Local Live & Album Reviews

[April 26th, 2006]

^BLOTTER

CURTIS-AID, PORTLAND EELS AND NEW VIVA VOCE.

Portland singer Curtis Salgado , best known for his brief stint as Santana lead singer and credited as being John Belushi's inspiration for the character "Joliet Jake" in The Blues Brothers, was recently diagnosed with liver cancer. Salgado plans to undergo treatments next month and hopes to get a liver transplant surgery in the near future. For information regarding donations and upcoming benefit concerts, go to www.curtissalgado.com. >> And then there were three. Los Angeles' Mark Everett , who calls himself "E" and whomever he's currently playing with "The Eels ," has come calling for Portland musicians. First, guitarist Chet Lyster was christened "The Chet" and set to work on a musical saw and suitcase/trashcan drumkit. Next, bassist Allen Hunter became "Big Al," and was ordered to learn the autoharp. Now, former Baseboard Heaters drummer Derek Brown (recently backing James Low along with Hunter and Lyster) has been conscripted, too. His marching order: grow a beard. The boys head to L.A. early next month, and are due at the Roseland Theater on June 3rd. >> Viva Voce has officially finished recording its third full-length and gave fans a first taste of the new material Sunday night at the Wonder Ballroom . Amy McCullough offers up this critique of the new material: "It was a little less I-love-you poppy, and more melt-your-face-off guitar rock." Compelling.

Sate our thirst for Portland music news. Email localcut@wweek.com.

^Alan Singley Saturday, April 29

Psychedelic songwriter's latest proves he is truly one of a kind.

[PSYCH-POP] Alan Singley, to put it lightly, is a different sort of musician. Unabashedly enthusiastic and unashamed of that enthusiasm, the pop songwriter seeks more than anything else to connect with an audience on an intimate level. Sometimes that effort is a little unsettling, as it was last week when he showed up at my front door with a copy of his new album, Lovingkindness, and asked, through the screen door, "Are you Casey Jaaaahman?" I told him yes, and added that I hadn't expected his album to be hand-delivered. His gaze wandered from my door up to some clouds, rested a moment on a couple of trees and then landed back down on me. "We were just driving around," he said.

Singley has always made music that's as goofy and full of wonder as he is. His songs are about love and nature, his voice well-rehearsed but still filled with a childlike unpredictability. Once in a while, Singley stumbles into a six-minute stint of wandering psychedelia or a quick and silly rock number, but the best work on his previous albums has also been the gentlest, with Singley's fragile voice wrapped in piano and finger-picked guitar. It's in those moments that one realizes Alan Singley was born in the wrong decade, his music resting comfortably between Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys or Village Green-era Kinks. Lovingkindness, Singley's third release, is his first album with backing band Pants Machine. It's also the first of Singley's albums to be properly produced in a studio, by John Cohrs, Skyler Norwood (Point Juncture, WA) and Gus Elg (Wilding). These changes have helped keep Singley's meanderings in check, while allowing him to flex his lyrical whimsy. This is on display on the album's uptempo opener, "I Dunno Where 2 Start," the utterly ridiculous, tight and funky party anthem filled with warbling moments of psychedelia and the line "They say it's your birthday/ So try not to get dizzy/ When the DJ gets the orders to pump up the Thin Lizzy." The machinery surrounding Singley not only helps him from straying into six-minute territory, it also wisely leaves him room to breathe on tracks like "Watersong," a classic, multilayered pop ballad, and "Underneath," wherein he sings with heartbreaking directness about an abusive father: "As we got older I started to think/ That underneath all the alcohol, the cocaine and the violence/ There was a man/ And I'm not saying it's right but I understand." This seriousness is something new for Singley, but you wouldn't know it by the way he delivers those lines, keeping the heavy parts heavy, the funny parts funny, and the pretty parts absolutely gorgeous. Alan Singley might be Portland's most eccentric songwriter. But he is also its most under-appreciated, and as Lovingkindness ultimately attests, one of its very finest. CASEY JARMAN.

Alan Singley & Pants Machine plays with Point Juncture, WA, and Please Step Out of the Vehicle at the Artistery. 8 pm. $5. All ages.

^Seantos in the House

A new manager at Sabala's lifts the lifetime ban on Deadheads and cleans the ladies' room.

[BEYOND ROCK] During opening night at Sabala's at Mount Tabor two years ago, a giant piñata of Jerry Garcia was lowered from the ceiling and smashed by tattooed and septum-pierced punks before the Gibson SG-toting Dwarves took the stage, complete with nudity and audience-molesting stage antics. The smashing of Jerry's head was a symbol of the club's transformation from a hippie haven to a rock mecca. But times have changed: A look at the lineup for this weekend's four anniversary hints at a departure from animosity toward the less-abrasive sides of rock music. WW sat down with Seantos, a Portland music fixture who, as the club's new general manager, is reinventing it into a multi-genre nightspot that cleans its bathrooms. JASON SIMMS.

WW: What happened to the hard-rock-only booking policy?

Seantos: Sabala's is such a big place to fill up, and in this town, if you're too focused on one genre, you're not going to last very long. What we've got now is a variety of people booking shows, so we're getting more of a cross section. One of the people booking is a production company called 2 Buddhas, and they do more jam music. And you know, on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, they put beers in people's hands and get people dancing.

That's a far cry from the Garcia piñata.

I wasn't here, so I really don't know about that.... It was some exorcism of hippies or whatever, but for me, I don't really care that much. We should be a bar that has rock shows; we shouldn't try to be a production company on top of that. And if people want to be segregationists when it comes to rock 'n' roll, I hate to break it to them, but it's 2006 and everything's pretty much blended together. We've all been through our various phases.

But does variety detract from the club's identity?

There's an overview—it's not like we have no point in what we're doing. But it's more fun to have different representations of music that's going on in this town, even on the same bill—like the first night of the anniversary party isn't just the baby version of High on Fire, then the more experienced High on Fire, then the band who really wants to be High on Fire, and then High on Fire. Who wants to see that shit for five hours? I don't.

So how would you characterize the new Sabala's?

It's part neighborhood bar and part mom-and-pop rock club. We're trying to make it more like you're going to an event. We're going to use the main room for big shows, with more variety of things in the Sideshow Lounge. We've got a belly dancing show in late May; we're doing karaoke on Thursdays; there's a burlesque group I want to get in; a marijuana legalization group meets there.... I mean, when you've got an opportunity to be creative, why not be creative?

Sabala's anniversary party runs from Thursday to Sunday, April 27-30, and features Starantula, the Nice Boys, the Epoxies and Reverend Glasseye. See listings for more information.

^Die Kapitalist Pig April 21 at the 15th Street Pub

Communist punks decide a bar in Vancouver is not the place to start the revolution.

[SATIRICAL PUNK] Wearied from waiting around for four hours at the 15th Street Pub in Vancouver, Wash., to play a headlining set, Die Kapitalist Pig frontman Tyler Riggs tells me he doesn't think the audience—a catch-all of out-of-fashion drunk people, ages 26 to 40—will notice the band's leftist message. This despite the obviousness of the band's name and its sound.

As the trio begins to play their simple, medium-paced punk, drummer Jason Ferris—with only a kick drum, snare and cymbals—constructs doot-DAT beats that make the band sound like communism's punk-rock cheerleaders. The drunk guy in red long sleeves who's been dancing all night continues, and a few people watch the band from a glassless window at the bar 25 feet away. A guy in a tuxedo T-shirt and Etnies bobs along, but when Riggs starts to scream into a mix that has the vocals turned up too loud, the room starts to clear. As if to fill it, bassist Frank Freeman steps onto the floor and stares up at Riggs on the 1-foot stage.

At this point I wonder why Riggs doesn't sass the crowd a little. Like before a song mocking car-centric culture, why not ask: "How many of you drove here? Don't you love cars? I hope you all drove by yourselves, because that's the best!" Why didn't DKP research some ultra-conservative Washingtonian politicians, ask for applause in their honor, and then cut it off with a witty remark? With a name like Die Kapitalist Pig, I wondered, "Where's the hate?"

Afterwards, Riggs explains. "I'm no Jake Rose [of Enchanted 4ST]," he says of his fellow Portland musician. "That guy's totally different when he's onstage—talking shit even if there are only five people there. But I figure, on a night like tonight, why not just let people enjoy the music? I am not attacking these people, but rather pointing out the harmful and ridiculous nature of our culture."

I end the evening by checking in with some of the people at the club. "They're what!?" says a cross-eyed drunk man who would only identify himself as "Big Phil" when I tell him DKP is a communist band. I decipher his ramblings to conclude that he is, in fact, sympathetic to many of the issues DKP sings about, like logging. Shane Gerber, who played pool during almost all of DKP's set, was surprisingly shrewd with his description of their sound as "Nirvana meets Modest Mouse." He enjoyed the music, but, as one could surmise from his description, the band's political satire went unnoticed by him as well. He did, however, add that the band's politics wouldn't have bothered him, since the Smurfs are communists, too. JASON SIMMS.

^Parenthetical Girls (((GRRRLS))) (Slender Means Society)

Parenthetical Girls show us the dark, dirty and beautiful spaces in between.

[PRETTY, UNCOMFORTABLE] (((GRRRLS))) has been lurking in vinyl form for two years now, having about the same effect on the Northwest music scene as any other private breakup. In that time, it seems, Zac Pennington, Parenthetical Girls' sole permanent member and a former Portland Mercury music, took his album's final line, "Some things are best left unsaid," to heart and left these songs in comfortable obscurity. What a goddamn shame. But, as Pennington might say (with a nudge), "Better late than never." We now have it in digital rerelease.

Self-conscious clichés aside, (((GRRRLS))) is a pretty yet uncomfortable 20-minute album, ripe with honesty that is as often ugly as it is shimmering. The music consists of bare xylophone and piano melodies suspended above a heavy bass undertow, exposing the influence of the album's partial mixer and Xiu Xiu lead man Jamie Stewart. The sound works to push this point home: The thing said and its shadow are inseparable. The track "C-86 Is Killing My Life" begins with a summery "sha-la-la-la" chorus that is pummeled seconds later by a massive bass drop and Pennington's intensely human (read: untrained, imperfect) vocals singing, "So please fight the tears/ For they never looked so insincere." On opener "Of Collateral Damage," a musically delicate and sweet song, he begins by singing, "I only meant half the things I said," and ends with the regretful refrain "you'll be alright," repeated over and over. Musically and lyrically, the album takes place in a confusing area where a tense field of pain mingles with its own beauty.

It's a horrific thought that if we didn't treat each other like shit, we'd never have that strange space. But we should be grateful for that, even if the only result is this line that's been stuck in my brain since (((GRRRLS))) first made its way to my headphones: "So take my lip between your teeth/ And taste me/ By devouring." It's uncomfortable and it reminds me that some things are best left unsaid, but you really don't know that until you hear them. And by then, you're hooked. MICHAEL BYRNE.