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Rocking
Cinco de Mayo There is no better band in Eugene to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with than the Los Mex Pistols. But last Cinco de Mayo, Los Mex Pistols Del Norte were nowhere to be seen. All the way across the ocean in Singapore, the septet electrified a room full of hundreds with their explosive rock and traditional Latin music hybrid.
A Mex Pistols fan originally from Denver sought out the band to perform at his new microbrewery in Singapore, explains Bruce Hartnell, the leader of the band and a godfather to the Eugene punk scene. "I thought the guy was full of shit, I didn't know if I could believe it or not. So I sent these outrageous demands in the contract and everything and he came through." Because Eugene is a college town, the rock scene tends to lack an institutional memory. Many band members and scenesters graduate and leave town. Los Mex Pistols Del Norte is a band that pops its head out of the ground about as often as the illusive groundhog. This leaves some to wonder, "Where are they now?" or the youngins asking, " Who dat?" However, the band, which has surfaced with several different lineups since 1995, has grown into more of a local, cultural institution these days than a traditional rock band. Infusing the sounds of tejana, conjunto, ranchera and norteno music with elements of paso dobles (celebratory music played at bullfights), Morricone instrumentals, along with punk and surf rock riffage, the band can navigate that borderland between rock and Latin, impressing the young and old with an uptempo, culturally rich sound. Vibrant layers of horns, tuba, farfisa organ and accordion clash with twangy guitars, staccato snares and incessant crash cymbals. "We've played bull fight songs and there's a mosh pit going on," Hartnell says. "In the same context, we can play that same music in exactly same way in the lobby of the Hult Center to a room of geriatric people and they think it's a high-cultural thing." The group has also become more selective with the gigs over their years; partially due to the band members' conflicting schedules, and partially due to less visible gigs at larger county and cultural festivals. They are slated to perform at this year's state fair, as well as another large festival on the San Juan Islands. The Pistols will also return to Singapore for Oktoberfest. "I try to play, not just at the same rock club over and over," Hartnell states. Don't miss a chance to catch the Pistols this Cinco de Mayo at the Jungle. Their all-night-long performance will cover everything from norteno to '50s instrumentals.
The
Opposite of Erosion Northwest Royale has kicked out enough members to make up a whole new band. It's not because they're assholes. It's because they're really serious about loud, in your face, energy overload metal.
"Back in 2000 when me and Colt started this, we decided we weren't going to take any shit," said drummer Chris Phillips. "If you slack, you're gone. We went through so many people because they didn't have the same goals as we do. But everyone here now is serious." At that point, Colt Williams, lead singer and guitarist, jumped in, as he often does both literally and figuratively. "You should probably also mention that we're still friends with all those guys." Which may be true, but "those guys" are still out of one of Eugene's hardest working, hardest touring bands — a band that, because of their work ethic, has a good chance of clawing their way to the top. They've had the same line-up since 2003 with Phillips, Williams, Blake Owens (percussion and keyboards) and Kenny Nestor (bass) and have logged thousands of miles, hundreds of shows and built their steadily growing fan base. In fact, they're leaving for a three-week tour in early May and kicking it off with a show at the Wetlands. "It's the opposite of erosion," said their roadie, Ethan Haskell. Their music is an angry, relentless, growling assault with so much energy that it zings through the room like lightening. It attracts a core audience that turns every floor into a roiling mosh pit of teens and 20-somethings, screaming the words to every song at the top of their lungs, bouncing up and down and pumping their fists in the air. "We've had bar shows where [underage] kids set up lawn chairs outside the show on the sidewalk," Owens said. "Or where they'll try to sneak into the show." Even on the sidewalk, their fans could probably hear the music just fine. These shows are the ones where you feel the beat because it's rocking the building. Officially sponsored by Jägermeister, Rockstar, Randall amps and Benavente Guitars ("Please mention our sponsors in the story," band manager Brian Smith requested) NWR recently finished recording their second CD, The Nosebleed Section, with producer Chris Hansen on the same soundboard used for Pink Floyd's The Wall. But all these guys really care about is that it sounds good. "Drinkin' Again" is particularly notable for its contagious refrain and hint of a melody. And energy. Lots and lots of energy. Because when NWR starts playing, it doesn't seem to matter if they're in a garage under fluorescent lights surrounded by broken cars or under the spotlight on a stage in front of 1,000 people. It's the music that feeds them, their oxygen. "We don't want to be millionaires," Phillips said. "We want to live music, breathe music and eat music."
Magnolia's
Melancholy
Jason Molina, the main force behind Magnolia Electric Co., is a familiar name to a certain sort of music fan: He recorded seven albums in seven years under the Songs: Ohia name, which has since been retired. Molina traded in Songs: Ohia's constantly rotating cast of players for a set band that includes Jennie Benford, who's perfected her reedy, timeless vocal style in her years with Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops. After a limited edition live album, Trials and Errors, Magnolia Electric Co. has just released What Comes After the Blues, a polished, graceful collection of heartbreak tales and melancholic ballads. "The Dark Don't Hide It," the album's first song, seems like a declaration of influence: There's a lot of Neil Young going on here, especially in the rolling, singalong chorus. But the album's tone immediately shifts as Benford takes the lead on "The Night Shift Lullaby," a slightly sinister ballad that alternates Benford's tremulous voice with a sweeping steel guitar. Throughout What Comes After the Blues, Benford is often the bright note, a light in the gray dusk that settles over much of the album. There's a resignation to many of Molina's songs, a worn-out, wound-down tone that sometimes seems to mute his more delicate melodies. But there's also an appealing immediacy to the record, the likely result of recording live, catching the songs as they were played. While Magnolia Electric Co. shares some common ground with Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown, these songs are a little less jovial about their sadness, a little less likely to tuck a musical wink alongside forlorn lyrics. As Benford and Molina wind their voices in "Northstar Blues," singing "How can I be the only one/ Whose life can't live up to the lie?" the sweet, sad simplicity of the album's prettiest song stands completely on its own.
Big
Finishes The recent LTD strike got all the attention here, but labor vs. management battles have erupted around the world lately in, of all places, symphony orchestras. The working stiffs won the most famous such conflict in 1772, when orchestra musicians complained to their composer/conductor, Joe Haydn, that their employer, Prince Esterhazy, kept extending their six-month season.
Since the musicians lived on the prince's remote Austrian estate for half the year while playing music for his court, this meant extending the players' long absence from their homes, other performance and work opportunities, and, not least, their wives. "I was young and lusty in those days, too," Haydn wrote later, "and thus no better than they." Eager to convey the message that it was time to let his players go, yet unwilling to offend an employer who'd been known to dismiss or cut the pay of unruly employees, Haydn devised a musical hint even an inbred monarch couldn't miss. It turned his superb "Farewell" symphony into one of the cleverest and most delightful valedictory works in music. I won't spoil the surprise for newbies by revealing it here, so you'll have to attend the Oregon Mozart Players concerts on April 30 or May 1 at the Hult Center to see why it's the perfect work to end the season. The rest of the program glitters, too, with the suite from Gabriel Faure's Pelleas and Melisande (which boasts a famously lilting theme) and even a contemporary work, John Musto's Dove Sta Amore, a cycle of five songs about relationships (including their comic side) based on poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Agee and Carl Sandburg. The songs feature Musto's wife, soprano Amy Burton, who'll also sing the most ravishing of Mozart's too-seldom heard concert arias, "To Forget You." Musto and Burton will also perform songs from the 1920s and '30s by French and American composers at Luna on Thursday, April 28. In recent years, Eugene's classical music companies have saved the biggest for last, and as the end of the season draws nigh, some large-scale masterworks loom. On Saturday, May 7, the Mozart Players join the Eugene Concert Choir for Beethoven's mighty Missa Solemnis. Many of his contemporaries (especially those expected to sing its more fearsome passages) considered the piece insanely radical, but the composer himself counted it among his greatest achievements. He wrote this mass in 1823, at the same time he was sketching his ninth symphony, in an attempt to invest the classical romantic symphonic form with the spiritual transcendence of Renaissance church music. On Thursday, May 12, the Eugene Symphony performs another mega-work for chorus and orchestra, Gustav Mahler's Symphony #2. Mahler aimed for the transcendence and drama suggested by its nickname, "The Resurrection," and symphony and season conclude with the most magnilo quent of orchestral climaxes. Finally, on Wednesday, May 4, still another grandiose Romantic spectacle comes to town when Opera Verdi Europa brings 100 singers, chorus and orchestra to perform a fully staged version of Verdi's operatic epic of ancient Egypt, Aida. Up in Portland, on the afternoon of Sunday, May 1, the Northwest's finest new music ensemble, Third Angle, closes its season in typically innovative style when they perform music appropriate to the three different venues in which they'll play it: the US Bank building, Fox Tower and the Hilton basement. Eugene's new music event of the year is the Bach Festival's presentation this summer of Osvaldo Golijov's magnificent Passion According to St. Mark. One of the singers in that show will be Brazilan singer/songwriter Luciana Souza, who also sang in Golijov's cantata Oceana at the Bach Festival a few years ago. That work introduced her to the work of one of the 20th century's greatest poets, Chile's Pablo Neruda, and Souza's latest CD sets some of his poems to musical themes by the wonderful, underrated Spanish composer Federico Mompou. She'll probably perform some of those art-pop piano ballads when she appears at the Shedd on Thursday, May 5 with her band, which includes players from Dave Douglas and Herbie Hancock's recent visits here. So this concert will appeal to jazz, pop, classical, and world music fans. Brazilian music lovers should be at the WOW Hall on Thursday, April 28, for San Francisco's acclaimed Bat Makumba. Supplementing an arsenal of Brazilian percussion with horns, keyboards, accordion, clarinet, bass and more, the group plays rambunctious party music that'll have the hall rocking.
Music
Shorts NoMeansNo Means You Will Go Canadian trio NoMeansNo declared their intent to pummel a square art-rock peg into a round punk rock hole in 1981 with a 7-inch, Betrayal, Fear, Anger, Hatred. With all the delicacy of Motörhead in a china shop, they sing songs about alienation, sexual obsession and madness coupled with a warped sense of humor. Founding brothers Rob (bass, guitar and vocals) and John Wright (vocals, drums, keyboards) wear their book smarts on their guitar straps, flecking their songs with articulate and intelligent albeit often weird lyrical moments. A hallmark of their punk hybrid style is ferociously tight playing and jazzy, complex song structure. Rob Wright, working in a campus cafeteria in Victoria, B.C., in the late '70s, was inspired to start a punk band after witnessing a death-defying performance by fellow Canadian punk rockers D.O.A. He grabbed a guitar and the rest is pure legend. The Wright brothers also masquerade as hockey-rockers Hanson Brothers. Along with two pals, they retool Ramones-ish three-chord punk gems into fist-pumping songs about hockey and beer. If you've never seen NoMeansNo, you owe it to yourself to see them at least once. If you're a fan, you already know the drill. NoMeansNo will perform with The Bastard Saints and On the First Day … They Were Kittens at 8:30 pm at the WOW Hall, Thursday, May 5. $10 adv/$12 door. — Vanessa Salvia
Noise Music Fest Examines Space and Sound In the literal sense, noise involves loud or discordant sound. Combined with the term music, the new label now takes on some semblance of shape and composition, at least in the respect that someone is consciously making and combining sound into a thought-out piece. Enter the world of noise music and Eugene's first NoiseFest taking place on April 29 and 30. Hosted by DIVA and local noise musician Don Haugen, the Eugene NoiseFest will showcase around 20 noise artists from the West Coast (with a heavy emphasis on the Northwest). Noise music comprises everything from waves of deafening feedback to collections of small blips in still space. Haugen calls it abstract music, comparing its relationship to traditional music the way one would compare an expressionist painting to a Jackson Pollock painting. "You can't use the same music conventions to describe it," Haugen explains. Noise music lacks standard structure and is usually characterized by its atonality and lack of an organized beat. But because it loosely embraces anything created by unusual means, it doesn't have to be devoid of melody or rhythm. The noise musician's arsenal of non-traditional "instruments" includes, but is not limited to: field recordings, machine sounds, incidental analog noise, primitive and homemade synthesizers and distorted guitar chords. Noise music blossomed from both the cutting edge of modern music as well as its dregs, citing roots in modern classical, early electronic music as well as post-hardcore metal. With a following as amorphous as its sonic bricolage, general interest in the genre tends to fade in and out, Haugen says. However, as an examination of the basics as well as the complexities of sound and space, the Eugene Noise Fest will prove to be a fascinating first for the region. Catch the Eugene Noise Fest at DIVA Friday and Saturday. Both shows start at 7 pm. $5 each night. Log on to www.humanmonster.comfor more info. — Steven Sawada
Rising Star Shines Over Eugene After recently inking a deal with Columbia records and making it onto Rolling Stone's list of top 10 artists to watch in 2004, Brandi Carlile has a lot to smile about.
The 23-year-old singer/songwriter says it was a gig as a backup singer for an Elvis impersonator that taught her about harmony when she was a teen. Apparently she took those lessons to heart. Playing with twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth (lead guitar and bass respectively) Carlile has spare, trimmed down melodies that burst from within the background guitars that surround and support them. Layered harmonies pile on top of each other as lightly as feathers, creating an amalgam so beautiful you'll barely hear the other parts of the songs. Her voice, one moment a breathy croon and the next a velvety rich powerhouse, is made for the Top 40. More than anything else, it's what sets her apart. She knows exactly when to lay on the gas and when to back off, when to shout and when to whisper. Take "Eye of the Needle" off her EP Acoustic for example. It moves along to the steady beat of the strum, floating through verse after verse until the chorus. Without jarring you, the song takes off and carries you with it. All Carlile needs to become a household word is that one big hit, that song that becomes the theme song for some huge sitcom like Dawson's Creek. But don't let that put you off if you pride yourself on saying you heard it first. Her stuff is real and earthy, not ethereal. Carlile's managed to blend the grit of dark folk with sweet, soaring melodies to create intense, emotion-laden ballads that fall like a steady rain and break through like a rainbow. Brandi Carlile plays Café Paradiso along with Shawn Mullins, 8 pm Saturday, April 30. $ 15 .
With Andy Friedman, Nothing's Off Limits If you missed Andy Friedman the last time he rolled into Sam Bond's, get thee to the bar and prepare yourself for one hell of a night. No one can figure out what to call Friedman because his show is a combination of art, slide shows and poetry. So he gets labeled with all these stupid terms that just piss him off. It seems that people either love him or hate him and in Eugene, he's well loved. Maybe it's because we like to think we embrace the bleeding edge, which is where Friedman likes to hang out. "Maybe I should have a press kit of all those lousy people who don't like anything new," he said, joking, during an interview a few months ago. "At one time, the singersongwriter must have seemed weird. But we've come to a place where it's OK to warble poetry and strum cat guts." So check out this artist who paints with words and creates melody with images. Andy Friedman performs with The Other Failures along with Ty Connor and Natalie Zukerman at 9 pm at Sam Bond's, Thursday, May 5. $5. — Melissa Bearns
ART OF EVERYTHING All
Ages AX BILLY GRILL & SPORTS BAR BEANERY All Ages BLACK FOREST
CAFÉ PARADISO CARROWS LOUNGE CLUB TSUNAMI COFFEE GROVE COOPERATIVE COUNTRY SIDE RESTAURANT COUNTRYSIDE
COZMIC PIZZA@THE STRAND All Ages DA HOUZE DOWNTOWN LOUNGE DUCK INN EMBERS SUPPER CLUB EUGENE WINE CELLARS GOOD TIMES
INDIGO DISTRICT JAXX LOUNGE@PREMIUM POUR JO FEDERIGO'S JOE'S BAR & GRILLE JOGGER'S BAR & GRILL JOHN HENRY'S THE JUNGLE THE KEG LATITUDE 10 CAFE All
Ages LAVELLE'S WINE BAR & BISTRO LONE STAR BAR & GRILL LUCKEY'S CLUB CIGAR LUNA MAC'S AT THE VET'S MAX'S TAVERN MCDONALD THEATRE All Ages MCSHANE'S BAR & GRILLE MONROE STREET CAFE All Ages MULLIGAN'S PUB THE O BAR & GRILL OVERTIME GRILL PEABODY'S PERUGINO QUACKER'S RAMADA INN RED LION INN SAM BOND'S GARAGE SAM'S PLACE STACY'S COVERED BRIDGE SWEETWATER'S TAP 'N' KEG TAYLOR'S BAR AND GRILL TINY TAVERN TRACKSTIRS WETLANDS
WOW HALL All Ages YUKON JACK'S
CORVALLIS AJ'S BOMBS AWAY CAFE IOVINO'S RISTORANTE MURPHY'S NEW MORNING BAKERY All
Ages PLATINUM NIGHT CLUB SQUIRREL'S TOMMY'S PEACOCK
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