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September 2008
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2008:02:29:08:00. Friday. NO!: THE DAN ANDREAS FAULT (#368, FEB 24 2008).
Things come together nicely with this contemplative duet originally by Ben Harper. The harmonica line gives it kind of a wandering feeling which fits the song really well. Fun fact! I was recently in a bar in Pittsburgh and heard the original version of one of the DAF's tunes, but had no idea until it was pointed out to me. Their version is much more enjoyable.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:27:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: THE DAN ANDREAS FAULT (#367, FEB 24 2008).
You might not think a brief McCartney Beatles tune would be the best feature platform for bright female vocals, but here you go. Singer/guitarist Andrea Ward brings a sunny tunefulness to their collection of covers, and I suspect will be a major focal point once they start debuting original material.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:26:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: THE DAN ANDREAS FAULT (#366, FEB 24 2008).
My pals in the Dan Andreas Fault -- headliners at my last ever King Club show -- are back out for a few shows over the next month or so. I imagine they're on their way to becoming well liked by local clubs, as they put about 40 people in the High Noon for a Sunday night show last weekend. They've got two March shows coming up at the Crystal Corner, which might burst if that kind of crowd shows up.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:21:13:45. Thursday. NOT DEAD YET. Hillary Clinton got crushed in Wisconsin and has had a bad February, which makes todays new polls kind of surprising. Keep in mind that, as of a couple days ago, Obama was up 7 in the national polls and that he pulled to within 5 in Texas before Wisconsin's primary.
Gallup Daily Tracking: Clinton 45, Obama 44
Fox News/Opinion Dynamics National: Clinton 44, Obama 44 Diageo/The Hotline National: Clinton 45, Obama 43 IVR Tex. Feb 20: Clinton 50, Obama 45 Caveats apply, of course, but I think it's clear that there's still a lot of room to move in this race, thanks in large part to proportional delegate allocation. If the Obama backlash is on the horizon, Clinton will get an opening that she's got a decent shot of taking advantage of. Either way, the continued splitting of national Democrats is going to make convention season very interesting.
2008:02:18:23:02. Monday. HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT.
Tomorrow morning I'll walk to Lapham Elementary School and cast a vote for Hillary Clinton to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, making me a hypocrite, a cynic, or worse. I've spent more time and energy going back and forth on this vote than any I've ever cast. However, the fact that I was going back and forth between Clinton and a protest vote for Chris Dodd, who dropped out after securing about four votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, ultimately made the pragmatic decision clear. Having just decided on my choice this weekend, I have spent the past couple days coming around to the idea that I can be OK with this, and not just resigned to it. posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:15:08:00. Friday. NO!: RA RA RIOT (#365, FEB 2 2008).
When I first heard Ra Ra Riot's demo, I thought this song was by far and away the best one. The one thing I didn't like about it was that it was over six minutes long, and ready didn't need to be -- I always find myself thinking it's time to wrap up at about the four-minute mark. Well, luckily for me, this is one of the few songs in the set that didn't come with some extra flourishes and instead came in a couple minutes shorter than the recorded version. So enjoy the tight little melody line, and don't fret about any extended noodling sections, because it's already been excised.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:14:08:00. Thursday. NO!: RA RA RIOT (#364, FEB 2 2008).
This tune hadn't really grabbed my attention on the EP, but I found it really compelling live for some reason. The deep, dark opening really resonated in the concrete box that is Club 770, bringing some nice ominous atmosphere to the latter part of the set.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:13:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: RA RA RIOT (#363, FEB 2 2008).
By my count, Ra Ra Riot have released eight full songs -- their six-track EP and another two songs from their Daytrotter Session. This set was much longer than that, I'd guess about a dozen songs, and this was one of the new ones they played. I would assume they have a full-length album in the works, and this will make a nice addition, particularly if it has some of the live flourishes that the EP songs had in this set, but don't on the record.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:12:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: RA RA RIOT (#362, FEB 2 2008).
If there were enough hi-hat-and-strings bands out there to constitute a trend, Ra Ra Riot would be the latest contender to rise in what would surely be a blog-fueled genre. They add a little string intro to the live rendition of this song, the opener from their self-titled EP, which all but dares you not to focus on the soaring strings throughout the tune.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:11:08:00. Monday. NO!: THE VIRGINS (#361, FEB 2 2008).
When I first checked out the Virgins in preparation for seeing them last fall, this opener from their EP was the song that really grabbed me. It's catchy as hell and has a great walking bass line that really sets up the rest of the record -- though, ironically, they played it in this set as their closer. Somehow I didn't include this song on my best of 2007 mix, and I think it's because I just forgot about it for no particular reason. It should've been there, though, and it was a lot of fun to see people dancing around and singing to it. (Also, something interesting I just figured out about YouTube. I posted my National Beekeepers Society clips, and at the moment "Amputee" has 420 views, compared with 27 and 8 for the other two. I assume this is because people are searching YouTube for videos of amputees -- I wonder if they're disappointed when they realize they're just getting indie rock and no sexy stumps.)
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:09:09:12. Saturday. THERE ARE CULTS, AND THERE ARE CULTS. The Obama people may be causing a certain reaction because we don't generally see major candidate supporters acting the way they do, but political cults are nothing new. Minor and third party candidates manage to generate small ones all the time, and Obama's is by far not the oddest of this cycle. That distinction belongs to Ron Paul, whose people have brought in ridiculous amounts of money (especially compared to the rest of the Republican field), little of which has been spent, to win their guy 16 delegates. Paul ran on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, so there's been a lot of speculation that he was using the GOP primary to raise his profile, but banking his cash for a third-party run. But yesterday he said:
With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties — just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.
I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen. So, he all but acknowledges that he can't win, won't run on the Libertarian ticket, is concerned about being targeted Kucinich-style in his primary, and is probably still sitting on a decent amount of money. Campaign finance laws allow him to transfer funds back to his congressional campaign, I believe, but he's in a pretty safe seat. Meanwhile, not a single one of his heterodox ideas got picked up by the other GOP candidates, who love the war more than ever. So what was the point of his campaign? I really don't get it. It's not like a Tom Vilsack or Jim Gilmore campaign, where they had no shot and figured that out pretty early on. There's something about the strategy that's just not lining up.
2008:02:09:00:34. SOME POINT. At some point in the evening, a light is going to shine down and you will have an epiphany and you’ll say, "I have to vote for Barack."
This line from Obama, reported at CJR, has been going around for the past couple days, and I wonder if it's the beginning of the end. Getting so close to explicit messianicism in his own words can only help to enhance the perception of his most rabid supporters as a cult. If people -- non-supporters and supporters alike -- are getting ready to start talking about how creepy some in the Obama base are, it's going to be a tough narrative to deal with. That's especially true if it happens now, at a time when Hillary Clinton has suddenly found a swath of small-dollar donors to tap. Whether it's her Super Tuesday showing, her urgent e-mails or more reaction to the MSNBC id, her people are suddenly opening their wallets. I can't imagine hearing that Obama thinks he's Jesus is going to do anything but make them pony up more.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:08:08:00. Friday. NO!: THE VIRGINS (#360, FEB 2 2008).
A couple years ago, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah came up out of nowhere and got a lot of comparisons to the Talking Heads. I never thought that made much sense, and I think it makes even less when you compare them to some of last year's new New York band success stories -- the Virgins, Vampire Weekend and even White Rabbits, to a certain extent, have the sort of quasi-tropical guitar bounce that makes me think of "Life During Wartime" or "Once in a Lifetime." For the Virgins, I think this song exemplifies it most. Their sound is still a little thin, but I think we're going to hear some ambitious growth from them.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:07:08:00. Thursday. NO!: THE VIRGINS (#359, FEB 2 2008).
Before this show, the Virgins were on a short list of touring acts I'd seen in the last few years but not recorded, due to a dead battery in my microphones. They opened for Tokyo Police Club at the show we went to in Vancouver, and were really impressive. Emily was especially taken with them -- she was out of town for this show and asked me to say hi to them for her. I tried, but unfortunately the merch area was a little packed at the end of the night. This song is available in demo form on one of the three pieces of merch that the band as (one EP, one white shirt, one black shirt), but this version sounds a lot more fleshed out, with some light keys replaced by a more striking guitar line.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:06:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: NATIONAL BEEKEEPERS SOCIETY (#358, FEB 2 2008).
When a local opening act gets a good response from the crowd, it's always hard to tell if they won a bunch of people over, or if there's just a bunch of their friends in the audience. NBS were well-received by both the kids and the handful of surprisingly older people at the show, so I expect it was mostly the former. I'll certainly be trying to check out one of the upcoming Icarus Himself shows, and will be keeping my eye out for the full band.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:05:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: NATIONAL BEEKEEPERS SOCIETY (#357, FEB 2 2008).
The NBS set contained a mix of songs from their self-titled album and songs from their singer's solo EP, such as this one. His solo act, Icarus Himself, has a couple of shows coming up that I'll try to catch one of. The material is somewhat lighter and softer -- solo-er, if you will -- but the full band versions fit pretty well with the other full band stuff.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:04:08:00. Monday. NO!: NATIONAL BEEKEEPERS SOCIETY (#356, FEB 2 2008).
Sometimes I feel like Club 770 is the best venue in town (except for the inevitable technical problems). Even though I often find myself not caring about the acts that play there, when I do, it's usually with other bands that I like. Exactly one year before this show it was Maritime, Bound Stems and Kid, You'll Move Mountains. This time it was Ra Ra Riot, with the Virgins and local up-and-comers National Beekeepers Society opening. I'd been meaning to see NBS for a while -- they actually sent me an invite to a show last summer, but it was on my birthday and my schedule was already spoken for -- so I was really glad to see them on this bill. They play a raucous kind of indie rock that reminds me a lot of Sleeping in the Aviary, if a little more restrained. This clip and the next one both come in at under two minutes, but they manage to sound like songs and not just bursts of sound.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:02:01:08:00. Friday. NO!: WHITE RABBITS (#355, JAN 19 2008).
This tune is Emily's favorite one on the record, and it's grown on me in large part thanks to the shambly explosiveness of the live version. In a lot of ways it's representative of their whole show, with people moving and playing different things, various people banging on stuff, back-and-forth vocals. It's the sort of complex production that makes you forget how new they are as a band.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
