MON: Tom Waits (Palladium) TUE: Islands/Awol One/Crayonsmith (Granada) FRI: Boris/Torche/Clouds (Rubber Gloves) FRI: The Party 2 Year Anniversary (Zubar) FRI: Shearwater/Kadane Brothers/Theater Fire (Lola's) SAT: Fuck Yeah Fest with Matt and Kim/The Death Set/Team Robespierre/Brother Reade (1919 Hemphill) SAT: Centromatic/Kadane Brothers/Theater Fire (Granada) SUN: Stone Temple Pilots/Black Francis (Nokia Theater)
Written by Defensive Listening, so direct all of your kind, thoughtful compliments at me and not Sally Glass or SR.
FRIDAY
Psychedelic Horseshit | Teenage Cool Kids | Fabulous Diamonds (Chat Room) For all of the static stain on Psychedelic Horseshit's purposely garbled recordings, their melody, both instrumental and vocal, still somehow glows through the chaos. This is even more apparent in a live setting. Australia's Fabulous Diamonds represent the decidedly less pop rock side of Siltbreeze, with a combination of minimal repetitive beats, drone vocal monotone, and the busy clicking and clattering of Eastern-styled percussion hypnotizing its way down the center of the mix. Should be an interesting show at the always bustling Chat Room.
Burnt Sienna Trio | Phantastes | Dust Congress | Some Say Leland (Hailey's) Mainly folk-based show with two of Denton's best, including a real curve-ball on the bill: Phantastes. This is the remaining members of The Undoing Of David Wright manipulating some intricately hand-made modulators and synths.
Times New Viking | Record Hop | Teenage Cool Kids (Club Dada) Featuring three acts that rock shamelessly, this is the first in a barrage of high-profile shows at Dada in the coming months. Times New Viking seems to be everywhere since their Strawberry Fields set last spring. Like Psychedelic Horseshit, their live set is extremely accessible and makes them seem much less challenging or as willfully obscure as their recordings suggest. Teenage Cool Kids and Record Hop are a good match and I think they should arm-wrestle to see who loves the Nineties more, though they are respectively worshiping different years.
The Great Tyrant | Fight Bite | Koji Kondo | Blank Blank (Chat Room) Three of Fort Worth's most intimidating live acts, one hardcore punk, one grindcore, and whatever The Great Tyrant considers their terrifying brand of gloomy prog. Fight Bite certainly stands out here, but will hold their own due to the wrist-slitting subject matter of every single one of their songs.
Hands Up w/ Gracie Chavez (The Loft) This time The Party presents Houston's Gracie Chavez who is a DJ, mother, music writer, and veteran of Houston's club scene. From shedding light on fellow female DJ's as a co-founder of the "La Femmes" project, to her recent ten thousand download triumph of her recent "Yo, Mami" mix, Chavez is quite the overachiever as well as the perfect act with a pedigree heavy enough to headline the chaos of The Party. Read the excellent interview over at Central Booking.
Spazm 151 | Damage Case | Akkolyte | Wayward boys | Kill The Client | Human Struggle | The Krumbums (Red Blood Club) Red Blood Club gets an appropriate send-off with some of the acts that made this one of the last destinations in the endangered Deep Ellum area. Just a couple of these bands would be a fierce bill, all of them together makes it staggeringly brutal. Watch your pretty face.
Attic Ted | Zanzibar Snails | Glass/Secret Briefcase (Wisconsin - 731 Texas Street Ex-Eighth Continent) Attic Ted plays loopy, skewed songs, heavy on the organ and with obvious quirky influences such as The Residents. They also bear a resemblance to the nervous rhythms and uptight vocals of groups like 100 Flowers and The Homosexuals. I wonder if any other weirdo acts are hiding out in San Marcos. Glass is the sludge-metal side project of Kaboom, Zanzibar Snails will include a guest appearance by Burnt Sienna Trio's Sinevil, and the night will be finished off by a noise improvisation by several local artists.
Russian Circles | Daughters | Young Widows (Lola's) Russian Circles is said to blend Explosions In The Sky-styled instrumental rock with metal overtones, and I can only imagine that would have to be an improvement. Daughters are a well-known live act, notorious for their anger, energy, and nakedness. Young Widows is ex-members of Breather Resist.
Final edit of Loose Change on Saturday, June 21 at 8pm (Lakewood Theater)
Sorry, Blogger had one of their obligatory two hour shutdowns today, so not too much info here, but we'll talk soon.
Stay School Swag School (Roof of Cool Beans) Though it's long been my philosophy that alcohol and rooftops don't necessarily mix, this "Roof Jump Off Party" sounds like a pretty diverse show and who doesn't like hanging out on rooftops? The lineup features the reunion of In Dot Dat, as well as Yeah Def, and Young Doc Gooden. Topping it all off is Andrew Savage of The Teenage Cool Kids, who will be playing records. Mind your step and please recycle.
Plan B | Darktown Strutters (Rubber Gloves) Mismatched show featuring our new favorite local band. We're so fickle with our highly sought love and attention.
Faun Fables | Invincible Czars | The Chameleon Chamber Group (Lola's) Faun Fables makes unconventionally theatrical art rock, has toured as far as New Zealand, and records for Drag City. A little over the top in a Ren' Fair sort of way and certainly not for everyone, but if that doesn't bother you give it a chance.
I have been consistently impressed with the shows at Conduit, Holly Johnson, and PNDB since I moved to Dallas. If you haven't made it out to any of them, all three have openings this week.
THURSDAY
And/Or House of Dang Summer Smackdown (4219 Bryan St.)
The two things I love most in the summer: outdoor movies and breaking into apartment complexes for a late night swim. This week is Teen Witch, with a Most Popular Girl Contest. Everything goes down at 8:30. Bring some popcorn and a lawn chair.
Marill, Starr, and Iwasaki (Conduit) I have been excited about this show ever since I saw two Iwasaki pieces at the CADD Art Fair.
Margo Sawyer: Synchronicity of Color (Holly Johnson)5-8pm A continutation of the work that Sawyer did for Discovery Green in Houston.
Twenty-one (PNDB) 5-8pm So, I screwed up and posted this last week, but it is really opening this week. Twenty-one photographs will be up, including work by Mario Algaze, Mario DeBiasi, Chuy Benitez, John Herrin, David Johndrow, and Elliott Erwitt.
Also, PNDB is also the sole gallery in the States representing Chinese photographer Wu Jalin. I would highly reccomend checking out his work while you're there.
Jackson Hammack, Jason Brown, and Jeanie Gooden (Craighead Green)
Playboywill be filling in for Nature at Taxi Faretonight at Zubar. For those who didn't know, Nature is currently playing shows in his home away from home-- San Juan, PR. Cool people know that the guy was huge there a few years ago, and a decent argument can be made that his is a name that should be mentioned along with Diplo when discussing how the contemporary dance music of Puerto Rico made its way to New York and the rest of the United States a few years ago. Anyway, Sober tells us that this Playboy dude is pretty good, but that is all we know other than the fact that he spins reggae/dancehall.
Dance Your Face Offis at the Cavern tonight, and it's for people who actually like to dance to, you know, dance music and stuff. I stopped by to sample one of the sets a few weeks ago and heard a lot of solid house and disco grooves. Pretty good stuff, even if an empty upstairs Cavern can be a pretty lonely place to hear high energy dance music. Hopefully people will catch on to this sooner rather than later.
Death Cab For Cutie | Rogue Wave (Nokia) Re: Death Cab- Where are all the people who used to bug me about this band eight years ago? Did they escape to South America with all the other war criminals?
The Roots (House Of Blues) The Roots have had their moments here and there (mostly on Illadelph Halflife,) but I've never been convinced that mixing in jam band elements is the solution to saving the live Hip Hop show. Judging by the fact that they will perform sans opening act tonight, that argument is still being made.
?uestlove (Ghostbar) After-party for the Roots show, obviously.
Dysrhythmia | Broadcast Sea | Four Days To Burn (Bar Of Soap) I'm told this show is free, all the more reason to go see and hear one of the handful of anomalies on Relapse Records, Dysrhythmia. Dysrhythmia is an instrumental group of considerable technical prowess, but aren't as boring as other groups in the tricky riff and time-signatures genre. Perhaps this is due to several surprising turns in the music, from the incorporation of Norwegian Black Metal sounds to ambient influences and even some melodic material that could pass for a record on Thrill Jockey.
free times new viking and psychedelic horseshit tickets
Remember a few months ago when we brought you Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit at Strawberry Fields for five bucks? Well, it'll be a bit more work (and cost a bit more money) to see these bands again this weekend, but it'll be totally possible to catch both, and certainly worth your time. Psychedelic Horseshit will be playing on Friday at the Chat Room in Ft. Worth, while Times New Viking will hit Club Dada on Saturday. Wanna go? Luckily for you, we have two pairs of tickets to give away to each show, and if you want to win them, please email weshotjrtix@yahoo.com before Thursday at Noon. Include the name of the show you want to see in the subject line and your full name in the email body.
It's been nearly a year since our infamous Matthew and the Arrogant Sea article was published, and despite some of the negative implications of that experience, I'm still somewhat intrigued by the group of musicians involved in the project. After spending a couple weeks interviewing with us and sharing the details of a phony record deal that turned out to be either a fragment of one person's imagination or the centerpiece of one of the most dumbfounding publicity stunts in recent local music history (depending on who you ask), Matthew and the Arrogant Sea and its related solo and side projects simply soldiered on during and after the "phony record deal" fallout in the local media, producing a constant stream of material under a handful of different monikers that has been a bit inconsistent at times, but generally more interesting than most of the "indie" folk fodder that passes for "buzzworthy" in DFW/Denton these days. In the process, the group noticeably raised their profile, playing frequent gigs with larger, more established acts while attaining greater recognition in the media and cementing their reputation as a band or group of bands that people tend to take interest in. Dismiss this modest rise in popularity as fickle, flavor of the month favoritism if you must, but it is difficult to deny that MATAS and its many offshoots have produced some solid material here and there, and their prolific recording tendencies and constant reinvention and exploration certainly have to be admired on some level.
One of the most impressive talents to emerge from Matthew and the Arrogant Sea is J Gray, a 16 year old songwriter who, at times, quite honestly soars above any similar recording artist in the area, including his MATAS band mates. His debut full length, J Stop Playing Those Sad Songs, is a consistent and imaginative collection of haunted, touching songs that reveals both the surprising strengths and predictable shortcomings of a young yet highly talented musician who is just finding his bearings as a recording artist.
Gray's debut is truly an article of the Myspace/bit torrent era in the sense that it plays like a collection of individual tracks rather than a work created as a coherent, multi-part whole. This isn't to say that the whole thing isn't worth listening to, but rather an observation concerning the stand-alone, isolated feel of most of these songs. This tends to work against the album a bit in the sense that some of the songs flirt with repetitiveness and redundancy by the time you get through with them, but the fact that it doesn't end up being much of a problem really says something about the strength of Gray's songwriting and the highlights that make his debut a relatively impressive achievement, particularly for a self released, home recorded offering.
The record's obvious calling card is Gray's emotive and highly distinctive vocal performance, stylistically hinting at a diverse array of talents like the Fleetwoods' Gary Troxell, frog-in-the-throat Nashville Skyline era Bob Dylan, and even Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, all the while managing to avoid sounding enough like any of the aforementioned vocalists (or anyone else, for that matter) to garner any straight up comparisons. Gray appears to be well aware of this strength, as his vocals are positioned front and center on each and every track, highlighting his soft, sad croon and the thoughtfully abstract lyrical content that often provides these songs with a level of intensity that is impressively literary at times.
Starting with the title track, an improved and slightly tweaked version of a song that appeared on our most recent Projection compilation, the album commences on an immediate launch to a lonely, introspective headspace that it proceeds to occupy for its duration. Most of the tracks here are minimal and sparse in their construction: clean, simple acoustic strumming and Gray's reverb heavy vocal tracks comprise most of the material, with occasional touches of drums, bass, layered backing vocals and additional guitar parts that simply add to the album's dreamy, desolate tone of longing and resigned curiosity. The minimal arrangements work especially well considering that Gray doesn't seem to need much help in making these rather traditional folk/country songs sound mysterious and heartbreaking, and one gets the sense that anything more would undermine the record's overall feel while simultaneously reducing its charm.
Although the standout tracks are many, a trio of songs with similar titles collectively provides perhaps the best indication of Gray's talents, as well as many of the album's emotional high points. "You Are the God of Sounds" is certainly the strongest track here, and it is a truly stunning thing to hear on a self released local album. Starting off with simple acoustic strumming, Gray's vocals come in almost immediately and proceed to steal the show with a beautiful, lost highway country influenced melody that sounds distant and almost ghostly in its sweetness. When the rest of the band comes in and joins Gray at the 1:00 mark, it becomes apparent that the song is something special, revealing Gray's impressive ability to come off as damaged and thoughtful beyond his years. "You Are the Golden Child" similarly combines quiet, full band accompaniment with a gorgeous, reverb heavy vocal melody for optimal effect, while "You Are the Stars" drops the rhythm and utilizes a drier, clearer sound that presents a textbook argument for "less is more."
Missteps such as the overly long and repetitive "Mr. James" hold things back a bit, and the album itself is not void of scattered, minor flaws-- errant lyrical goofs and overzealous use of vocal effects emerge from time to time, demonstrating that Gray certainly has some room to grow as a songwriter. But these issues pale in comparison to the record's strengths, and they are easily overlooked as Gray's talent and potential continually reveals itself throughout. It seems almost impossible to predict success in our fickle and downright confusing regional music scene, but a few listens to J Stop Playing Those Sad Songs will likely leave you confident that on his own, J Gray likely has a shot at turing a lot of heads and creating enough of a stir to attain some kind of record deal in the near future. For real this time.
