Personally — and professionally, come to that — I had more fun with the imported comic illusionism of Elephant Room at Arena (“would look far more comfortable in some ramshackle, claustrophobic space, where its raw aesthetics and ironic sensibility might … Continue reading
Adams: "I got a plan."
I saw Ryan Adams and the Cardinals open for Oasis (!) in 2008 (!!!) but I only caught part of their set from across a basketball arena and anyway it was not an especially memorable experience. But I quite enjoyed the talky, sloppy Adams solo show — and opener Jason Isbell — that I review in today’s Washington Post. Continue reading
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Tagged Aimee Mann, Click Track, Drive-By Truckers, Jason Isbell, music, Patton Oswalt, pop music, Ryan Adams, Strathmore, The Birchmere, The Washington Post
I covered the first of Beirut’s two-night, tour-ending stand at 9:30 Club last night for the Washington Post. Read all about it in the paper-paper version, or see the version on Click Track for a few more of Josh Sisk’s fine photos from the show.
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Tagged 9:30 Club, Beirut, Click Track, concerts, Francophiles, music, pop music, The Washington Post, Zach Condon
I’ve seen The Swell Season perform twice. One of those shows was an opening set for Damien Rice about six months before the film Once came out in the States, dramatically raising their profile. I’ve seen male-half-of-the-Swell Season Glen Hansard’s longtime band The Frames play a great show to a half empty 9:30 Club, too.
Anyway, the Paper of Record sent me to the 9:30 Club the other night to cover Marketa Irglova’s first solo tour, supporting her debut album Anar. My conclusion? She’s a great singer but too humble a performer to sustain interest through a headlining-length set, and the songs she’s writing without Hansard all seem to share one, slow tempo. To be fair, I don’t think Hansard’s as good a songwriter on his own as he is when collaborating with her, either. Here’s the review.
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Tagged 9:30 Club, Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, pop music, The Swell Season, The Washington Post
So the Washington Post sent me to a Kid Rock show. One of the best things about working as a critic is that it forces you to broaden your taste! It was my first visit to the Fillmore Silver Spring, the new Live Nation concert venue across from the AFI Silver Theater that finally opened its doors two months ago after years of preamble. Here’s my report of what all went down.
Kid Rock is 40 years old. His most recent album, the year-old “Born Free,” was produced by late-career rejuvenation specialist Rick Rubin and evokes 1970s Bob Seger more than it does the Clinton-era rap-rock that made Rock a multiplatinum star. He hasn’t been arrested at a strip club or a Waffle House in years. He’s recorded a duet with Sheryl Crow. Twice, actually.
But chin-and-middle-fingers up, Kid Rock fans. While these harbingers of mortality are unmistakable, Rock’s 105-minute set at a tightly-packed Fillmore Silver Spring last night demonstrated that maturity hasn’t laid its liver-spotted hands on him just yet. Continue reading
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Tagged bros, Click Track, Fillmore Silver Spring, Kid Rock, music, pop music, The Washington Post
I’ve written about OK Go, a band I like, on two prior occasions. The first time, I even incurred a big, fat ugly correction for four errors in the piece, only one of which was present in my copy as filed. (I’ve forgiven and forgotten, obviously!) Plus a lot of randomly italicized letters. But this piece I wrote in the Kennedy Center’s press closet in half an hour on a bottle of water and a cookie. With a headache.
Continue reading
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Tagged Damian Kulash, Kennedy Center, Milennium Stage, OK Go, The Washington Post
OUT: More Cowbell.
IN: Enough with the Goddamn Vibra-Slap Already.
“We’re opening for ourselves!” CAKE frontman John McCrea announced last night at the first of three consecutive sold-out evenings at the 9:30 Club. He was explaining their appearance at earlyish hour of 8:15. It’s “an evening with CAKE,” he said, stretching out the word “evening” in his mouth. Sounds like the eclectic Sacramento group — riding high on the strength of Showroom of Compassion, their first new music in seven years — had prepared a lengthy program and we’d all best get comfy, right?
Nope! They played exactly 90 minutes, the minimum acceptable amount for a band with a 17-year catalog. Which would’ve been okay if they didn’t do everything possible to drain the gig whenever any momentum or excitement threatened to accrue. A 20-minute intermission after only 45 of music? Allowable if you’re going to play at least double that upon your return, or if you’re an aged legend who physically requires a midshow rest. These guys? All in their mid-40s.
Post-intermission, they burned another 10 interminable minutes giving away a tree to an audience member. And eliciting a promise from the unlucky winner to re-plant said tree. And to use it to teach his students — he’s a teacher — “where food comes from.” And to post photos of himself with the tree on the band’s website. I have a compost pile in my apartment, and this was, even to me, insufferable. Continue reading
My WashPo review of is right here. Click on that Kyle Gustafson photo up there to get the Click Track version featuring more of his images.
Rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson, after taking the stage at 23:35 hours Friday night: “I said, ’9:30 Club?,’ looked at my watch and said, ‘Heck, I already missed it.’” What a voice, what a lady, a proud daughter of the great state of Oklahoma. Here’s my Washington Post review.
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Tagged 9:30 Club, Elvis Presley, music, The Washington Post, Wanda Jackson
I never listened to a Dismemberment Plan album in my life until a week-and-a-half ago, when I got a copy of Emergency & I to prepare for last weekend’s reunion gigs celebrating the 1999 albums’s new vinyl release. In addition to the Black Cat show I reviewed for the Washington Post on Friday night, I saw the second of The Plan’s two shows at the 9:30 Club, on Sunday. I’m glad I was there.
My review is after the jump. Continue reading
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Tagged Click Track, The Black Cat, The Dismemberment Plan, The Washington Post
Also, I went to a Michael Buble concert this week. I thought it was good, even if a few people who read my review thought I was raining on the guy just because I don’t think much of most of his original songs. But I like him just fine when he’s singing standards, and as a live performer — a guy who is fully present when he’s on stage; whose mildly blue (turquoise?) quips and dance steps don’t seem rehearsed to death, and who’ll draw out a tween-song interlude to five minutes as long as the jokes don’t dry up — I really do think he’s aces. “The American media thinks that because I wear a suit and sing romantic songs that this is some Sex and the City 3 shit,” he told us. “I’m here to change that perception.” The first time I saw him play, three years ago, he did exactly that. Ring a ding ding!
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Tagged Click Track, concerts, Michael Buble, pop music, The Washington Post, Verizon Center
Photo: Marina Chavez
So Saturday, me and my pal @HeatherMG went to see the guy who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee.” This short review is kinda buried in today’s Paper of Record, and split over two pages web-wise, so I’m posting it here to make things easier. For all of us.
Kris Kristofferson is no hurry, but he doesn’t like to waste time. At the Music Center at Strathmore last night, he marched onstage in his customary black-shirt-black-jeans-black-boots regalia at exactly the announced go-time of 8 p.m., launching with little fanfare into a generous 30-song solo acoustic revue of his bone-deep body of work. A hardy 74, the Rhodes Scholar and former Army helicopter pilot moved lightly from one coiled, economical story-song to the next, punctuating each tune with an abrupt “Thank you!” or better still, “True story!” rather than allow the last note to hang in the air — as they can, within the Music Center’s sound-abetting walls. His tectonic growl would be frightening if it didn’t let it break so freely into laughter, or if you couldn’t see that beatific smile. Continue reading
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Tagged country, Kris Kristofferson, pop music, Strathmore, The Washington Post
The membership of Toronto indie-rock impressionists Broken Social Scene fluctuates between as few as a half-dozen and as many as three times that, which maybe has something to do with how this band has always — well, since 1999 — made music that feels intimate and epic at the same time.
Their generous 130-minute show at the Warner Theater last night boasted a lineup of eight (with Lisa Lobsinger performing the parts sung on record by BSS alums Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, and Amy Millan) performing crystalline lullabies, triumphant fist pumpers, and a few of the discursive, hazy instrumentals that used to get a lot more time on the collective’s albums than they do now. The one that came out at the beginning of summer (after leaking weeks earlier) Forgiveness Rock Record, is more focused and song-oriented than its forebears. It contributed the bulk of last night’s set, but the show still felt thrillingly rife with possibility, even if it was, as frontman and co-founder Kevin Drew repeatedly observed, a Monday night. (That still matters when you’re a full time rock semi-star? Depressing. A more likely potential inhibitor was that Of Montreal and Janelle Monae were kicking off a tour a couple miles north at the 9:30 Club.) Continue reading
Posted in music, The Washington Post
Tagged Broken Social Scene, Click Track, pop music, The Washington Post, Warner Theatre
The abz of Songz
In the post-R. Kelly R&B carnality arms race (or is it an abs race?), 25-year-old Peterburg, Va. native Trey Songz is in little danger of being outgunned. He may one day use his limber tenor to map the terrain of other subjects and emotions, but four albums into a career on which he’s cited Kelly as the prime influence, Songz is, to hear him tell it, a man whose devotion to sex is so pure, so singular, so encompassing, “monastic” is the only word.
Last night at a sold-out DAR Constitution Hall, he prayed a high holy Mass.
The 100-minute session opened with “I Invented Sex” and peaked with “The Neighbors Know My Name.” (Not because they accidentally got some of his mail.) In between, Songz issued a more humble declaration of fealty with no, ha, fooled you. He did snap a photo of the audience, telling us, “There is no me without y’all.” Save for some conspicuous pre-recorded backing vocals, his tour with long-lived R&B star Monica was absent big-venue production gimmicks: the gig succeeded entirely on its star’s vocal power, energy and charisma, all boundless, though you wonder whether he has any other hobbies. Truth, his main addiction might be work: His breakthrough album, “Ready,” is barely a year old, but the follow-up, Passion, Pain & Pleasure drops next week.
Continue reading
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Tagged Click Track, DAR Consitution Hall, pop music, R. Kelly, shirtlessness, The Washington Post, Trey Songz
When Man of Few Words, Many Songs Tom Petty allowed himself a few words in praise of his since-forever band, The Heartbreakers, last night at — there’s just no way to get around saying this – Jiffy Lube Live, he introduced drummer Steve Ferrone as “the man who gets the job done.”
He could just as easily have been doing something he seems to detest: talking about himself.
Everyone knows you don’t go to Tom Petty for flash or invention. You to him for the thing he has, more than any other rocker of his generation, come to embody: excitement-free dependability. Since 1976, he’s rarely let more than a couple years go by without giving us another song or three that sounds just perfect on the radio of a car with the windows open. (It should’ve been Petty who eventually starting selling pickup trucks, not John Mellencamp, who despite sharing Petty’s greatest-hits approach to live performance, has at various points in his career appeared to suspect he was making art.) Petty has always made writing great — well, greatish — songs look easy. And last Christmas, an expansive box set compiling three decades of concert recordings made a strong case that TP and the HBs have earned a spot in the live rock band pantheon. Continue reading
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Tagged Click Track, John Mellencamp, pop music, set lists, The Washington Post, Tom Petty
When you fling a bra into the abyss, the abyss flings it back at you.
…where, ah, “the abyss” is the possibly-biggest-selling, certainly-biggest-sounding band in indie rock. Specifically, Arcade Fire. More specifically, Régine Chassagne, singer and co-songwriter and spouse of frontman Win Butler, who, late in Arcade Fire’s ecstatic 95-minute concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion last night, briefly abandoned her post behind the piano to toss that ladies’ garmet (which might actually have been a halter top; it was hard to see) back to its owner. This isn’t 1987 and we’re not Poison, her revolted glare seemed to scold.
Of course, it could very well have been circa-1987 U2, what with the urgent vastness of the music; the related sense of a big, important band grown huge and courting self-importance; and also the lack of any detectable awareness of sex– which is kind of weird, given how driving and propulsive Arcade Fire’s most arresting music is. On a tune like “Rebellion (Lies)”, the dizzying set-closer that invited the bra-throw, all eight musicians on stage were basically playing percussion, and almost all of them were shouting the lyrics whether they had microphones or not. Continue reading
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Tagged Arcade Fire, Click Track, concerts, Merriweather Post Pavilion, setlists, The Washington Post
(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. Continue reading
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Tagged Click Track, concerts, New Pornographers, pop music, setlists, The Washington Post
Better than Sleigh Bells, not as good as Broken Social Scene. My Click Track review of last night’s Broken Bells gig at the 9:30 Club is here and also here. I regret to inform you there was no sign of Christina Hendricks at the show.
RELATED: I wrote about Gnarls Barkley when they played the 9:30 a couple of summers ago.
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Tagged Click Track, Danger Mouse, Gnarls Barkley, music, The Shins, The Washington Post
Because the abstract of my already-short Click Track review of Jakob Dylan’s Friday-night 9:30 Club show with Neko Case and Kelly Hogan would be, “Okay, but too many samey-same slow songs and not enough Neko!,” I am re-posting this very distinct, very fast 2009 Jason Creps photo Campfire Noir Knockout with Twizzler (Or Is That a Red Vine?) in an attempt to balance the scales. Continue reading
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Tagged 9:30 Club, Click Track, Jakob Dylan, music, Neko Case, The Washington Post
So your problem with Norah Jones is what, exactly? Do you hate her because she’s beautiful? Because your mom likes her records? Because people have bought 35 million of them? Do you find it disrespectful to the honored dead that she sings like Dusty Springfield, even if that means her singing is lovely? Do those lulling, breathy pipes make it hard to tell, even after four studio albums, if she’s a good songwriter? Do you wish Ravi Shankar was your dad instead of hers?
Get over it. Or don’t. On the evidence of the latte chanteuse’s pleasant if not revelatory 90-minute set at the Warner Theatre on Friday night, it don’t make no nevermind to her. Ease is her thing, not exertion.
Read the review in its brief entirety on Click Track.
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Tagged Click Track, Norah Jones, pop music, The Washington Post, Warner Theatre, your mom
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