Live: Songs for Moms, Future Virgins, Landlords

When: April 29
Where: Silent Barn

Another very tardy live review (and now several days more tardy thanks to Blogger's disappearing act last week).  There was a showcase of sorts for Shellshag's Starcleaner Records at Silent Barn a couple of weeks ago.  Shellshag canceled their own set at the last minute, but the rest of the bands were plenty to carry the show.

Landlords had played energetic punk that was just a bit country-influenced.  Honestly, I don't have that much to say about it (I know!).  It was very enjoyable.

Future Virgins were even better.  They started their set at full tilt and hit that perfect balance of hardcore and pop (perfect balance is not the same as an equal balance - they are way more hardcore than pop).  They were tight, they were aggressive and they were fun.  This is one of the best punk bands I've seen in a long time.  They're fairly traditional, but they've got their own voice

Of course, the highlight of the night was Songs for Moms, a trio of ladies from California.  They've got this feminist cow punk thing going on that, while maybe not musically revolutionary, sounds very fresh.  There is a country twang in all of their songs, but the cues they take from country are the genre's greatest strengths, often overlooked by rockists who like "everything except country."  Country music has a long history of powerful women with powerful voices and it's an appropriate reference point for the tough wail of SFM's two frontwomen.

The band is more punk than country, though.  Their songs are loud, aggressive and often shouted.  There's a lot of anger in their music (several songs are about the band's personal experiences with rape and sexual assault) but also a lot of compassion and depth.  Their lyrics on their album We Used To Believe In the West are some of the best I've heard in recent years - courageous, personal, insightful, simple yet oblique enough to leave them open to interpretation.

The band is tight.  Although their music is purposefully simple - SFM don't need any trickery - their arrangements are deceptively difficult.  The band has an exceptional ear for songwriting and arrangement, with instruments dropping in and out, answering back to the vocals, breaking into split seconds of silence, cutting or doubling tempos and cutting through some breakneck licks without ever making a big deal of it.  Their melodies are also consistently excellent, very catchy but still interesting.

My only disappointment with the show is just that the band didn't play many songs off We Used to Believe.  I love that album and there's not a song on there I wouldn't like to hear live.  But the band hit a few of them and their other songs, both older and newer, were of equal caliber.

Songs For Moms aren't cutting edge in sonic experimentation or anything like that - that's not what they're about.  They're about seeing how they can carve a space for a new voice using traditional country and punk frameworks.  And while they aren't off exploring music's frontiers, they don't sound quite like anyone else I've ever heard.  They are a group of rare talent and rare heart. [myspace]

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Live: Jeff the Brotherhood, Heavy Cream, Hell Beach + more

When: April 2, 2011
Where: Death By Audio

When I went to Death By Audio last weekend, I will admit I was not really in the mood for the music of the night - namely slightly southern-fried, post-ironic-hipster-idol-y, 60's-inflected indie rock.  But that doesn't change the fact that nearly the entire show was a disappointment.

When I arrived, Colleen Green was on stage.  The band is made up of two affected, Ray-Ban sporting women playing guitar and bass over a cheesy drum machine.  That's a setup that could go either way, but in this case, it went in a bad way.  The music was terrible, but that wasn't really the problem - in fact, that provided the only point on which you could argue the band had some merit.  My friend Pepe (thanks, random name generator) thought that the band members were courageous to take the stage even though they were so astoundingly bad.  However, I had the distinct feeling that this wasn't a brave presentation of incompetence in the populist tradition that runs from punk and No Wave through Beat Happening up to contemporary vanguard of bands that at least (sometimes) fake inability to play their instruments (e.g. Stupid Party, Total Slacker).

But Colleen Green is of a different tribe.  To me, their performance reeked of cowardice.  Their incompetence seemed distinctly calculated to allow them to take the stage without threatening insecure men.  This is one of the most disturbing faces of the nostalgia that has overwhelmed indie music and alternative youth culture in recent years - the relegation of women to a sort of Trix Rabbit role (silly girls, guitars are for men).  It's been difficult for me to put my finger on what separates the anti-feminist backlash of bands like Best Coast and Colleen Green from distinctly empowering female figures like Alexis Krauss of Sleigh Bells (who, after all, does not write the band's music or play an instrument, but whose ditsy bimbo character who thought she forgot her sunglasses is delivered with ambiguous derision and balanced with massive, nasty sound and one uncurbed scream).  Not every female in music has to be a bra-burning Riot Grrrl, but if you are female and playing rock or pop music, you are making a statement on feminism, whether you like it or not.  This isn't about what's fair, it's about reality, and in reality, Colleen Green says loud and clear that "girl bands" are a novelty.  We ladies of the music scene are good for a laugh, but let's leave the real music to the men.

Colleen Green were followed by X-Ray Eyeballs, an ultimately forgettable act of two and three chord songs.  I'd give them another chance, but their performance at DBA was not exactly something to write home about.

I wish Hell Beach was as forgettable as X-Ray Eyeballs, but unfortunately, the opening of their set, a song charmingly entitled "Dead Friends" is still seared in my memory.  The lyrics, which you can read for yourself here, are a tasteless, artless attempt to be edgy.  Or maybe it's an attempt to parody edgy rock lyrics.  Whatever they were attempting, they failed.  Actually, I should say vocalist Susan Tinsley failed.  The other two members of the band were pretty alright, with drummer Jolene Boyce having exactly the edge that Colleen Green was lacking.  Brad Holland managed to wrangle some nasty snarls out of his guitar - cliched snarls, but in a way that's more art-smart referential than uncreative.

The band is clearly going for some sort of goth punk or goth grunge.  Don't get me wrong, goth is all about having a sense of humor (a dimension of the genre missed by an entire generation of Hot Topic customers and sickly-looking gloomsters).  Goth's seminal single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead," is one of the of the funniest songs in pop history.  But that song was both lyrically clever and sonically creative.  "Dead Friends," on the other hand, is so obvious that you can actually feel yourself getting stupider as you listen - and not in a fun way.  I mean, c'mon Tinsley, how old are you?

The only band of the night that really did meet my expectations was Heavy Cream.  Part of the reason the band met my expectations is that those expectations had been lowered when I saw Heavy Cream at Union Pool (if I remember correctly) and found them to be nothing more than good Nashville-inflected garage rock.  I had hyped them up in my own mind to be the greatest thing since half-and-half (sorry) but this time, I approached the group with more reasonable expectations.

Nashville-inflected garage rock definitely still summarizes the band's sound.  However, there was something far more punk rock about their performance at DBA.  Part of it wasn't musical at all.  When guitarist Mimi Galbierz broke a string soon after the band took the stage, the set was stalled while the band tried to find a guitar to borrow.  (Jake's guitar, "Jamin," was suggested until the band remembered that guitar would only have three strings to their current five.)  While the band awkwardly pleaded with the audience to supply them a guitar, singer Jessica McFarland began berating the audience for their lack of creative contributions in the downtime.  Whether tongue-in-cheek or serious, McFarland's obvious contempt for the audience brought the show to a new level.  The band's frustration at being plagued with technical difficulties (the guitar being just one of several mishaps) was channeled into their music, giving it a harder edge.  McFarland can be compared to that other blond singer of the young Nashville scene, Jemina Pearl, in as much as both possess the stage with delightful arrogance and a sort of icy sexuality.  But McFarland's presentation is far more mature than Pearl's petulant (if captivating) behavior.

After the venomous performance by Heavy Cream, headliners Jeff the Brotherhood failed to impress.  I mean, they failed to impress me.  The audience seemed to dig it, moshing violently from Jake's first note on.  But the crowd at Jeff shows seems increasingly dominated by the kind of people who use the mosh pit as an outlet for macho aggression.  The pit is all about violence, which is obviously kinda the point.  But every scene where slam dancing dominates eventually seems to draw out a more bullying element, the meatheads who have ruined countless hardcore shows from the early 80's onward.  To be clear, these sort of meatheads didn't dominate the Jeff show - but I can feel a slide in that direction in the increasing roughness and decreasing fun of the audience.  People are starting to come not for the music but because they like to shove other people around.

But that's not the Orrall brothers' fault and it wasn't what made the show such a disappointment.  What ultimately ruined the set was simply the band's straightforward delivery.  The reason Jeff the Brotherhood shows have always excited me is Jake's ridiculous rockstar posturing, his command of the stage and piercing comprehension of rock'n'roll showmanship.  But last weekend, the band just played their songs.  They played well and with enthusiasm, but a spark was missing.  Whether the band is burning out, growing lazy or was just having a weary night remains to be seen, but whatever the reason, the band was simply not compelling or commanding.  Of course, in saying this, I am only comparing the band to themselves, their past performances.  Compared with the vast majority of acts out there, they are still one of the meanest live shows of 2011.  But for longtime fans, their current presentation seems distinctly uninspired.

Let's hope it was just an off night and not the start of the decline of indie's rockingest band.

Album: Meat Puppets - Sewn Together

Album: Sewn Together
Megaforce, 2009
Rating: ******** (8/10)

Seminal cow-punk freaks the Meat Puppets were one of American punk's earliest and most important groups, back in the early 80's glory days of Black Flag's SST label. Though they helped jumpstart the hardcore scene, the Puppets have always been far more relaxed than most of their West Coast peers, drenching their music in country and psychedelia to the point that it's only recognizable as "punk" by its historical context.

A lot has happened since those days, though. The lines between indie and mainstream have blurred and American punk has undergone a disturbing metamorphosis to become "alternative rock." And in this new context, the Puppets seem to have had some trouble getting their footing.

Sewn Together is the second album since Kirkwood brothers Cris and Curt reunited in 2006. Their 2007 release, Rise to Your Knees, hearkened back to the Puppets' best era but fell short of the excitement of their SST records. On Sewn Together, the band takes a different tack. Following a label change (their sixth move in as many albums), the Puppets recorded their most polished, commercialized music to date.

I'm not one to begrudge a band the use of technology out of some false nostalgia, nor am I one to criticize a band for relying heavily on the producer's engineering to shape their sound. But fans of classic Meat Puppets material will likely be disappointed. In addition to the slick production, Sewn Together has toned down both the velocity and the volume of the band's earlier work. Everything is cleaned up and consequently, it's far less in-your-face than the old material.

Now, if this is the band "selling out" and attempting a commercially viable album for once in their careers, I really can't hold it against them. After all, they deserve some fans and some money for all they've contributed to the evolution of rock music. And if this is how they have to get it, so be it. Or maybe it has nothing to do with moving units, maybe they just like the way this sounds. And that's fine too. It's a totally solid album and would be from any band - it just might not appeal to the same crowd as did, say, Meat Puppets II.

And the Puppets haven't lost any of their real strengths either - as always, they boast masterful songwriting, addictive melodies and some stunning lead guitar. "Blanket of Weeds" boasts a brilliant guitar line and well-conceived stops, as well as some cool sonic disintegration at the end. "Sapphire" and "Go To Your Head" waltz through slow 6/8 rhythms, while "I'm Not You" launches into a high-speed two-step (and sounds more like classic Meat Puppets than anything else on the album).

As the album wears on, it becomes slightly less worthy of note. None of the songs clock in under three minutes (compared to their first two albums which had one song between them over the three minute mark). That's not inherently bad, but some of the songs on Sewn Together do drag on too long and end up stagnant. The arrangements are also rather monotonous. There's quite a bit of piano and even some whistling on the album, so there is variety between the songs. But within each track, all the instruments tend to just carry on together right through doing about what they did from the start. This might work with shorter songs, but in the three to five minute range, it's hard not to thirst for something less predictable.

Despite the lack of momentum on some tracks, though, Sewn Together is a great album. Few songwriters can match the Kirkwood brothers and that alone could carry the record. This album may not be the dream of old-school fans, but its more tempered psychedelic country twang will bring a new audience into the fold.

[MySpace]