A Couple Of Words From The Cold South

Well - "south" - is maybe a bit of an exageration, but it was south of the danish border, when I was on a short germany club tour with the band Late Night Venture last thursday and friday.

I thought i'd just put a couple of words and launch some pictures from the tour.

By now, we have played quite a lot of shows here and there in all sorts of venues in denmark as well as in other countries such as Sweden, UK, Finland and off course also Germany, and this time it was the time of playing small clubs : Astra Stube in Hamburg and Intersoup in Berlin.

It seems like everytime we go to germany it always ends up in ourselves having a really good time, which is due to a very enthusiastic audience, venues that cares about making everything work as best as possible, and then just good vibrations.

This time was no different, than the other times, making both shows a very nice experience.

17.04.2008 - Astra Stube - Hamburg

First show was at the small club Astra Stube in Hamburg, a really cool and pretty smashed place, just like we like it. We've played there before, but this time, they had improved the place, making a bigger stage and some better monitoring gear, so we could actually fit on the stage this time (last time both Peter and myself had to stand on the floor instead of the stage) .
One could think that these small places are not good for our pretty broad sound, but it really doesn't matter, in fact we feel quite comfortable at these small venues. It feels a bit more like the rehearsal space and it's very nice to be so close to audience, and that night there was a lot of dedicated listeners in the audience, making it even better to play the songs.

These things all added up to a good atmosphere which kind of developed into a party afterwards, being able to talk with a lot of the locals and just have a good time, drinking all the Astra's in the Stube.

Hospitality is not an issue in Hamburg, so we had a good sleep, and on the day after, the arrangers had us out for brunch, before we were off to Berlin.

Astra Stube is definately a good place to stop by when touring in Germany, and we will be back there for sure, just not on our forthcoming Europe tour, because its too close.

The Setlist of this night was:

• Lazy Star
• Love/Respect Call
• Ready For The Knife
• End Of I
• Sidekick Trip To Mars
• Trapped In Glass
• Skylights
• After
• Acorns Fall

• Encore : Silent Carriers

18.04.2008 - Intersoup - Berlin

Berlin is definately a nice city, I've been there lots of times by now, mostly when playing concerts but also at other occasions and one thing that Berlin has a lot of, is those combo places, where they have a bar, some cafe stuff and then also a small club for live music, all packed into a former resident area and typically with very mixed interior, made out of old 70's furniture, antique looking divans, colored carpets and in general a lights design that makes the places very cozy.

Intersoup is one of those places. In general, it's a bar, it's an asian eating place, and has a club where we would set up and play a show.

I must admit that I had bit crisis, when discovering that the PA system in this place, was really really, and I mean really small, the smallest PA speakers I think I've seen, not really suitable for a full blown rock band, which we are.

So there definately some sound issues with Vocals and Keyboards, but we tried to get the best out of it, and tweaked it to its max output. Nonetheless not optimal, but still the show ended up being one of those connecting experiences, where the audience is really with you and we had the same show as in Astra Stube, but had to put in one more encore.

As in Hamburg, there was quite a good mood and everything ended up in a nice party afterwards, until we had to depart with the gear. Luckily had some extra hands to carry for us this time. Thanks André .

Before we played the show, we we're fed by the intersoup kitchen, and that was really something. I enjoy "Dim Sum" a lot, and the "Dim Sum" they made here was so excellent, I don't think I've had better Dim Sum since a time in Chinatown, San Fransisco. I lived long on those Dim Sum :-)

Below here I've posted a couple of pictures to give you an idea of the setting, it was very cozy and atmospheric club in my opinion. To see all the pictures go to our Flickr here




The Set list of the night was the same as Astra Stube, but with a 2nd encore, where we played Condition Lost.

19.04.2008 - Home

After this short tour, we had to pack up and get back on the road, nothing exciting about that. Just a short pit-stop 30km's from Rostock made us pretty nervous.

The tour bus broke down, and just wouldnt start. Time was running, the ferry probably wouldn't wait on us !
After half an hour of boxing with the bus, calling the rental company, having a german tank-stop guy helping us, we finally got it running, and actually made the ferry.

But this just ends up in one more experience that we should add to the list of what to do when you tour.

Two major things to remember next time.

• Always have your own PA along, you never know what's in the place (this is mainly for the small places, bigger venues always have decent gear)
• Always rent a "newer" bus, we've recently had 3 busses breaking down on us, last time in germany we had two breakdowns before we even left denmark.
  

So next up is a local show :

• 29.04.2008 : Loppen, Copenhagen. Playing a show with "This Will Destroy You" from U.S. I'm looking forward to that, I really enjoy This Will Destroy You.

Bus Rotation

As with most older bus'es you don't get a CD player in it, and even though our friendly healthcare manager and driver had brought along his cassette IPOD converter, it didn't really work, so we didn't get to listen to much music on this tour, but the Macbook Pro was nonetheless playing :

• This Will Destroy You
  
• Snowden
  
• Dinosaur Jr
• Sonic Youth
• Kyte
• DJ Shadow
• The Cult
• Cult Of Luna
• Afghan Whigs
• Charlotte Gainsbourgh
• Band Of Horses
• Blue Foundation
• Mice Parade
• Manual
  

Blondes vs. Twins

Once again I've had the opportunity to go to two shows near eachother, with two completely different bands. First of all I went to the highly expected "Blonde Redhead" show at Pumpehuset last Thursday and then Yesterday to another show filled with expectations, namely "The Gutter Twins". Let me just try to tell a bit what I think, and maybe spice it with a bit of background.

BLONDE REDHEAD

First show was a show with the NY act Blonde Redhead. A band that I have enjoyed a lot on record. Specially their two last albums:

• Misery is a butterfly, which is a beautiful masterpiece, very artistic and minimalistic, filled with excellent compositions that you cannot really can't find a match for. In my opinion a very unique sound.

• 23. A more "traditional" album, that lends a whole lot from the shoegaze scene. I've already mentioned this earlier in my post further down about "Reinvention of Shoegaze". I love this album as well, specially the opening song which is as taken and delivered as a direct follow up to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.

With these two albums pretty present in memory I went to the show along with Peter and Jonas from LNV, expecting a really good show with excellent music.

Arrived at the scene just 20 minutes before show start and got a good spot up front, to see the music up close.

I had thought a bit about how they would pull their sound off, when playing live. Specially on the new album "23" there's lots of layers, double vocals, many guitars, samples and all that.
So it wasnt a surprise for me to see that one of the musicians in the show was in fact a sampler/sequencer that could help them out in the passages where layering was needed.
After all, they are only 3 persons in the band (essentially bass, guitar, drums.. Sometimes guitar, guitar, drums and sometimes piano, guitar, drums).

The show started off really good. The 1 girl and the 2 guys had lots of nerve and looked like they wanted to play, but as the show progressed I was kind of surprised how much of the "Live" concert actually was playback or to put it nicely "sequenced"... All sorts of stuff was sequenced.

I'm used to hear drums, some percussion, some samples, some keys sequenced here and there, but one thing that is not sequenced that often is vocals. There were heavy use of vocal sequencing here, to back it all up.

So what's the point in playing live when you just "playback". Well it's not entirely playback, they did play guitar, bass, nord, drums, vocals and the bottom line is that even though, I did have the feeling "Come on, bring some musicians then" I was really entertained and loved the songs they played and in the end had the feeling "Please play more".

So I guess even though it felt a bit like they cheated I think it was a good show, cause they played a lot of songs from the two latest album which is the sound of Blonde Redhead i prefer.

That said, I think it would be more cool if they actually played some more stuff themselves, for example by adding 1 or 2 extra musicians for the live thing. Maybe I'm old-school, but just think that live should be more "live".

Try take a look at this video for "23"



And then this Live version of "23"



What do you think ? I guess I think both are great :-) so what if there's some excessive sequencing :-)

Then take a look at this

Messenger - Live (from Misery is a butterfly album, a really great song)



THE GUTTER TWINS

The Gutter Twins has quite a history behind them even though - by name - it's a new band.

Essentially as I see it (and there will probably be people disagreeing :-) ), The Gutter Twins is a band that is existing around frontmand: Greg Dulli that essentially has made the band out of his other band The Twilight Singers which essentially was made out of the band Afghan Whigs. Greg Dulli is the engine, he's the one that writes the songs, there really is a red thread all the way from 1991 Afghan Whigs debut : Up In It up til the recent release of The Gutter Twins : Saturnalia.

Fact is, that even though - in my opinion - The Gutter Twins, Twilight Singers and Afghan Whigs is painted by Greg Dulli - it's really just as much the presence of Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens Of The Stone Age) that makes up the image of The Gutter Twins.

It just have to be no secret that I've never really been into neither Screaming Trees or QOTSA. I do think Mark has a fabulous voice, but never found the music that interesting.

This is quite opposite to my addiction to Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers.

What Afghan Whigs had back in 1991 was the sound of the black sheep of grunge. There was all those Mudhoney, Tad, Nirvana, Soundgarden etc.. all evolving around rock as basic ingredient, then fuzzed and punked up.

This is where Afghan Whigs really were the originals and the outsiders, cause they took way more inspiration in Soul music. An inspiritation that evolved a lot on the excellent Afghan Whigs records released from time to time. For every record put out there, everything became even more soul oriented, but still with the rock, punk, grunge flavour of noisy guitars and off course Greg Dulli's intense voice.

To just give you an idea what I'm talking about, try looking at these to Tubes :

My Curse - Live Bootleg ( This is a very good example of the soul sound, where even Greg Dulli had to back out and let a woman sing it instead, a cool song )



My Enemy - Live Bootleg



It was a hard pill to swallow when they broke, but when Dulli arrived with The Twilight Singers it was pure relief. A new sound more mellow, even more electronic and quiet was found on the debut album of The Twilight Singers.

Here's one by Twilight Singers.

King Only - Live Bootleg (from their first album)



From there it went more traditional again, with rock as basic ingredient, and leaving the soul a bit behind. A couple of nice records, some songs with Mark Lanegan, and now ended up in Saturnalia. To me, that album sounds as a natural addition to The Twilight Singers repertoire, with Lanegan added off course. But that's not so weird, cause Lanegan was almost full member of Twilight Singers in the late days.

It' a long journey from the first times I saw Afghan Whigs live at different venues in Copenhagen, till now where I was going to see them live at Vega at exactly the same stage where I saw Afghan Whigs on their 1965 tour. That show was epic, with an alive Greg Dulli that really knew how to entertain. So with that as unreasonable expectation Peter (the drummer from LNV) and myself went off to see the show.

The show was the first after a short break in The Gutter Twins tour, due to Greg Dulli had to visit the hospital because he had a "Hypothermia" incident :-) . So I guess it might have been due to that, they had a somewhat slow start, that seemed a bit vague, not really putting any charisma outside of the stage.

But as the show progressed, Dulli, kind of woke up, and started doing what he is good at: Entertaining. And that he did. Dulli is good at getting people going, and he did put his voice out to the brim that night.

As for communication, it also seemed like there was a good chemistry between exactly Dulli and the rest of the band. But there was almost non-existing communication between Dulli and Lanegan. I found that kind of weird. But maybe it's the Lanegan style. Lanegan did not move one inch from the show started till it ended, and the only words he spoke was introducing Greg Dulli. I guess his style is, being a crooner, put both hands on the mike stand, close his eyes and sing, that was pretty much what he did.

He did sing very very good, and specially when the two: Dulli+Lanegan sang together it lifted the roof, what a good mix. Lanegans deep voice and then Dulli's raw and more high pitch voice on top. Excellent.

But where Dulli entertained and had communication both with the band and the audience, Lanegan was more a statue. It didnt mean so much to me, cause Dulli worked on it instead, but a bit more contact wouldnt kill him.

The Gutter Twins delivered a good show, had really good sound, used a bit of sequencer :-) but played the thing LIVE! . as opposed to Blonde Redhead.

Take a look at this Live Bootleg, it's pretty much as it was yesterday.

All Misery/Flowers (One of my favourites from the Saturnalia album)

VERDICT
I know this is really hard to decide upon, two shows with pretty different bands, with very different backgrounds. Which was best ?? . This is really hard to decide upon, but in the end i think I actually enjoyed the Blonde Redhead show the most. Yeah they sequenced themselves through the show, but two factors is making it win the "competition". For one i think they were better on stage doing what they do, than the whole of Gutter Twins were. Gutter Twins we're pretty much Greg Dulli, and you didn't really notice the rest.
The other factor is that I just like Blonde Redheads music better than Gutter Twins, making it a bit unfair off course. In the end, two fine shows, none of them to the skies, but worth the money.




Resources : The Afghan Whigs, The Gutter Twins, Queens Of The Stone Age, Screaming Trees, Twilight Singers , Blonde Redhead

The Mountain Came To Us

So yesterday evening was the night where I got the pleasure to see the canadian symphonic ensemble Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band.

A band once a side project of the massive post-rock act Godspeed You Black Emperor.

The Memorial Orchestra defines itself in making long symphonic and dark voyages beyond what is normally done in neither post-rock or indie as such. It's sort of psychedelica meets orchestra.

One of the strengths of TSMZ&TLLB is that they use a lot of vocal harmonies. Everyone in the band, counting all 7 of them, has a microphone and everyone uses it from time to time.

Nevertheless there's a feel of Efrim being their "lead singer" (even though he doesn't see himself as such) and the rest is just in for support, but they actually do a very fine job making harmonies and beautiful moments that makes the songs very fulfilled and does make it feel like a whole experience.

So last night I got to see them once again. Last time was a couple of years ago and at the exact same venue.

This time they did the show exactly as last time, standing in a half circle fronting each other.
I kind of like that, it shows a band being in focus on playing together as a whole and not as a band of individual presence and performance persons.

Yesterday evening this felt very fine as well.

So the only difference from last time was the songs they played, else it was pretty much the same experience.

The experience of drifting away to their long repetetive escapades that evolves and diminishes in & out of everything and nothingness, quite effective & quite spellbinding.

The fact that the band also seems very relaxed, down to earth, and had a good sense of humour, talking about everything from losing their gear in london, making Ian the guitar player forced to play a shitty epiphone guitar that he leased, all the way over to the fact that the internet is made of dead people, that essentially is diamonds that also is used for blood transfusions, gave just another view of a relaxed and humoristic band.

Silver Mt. Zion is an interesting band and I definately prefer to see them live rather than listen to their albums, but that's a taste thing i guess. Nonetheless i will encourage to go to this YouTube video and just see a nice clip, what they're all about (sadly i can't embed it).

THEE SILVER MOUNT ZION ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA BAND @ YOUTUBE

And just take a look at this live bootleg video, a song they also played yesterday.



Last off, here's also the song they opened the show with : 1.000.000 Died to made this sound :