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2009:06:30:13:38. Tuesday. PICS: TESTA ROSA @ SUMMERFEST.
Pictures from Testa Rosa's Summerfest set. Archie Powell and Spoon videos to come!
2009:06:28:08:00. Sunday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#486, JUN 14 2009).
Even though, to be frank, we never went to a lot of Madison's many summer festivals, I was always really glad that they were there and will miss them when we move. They're great outlets for local music and give bands a chance to get in front of different audiences than they see in clubs. If anything I think this one might be growing -- it's the first time I've seen such a big-time stage setup for the Marquette Waterfront Festival.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:26:08:00. Friday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#485, JUN 14 2009).
This one provides a nice opening to the PYGs most recent album, and apparently it's also great to dance and spin around to. A section of newer stuff came up in the set starting with this song, but overall the set seemed to be mostly first-album stuff that maybe works a little better live.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:25:08:00. Thursday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#484, JUN 14 2009).
OK, Pale Young Gentlemen, I give up. My iPod has your two albums and your cover of "Paper Planes." If you have some stock of secret other songs that includes this one, I don't know about it. I do like this one, though.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:23:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#483, JUN 14 2009).
Experiment time! Since the Marquette Waterfront Festival is an outdoor event, I decided to try out shooting a clip with my Nikon D90, knowing the dissipated sound wouldn't overwhelm its little mic. The potential advantages to this: 1) it shoots in HD, though I realized later that I hadn't actually set it to HD, and 2) I get the visual benefits of shooting through a nice SLR lens, with all the options that implies. But the disadvantages were many: 1) it's a lot heavier than my camcorder, 2) autofocus doesn't work for video, which limits my ability to alter the zoom angle very much, 3) can't really fiddle with any of the other options while shooting, either, 4) no image stabilization. But that said, I really like how the picture came out -- the detail's good enough to get a sense of how many little gnats were swarming around the lakeside -- and I think if I'd brought a tripod and thought about how I wanted to shoot in advance the weaknesses could've been overcome.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:21:12:37. Sunday. ADVERTISING IS MAGIC. Once I get settled into my job I'll be blogging about mass comm and new media topics more frequently, but I saw something the other day that prompted me to get ahead of myself a little. Ezra Klein had this note about the RSS feeds at his new Washington Post blog: As you know, [the previously posted internal feed] works fine. But now the main feed is working too. The difference is pretty simple: About once every 20 or 30 posts, the main feed includes one post with an advertisement. Annoying, right? But it also helps make this blog viable. More to the point, it helps convince the Washington Post that full text RSS feeds -- which they've kindly allowed me to retain -- are viable. So though no one likes advertisements, making full-text feed more viable as a matter of revenue means they'll be more common at revenue-dependent institutions.
I don't mean to pick on Ezra at all here, since this is a notion you see frequently and his post was just the thing that made me remember I wanted to write about it. But isn't this expression of the open secret that online advertising is just noise interesting? This is one of the long-term issues with ad-supported online media that no one's really thinking about much in corporate accounting offices: People tune ads out. There's this idea among advertisers and media orgs that simply showing people ads -- for example, getting them to use the ad-interspersed RSS feeds -- is worthwhile. But even apart from tools like AdBlock Plus, people have been conditioned to use internal ad blocks. What happens when, at some point in the future, advertisers begin to realize that their magic isn't working?
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:19:08:00. Friday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#482, JUN 13 2009).
Thanks again to my tipster, I've got the name of this one and now know that yesterday's song is, in fact, called "21st Century." Just in time to correct them for YouTube! As I noted previously, I was kind of surprised by the low-ish turnout for this show. The balcony was closed off, which I've never seen at the Majestic before, and I assume it's because they didn't need the room -- a few people wound up sitting up there during the Locksley set, but no more than half a dozen. But meanwhile, those people who were down on the floor went crazy pretty much the whole time. And for almost exclusively new material! I'm actually really excited for the new album (due this fall, supposedly), as there have been a number of follow-up albums lately that haven't really done much for me.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:18:08:00. Thursday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#481, JUN 13 2009). Turns out I was wrong about that song title I was so sure of. A reader (Viewer? What do you call a member of a video podcast/blog audience?) e-mailed me with correct names for the first three new songs I posted -- the first is "Down For Too Long" and yesterday's "kind of a title track" is actually called "Days of Youth." I was right about "One More Minute," though! Today's and tomorrow's I won't even guess on since the band didn't mention any titles, but the phrase "21st century" is pretty prominent in this tune. It's another good display of just how much they can get a crowd going, even one that seemed a little smaller than it should've been, as this one did. It was definitely a smaller group than at last fall's Barrymore show, which I'm guessing is down to UW students being gone.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:17:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#480, JUN 13 2009).
Of all these new tunes, this is the only one whose title I'm sure of -- probably because "title track" is easier to understand from the echoey Majestic floor than any of the actual titles. More rotating singing duties on this one, and a harmonized ballad style that they didn't really do much of on their first album but that fits well with their overall sound.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:16:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#479, JUN 13 2009).
I'm a bit more sure about the name of this one, going by what the lyrics sound like; could still be wrong, though. It's also a good example of how the new material continues to spread singing and songwriting duties around in the band. This one is a big call-and-response number from bassist Jordan Laz who, like the rest of the band, has really figured out how to sell a tune like this on stage.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:15:08:00. Monday. NO!: LOCKSLEY (#478, JUN 13 2009).
The prodigal sons of Madison power pop returned home last weekend with a whole new album's worth of material. Be in Love doesn't have a release date yet, but I'm pretty sure they played the whole thing, along with all the best stuff from their debut. Now, owing to the acoustics of the Majestic, I'm wildly guessing on what Jesse Laz said most of these songs were called; I think this one is "That's True Love" based on what the lyrics sound like, but it could also be "That's Too Rough" or "That's What You Are" or maybe there's no "That's" in the title at all. Judge for yourself.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:13:08:00. Saturday. NO!: THE THERMALS (#477, APR 28 2009).
So things were kind of raucous throughout the show. Towards the end of the set this mellow tune brought out moshing and crowd-surfing from the band's devotees -- not a common sight in the compact stagefront area at High Noon. Even frontman Hutch Harris seemed surprised by it, and that energy makes me want to see them in a slighter bigger room. Maybe my new basement in Carbondale will be big enough to hold 500 people...
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:12:08:00. Friday. NO!: THE THERMALS (#476, APR 28 2009).
Following straight along from "A Passing Feeling" is the song that follows it on the band's debut album, this one pulls things back a little bit and shows them moving their garage sound toward 60s-vintage power pop. Good solid piece of stuff in the live setting, especially with a strongly appreciative crowd going crazy.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:11:08:00. Thursday. NO!: THE THERMALS (#475, APR 28 2009).
This quick, rollicking tune is one of the archetypes from the first Thermals record and represents a lot of what this show was about. It was nice to hear this outside the extremely lo-fi confines of that first album; like a lot of their later stuff, it's got some body to it, but that comes through a lot more onstage than on record.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:09:08:00. Tuesday. NO!: THE THERMALS (#474, APR 28 2009).
The Thermals have had kind of a weird career progression, and I'm not sure anyone in the indie rock world really knows what to make of them. I heard their first record back in 2003 and thought it was OK, but really same-y -- two stand-out tracks and a bunch of indistinguishable mud. Then the next two got a lot of glowing attention (the third, in particular), and I didn't really hear much different on them. Their new one I think does sound different -- they went from Sub Pop to Kill Rock Stars, but the change actually sounds more like the reverse -- and is quite catchy, but hasn't gotten nearly as much attention from what I've seen. Meanwhile, it turns out they have a surprisingly big and active fan base. This show was full of not just indie kids, but more then a few frat boys and aging scenesters. The response all night was pretty ecstatic -- to the new stuff, and to the somewhat older stuff, like this one.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:06:08:00. Saturday. NO!: DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE (#473, APR 19 2009).
This was my early favorite track from Narrow Stairs and I was quite glad to be able to record it here. Those new songs in general were exciting to hear live, especially "I Will Possess Your Heart" with its epic build. Also nice to see Ra Ra Riot again, who get better every time, and they did a nice job despite the fact that the venue really wasn't built for their sound. And for the third time we saw Cold War Kids by accident as an opening act; as usual they were decent but a little repetitive. Can't go wrong with "Hang Me Out to Dry" live, though.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:05:08:00. Friday. NO!: DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE (#472, APR 19 2009).
Somewhat to my surprise, they played quite a few old tunes before getting into the Narrow Stairs material in earnest. To their credit, the crowd seemed to appreciate it just about as much as the newer stuff -- sadly, this just got my hopes up for "Lowell, MA," which never came.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:06:04:08:00. Thursday. NO!: DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE (#471, APR 19 2009).
So obviously with my dissertation in progress and an impending move, my enthusiasm for the podcast has waned. I've been sitting on the clips from this show for about a month and a half, and finally got on them because I got a new computer that I wanted to put through its paces. Also, I shot these clips on my old camera (though upon arrival at the show I realized I probably could've got my bulkier new equipment in with no fuss), which I find super-annoying now. How did I ever use that thing to shoot video for so long? But, the show itself. I never saw any direct evidence, but I assume this show was set up by some student activities committee at Carroll College, because the school's fieldhouse was a very odd place for it to be. First of all, Waukesha turns out to be a much more strangely laid-out city than I ever realized. Getting from the freeway to the show -- with iPhone in hand, luckily -- was an absolute maze of twists, off-shoots and sudden one-way streets. And secondly, wouldn't the Rave or the Dane County Coliseum have made more sense for a southern Wisconsin show? At least as campus shows go, the sound was generally decent on the technical side (though the building's acoustics were not optimal). But beyond that, this was a show that I wouldn't have gone to a year ago, but which, after Narrow Stairs, I was quite excited for. Death Cab's major-label debut -- from which this song is taken -- sounded very major-label-debut-y to me and I lost a lot of confidence in the band after it. Then I heard that the lead single from their follow-up would have a five-minute instrumental intro and thought, oh, terrific, they're going "mature." Instead, they produced something complex and experimental, which is easily the best record they've ever made (I never got around to writing up my top albums of 2008, but I've got it at #4 on that list). On top of that, they probably won't be playing within 45 minutes of us again any time soon.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
