Entries tagged as ‘concerts’
(Two-thirds of) The New Pornographers. From Canada!
Who was it who said that 90 percent of success in life is showing up? Was that Woody Guthrie? Allen Ginsberg? Vince Lombardi? Brian Eno? T-Pain? It was somebody smart, and he or she was almost certainly discussing a concert by The New Pornographers, Canada’s pop musical Justice League whose legend far eclipses that of any of its individual superheroes (with the eternal exception of the exceptional alt-country chanteuse Neko Case). When the group can field its complete nine-strong roster — a feat they haven’t always managed when playing Our Nation’s Capitol — the results are seldom less then splendid. (more…)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Click Track, concerts, New Pornographers, pop music, setlists, The Washington Post
So there was Conan at DAR Constitution Hall last night, dressed in what he said was Eddie Murphy’s catsuit from Raw, possibly signaling his awareness of the perils that await the comic who lets his moment of cultural primacy go to his head. Raw came out in 1988. Eddie Murphy’s last good movie was, I think, Boomerang, from 1992.
Conan is even rocking Eddie’s odd pose from Raw in the first photo there. My phone is to a real camera what I am to a real photographer, but I figured you’d want to see these anyway on your way over to checking out the City Paper’s Arts Desk debrief of the DC stop on Conan’s almost-done Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. (SPOILER: It was good, but not great, but we liked it anyway.)
This discussion, which I failed to grasp was being “recorded” and would be presented to you, the reader, with minimal editing, stars Benjamin R. Freed and CP arts editor Jonathan L. Fischer and one Christopher T. Klimek, whom I suspect may have been drunk for at least part of it. It’s choppy and discursive and long-winded and confusing, but that’s all part of the choppy, discursive, long-winded fun. (more…)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: comedy, Conan O'Brien, concerts, DAR Consitution Hall, Meat Loaf, Television
So Elvis Costello is playing in town tonight. I am a fan. I admire a lot of things about Elvis besides the fact that he’s written hundreds of songs, a very high percentage of which I find listenable, dozens I think are pretty great, and at least a handful I don’t know how I lived without. (Not ’til I was 22 did a pal give me a copy of the The Very Best of Elvis Costello & The Attractions, if you can believe.)
Admittedly, my can’t-live-without E.C. playlist does not include anything from, say, the album he made with Anne Sofie von Otter, or the one he made with Burt Bacharach. But I commend his adventurousness and versatility, and especially his work ethic: He’s always giving songs away, interviewing Lou Reed or Bruce Springsteen or Bill Clinton on premium cable, singing on other people’s records, teaching himself musical notation 20 years into his career, composing a ballet, making unaccountable cameos in movies like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, writing an opera, and here and there tossing off another perfectly nasty rock song like it’s nothing. Dude always has four projects cooking and and nine more on the back burner, and he seems to pay for his collection of funny hats by flying around playing concerts that seldom repeat a setlist and regularly clock in around two-and-a-half hours. So: Respect.
Of course, Elvis’s productivity and idiomatic wanderlust are the selfsame qualities that can make him seem like an annoying magpie, especially to listeners who only want to hear him spit venom about Liv Tyler’s mom while keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas open up the throttle. (more…)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: concerts, country, Elvis Costello, pop music
“There’s something about the authoritative wrong note that I’ve always really liked,” opined John Mayer at the Verizon Center Saturday night.
You think? Ever since his racy, racially inflammatory musings in a Playboy interview* hit the web, Mayer — the 32-year-old, six-foot-plus, sensitive balladeer and guitar lothario who once took home a Grammy for a song called “Your Body Is a Wonderland” — has been in a defensive crouch. For his 3.1 million Twitter followers, the rest has been (mostly) silence since 2:26 p.m. on Feb. 10, when he fretted, “They don’t make rehab centers for being an a-hole.”
That night, he nearly broke down on stage in Nashville, fumbling through two minutes, 50 seconds of awkward, apparently heartfelt apology for saying — well, he said plenty. Let it suffice that the interview begged the question of why megaselling albums like 2006’s Continuum and last year’s Battle Studies are such stubbornly milquetoast insipid affairs when their singularly self-aware author seems to have at least a boxed set’s worth of early-Prince freakitude inside him. (more…)
Categories: The Washington Post · music
Tagged: celebrity, concerts, damage control, John Mayer, Playboy, pop music, Verizon Center
November 23, 2009 · 1 Comment
By Thursday morning last week, I had made up my mind to give the show Bruce Springsteen played in Baltimore on Friday night a pass. My attempts to procure a ticket through honorable means had failed. The aftermarket bidding for general admission tickets to the arena floor, where my friends would be, had inflated beyond my rationally justifiable price range. I’d already seen the great man perform with the E Street Band twice in 2009; five times in the last 24 months. That’s enough Boss, surely.
Even before I was a semi-pro critic, I was skeptical of superlatives. To me, they always reduced criticism to mere marketing. I don’t even like the year-end lists nearly every professional critic is compelled to compile. So that’s why, after returning home in the small hours of Saturday morning having experienced a concert that left me elated like no rock show has in years, I hedged. “One of the three or five best gigs I’ve ever seen,” I wrote in a excited Facebook post before going to bed.
But after chewing the matter over in the cold, clear light of a couple of days, I’m prepared to go all in: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s first show in Baltimore since 1973 was the best concert I have ever attended, by The Boss or anyone else. (more…)
Categories: job insecurity · music · navel-gazing
Tagged: Baltimore, Bruce Springsteen, concerts, criticism, pop music, setlists, superlatives
Bruce Sprinsteen at Verzion Center, Monday, May 18, 2009. Photo by Kyle Gustafson.
Better: Read this review on DCist, where you can enjoy the rest of the great Kyle “Information Leafblower” Gustafson’s fabulous concert photos.
Bruce Springsteen is still Working on a Theme.
Actually, it’s more or less the same theme he’s been working on at least since Darkness on the Edge of Town in 1978, when the theme morphed from, essentially:
This town is full of losers. Let’s you and me pull out of here to win!
(more…)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Bruce Springsteen, concerts, faith, music, rock and roll, salvation
They’re called PufferSpheres, apparently, and they’re made by PufferFish Ltd., a firm in Edinburgh. How do I know? I just got a nice e-mail from PufferFish’s Mr. Ben Allan, thanking me for my kind (and kind of juvenile, though he was nice enough not to mention that) words about his remarkable product. (While my verdict on Coldplay was mixed-to-favorable, my estimation of the vidi-balls was an eleven-point-oh.)
I’d post a photo of one of the vidi-balls in action, but despite all of the picture-takers that David Malitz mentioned in his review in the Paper of Record, I can find only photos of the balls glowing in different colors — none that illustrate their unique video-projection properties. You can check out PufferFish’s site for some quality demo reel.
Mr. Allan continues:
And nice ‘balls’ centred punnery too – something for which we have a particular penchant, but not often the balls to go in for publicly!
No, Mr. Allan, thank you. Your balls were unquestionably the best thing about this most entertaining show.
Categories: DCist · job insecurity · music · technology
Tagged: Coldplay, concerts, PufferSpheres
How many things cost only one-third more now than they did seven years ago? Concert tickets, following their stratospheric mid-90s leap (another reason to hate Don Henley) may actually have leveled out in the first part of the 21st century. When the Old 97s play the 9:30 next week, they’ll be charging only $5 more face than they did back in 2001. (Good seats still available, incredibly.) These guys have kids and mortgages! How can they do that?
Here’s my review of their reassuring latest, Blame It on Gravity, from today’s Weekend section. I haven’t been able to find it on the Paper of Record’s web site anywhere except for right here.
Categories: 9:30 Club · The Washington Post · music · navel-gazing · shameless self-promotion
Tagged: concerts, inflation, nostalgia, Old 97s
Emmylou Harris. National treasure, no? Yes. Reviewed at Wolf Trap for the Paper of Record.
Categories: The Washington Post · Wolf Trap · music · shameless self-promotion
Tagged: concerts, cowboy boots, Emmylou Harris, lightning
