Noise Pop Review: Kid Koala, DJ Swayzee, Jel, J House
February 28, 2011
Friday night’s Noise Pop show at Mighty was a pleasant mix of those who don’t get out to dance at the club that often and those who do. This had a lot to do with the contrast of acts for the evening, a clever mix of talents that united two different crowds.
Hailing from San Francisco, J House is a DJ with an artful streak. Stylistically he was all over the board in a way that in less able hands would have been a mess. He jumped from genre to genre, evoking the electronic music gods all while keeping his mind on the dance floor.
Jel makes instrumental electronic music with beats as hard as titanium, mostly live. His hands move so quick he could put non-sentient beings out of work. Using a few sample triggering devices (MPC and SP-808 to be exact), a loop pedal, and a minimal backing track, he created songs that others would have to spend days programming. Jel only looked up at the crowd between songs, because like everyone else in the room, he couldn’t take his eyes off his fingers.
San Francisco’s DJ Swayzee brought a dance club sensibility – evidenced by the fact that nearly the whole club squished onto the dance floor once the bass hit the speakers. The temperature of the club skyrocketed, so kudos to him for being the only one in the club who was able to keep their jacket on (and it was leather at that).
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Noise Pop Review: The Concretes, Birds & Batteries, Magic Bullets, Psychic Friend
February 28, 2011
On a night when a meteorologist’s conspiracy hoodwinked all of us into thinking it would snow in our temperate little town, the Rickshaw played host to Sweden’s The Concretes, two of SF’s local heavyweights, Birds & Batteries and Magic Bullets, and a debut performance from Psychic Friend (featuring Will Schwartz of Imperial Teen).
Energy was a little low at the start of the evening, but Schwartz being the music vet he is, wasted little time hooking his overtly emotional, piano-powered pop into the emerging crowd. Filling out the guitarless trio were drummer Patty Schemel (Hole) and bassist Bo Boddie, who if a bit stoic, helped round out the tightly condensed numbers in robotic pop form. When Schwartz and Co. flushed things out a bit, it worked well, giving listeners a breath from the sometimes overbearing theatrical punchiness of it all.
Due to some technical issues and worrying about my own sustainability on a four band evening on an empty stomach, I unfortunately ended up missing most of Magic Bullets’ performance. Although from the little I heard and saw, the entire club was suddenly sweaty and beholden to their jangly Brit-laced dance pop. It’s no wonder the band has consistently reigned in the top tier of SF’s local acts for almost a decade, and the rest of the country is finally taking notice.
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Noise Pop Review: Tamaryn, The Black Ryder, The Soft Moon, Wax Idols
February 28, 2011
Each club has its own personality. Some are prompt and efficient. Others take it easy late into the night. Some have out of the box light show programs, while others put up a few desk lamps.
Cafe Du Nord has made good for years now on their formula of getting multiple bands on and off on schedule and refusing to light the entire right half of the stage. But it is a flagship Noise Pop venue, long on ambiance, good beer and good cheer, which this representative of the press appreciates.
Friday night’s bill could be lumped into the shopworn “shoegaze” category, only because the four acts are united by a penchant for noisy guitars and serious lyrics. We attended primarily to sample two promising local acts — Oakland’s Wax Idols and rising stars (along with Young Prisms and Melted Toys, who seem to be everywhere all of a sudden) The Soft Moon.
Wax Idols are Heather Fedewa’s project, and freshly-minted. She propels the sound with her U2/Big Country guitar leads and raw-edged girl group vocals. She has the good fortune of anchoring her band with drummer Courtney Gray and guitarist/singer Ashley Thomas, late of east bay garage rockers The Splinters. (Courtney, without a doubt the smiliest, most cheerful badass drummer of our time, lamented between sets that two of the Splinters are now based in New York, but also reports that she and Ashley are working on a side project on top of Wax Idols).
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Noise Pop Review: Battlehooch, Nobunny, The Exray’s and The Downer Party
February 28, 2011
Blame the weatherman. Even though people kept going to Bottom of the Hill’s rear courtyard and disappointingly peering up into the cloudless, snow-free sky hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime show, the real show was going on inside.
After The Downer Party‘s poppy, riot girl-inspired punk rock opened the night, San Francisco’s own Exray’s took the stage. Nominally a duo but performing as a three piece, Exray’s have a unique live setup. Instead of a drummer, their percussion is handled entirely by someone playing an electronic drum machine. Interestingly, for the majority of the set, the “drummer” used naturalistic drum sounds and was playing them almost exactly as a real drummer would. If you were just listening to a recording of these songs, you’d have no idea the drums were canned. The effect live, once the novelty wore off, was similar that that of a band playing with a minimalist drummer but without the added electric crispness that comes from live drums.
The songs themselves were uniformly mellow garage pop. The guitars were jagged but unaggressive. The band’s sparse arrangements highlighted singer Jon Bernson’s uninflected vocal lines and engagingly off-kilter melodic sense. At times the band sounded like a less aggressively amateurish version of Beat Happening fronted by one of the Johns from They Might Be Giants.
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Noise Pop: Ted Leo, A B & The Sea, Kevin Seconds
February 28, 2011
I always get a little nervous at the prospect of seeing a favorite artist play without the comfort of a backing band. On some level, I think, a solo performance is inherently a struggle, with one individual responsible for keeping the crowd entertained, or, at the least, preventing its attention from getting distracted elsewhere. I’ve seen more solo sets than I care to admit fade behind audience conversations and noise from the bar, or drag in uncomfortable between-song silences.
Given the king’s welcome Ted Leo received when he climbed on stage at Bottom of the Hill on Thursday night, it was clear that the audience was there to see him, and ready to hang onto his every note. In exchange, we were treated to an hour’s worth of Leo classics from the last decade, with the artist hammering away at an electric guitar and giving it all through a voice that was slightly strained but ultimately none the worse for wear.
The stripped-down setup may not have generated the sort of frenzied steam heat that Leo + Pharmacists shows typically do — aside from some bopping in place, the crowd remained mostly in place but attentive — but it brought extra focus onto the songwriter’s great political-meets-personal lyrics. I was reminded, for example, that “Me and Mia,” from 2004′s Shake the Sheets, isn’t just an incendiary piece of rock-pop — it’s also a comment on the devastating impact of eating disorders. Similarly, minus a rhythm section’s bop, the solo take underscored the isolation and introspection in “Bottled in Cork,” from last year’s excellent The Brutalist Bricks. It was a set full of intimate little moments like that, by one of the best songwriters out there today.
Ted Leo dedicated “The High Party” to his tourmate Kevin Seconds, who he said “taught [him] how to write songs like this.” Seconds, who cofounded the band 7 Seconds, was joined by his wife Allyson for vocal duets and Kepi Ghoulie on drums, and offered a relatively straightforward but heartfelt set of folk-punk. Seconds deserved bonus points for the hellacious time he had getting from the previous evening’s show in Riverside to San Francisco. In short, his car died at the northern end of the Grapevine, and, after a tow truck and a rental car, he arrived onstage just in time for the show.
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Noise Pop: The Bay Bridged Happy Hour with Shannon and the Clams, Jake Mann & The Upper Hand, Wet Illustrated
February 27, 2011
Photos by: Nicole Browner
A big thanks to everyone who attended our Happy Hour show on Friday! Thanks as well to all three bands, Noise Pop and Bender’s for putting together a really fun time. Enjoy these shots from the show!
Shannon and the Clams
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Noise Pop: Film School, Apex Manor, Gregory and the Hawk, Melted Toys 2/24/11
February 26, 2011
Sometimes Noise Pop Festival lineups aren’t necessarily about Noise Pop as an entity. In fact, my very first Noise Pop show was in 2007, and I wasn’t even aware that the Noise Pop Festival had been going on for years – I just wanted to see Spinto Band. And I did. And it was fun.
Day 3 of Noise Pop 2011 featured Film School, Apex Manor, Gregory and the Hawk, and Melted Toys at Cafe du Nord. Stylistically, you can draw some parallels between each band, or at the very least, appreciate what each act has accomplished and the role they each play in making up the festival as a whole. Or, you could be a group of die-hard fans who attended the show just to see an act play San Francisco for the first time.
“I think this is the first time I’ve played San Francisco,” a casual statement made by Meredith Godreau, who plays under the moniker Gregory and the Hawk. She was met by various gushing reactions: “You’re welcome back any time!” “Please don’t ever leave!” “We came here JUST FOR YOU!”
Clustered up front by the stage at Cafe du Nord, while the rest of the concert patrons spread out in the back chatting over beers, a seemingly private concert session was going on – just the gorgeous, delicate folk of Gregory and the Hawk and her fans, who had been waiting a long time to finally see her perform live. In fact, the sheer devotion of her fans made her set feel entirely too short (although she played the standard-length set for an opening Noise Pop act). Too short is better than not at all, however, so hopefully the Bay Area will be seeing Meredith Godreau again soon.
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Noise Pop Review: The Stone Foxes, Voxhaul Broadcast, Ferocious Few, The Soft White Sixties @ The Independent 2/24/11
February 26, 2011
Photos by: Agata Kamler
I’ve seen the Ferocious Few more time than I care to count. I’ve seen them in parks, on street corners, at raucous outdoor festivals. I saw them play in the middle of a packed street during a joyous near-riot the night Obama was elected. I’ve seen them so regularly that I once recognized their guitarist on an airplane. This may be the only local band at their level I’ve seen often enough to pick out of crowd whose members I didn’t know personally (I’m terrible with faces). Yet, I’ve never seen them indoors or gone out specifically planning on seeing them.
For the uninitiated, The Ferocious Few are a two-piece band primarily known for their busking shows all over the Bay Area. They play a spectacular version of country-fried garage rock with nothing more than an electrified acoustic guitar and bare bones drum kit. Think of the Black Keys but swap about 50% of that band’s blues influence for country-folk without losing a single joule of the hard driving, rock and roll energy that makes people want to get down and boogie and you’ll have a good idea of why the Ferocious Few are gradually becoming the mustachioed poster boys for San Francisco’s indie scene.
Seeing them indoors, playing out of full size amps, in a room with natural reverb, had an interesting effect on their music. The increased size and scope makes everything sound infinitely more serious then it does on a street corner. Their songs are transformed from playful rave-ups to something bordering on the biblical. In this setting, songs are based more on their almost Gothic atmosphere than they are on the band’s blistering live energy. A lot of that comes from the drums. When the Few busk, their drummer plays with brushes but at this show he used sticks. Brushes, when played hard and fast on a snare (which is the FF’s drummer’s busking M.O) fills the sonic space around the kit with a dirty, skittering energy. In the setting of the Independent, the drumming was much more spacious—letting a near-constant four-on-the-floor kick drum do most of the percussive work.
While the change in setting was welcome and interesting, I think I prefer them outdoors. The band, usually supremely confidant when they play, seemed a little cowed by the venue and let a couple minor rhythmic flubs in the middle of the set throw off their groove, which they never entirely got back. While their set started out promising, it lacked a bit of the ferocity the band is usually brings by the bucketload.
