Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Let's Go Do Some Crimes


Beach House - "Master of None"
Jeffrey Lewis - "Don't Let the Record Label Take You Out to Lunch"

First, S. Trout's got it right. With her ostensibly benign yet quietly devastating echo-croon, Victoria Legrand of Beach House seared the lowly visages of a bunch of people with haircuts and chucks standing around in the Mercury Lounge last night. Jeffrey Lewis' opened playing with this hilariously spastic guy named Peter Stampfel who's some OG folk dude who needs to hang out with me all the time and play hopscotch. Also the chick on bass really seemed to be the nicest person ever to wear pants. She was very small and sitting on a stool. Stampfel said he was working on an album made up of a song for every year from last century. Sufjan's got nothin' on this guy. Jeffrey Lewis had what he called "low budget videos" which were these big books filled with sequential crayon drawings. He turned the pages as he sang and the pictures corresponded to the lyrics. That took way too long to explain something very simple. Anyway, he did this song called "Creeping Brain" which was basically the funniest thing I've ever seen on a stage where guitars are supposed to be all serious. He also had a book for "Sifting" by Nirvana, which was equally funny. Just from that show it was clear that Lewis is one of the most pointedly and self-consciously clever songwriters around. So yeah, the Dave Eggers or Chuckles Kaufman of neo-folk. And man, he doesn't even try to sing. I hate when peeps try to do that.

Beach House basically made me feel like I was being slurped into the pillowy bowels of a benevolent God. All I got to say bout that.

Overall, Best show I've seen in awhile and I only had two beers.

Second, I'm not paying attention to this right now. But I am paying attention to this. This song bookends Zodiac, something else Trout already covered pretty well, considering his brain's only nutrients come from meat roll-ups. I couldn't find SP's favorite video of all time, the one for Donovan's OG version of the song, which is the one in Zodiac. This one has a tumescent belly-button though. All's I hafta say is, at least its not a tumescent butthole!

That's what she said.

2 comments:

Speckled Trout said...

seems like the Arcade Fire is getting pretty great reviews, but blog commenters are reluctant to praise it. Everybody at that idolator link was negative or snarky or indifferent to the album. i can't recall seeing a positive comment on that blog or in the comments on the many Fire posts they've thrown up over the past couple days.

whatever, i like it.

Furman P. Slothra said...

just listened to it all the way through. some good stuff goin on there, but didn't quite cause me to restructure my view of the cosmos or anything. we'll see after more listens.