Local Live & CD Reviews

[May 31st, 2006]

^Blotter

BAND SIGNINGS AND BUYOUTS, AND CD BABY GROWS

Heroes and Villains have signed with new local label Pampelmoose . H&V will join a healthy local roster at the label, started by Gang of Four bassist and Portland businessman Dave Allen , including Wet Confetti , Kleveland and Dirty Martini . The parlor popsters plan on releasing their debut in September. >> The Village Green recently signed to spinART , a Brooklyn independent label that carries artists like Eels and the Apples in Stereo . TVG, which has already had the honor of playing South by Southwest earlier this year and Sasquatch! Music Festival last weekend, announced that its new album, Feeling the Fall, will be released Aug. 29. >> Stars of Track and Field have delayed the release of their new album, Centuries Before Love and War, due to a contract buyout. The album, which was originally slated for a June 6 release on SideCho Records , is being pushed back to mid-fall. No word yet on who is behind the buyout. >> CD Baby , the Portland-based online independent music market, just signed a deal that will allow distribution of its artists' music to 2,400 retail music stores in America, including chains like Tower , Best Buy and Hot Topic . Before the deal, CD Baby was able to offer distribution via the Web only to the 100,000 artists it works with.

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

^Brian Foote of Nudge, Wednesday, May 31

Brian Foote is in the Windy City, but fear not, Portland's not losing Nudge.

[WIRED JAZZ] Last August, Brian Foote split Portland for Chicago to run promotions for the Kranky record label, basically the acme of experimental music in the United States. Even ignoring the obvious deterrents (Chicago is expensive and scary and COLD), the move was a tough sell: Foote, after all, had to leave behind his wired jazz trio Nudge, a source of Portland's finest antigravity lounge music. You'd think the end was nigh for the band—an absolute tragedy—at least in its current lineup of Foote, Honey Owens and Paul Dickow, but not so. Using the miracle of the Internet, he's taking the relationship long-distance. Proving the point, Foote sat down with WW for an "e-chat" about Kranky, crossbreeding and the future of Nudge.

—MICHAEL BYRNE

WW: Looking through Kranky's eyes now, where does Portland stand in the national left-field music scene? James Squeaky (Argumentix) told me a while back we were among the best...

Brian Foote: I felt that way when I lived there and, yes, I still feel that way. Lots and lots of crossbreeding makes for some astonishing mutation. Though it can get annoying. I would say the "everyone is in three bands" thing has a huge effect. It's a small Portland after all.

Are you thinking of Nudge at all in regard to musical crossbreeding?

Nudge has always been about [crossbreeding]. With each of us exploring music on our own in other projects (Valet, Strategy, Jackie-O Motherfucker, World, DJ P. Disco), it makes for no shortage in us coming back to Nudge with new perspective. We've been really lucky to draw from a pool of collaborators from the Portland scene over the years.

How would you define Nudge, then? What are the boundaries?

Nudge's boundaries have always been an issue. Possibly to our detriment, Nudge has sometimes almost been an experiment at being a new band every song. Over being active in some form for about eight years, patterns have emerged, which is why I'm happy to keep this lineup active regardless of the distance: We all understand the patterns/boundaries to an extent that is maybe not evident to others.

How are you going to overcome the distance?

Pretty much exactly how we are doing this interview.

Nudge plays with Jan Jelinek and Unrecognizable Now at Holocene. 9 pm. $8. 21+. Brian Foote will also be DJing with Bodycode, Sutekh and DJ Suppoz, Saturday, June 3, at Holocene. 9 pm. Free. 21+.

^The Stolen Sweets, Saturday, June 3

Pete Krebs and crew recreate the swinging sound of the '30s, with respect.

[HOT JAZZ] When Pete Krebs talks about the music he is making, the word "respect" pops out of his mouth so often that you'd think he had a very mild, kindly form of Tourette's. But unlike in his early days as a young Portland rocker in groups like Hazel and Thrillhammer, the 39-year-old is now demanding respect not for his band but for the music of a bygone era.

"I feel like it's a respectful record," Krebs says of the album his band, the Stolen Sweets, will be releasing Saturday at the Aladdin Theater. "We went to great lengths to do the homework and do the hard work to create a sound that is not only respectful but elegant and, hopefully, interesting."

And it is. The record, Shuffle Off to Buffalo, is as flawlessly executed as it is earnestly true to the music it attempts to recreate, namely the vocal jazz of the 1930s. Krebs leads the ensemble that includes instrumentalists Keith Brush and David Langenes, and vocalists Lara Michell, Erin Sutherland and Jen Bernard. The three ladies take stage front and center, delivering the punchy vocal harmonies filled with upbeat innuendo and winking sass of the Boswell Sisters, whose songs make up most of the Stolen Sweets' repertoire. Krebs takes turns at the mike as well, playing the elegant crooner to perfection, his drawn vocals as smooth and mesmerizing as swirling smoke in a still room. The foundation of the Stolen Sweets, though, is the instrumentalists, who have gone to great lengths to recreate the swinging rhythms and oddball melodies of the era.

"Players that play older music face the dilemma of whether they want to rewrite everything or reproduce it in a contemporary way," says Krebs. "I think that there is a fine line between the two. I mean, obviously it's not 1934, but by the same token, I think that anytime anybody monkeys with the original formula, it kind of ruins it."

In order to assure that the band sticks to that original formula, Langenes went to work transcribing the songs of the Boswell Sisters, Cab Calloway and others. Some of the songs, like "Me Minus You" and "Wasting My Love on You," hadn't been charted since they were recorded 70 years ago.

It sounds like a pain in the ass, but it's what is necessary to, as Krebs would say, show respect for the music.

"Anytime you play old music I think you have to do your best to educate yourself about the music," he says. "Play it in a respectful and contemporary way that, you know, you're not walking around wearing funny hats, playacting like you're in a Hollywood movie."

—MARK BAUMGARTEN

The Stolen Sweets play with 3 Leg Torso at the Aladdin Theater. 8 pm. $12 advance, $15 day of show. All ages.

^SOLENOID

On Supernature, David Chandler baits the hook.

[ELECTRONIC BRAIN CANDY] The first time I saw David Chandler, a.k.a. Solenoid, he was performing behind camouflage mesh and wearing a flak helmet while crouched over a table of drum machines and synthesizers, unleashing volleys of 4/4 beats. It was like he (and his Cascadian Knights compatriot Paul Dickow) were mounting an assault on the dance floor below. Indeed, there was no defense. And, as expected, there is no defense from Solenoid's Supernature (ORAC), 40 minutes of electronic dance love and glorious brain fuck.

Chandler doesn't let his productions wander far from that dance floor, yet he never lets them be governed by it, either. He keeps his album well within the realm of head-scratchability, throwing in initially ignorable glitches, analog fissures and tightly packed beat sequences. At the disc's crux, that driving force is barely traceable: On the fourth and longest (at six minutes) cut, "Bezoar Tides," Chandler is matching no fewer than three beats, while playing with an atmospheric synth line and washing the mix with irregular acid baths. For a while, the album is nearly without break, linked by that almost eerie synth and, of course, a near-resolute faith in dance continuity. Two-thirds through, however, on "Acid Mule," Chandler's history in experimentalism appears, and Supernature is flipped on its back: The beat drops out, replaced by an undulating bass line, a subtle undercurrent to carry the dance floor while the melodies veer into creepy atmospherics edging on clamor. Two tracks later, he truly kills the beat for the first time, in favor of a bent acid/viola mutation, only to have it return in force 50 seconds later in heavy 4/4 bass pounds. Given the gritty three-minute synthscape that follows, that beat seems to be mere bait. Take it.

—MICHAEL BYRNE

^Eels With Strings: Live at Town Hall Director: Niels Alpert

[SAD POP] Mark Oliver Everett, a.k.a. E of the Eels, likes to find good musicians, then push their boundaries. On the act's last tour, Eels With Strings, preserved now on DVD and CD, Portland player Chet Lyster was conscripted for not only electric guitar but lap steel, saw and suitcase-trashcan drum kit, while local bassist Allen Hunter was pressed for duty on mandolin, celeste—and autoharp, with which he had no prior experience. As the name of the tour and the recently released CD/DVD indicates, the band is also accompanied by a string quartet.

During one between-songs documentary segment here, E calls "The Chet" the band's "greatest asset," before Lyster himself declares, "My mother said I should be in charge of the band." E makes it clear who is in charge, announcing from the stage, "Eels, Los Angeles, California," but there is plenty of Portland spirit here, too. Our homeboys acquit themselves more than admirably, serving the songs with technical sophistication, visual style and generous emotional reserves, especially evident in several close-ups of a pensive Lyster.

Most of the songs come from the double album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, their heart-wrenching tales of familial death and dysfunction shot through with mordant humor. And this live rendering certainly takes a viewer on an emotional journey. Late in the set, when E closes "Things the Grandchildren Should Know" by humming "Theme from Blinking Lights"—played at the top of the show by Lyster on melodica—there's a sense of having lived through and learned something over the course of the night. Something that can't quite be put into words, making it all the more profound.

—JEFF ROSENBERG

The Eels' "No Strings Attached" tour, featuring Lyster, Hunter and Portland drummer Derek Brown, rolls into Portland Saturday, June 3, at the Roseland Theater. 9 pm. $17.50 advance, $20 day of show. All ages.