 |
  |
|
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
Stop
the Violence With Hip Hop … The other day I had this intense argument with a friend about how I thought Michael Franti's musical exhortations were a little too banal and preachy. But as the discussion turned to Franti's new film, I Know I'm Not Alone, which was inspired by his recent visit to the Middle East, she said something that made me rethink my opinions. She said the difference between society's reaction to our current war and the Vietnam War is the severe lack of protest and activism on the part of the music community — and Franti is one of the few artists out there using his music to draw attention to this fucked-up war.
It's hard to deny the wall of callousness surrounding popular music as a whole, but on the local level, thanks to Shawn Mediaclast (aka The Audio Schizophrenic), Eugene's dance community is getting involved. Mediaclast has quickly transformed Wednesday nights at Jaxx into a haven for disenfranchised DJs and hip-shakers ready to use their scene to speak out against the current war in the Middle East. Galvanizing a huge collection of rotating local DJs, with a milieu of musical genres coalescing every night, Mediaclast's Dance for Peace is building steam amongst Eugene's pack of already successful weekly dance nights. "The idea to do an anti-war benefit dance party came with a general feeling that the oppositional political culture in general, in the United States, and even here in Eugene, which is supposedly a hotbed of progressivism, has essentially died," says Mediaclast. Besides the anti-war theme, the night's popularity can also be attributed to its diverse cast of peace loving DJs. Newbie DJs like Yogi and The Turntable Enabler mix with local fixtures such as Moonvoid and Supa J (aka John Smith), mashing together divergent sounds like hip hop and disco punk. According to Mediaclast, recently some of the more progressive dance tracks actually fuse together these different genres of club-inspired music. "In my opinion, the dance culture has really diversified over the last five years," he says. "People are getting away from their dependence on '80s and top 40 hip hop to get their asses on the dance floor." With few anti-war cuts coming from pop music's corner and no real genre dedicated to protest songs, the Dance for Peace clan has turned to the underground for bootlegs and mash-ups with politically oriented themes. In this new universe of anti-war music, nothing is sacred – the now antiquated "Give Peace a Chance" gets a funky electronic makeover, and Bush himself gets punk'd by the cheeky DJ Shadow in a cut and paste number that features the Pres repeatedly blabbing "terrorist." Outreach and activism are slowly becoming a bigger part of the party. Proceeds from the $2 cover are donated to Peaceworks (the grassroots non-profit focused on counter-recruitment) and CALC (the Community Alliance of Lane County), and Mediaclast says the event will soon include guest speakers as well as small demos by CALC. Maybe music as a whole has betrayed the anti-war effort, but the revolution has to start somewhere. And with your cover going to a good cause, what better way to begin than dancing for peace at Dance for Peace? Dance for Peace. 9:30 pm every Wednesday. Aug. 9 features The Audio Schizophrenic and The Turntable Enabler. Jaxx • $2
Ready
to Sweat On the other side of the world, Death Cab for Cutie bassist Nick Harmer is laughing incredulously. "That's crazy talk!" he says upon hearing that temperatures in the Pacific Northwest have been cracking triple digits. "That's not cool! What's going on?"
Harmer and his bandmates have been on tour in Australia; he's sitting in a hotel room in Sydney, where outside it's rainy and cold. After playing one festival and a bunch of their own shows, the band is about to head back to the U.S. "We really felt like we were missing summer here, so we felt like we should go back to the States and stand outside in the hot sun and sweat like crazy," Harmer says. Since forming in 1997, Death Cab for Cutie has steadily gained listeners, fans who stream into larger and larger venues to hear the band's clear-eyed, emotionally resonant, occasionally anthemic indie rock. Singer Ben Gibbard's lyrics are nostalgic, self-conscious and poignant; through DCFC's first four full-length records, on Seattle indie label Barsuk Records, he crystallized moments, spinning them into stories about hiding cigarettes, finding photos in the glove box or half-dreaming through a road trip. For the band's most recent album, Plans, Gibbard's lyrical focus shifted. The album opens with a dream — "If I could open my arms / And span the length of the isle of Manhattan / I'd bring it to where you are" — but moves into darker places for some of the best songs. In many ways, Plans, with its musings on mortality and change, is the band's most mature album. It's also their first released on a major label. Harmer says "all good things" about the band's move to Atlantic Records. "We sort of take each day as it comes, and we're figuring out how to be a band and how to exist in this world, and I think we're doing an OK job of it," he says. Like all DCFC records, Plans was produced by the band's muti-talented guitarist-and-more Chris Walla, who keeps things crisp and clean. "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," a timeless, darkly romantic acoustic ballad, sounds as if it were recorded plainly, in one take, and it's refreshing to hear such an unadorned performance from a now bigger-time band. Though the record doesn't have the immediate hookiness of 2003's Transatlanticism — or a song that quite rivals that album's swelling title track — it has the richness of a record that takes time to sink in and then lingers. As the bassist, Harmer says his role in the songwriting process is "more of a support role, for sure." His deliciously geeky comparison is, "If Ben is Luke Skywalker and Chris is Han Solo, then I'm Chewbacca." Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr, he says, "are there for writing parts and saying 'Yeah, that's a good idea' or … 'How about this instead?'" It's been a busy year for DCFC since Plans came out last August, with touring, more touring and a January appearance on "Saturday Night Live" that Harmer says was "pretty awesome." Also, there have been plenty of interviews. "I feel like there isn't an inch of this band that hasn't been explored by the press," Harmer says. The band plans to "tour like crazy men" until December. Then, Harmer jokes, "I'll shave my head and grow out the biggest beard I can and disappear for awhile … nah, we'll take some downtime and start working on the new record. We've already started talking about some things. Ideas, concepts." Death Cab for Cutie, Mates of State. 6:30 pm • Thurs., 8/10. Secret House Winery. $25 adv.,$28 dos.
Stories
in Song Songs and stories have walked hand in hand way back since the beginning of history. Many of the epic poems and portions of classic theater works we now read were actually originally sung. The mid-20th century folk music revival reinvigorated the musical storytelling tradition, and its latest local incarnation is the Lusty Leaf folk collective. Employing fiddle, banjo, keyboards, fiddle, guitar, marimba and other "percussive doodads," sampler, beats and other "weird electronics," the quintet creates songs that function like chapters in a book and put listeners in the position of the story's protagonist. Its hour-long current tale, "Wide open world, where are you?" traces the protagonist's adventures in love and life from a pastoral "slumber party forever" to the mechanistic rituals of urban life. The group's sound reveals traces of early Lou Reed in his Velvet Underground acoustic phase; the tempos tend to be deliberate, the mood often dark, but somehow it sounds fresh and natural, not pretentious as you might expect from a group that cites influences as diverse as poets (Brautigan, Shelley, cummings, Hopkins, Gary Snyder) and other writers, outsider artist Henry Darger and more obvious musical predecessors like Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Joy Division, jug-bands and freak-folkers. The collective's been touring the Northwest, and it brings the song/story show to DIVA on Aug. 14. DIVA also has a somewhat mellow triple bill of electonica-influenced pop on Aug. 7, featuring DoublePlusGood (former UO Future Music Oregon student Erik Carlson's ambient textures and pop hooks), Castle (breathy/spacy vocals and acoustic guitar over electronics) and Kid Theodore. DIVA gets noisier the following evening, Aug. 8, when a quartet of L.A. experimental bands — Kevin Shields, Privy Seals, Toxic Loin Cloth and Ex Jesus — join Eugene's JMGinsberg. Summer's here, and the time is right for swaying in the heat, or something like that. The Cuthbert has two irresistible shows: Los Lobos Aug. 10 and blues legend Buddy Guy on Aug. 11. One of the last of the second generation of Chicago bluesmen, in the mid-1960s, Guy integrated a lot of soul music's innovations into Chicago blues and draw in fans of both genres, along with white electric blues lovers in the '70s. The Grammy-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has played with all the legends, influenced Clapton, Jimi and Steve Ray — and occasionally been known to pander to yupster crowds with prolix solos and duets. But at his best, Buddy Guy lives up to his legend.
Pickathon Fest Offers Values, Music It's always been a curious phenomenon to me that the keepers of traditional roots, folk and old-timey Americana music are also often some of the most progressive, forward thinking people I know. It probably shouldn't be that surprising, however, when the genre has so many ties to the progressive folk populism and protest songs of the early to mid 20th century, when American "values" and liberal ideas walked very closely hand-in-hand. Those progressive values and music are still closely intertwined at this year's Pickathon Roots Music Festival.
"Sustainability is a major theme this year," said Zale Schoenborn, a festival organizer. "We're trading energy credits, working with green-friendly sponsors and vendors and working on alternative transportation and ride sharing." Transportation options listed on the Pickathon website include downloadable bicycle routes, a biodiesel bus running hourly between Portland's Gateway MAX station and the festival grounds and carpooling and ride-sharing information. "Basically, if you can get to Portland, near a light rail station, you can get out to Pendarvis farm. No car required," Schoenborn said. Pendarvis is an 80-acre site in Boring that features meadows and forest groves. Camping will be available, and the site offers hiking trails for those wishing to take a break from the music. There will be several workshops, and people who bring their instruments along are bound to find someone to pick and grin with, Schoenborn, himself a mandolinist, said. The festival will be running three music stages. Friday night's headliners are Greg Brown, a strong songwriter known for his deep baritone voice, and Iris DeMent. Simply put, if you haven't heard Iris DeMent sing, then you haven't heard singing as it should be done. It ain't fancy singing; it's better than that. It's real and straight and honest and true. Other top draws are The Danny Barnes Collective, Darol Anger, Kelly Joe Phelps, The Wailin' Jennys and Kris Delmhorst. The 8th Annual Pickathon takes place noon-2 am Friday, Aug. 4 and 9 am-2 am Saturday, Aug. 5 at Pendarvis Farm, Boring, Ore. $85 weekend, $55 Friday, $65 Saturday. www.pickathon.com— John Ginn
Music With a Cane and a Top Hat "Something way more magical happens when close friends create music together," says Rhythm Pimps guitarist and singer Anthony McCarthy. "Plus, it's always cool to say 'Yeah, I'm in a band' when you're talking to chicks and stuff."
The name fits the game for the wacky Rhythm Pimps. With a bouncy beat that loops and tumbles like Primus as well as punk speed that channels Black Flag, the band's sound can't be summarized with just one musical description. The best way to find out just what the Rhythm Pimps sound like is to see them live. "We started out as a swingy, funky reggae band," McCarthy says. "We're exploring some heavier stuff too but we still love to pimp the funk and skank out. We draw our melodies from the metaphysical level of rock and roll … the same river that Jimmy stumbled upon, the same river that Dylan swam in, the same river that Bradley found." The band hasn't released any new material since 2003's Groundscore but is currently working on a four-song EP that could soon see the light of day. "When we first starting writing music, it was poppier," bassist Mike Hoffman says. "Now we've gone back more towards rock. We're working more on listening and getting our transitions down solid." Rock, pop, whatever genre you can think of: The Rhythm Pimps whore themselves out to endless styles of musical expression. One song they write may turn out to be the total antithesis of the previous song. For this trio, exploration is the name of the game, and while pimpin' ain't easy, these guys make it look pretty simple. The Rhythm Pimps and Kenny Norris play at 10 pm Tuesday, Aug. 8 at Diablo's. 21+ show. $3-$5. — Dan Hoyt
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
