR: That is where any other band probably would have called it a night and closed it out with the big grandiose distorted finish. But no. Then they played one more song and did a three song encore that was poor.

Roberto: True, I might have let the noise thing slide if they'd closed the set on that loud note. I can appreciate a climax. But the last song of the main set was totally forgettable (literally, as it turns out). The encore was respectable in length but pretty weak otherwise.

JR: They didn't save any of the their best tracks for the encore, so it was very anticlimactic. They also lost whatever magic they had with the sound board, because the encore sounded horrible from an acoustics perspective. And throughout the encore the drummer especially seemed like he was playing with a different band -- it just wasn't working, period.

Roberto: My favorite Girls tune actually popped up in the encore: "Lauren Marie." Unfortunately it was totally lackluster and the vocals were really drowned out. "Big Bad Mean Motherf*cker" was only slightly better. All in all, I left a bit disappointed, which is too bad because it really was a good show for the most part.

JR: I would give the show as a whole a 6 out of 10, and that figure is aided significantly by the Dum Dum Girls' performance, which was very good. Ultimately, no one really wants a 6. Your friends probably won't make fun of you for being with a 6, but you will never be totally satisfied, always wondering if things could have been better. That's how I felt about this show. It was good enough not to be embarrassing, but the lows outweighed the highs, and I left feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Roberto: Agree, the lows just outweighed the highs in the end. I’m on board with that 6 out of 10. Or, 35 out of 57 varieties on the SITKOT scale.

Concert Review: Deerhunter / No Age / Dan Deacon at Mr. Small's

I got lazy and didn't make it out last night, so we turn to our loyal readers for their thoughts on the matter:

Lupe: Deerhunter pretty good, No Age so-so, Dan Deacon oddly out of place stole the show. imo. Jimmy?

Jimmy: I generally agree with Lupe. The acoustics were terrible. After the first "round" of songs (after all of them playing an opening number together, each group took turns playing one or two songs, then passed the stage to the next group), Dan Deacon went into the sound room at the back of Smalls and must have helped with the mix because you could barely hear any vocals at all.

I had very high hopes for this show, so I'm pretty disappointed today.

Deerhunter definitely has the best book of songs out of the three groups, but played a scattershot of material, omitting most of their best tracks. No Age sounded ok, but again, you basically could not hear the vocals at all. I agree that Dan Deacon was out of place, but it was almost necessary to have something to break up the show that wasn't just heavy noise. His last song, "Wham City," was the highlight of the night for me.

Now for the worst part. After Deacon finished up with "Wham City," everyone came back on stage and started playing together, but there didn't seem to be any plan. After playing something that started out sounding like a song, all three of the guitarists started pounding the same chord for what seemed like at least 8 solid minutes. The singer for No Age started hitting his mike against his palm to see if any sound was coming out and nothing registered, so he tossed his mike on the ground. At that point, I turned to my friends and said that I'd had enough. They agreed, and we left. I don't know if there was any encore because we didn't stay, and no, I did not hear my favorite song, "Agoraphobia."

Disappointment. I have a feeling that this show needed to be at an outside venue because Smalls just couldn't deal with the sound issues. Dan Deacon was also the only act that even attempted to interact with the crowd in any meaningful way.

Some concert announcements

Maybe these are old news by now, I'm not sure. But the Walkmen and Conor Oberst are on their way to Mr. Small's in July. Not together, though. Which is cool.

I don't want to be that "I saw Conor before he got mainstream" guy, but I did, so I will. I thought--and still think--that Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, despite having a totally pretentious album title, was an awesome record, and maybe Oberst's best to date. That's about the time I got into Bright Eyes, and I got into it hard, and I bought some EPs and the earlier stuff and I saw him/them play a show in California (I won't go as far to say it was in a smoky little backtown club, because it wasn't) and he sort of sucked. He sounded alright, as did his band of the hour, but he was this whiny little emo-folkie who was just pissed off about capitalism and church and suburbs and other stuff I didn't pay to hear about.

Still, I bought the next set of records and dug those, too (particularly I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning). And then came Cassadaga and an eponymous solo record, both of which struck me as increasingly (decreasingly?) "just okay." I haven't given the new record much of a chance yet, even though a few of the songs I've downloaded are pretty decent (which is, I suppose, a step or two above okay). Anyway, the dude writes a good song (though delegated some of the writing duties to bandmates on his latest) and puts on a pretty impassioned performance (or did when I saw him anyhow), so I'll probably check him out and see how adulthood is treating him. That'll be on July 12, a Sunday.

More excited am I about a chance to see the Walkmen play a set longer than seven songs in a setting other than some basketball arena where soundwaves go to mutate and fratkids who can't hold their Miller Lite go to push their way by me in effort to be as close as possible to the Followills when it finally comes time to clap awkwardly and arhythmically along to "Sex on Fire." (Q: Is the Palumbo Center the worst place in Pittsburgh to see a concert? A: Yes.) You and Me was one of my favorite records of last year, and Matt Barrick can bang on a kit like I couldn't believe. Hell, to hear just "The Rat" played in Mr. Small's would be worth the $12 ticket. So I'll buy one, and I'll be there on July 25, which is a Saturday, which is nice.

Download:

The Walkmen - "Canadian Girl"

Bright Eyes - "Bowl of Oranges"

TVOTR Post-Gazette interview

Read it here. They'll be at Mr. Small's on Monday.

Video: Jenny Lewis on the Late Late Show

She'll be at Mr. Small's on the 5th of July. Here she is last night doing "See Fernando" on Craig Ferguson's show:

G. Love to guest-DJ on WYEP today

Before tonight's show at Mr. Small's, G. Love will drop by the WYEP studios to take over the afternoon mix for Rosemary Welsch. Tune in at 3:00 to see what Mr. Dutton is listening to.

Then, head on over to Millvale for what is always an entertaining show by one of Philly's best. As Love told the Trib's Rege Behe last week, "Music is supposed to make you feel good, help you forget about the stress of everyday life and stuff like that. When people come to see you, they're there to have a good time, and that's what happens, for the most part, at our shows. People are there to peace out."

Peace.

Out.

Sunday's quandary

Josh Ritter will be in the Southside, while the Heartless Bastards will be in Millvale. Both are known to put on a great show. It's a tough one, but I gotta think you can't go wrong either way.

Here's Erika Wennerstrom and her band last week down in Austin:


And here's Ritter and his a few days ago in Charlotte:


Godspeed.

Airborne Toxic Event Monday at Mr. Small's

Sure, it’s at least a little pretentious for a band to name themselves after anything taken from a DeLillo novel. But damn if it isn’t up there in my mind with Gatsby and Grapes of Wrath as holding some of the finest final pages of any American novel:

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers... There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Airborne Toxic Event will be at Mr. Small’s tomorrow night. If you miss the show, still try and make it a point to read the book sometime in your life. And if you don't do that, maybe pick up the band's eponymous CD. It may not rock you like a DeLillo novel, but it's pretty solid stuff.

Download:
The Airborne Toxic Event – “Sometime Around Midnight” (Mediafire link)

TV on the Radio announce Pittsburgh date

A return to Pittsburgh is significant for TV on the Radio because it's right here in our lovely town where TVOTR leader Tunde Adebimpe (a graduate of Shadyside Academy) and Kyp Malone (of Moon) first connected years before they would meet again in a chance encounter that ultimately brought Malone into the Brooklyn-based band.

If you missed them last time they passed through Mr. Small's before all the hype around Dear Science picked up, they'll be back around for you on May 11.