mikeherr's Posts
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I'm a St. Louis native and volunteer music writer for KDHX. I like listening to music, reading about music, and writing about music. But mostly I like listening to music. Follow my blog for CD reviews, show previews, and other musical musings. |
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‘What am I not hearing?’ An interview with Greg Saunier of Deerhoof
en.wikipedia.org / Simon Fernandez
After playing its first show in St. Louis this past September, Deerhoof was on its way again up to New York state. A few days later, I got a chance to call and talk to founding member of Deerhoof and consistently ecstatic, creative force-of-nature drummer, Greg Saunier, about a shared favorite album, Tony Williams, making music with the greatest living Congolese musicians and the current state of American music.
Mike Herr: After a long summer and spring abroad, is it good to be back in America?
Greg Saunier: Well, no because I’m just seeing everybody put away their summer clothes basically, which I completely missed. The only summer clothes I saw was us playing to like thousands of people wearing raincoats and holding umbrellas and standing in the mud, you know, over in Europe. I’ll never get summer 2011 back again. It’s very sad.
Yeah it is kinda sad. You can imagine what it was like though.
[Laughs] Imagination only takes me so far.
I saw you the other night in St. Louis, it was great.
Oh, thank you for coming!
Actually, I was the dude with the “On the Corner” t-shirt on, if you remember that.
Oh yeah! [laughs] Miles Davis. … It was a funny coincidence. I always bring my iPod, and I’ve made a special playlist that’s always playing at our shows between the bands. And I’ve got “Black Satin” on there, which is one of the songs on “On the Corner,” and it’s so funny that you walked over with that shirt on.
I felt like a big dork.
Well, you should’ve felt authorized! You should’ve felt vindicated. You should’ve felt pumped up.
I did feel validated.
Miles … Many times we’ve tried to, you know, we’ve just taken the music of Miles Davis in that period — from “Bitches Brew” ’til maybe “Get Up With It,” that sort of stretch in the early to mid-’70s — and like if we’re working on an album or something, we’ll play it back to back with that, and just be like, “What’s wrong with ours?” and just try to make it sound more and more like that.
And actually, it was Nels Cline, currently of Wilco, who first noticed that. And he thought that we were gonna, maybe not get sued, but he thought everybody in the universe was gonna be pointing it out. There’s this clapping part in one of our new songs, called “I Did Crimes For You,” that’s almost a complete, direct rip-off of the clapping part in “Black Satin,” which is on “On the Corner.” It’s not exactly the same thing, but it’s very close. It’s this really awkward-sounding, fast clap thing. The band sounds like it’s at the other end of some cavern like the Fillmore or something like that, but then for some reason there’s these weird clapping things right in your ear, and it’s just the most bizarre overdub.
And there’s no way in the world you can imagine Miles Davis having bothered to be the one to go do this clapping overdub. It’s like Teo Macero, the producer, or Paul Buckmaster, who did the string arrangements or something. No, there are no strings, I don’t know what he did on that thing. I guess he was just helping produce it and add a bunch of weird sounds.
Concert review: St. Vincent and the art of restraint at the Old Rock House, Thursday, October 6
Kate McDaniel
After Welsh songstress, Cate Le Bon‘s, ethereal opening set of songs, the crowd slowly set in on the stage, waiting anxiously. The crowd had a crush on Annie Clark, like anybody does who’s ever heard her, seen her perform.
After a warm, seeping version of “Cruel” to start the show off, she even mentioned that she recognized most people from the last time she played St. Louis. It’s the nature of her relationship with her fans: some ambiguous haze of stalker and stalked, but the stalked is in full, graceful control. She’s always had a verbal and lyrical sureness and clarity, an uncanny sense of line and melody, an ear for jagging sounds; she’s also beautiful, but with the release of her new album, “Strange Mercy,” and her performance last night, Ms. Clark has perfected a dimension of sexiness as well.
As usual, Clark is endlessly tweaking the arrangements of her songs, the size and shape of her band. Last night, in the intimate dark and oscillating blues of the Old Rock House, St. Vincent was stripped down to two synthesizer players (one playing a Moog), a drummer (half his set digital, two sets of hi-hats), and Clark’s vocals, guitar and pedals.
For all the words that are thrown at her playing and the band’s sound as a whole — wild, shredding, wailing, etc. — it’s rarely acknowledge how incredibly controlled, paced, tasteful it is. Clark has cited Steely Dan as one of her favorite bands and chief musical influences, and you can hear this in the gnashing funk and chatter of her guitar lines and how clearly her ideas come through in the crispness of the music.
Concert review: Bon Iver (with Kathleen Edwards) reshapes sound at the Pageant, Sunday, September 11
Nate Burrell
The Pageant was filled. This has happened before, but probably not quite like this. There was this current humming through the blood and words of the crowd and the musicians that suggested this night was something special.
Maybe you can chalk up the feeling to Bon Iver‘s first appearance in St. Louis since 2008; maybe this was the crowd’s response to the new, self-titled album; maybe Justin Vernon is just soaring — could this be the high point of his career? — and people are aching to be in the slipstream.
On a night like this, the opener has to be solid, unquestionable, almost taken for granted — and Kathleen Edwards roused the crowd just right. More than an opener, she wasn’t merely setting the stage or the sonic immersion people just take for granted before the act they paid for — Edwards played her songs intently, reining and releasing her voice flawlessly while her two sidemen added subtle guitar work and wind-through-wheat voices.
The crowd loved her, especially when Edwards introduced songs, singled audience members out, wrought her personableness in one of the biggest rooms, on one of the tallest stages in St. Louis. Despite the strength of her voice, her songs slipped too easily into the typical modern country/western mode of snow on trees, creaking cabin walls, desolation, loneliness. For its brisk clarity, Edward’s voice began to sound generic within her redundant phrasing song after song (stretching the last syllables of lines into a higher harmony over the pulsing strum of guitar).
Watching and listening to her and the two guitarists was like experiencing the culmination, the vanishing point of this kind of music. Can it really go further or get better? They muddled their prairie sounds and steel and thrum together about as well as anyone I’d ever heard, but it wasn’t exhilarating; it felt too familiar. The crowd’s response was hugely generous though. Her last song got me though, a sensitive and outstanding cover of the Flaming Lips’s “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” Even if Edward’s song-crafting doesn’t really do it for me, she undeniably knows how to ring it out live.
Concert review: On the musical midway of the Tower Groove Records Carnival, Off Broadway, Sunday, September 4
Roy Kasten
A sense of timing is imperative to the success of launching a record label, playing a good show and throwing a party.
It was gorgeous, hinting at Fall weather Sunday, and if you walked through faux-stone entrance to the yard at Off Broadway, it might feel like you were crashing a family reunion. It’d have to be a family that loved booze, music, games and — well, everyone else in the family. The Tower Groove Records collective put on an authentic South City carnival complete with home-prepared BBQ, St. Louis themed games, kissing booth, mawkish calliope music, Fred Friction dressed like a clown and Larry Bulawsky of Magic City slurring “Step right up…” into a baby megaphone. But this carnival also functioned as a showcase of and fundraiser for many of St. Louis’ best, working bands, aka the Tower Groove collective.
Inevitably, and relevantly, the event and the collective itself have been compared to St. Louis musicians’ past collective efforts, especially the Rooster Lollipop collective and its long-gone “Axes and Snackses” showcase. Hosted by the Way Out Club, that party also had games, a kissing booth and a bunch of bands playing that had come together to support each other and to make something edgy, lasting and important in St. Louis music. That was over a decade ago, and it didn’t work out for reasons those involved could explain much better than I.
One critique of Rooster Lollipop though was that many of the bands sounded similar, shared the same musical sensibility and aesthetic. However, the 20 or so bands that played the Tower Groove carnival dotted the musical style spectrum — most do not even fit into a genre. Also, there was no rigid sense of rank or entitlement among the bands despite the huge variance of recognition, age and length of career among them.
Concert review: An enthralling end to LouFest 2011 at Forest Park, Sunday, August 28
Nate Burrell
St. Louis’ own Old Lights opened the second day of LouFest with class and passion. Their set was mostly attended by old fans and friends with a slow trickle of people coming in during the music.
LouFest, like any music festival, has its fair share of people coming solely for the headliners, but Old Lights had fun on the stage and wrung their tunes out for all they were worth. The southside band has become one of the flagships for the St. Louis music scene’s legitimacy, the city’s capacity to produce professional artists, and for good reason: The band is tight. But sometimes it seemed like the songs were safe emulations of what a more adventurous band could turn into more dangerous rock ‘n’ roll. David Beeman’s rush of noisy upper-neck strumming wasn’t as exciting as his face suggested, nor were the songs as infectious as the band wanted them to be, calling for claps and chants. Still, their music is solid and it was good to see them opening the day.
Jumbling Towers completed the local music set for the day on the East stage. Stylistically, the band has a lot going on: Josiah DeBoer’s cringy vocals border on the comedic, while his snappy, sometimes mean guitar work slips out of a void like Robert Fripp on Eno’s stuff. The other members of the band basically set up a dance-pop rhythm that seems generic except for the huge space between the instruments. Maybe this is just a result of playing on an outdoor stage, but it made them sound weirder, harder to put your ear’s finger on, which is almost always a good thing. They lacked some of the upright composure Old Lights had, and it was good to see the goofier side of our city’s music represented.
Then, anyone just arriving or drinking in a lawn chair or thumbing through records at the Euclid Records tent got woken the fuck up by Ume. This three-piece from Austin brings a fat sound united under guitarist/vocalist Lauren Larson’s serrated, live-wire fretwork and her mix of delicate crooning and all-out howl.
She also moved more than the crowd did while playing, stirring up the humidity with kicks and showers of headbangs while wringing the neck of her guitar for muscled-up, nerve-twitch melodies. Bassist Eric Larson threads his fuzzed-out sound through the guitar with perfect balance, at times echoing her flood of 12th fret notes with a single line eight frets lower. Ume’s new drummer, Rachel Fuhrer, hammers out a big, crisp rock sound, her sure and distinct kick and tom work as integral to the band’s sound as John Bonham’s was to Led Zeppelin. Lauren Larson claimed they drove 15 hours overnight to get to LouFest, and I couldn’t have been more grateful to them. They brought some crazy noise to a festival that had too little.
The change from band to band was a little more abrasive on the second day of LouFest, but the need to adjust my ears, mindset and sometimes my emotions on the walk from stage to stage sort of renewed my spirits, opened my expectations of the next act. This was what happened in the transition from Ume to Lost in the Trees. While Ume hammered your heart out of the body’s normal time signature and jolted your muscles, Lost in the Trees was all tingle and shivers on the skin. Trees began with Ari Picker’s almost inaudible fingering and gentle, then soaring delivery of lyrics, and before you realized it, was churning into a kind of acoustic prog-rock.
The musicians pulled off the disorienting, enchanting swish of sounds with incredible control on songs like “All Alone in an Empty House” and the orchestral rush of “Walk Around the Lake.” Most of the songs bristled with the strings section (cellists Drew Anagnost and Leah Gibson; violinist Jenavieve Varga), which took on roles from whipping the song into a spectral waltz, to acting as a kind of counter-verbal sound to Picker’s unexpectedly sweet voice.
And then there was multi-instrumentalist Emma Nadeau, whose voice crept through you like theremin, even as she hammered a floor tom or dotted the keys of a xylophone (she even got a round of applause mid-song for a vocal solo). Unlike some of their stylistic cohorts and contemporaries, Trees sounds put you on edge, create a sense of alarm even as they are beautiful. And their live set at LouFest was no exception: Fheir music made me uneasy in the brightest part of day.
Concert review: LouFest 2011 Day 1 in the sun at Forest Park, Saturday, August 27
Kate McDaniel
It was surreal to roll through Forest Park Saturday morning, past bikers and joggers, the quiet fountains, apartment buildings looming like mountains on either side of the park, and then, the sound of Troubadour Dali’s “Ducks In A Row” coasting out from atop the central field.
What’s weird is that this hasn’t always been happening: a music festival in Forest Park or anywhere in St. Louis. When I saw the two huge stages hunched on the hill, it was like déjà vu.
The air warbled in the heat, and there was still plenty of space when St. Louis’ Troubadour Dali unwound their tight, gaze-into-the-sun concoction of stinging rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelia. (And I apologize to Jon Hardy & the Public for missing their kick-off performance.) Their set was nearly perfect with enough energy and inertia in the music to heave the ball forward, draw the crowd in — something about that shoe-gazey sound makes for a great immersive music, but Dali’s sound is also rough around the edges, trading space for the electrifying, cathartic downstroke.
It was also an acid test for the way the day would sound through the speakers, because Dali had one of the most balanced sounds of the day — their through-the-cracks harmonies and tremolo and Drew Bailey’s fresh, rolling percussion. While most people showed up later in the day for the headlining acts, Troubadour Dali’s set stuck with me through the rest of the day, palimpsestic as a good dream.
After their set, singer and guitarist Ben Hinn directed the crowd over to the east stage to see Sleepy Sun, whom he described as “freakin’ awesome.” LouFest already had kind of an all-ages feel about it: plenty of 8-year-old kids milling around, infants on their parents shoulders, a monotonous, hip sea of sunglassed 20-somethings shoulder to shoulder with men and women who’d smoked weed at Monterey Pop or who at least had read the headlines about Altamont. It’s another reason that Dali’s set was important and relevant, their set like a tribute to the era and the events inseparable from that psychedelic sound.
Sleepy Sun offered more of the same, but with a little more blues at stake, a little more fire in their bellies. Led by singer Ben Constantino (a great frontman for a great band, some perfect conflation of Country Joe and all the members of Canned Heat transplanted into modern day San Francisco, and here playing for us), the band ripped and roared through the sometimes brooding, always noisy guts of their songs. Their set ended just short of 3 p.m., and the crowd was steadily growing in volume and responsiveness. LouFest was 2 for 2, but no one was ready for what came next.
Concert review: Sade (with John Legend) makes a compelling soul statement at the Scottrade Center, Thursday, July 28
Travis Crosby
Scottrade Center‘s first floor was a jammed and buzzing scene before John Legend took the stage last night. It was also just weird.
There: a beerman studded with Blues hockey emblems calling out his fare; next to him: a man in a white robe and sunglasses looking exactly like Isaac Hayes in his prime. Parents with their kids next to unbelievably gussied-up people on hot dates. An old man waving the concert programs as if they were a hockey roster. Pretzels and Bud Light and garlic cheese fries and lots of dreadlocks. But then, Sade.
It was clear, even as John Legend played, that everyone was there for Sade. People cheered Mr. Legend, even catcalled at some of his commercialized vocal riffing, but once he introduced his band and himself, exiting the stage, and an image of Sade appeared on the screens hanging on either side of the stage, there was an audible inhale that sucked through the crowd.
I don’t mean to write Mr. Legend off. He warmed up the crowd, made me forget about how really unsexy and devoid-of-mood the place was. Everything was obvious, he spoon-fed his music. Even as he rallied the crowd to clap or to “get up and dance with me,” his act sagged with the soak of a crisp, highly-commercial agenda. His voice is undeniably strong and even sometimes surprising, but, like most singers of his caliber today, it’s too clean. The whole performance had no edge to it, which was made keenly obvious when he performed a Vegas’d up version of James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy.” Eh.
Sade’s set was different. She emerged from a ramp under the stage to the sound of guns and explosions, her band ascending behind her on platforms, mid-groove in “Soldier of Love.” The crowd howled as she saluted each section of the stadium, and then her voice came through. Maybe it was just some great coincidence of where I was sitting and angle and luck, but the sound was great — and not just by Scottrade standards. The jag and clip of the guitars, the electronic snap of the drums, the synth-roar swarming, and Sade right up front.
Her voice is still great; maybe better with age. It sounds even reedier, more textured than ever, but can still blow through any of her songs’ most pyrotechnic/acrobatic moments.
She was all bravura and class and even when the set dragged a bit during a string of low-tempo, mood songs, Sade’s voice kept me in it. There is nothing plain or less-than-compelling about her singing, even when stage effects, weirdly British stage theatrics, and song after song drilling out the power of love or sadness in the lack of it threaten the music.
These conceptual theatrics often missed their mark or just sort of baffled me. A see-through curtain would drop on all sides of the stage, on which projections would create a live double-exposure –the band played through “Kiss of Life” and “Cherish the Day” while speeding down a country road or floating through a cityscape — and undermine the music. Between pseudo-Super 8 footage of the band, a hokey Raymond Chandleresque intro to “Smooth Operator,” and Sade singing alone onstage over pre-recorded strings while a huge burning sun rises and sets behind her, the night had its clichés.
But, for all the gloss and production, the band was genuinely into it. They were right with her, smiling at the crowd who’d been waiting for them for so long. “Is It A Crime” was the high point of the night: a nearly 10-minute-long showcase for the band’s stop-and-start exactness and Sade’s lush, soulful singing. She and her saxophonist/guitarist, Stuart Matthewman (her Bobby Keys, her Clarence Clemons) wrung the song out for all it’s worth. I’ve never seen so many people dancing and yelling before. It was like a homecoming for Sade.
Concert review: Britches, Yowie, Gnarwhal and Marnie Stern bring the noise (and much more) to the Firebird, Wednesday, July 6
Ben Mudd
Britches, Yowie, Gnarwhal and Marnie Stern (playing in that order) represent a formidable and tightly wound playbill — all the bands are wheeling in roughly the same sonic orbit, but their approaches are disparate, and they are all at vastly different stages in their musical lives.
Wednesday night at the Firebird was a showcase of bands moving at the fringes (or in Yowie’s case, just completely outside) of anything music critics try to mold into genres, each band’s live show doing them varying degrees of justice.
Britches ripped the night wide open (adorned in furry dog masks, no less), putting the willing crowd through their digital thresher and showing why they’re one of St. Louis’ busiest and most exciting acts to come along in years. Watching Britches, two things are immediately evident: the distinct danger and swirl of the sound and the confidence every member has in presenting it.
There is something that you can’t put your finger on — maybe it’s the childish/fetishist headgear, the keen edge of absurd humor and movement (bassist Bryant Hoban hunches in a bounce like a monkey), the seamlessness of their set (each song is joined by a wordless, crunching soundscape like crepitus’d joints), and the strong emotional undercurrent of something-is-wrong flowing through all the songs. Their music cut through a lot of the empty space that exists at the beginning of any show, the sparseness of their arrangements and brittleness of their sound drawing in anyone who did get there on time.
Yowie played next, but we’ll get back to them. Gnarwhal, out of Nashville, took the stage as a two piece — drums and guitar — looking at little rushed and flustered. They blasted through their set almost as if they wanted just to get through it. The vocals were completely lost in the wires, and the guitar parts couldn’t be fully heard or appreciated in the rush of sound. Partly, I owed this to the nature of their music. Like Lightning Bolt, it is virtuosic, technical stuff awash with fuzz and purr, but the lack of cohesion in their sound breaks the energy a bit, takes you out of the music when you want to join in with them.
Which leads to another key factor regarding their set: vocalist Chappy announced to the crowd that a couple of their members (the other guitarist and their bassist) quit recently, and the two remaining members have had to write new songs. It wasn’t a plea for sympathy, but it help put their set in perspective. These guys had been, and were, working their asses off, and still believed wholly in what they were doing. With such surging energy and ability, I couldn’t doubt their dedication.
Marnie Stern’s set began and ended in intensity: Her lightning flourishes of hammer-ons rode on tidal, more-is-more drumming. But it took a few songs for them (or the songs) to get in the slipstream; their set like a puzzle for the audience’s ears, each song a piece that they shaped, but couldn’t quite fit together for the first half of their time.
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Previous Posts
- Concert review: Gregory Alan Isakov (with Geoff Koch) satisfies hearts, minds and ears at the Old Rock House, Thursday, May 17
- All Aboard for Fun Times: St. Louis show highlights for 5/18-5/20
- Album review: Tracie Bennett Sings Judy: Songs from the Broadway Production of End of the Rainbow
- Album review: Silversun Pickups roll through ‘Neck of the Woods’
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