Skip to main contentSleater-Kinney Aug. 12 at the Crystal Ballroom
Portland's greatest rock trio ends its career doing as it pleases.
[ROCK] As a sold-out crowd waited for Sleater-Kinney to take the stage for the trio's final show Saturday night at the Crystal Ballroom, Eddie Vedder appeared, clutching an acoustic guitar. The unannounced guest played two songs, a powerful protest song called "Here's to the Land You Tore the Heart Out Of" and a duet with Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, "Tonight You Belong to Me." But the most important thing the Pearl Jam leadman did that night is to put the epochal evening into context.
"Like a lot of you, I wish I was around to see the Beatles play, or Hendrix, or Led Zeppelin," he said. "But I am extremely fortunate to live in a time when I can see Sleater-Kinney live."
Fifteen minutes later, Weiss, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein took the stage and launched into "The Fox," the lead track from Sleater-Kinney's seventh (and last) release, The Woods. What followed was a two-plus hour, 24-song ride through the band's career, touching on favorites and deep cuts from throughout its 11-year stint as the favorite band of some of the world's most fervent fans.
"The End of You" from The Hot Rock followed and the crowd, largely subdued for the somewhat plodding first song, ignited as Brownstein sang "I am not the captain/ I am just another fan/ Sailing off the edge of truth/ into the end of you."
Tucker, Brownstein and Weiss went on to indulge fans with back-catalog favorites like "Good Things," "Step Aside" and "Turn It On," but the band devoted almost half of its set to songs from The Woods. Given the band's unyielding performance of those songs—including incendiary renditions of "Entertain" and "Wilderness" and an absolutely frightening feat of guitar violence committed by Brownstein in "What's Mine Is Yours"—it's reasonable to suspect the trio would have played more of the new dark, amazingly complex material if there was any left (with an encore performance of "Steep Air," the band had played every song off the new album). That being the case, the two encores were mostly devoted to older material, the band ending its last show with the fitting won't-you-stay anthem "One More Hour."
Clearly, in the end, Sleater-Kinney's sense of dramatics was finely honed, but so was its sense of self-preservation. This is really the only explanation for a band's calling it quits at its creative peak, as Sleater-Kinney has done, and the only way a band could disregard the throngs of fans shouting for nostalgia and just play the music it wants to be remembered for, as Sleater-Kinney did on Saturday.
—MARK BAUMGARTEN.
For a complete review of the final Sleater-Kinney show, as well as a photo gallery, go to localcut.com and search "Sleater-Kinney."
Fernando Enter to Exit (In Music We Trust)
Portland pop veteran recalls Elliott and John on his way to eviscerating the Posies.
[POP] My first listen to Fernando's Enter to Exit coincided with my rediscovery of the Posies, which I found to be a pretty happy music-critic accident. Fernando's veteran Portland frontman, Fernando Viciconte, has a similar musical vision to the influential Posies CEO, Ken Stringfellow, as both twist the Beatles' warmly layered girl-song formulas to accommodate more somber and personal narratives. Both frontmen also share slightly feigned accents, though Viciconte ditches Stringfellow's nasal whine for John Lennon-esque pronunciation and tone.
To the eager ear, Fernando will also draw Elliott Smith comparisons—which are fair game in a town where Smith's influence is unavoidable. The doubled vocals and guitar stabs of "One Trick Pony" are eerily similar to Smith's darker work, with lyrics about "scars on my arm" keeping it suspect as a dig at the late Portland songwriter. The Lennon influence, though, is what really shines through on Enter to Exit. It's crystal-clear on "Everybody Knows," where Viciconte repeats "Everybody Knows/ Reapin' what you sow" in his best Lennon walk-down vocal over a jangly guitar line. But Viciconte's vocal presence is warmer than Lennon's, and devoid of the late Beatle's pissed-at-the-world baby-screams.
If Fernando, the band, wears its influences on its sleeve, it certainly doesn't hurt Enter to Exit as an album. Viciconte is a formidable, personal songwriter, and his confessional tone finds a perfect vessel in the band's well-timed twists, turns and key changes. The production is seamless when it needs to be and absolutely epic at other times. Fernando's album-ending "Waiting," which takes a cue from "I Shall Be Released," is one of the more gorgeously thick tracks I've heard in a long time. The tune is carried by its slightly psychedelic production and Viciconte's commanding vocals, and it holds a couple of the many chill-inducing moments on Enter to Exit, which Fernando hides like easter eggs throughout. If the rest of Fernando's back catalog is as hook-laden and charming as this pop jewel, I'm pretty much over the Posies.
—CASEY JARMAN.
Burn to Shine 03: Portland
A new DVD depicts Portland musicians burnin' down the house, literally.
[indie rock] Sleater-Kinney's Janet Weiss climbs through a living-room window and sits at a drum kit positioned next to a large brick fireplace and under impeccably creased mauve curtains. The soft buzz of her snare rattles behind Carrie Brownstein's angry, impassioned vocals before Weiss tears into an amazing harmonica part. The song is "Modern Girl," and it is perhaps the best, most intimately performed track on director Christoph Green and producer Brendan Canty's third edition of their Burn to Shine DVD series. The series picks a city, finds a building there that's about to be demolished or burned, implores the city's best artists to spend a day playing music in the building, and leaves the interpretation of the event up to its viewers. For Burn to Shine 03: Portland, local curators Chris Funk (the Decemberists) and booker Seann McKeel helped assemble a group of hot-shit Portland bands for a recording session in a soon-to-be-burned Tualatin home.
Each band is given one hour to set up, run sound-check and record one song, which you would think—coupled with the task of giving an old pig farmer's home its last rites—would make an artist approach more low-key, introspective material (as Sleater-Kinney did). And Quasi's raw, amazing performance of "Peace and Love" is a perfect example of that sentiment. Likewise, the Shins' "Saint Simon" displays singer James Mercer at his earnest best. Mirah's weirdo klezmer-folk band adds to the surreal feel of the space, but Mirah herself—with eyes closed and bare feet shuffling over beige carpet—appears strangely at home singing "Light the Match." Unfortunately, the Decemberists go in a less personal direction, playing (of course) "The Mariner's Revenge Song," a melodramatic piece of theater that gives the impression the band hasn't yet realized that, in some situations, less is more.
In a much more obnoxiously dramatic performance, the Planet The's Charlie Salas-Humara flails about awkwardly, as if he doesn't know what to do without an audience. It feels like overcompensation, making his performance—except for the moments when he stops thrashing and closes his eyes—come off as contrived and almost silly. Lifesavas, on the other hand, deal with the same problem superbly: Vursatyl makes the camera his audience, working it like he's (indeed!) recording a music video.
The final song before the Tualatin Fire Department steps in to start the fire is the Gossip's "Listen Up!" Frontwoman Beth Ditto wisely follows Mirah's lead, saying, "I'm just gonna close my eyes," before the song starts. And despite the band's often laughable hipster posturing, Ditto delivers a damn inspiring performance by keeping it simple and straight-up owning that smooth, soulful voice of hers.
One of the coolest things about the film, though, is how blunt the transitions are—from song to song and, finally, from the Gossip's performance to footage of the all-encompassing fire. Besides a very brief, informative intro, Burn to Shine is all music with no interruptions—until fire destroys the stage. Though the ominous sky and brutal, discordant soundtrack that accompany the burning give you the impression the film is trying a little too hard to hit you over the head with some poignant lesson about old houses being razed in the name of McMansions and golf courses, it thankfully keeps the drama to a minimum and does the right thing: It lets the music and the fire speak for themselves.
—Amy McCullough.
Burn to Shine comes out Tuesday, Aug. 22.
Show me the pink Monday, Aug. 21
Show Me the Pink visits the heart of Rad America.
[ELECTRO-DANCE] Last spring, the electro-dance cyclists in Show Me the Pink went on a 50-date tour to spread the gospel of Rad America, an ideology formed by the group to combine fun and self-reliance with community politics. They found that people in many places—including Cleveland, Miss., where they played to a packed barn house—were already on the same page. But nowhere was more ahead of the game than New Orleans, where the five-piece played a free, generator-powered show for a few hundred post-Katrina volunteers. I sat down with multi-instrumentalists Emilina Dissette, Noelle Archibald, Shannon Palermo, Eliza Strack and 11-month-old Starlet, who screamed excitedly as the SMTP's ladies delivered the Rad Word.
—JASON SIMMS.
Noelle: It was like people who had never heard music before.
Eliza: They wanted to dance off the craziness they had been dealing with all day long.
Shannon: It was a totally different kind of audience. Here were these people who had been working their butts off since 6 in the morning in toxic mold, and so when we played, we weren't like rock stars. We didn't get into costume that night. We didn't sell merch. We were just like, "Thank you, thank you."
Emmy: We usually gave a speech about staying positive and being an example. But what could we say to those people?
Noelle: One of the things we focused on was making your one square foot totally tight. It's just the idea that there are a lot of things done in the name of our country that we don't want to be a part of, and sometimes it's hard to be proud of being an American. But you can make the space that you personally occupy however you want it to be, no matter where you are. If each one of us makes the square foot we occupy totally tight, eventually there will be that one person that shifts the tides and all of America will be rad again.
And you don't have to agree with what Show Me the Pink thinks is rad. We're not trying to create the world in our image. We want people to take over their own space and make their own community in their own area how they want it to be.
SMTP plays with Japanther and This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb at the Wonder Ballroom. 8 pm. $5. To learn some SMTP lyrics before the show, check out Localcut.com's Cut of the Day, Aug. 21.
WWeek 2015