Monday, May 15, 2006

go robot its your birthday!

hey dudes and ladies its edan here, just wanted to point out the fact that this some bitch is a year old already, i cant believe it, seriously, i thought i would keep up with this for like a day, but here it is and with many exceptions ive been bringing the show reviews weekly. ive left this thing alone for months at a time and people still come back to check it out. i just wanted to say thanks to every one who stops by and especially all the bands for putting on the shows that keep me getting out there and seeing what its all about. im gonna shut up now and do something else, im not just a blogger you know, jeeeeez.

thanks,
edan

ps maybe in a few days ill tally up the results and see how many bands ive seen and award people i have seen the most, with an award that means absolutely nothing and will exist only in word form right here on this page, now thats honor if ive ever seen it.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Pretty Girls Make Graves, Giant Drag & the Joggers @ Irving Plaze 5/13/06

Fucking Irving Plaza! they always fuck with the set times, one time you go and you wait around forever for the first band to play and then other times you get there 45 mins after doors and the band is playing thier last song, that was the case last night i caught the last song from the excellent Joggers but that was it, i was pissed i havent seen them in months and they rock the live show.


Giant Drag blew it, up the two piece from LA couldnt be cooler, so many good duos there days. the simger is so cute and soft spoken but shit if she doesnt have the dirtiest sailors mouth ever. they played a chris isaac cover and she told a story about how she originally wrote the song when she was 8 and she played it for her 24-years-to-her-elder lover and he stole it and never talked to her again. and afterwards she said "sometimes broken hearts are worse than broken hymens" jesus! and this time i noticed something i hadnt before, the drummer has a keyboard set up next to him that he plays the bass line with, its a great setup i cant think ive seen before. these guys have been in support of thier first full length for like ever, but it hasnt gotten old yet. check out "my dick sux"



Pretty Girls Make Graves tear me up. i mean, i love em, but they have this problem with fame i think. they have been around for quite a bit now, something like 4-5 years. ive seen them in many different settings and they always seem like they want more fame, but they are not a fan friendly band by any means, they always say how thankful they are, but they never seem to stray from a selist or play an old song, even though they always get begged for, youd think that by this point they could say maybe we should learn that song and play it on tour, but they are all about thier new material, which is good but the longer they are a band the more they stray from their roots. the new album is a good album, but its a pregression where each album makes the last almost unrecognizable, the efforts have always been more interesting than the last but that doesnt make them better. they used to be really punk rock and the crowd would rock out along, but they jsut keep evolving and attracting the types of people that make shows unfun, im talking to you standers, i actually heard a girl last night between songs say, "man i wish he would stop dancing" ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME! so thats my cents, the performace was excellent, but the crowd made the experience less so. the band are all great at what they do and the new keyboard player just keeps melding more and more, the guitarists murder thier instruments and andrea zollo is a commanding frontwoman but she doesnt play an instrument and that is where you start getting more in with the crowd playing to them and what not, you cant just stare at a dot in the back of the room like youre queen shit, wave to people, play to them. when you sing a lyric like "reach out so i can touch you" fucking reach out, you dont have to have one of the peons actually touch you god forbid, just reach out towards them, come on. im sorry about this review, i do love this band, i loved them last night, but i think its because i do that i have so many harsh criticisms for them, i wish it werent this way but it is. i could go on for hours but i wont, ill get to the pics, isnt that what you people skip to anyway?





Matt + Kim, Aa, & Utep @ union pool 05/10/06

The Bicycle Film Festival which ended its run today had a kickoff party last wednesday with some rockin bands to promote it, and it was free! i missed home video sadly as they have been on hiatus for like 11 months because they were having trouble shopping thier album and lost thier drummer, but this was their first performance back so i was eager to see how the chemistry was with the new lineup, but alas ill have to wait to see them at mercury on tues w/ his name is alive.

utep (cant find a link because thats also the name of a college in tx) was hard to get into, at times i thought it was kind of good spacey metal stuff, but then other times it just seemed like popmetal crap that could easily meld in with the mtv crowd, but what do you expect from the assclown that runs lit lounge. he named his club after a terrible band.

Aa are back to the same old tricks after experimenting this way and that its back to the classic four man tribal space stuff, i have to say i really like the one guy who has the delay on his mic and does lots of drum work with and without that on them, it adds that little something extra to and already great band, i know hes been doing it forever but its just a little nuance i was paying lots of attention to this time around.



Matt and Kim
descend further and further into thier bulk of new material and i couldnt be happier, the crowd was so into this performance and it made it megaincredible and there were so many crowdsurfers i thought i was at a nofx show. seriously i got beaten down. they only played one old track, the classic, 5k, except for that it was all fantastic newness, with one song never erver played beferr. speechless as usual, but apparently this record still wont come out for a while, theres a bunch of mixing left and shit, but i dont give two shit, the microphone couldve been up matts ass and the shit would sound great, gross pun not intended. im just dying because i got these fragments from the different new songs, so ill just think about three seconds of keyboard and play it over and over in my head for hours. its like this: doot da doo doo doot doo doot doot blam blam blam, blam blam blam and thats all i got stuck in my brain all the time. its not as fun as it sounds, who am i kidding its fucking fantastic!

Lightning Bolt @ the hook 5/7/06

Lightning Bolt hadnt graced nyc with thier presence since early august. Since then they have released an entire new album, to great acclaim including my own. They have also spawned brian gibson's side project Wizardzz which is also pretty awesome, how couldnt it be? so i had incredibly high expectations for thier first show in 9 months, but i was somewhat disappointed. not highly, but somewhat. they just seemed rusty, they had some technical problems, but that wasnt even it, something was missing and it was just the vibe that was being spread, something felt funky. maybe they just hadnt been touring as hard and werent in full swing yet, that shouldnt be a problem now that they are on tour for the rest of the summer, including a week or two in japan. they just didnt play the hits, they played only a few tracks off the new album a few oldies and then some freejams that just didnt seem like killer LB jams. no 13 monsters, no draculas mountain. i wanted to hear more of the new album since ive had the time to absorb it because it really does just blow all thier other efforts out of the water, but maybe they just cant do it all at once since it is so incredibly heavy. oh well, i am in no way put off, ill be there front and center next time but for now all i can do is hope that ill get my head blown off next time. one pretty cool thing about the performance was they have this new setpiece that is a huge convex mirror that is mounted above thier amps and set at an angle so if you are short or out of range of the melee you can still see the LB rocking out backwards, but you cant really get a picture of it because it shoots your flash right back at ya. also so many people shoot video at these bolt shows i go to, but none of that footage comes to light, sure there is some shit on youtube, but not everything. you can hear some recent perf clips over at thier site from thier terrastock set. until next timel: "shwa shshhsh ammash shmoo yawashaa!" -brian chippendale.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Bent completely Outta Shape

hey all, read some sad news this afternoon, it appears bent outta shape are gonna call it quits. and i was just listening to stray dog town this morning. jaime put this message up on thier myspace today:

so Bent outta shape has decided to call it quits. this is probably good news to some and bad news to others. S'bout time you say! Why do you ask? many reasons. The main one being that since around the time Nate left it started to feel like it's "me and skip's" band...which i don't think is lame..but it doesn't feel right for this particular group. So we figured we should just do a new band with new people who don't come into it thinking they are joining a pre-existing entity and have to do what we say or something.know what im sayin? Also nate and ren are moving to california , mike catalano is busy jerking off to vampire lesbian movies, and Ian and Lauren can't tour. Skip and I figured it was just better to end on a somewhat dignified note i guess? i dont think im conveying anything relevent in this message...i guess i just want people to know! bent is fucking done! hallelujah! im sad...but happy. ... i mean it just a band..whats the point of basing your life around something silly like that if it isn't the same anymore.... anyway we are going to do a last show or maybe even a short tour in the end of june/ early July. Keep ya posted.Hope you dont think this is wierd i posted this on the internet...Love, Jamie Ewing take care!

to bad to see a good band go the way of the betamax, but if it has to it has to, hopefully the last tour we be balls out and the new projects the same.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Shoplifting @ the knit 5/6/06

Shoplifting were awesome, they have a great dancy sound. it definatley shapeshifts is genre quite a bit but if i listen hard enough at times i am reminded of a young make up. its just got that mad dancy feel to it. i just want to mechanically dance along to hannah killer tight drums, i swear if i didnt see her i would think it was a machine she is right on with her chops. the guitarist is the highlight here though going from rhythm to psych freak and back again the guy definatley commands a band where every member is giving there all to be the most in control. vocally they go from sweet serenade to fits of yelling all in the span of one song. i wish i could see them again at thier matinee show, but alas, they had to cut last night a bit short due to time restraints but that didnt change the quality of the show one bit.

the Yeah Yeah Yeah's, the Dirtbombs & black lips @ roseland 5/3/06

of course work cause me to miss the black lips and 75% of the dirtbombs, oh well, thats annoying. i cant believe black lips played at roseland i hope they blew those snobby fucks away, this show was seriously insanely overcrowded, but i guess i shouldve expected it. its been like three years since ive seen the yyy's at bowery, that show was right before fever to tell broke them like crazy. it was a great show karen was such a crazy bitch of a front woman and chase and zinner are really great together, all of them sorta of seem to feel each other. which brings us to now show your bones just came out and it slays straight up, i really dig the record, i could use for the more metal side of karen, but thats fine these tunes are so catchy and chases drums are so prominent in the mix, zinner doing some crazy psych effects on his guitar. so there it is roseland gets dark and the kids take the stage to a packed house. theyd already been properly prepped by the openers so it was go time. they dove right in and blew threw a pretty good sized set full of oldies and newies and karen was in full form, ive read in the past that she doesnt really feel as much energy at the larger venues, but she didnt seem affected by it on this night. she was all over the place and rockin it out phenomena was fantastic but it was the older stuff like pin and y control, holy lord what a good rendition. after a quick costume change they closed of course with an acoustic maps dedicated to every one and then a little date with the night. a showgasm if there ever was. sometimes i hate paying the big prices but then when i do i always end up knowing it was worth it.



Mt Eerie + Thanksgiving @ the syrup room 5/1/06

I can always enjoy a nice light mt eerie show to counteract the crazy rediculous rockness of many of the shows i go to, you know its always going to be a fun night full of really sweet songs and probably just as many laughs to go with it, not to mention the most curtsies ive seen since i went to the nutcracker.

thanksgiving was really good, i had never seen him before, its the guy who plays the drums for phil these days, and phil plays drums for him. nice pop tunes with very engaging vocal stylings, if there was a school of songwriting that phil leads, thanksgiving seems to be a disciple, which is not a bad thing, but if you start hanging with some one like that for that long he might rub off on you.

mt eerie was grand but not the best ive seen he played a somewhat short set, but i guess it was getting rather late. it was a great mix of his shakey voiced electric guitar drivin ballads. i do love it when he rocks out though seems so out of character but at the same time exactly what he should be doing. the highlight came at the end when he sang the selfreferecial song about going to a mt eerie show, but he told the crowd to sing along and he would tell them the lyrics as they went. it was kind of a disaster but it also sounded really great because he wouls squeek out most of a word and then every one would relaize what it was going to be so it was a bunch of people jumping the gun on lyrics just to try and keep up, does that make sense? dont worry neither did the idea. i was able to grab the vinyl version of "no flashlight" courtesy of a friend and it says on the cover that its the biggest album cover ever, but i didnt think it could be, upon getting home and folding it out it really is like 5'x5' shit is tight.

Defiance, OH & Matt + Kim @the coz 4/30/06

ifn i didnt go to two shows that gloryhole played in one week and miss them both times, fuckin work mixing with early shows, this job thing is for suckers. anywho go to the coz just in time for matt and kim to set up and play, the news songs are solidifying in my brains finally i can start rapping my head around the goodness, it was pretty warm and packed in there so matt had to stand upon his amp just to be able to chat with people between songs, i think much of this crowd made the trek out for defiance not really having a good idea of who matt and kim were, so most people were pretty mellow through out but it didnt stop the diehards from rocking out, good stuff, but it was no last weeks loft party.


it was a triumphant return for defiance, about a year after they had played right next door at the woodser. will couldnt make it out on this tour and lacking a core member sure seemed to make the band feel like something was missing, but all the kids tried as best as they could to fill in the gap left by him, by singing along as loud as they could on classics and new songs alike. i really have a soft spot in my heart for these folkpunkers from OH. they just have really great ideas for how a band operates on all fronts. they just released thier first full length that they didnt self release, they chose no idea, which i think is doing some pretty great work these days for lots of people in the diy punk community. a pretty good distro deal, $6 for the cd or the vinyl, you cant beat that shit. and its a very diverse record, i mean sure its all folky, but there are some plucky acoustic jams and some rough sing along rockers. all in the span of 32 mins. but back to the show, they rocked hard kids were flyin every where, song vocal chords were definately blown and as if every one werent tired enough after 12-15 songs they closed with a cover of "things we say" by the gorilla biscuits. killer cuts! so sweaty and drunk and it was only 9pm.