Kings of Leon @ Lolla 8/7/9

This was my third Kings of Leon show, and I've had enough. I first saw them at Summerfest about 4 years ago, on a smaller side stage, and I was blown away. At the time I was still in love with Youth and Young Manhood and had I been blogging back then, might have put that show at the top of the list that year. My how the mighty have fallen. They've become the new U2 (sorry, Coldplay) - and I hate U2. I found it hilarious at my last Art Brut show that Eddie Argos spent a good 5 minutes bitching about how "Sex on Fire" makes no goddamn sense. He then proceeded to bitch about U2 sucking. Which endeared Art Brut to me all the more. I couldn't agree more.

D

Of Montreal @ Lolla 8/7/9

Going to grad school in the hometown of Polyvinyl, I got to see Of Montreal nearly every other week (Polyvinyl still owes me a big box of albums that I ordered nearly 2 months ago, BTW). Which was good and bad. Of Montreal is a fun live act, but they're also a little full of themselves. They continue to add the schtick each time I see them, and their performance at Lolla was truly over-the-top with numerous costumed dancers and flamboyant outfits. It adds to the aesthetic, sure, but I've never really been all that clear on what the attempted aesthetic is, exactly. It's like a dumbed-down, less tongue-in-cheek rendition of Flaming Lips. Which is not to say that the music is dumbed-down, because it isn't. Oh no, it's way heady stuff, with tracks like "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse". See, can't you tell how intellectual they are? The saving grace with this band is that they're catchy, the keyboardist actually looks like she's enjoying herself and seems appreciative of the fan base, and they don't think themselves too good to play Canopy Club in Urbana, Illinois every other Tuesday evening. At least not yet.

C-

Decemberists @ Lolla 8/7/9

I like that The Decemberists now have to tell their crowds ahead of time whether they'll be performing a "regular" show or a "Hazards of Love" show. That's what a concept album will do to you. I agree with the critics that the album isn't all that great front-to-back. Give me Operation Mindcrime any day of the week over this album. But, like most Decemberists effort, even if I don't particularly like a certain song or album, I can at least appreciate the effort, and know that they do so with a mixture of sincere artistry, humility and fun. I've written about Decemberists before, so I won't extol again here my love-hate relationship with the band. Instead, I'll talk about this Lolla show. They simply rushed through the Hazards of Love front-to-back, and as everybody expected, the guest female vocals stole the show. Much ink has been spilled about the Diamond gals on this album, so I won't go into it here. It was a solid effort, if rushed, and broke no real new ground. As part of a weekend festival, it worked, but as a stand alone show, I wouldn't have been real happy.

B

Fleet Foxes @ Lolla 8/7/9

I've seen Fleet Foxes exactly twice, once at Pitchfork and now at Lolla. So, at two outdoor festivals. And you know what? They sounded better at Lolla - the larger outdoor space. This doesn't seem right. A band heavy on vocal harmonies and angelic choruses should be better at a more intimate venue, right? I think the answer is that the passage of time honed their skills. At Pitchfork, FF seemed a little shy, reserved, nervous perhaps. At Lolla, they've more fully embraced and realized their potential, seeming to have more fun with the venue, and casting their mellow harmonies across the large field. The rain soaked crowd seemed to lap it up, as did I.

A-

Greg Kot - Music Industry interview podcast

This is largely a repost from Gizmodo, of all places, but Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune rock critic and co-host of Sound Opinions recently wrote a book about the downfall of the music industry as we know it, thanks to illegal file sharing. He has no love for the old model, but also doesn't think that iTunes and its ilk is the answer. His views largely mirror the sentiment in my rant to Larry Ribstein, but Greg is a lot more effectual and a lot less effusive than my missive.

From Gizmodo: "In his interview on the fantastic podcast The Sound of Young America, Kot states that the music industry was actually one of the primary causes of piracy. The explosion of boy bands and bubblegum pop in the late 1990s was due to the labels' insistence on pouring a huge amount of money into just a few dumbed-down, impersonal, lowest-common-denominator acts, which meant in turn that commercial radio was almost completely garbage. There was little room for genuine weirdo geniuses like, say, Prince or David Bowie, and devoid of good music, the market was bound to react—hence Napster."

Download the podcast here.

Michael Jackson is the new Gnarls Barkly

I'm predicting lots of MJ covers at this year's Lollapalooza. I'm setting the Over-Under at 8. Any takers? I'll insert any that I hear in the comments to this post, and I invite everybody else to do the same. BTW - I heard 4 MJ mashups at last night's Hood Internet show at The Hideout (review to come).

Full Lolla reviews to come. Stay cool and dry out there. Lousy Smarch weather :(

15 Second Record Review

Eagle and Talon - Thracian - if you miss Sleater-Kinney, and wish they came back as a sly garage duo, this is the album for you. Plus, the song "Moisturizer" has the great line: "my face is itchy all the time". Fantastic!

A

15 Second Record Review

Julian Plenti - Julian Plenti is...Skyscraper: it's usually a bad sign when the front man of a famous band makes a solo record that might as well be the next release from Famous Band. Luckily, I love Interpol, and this is a fantastic faux-Interpol record.

A

New shows - updated SHOWcal

New August, September and October indie shows added to SHOWcal

Blitzen Trapper @ The Pabst, 7/20/09

One of the reasons I enjoy live shows so much is the people watching. Each show has a different crowd. Sure, there's always the demographic of hipster/hipster posers, both with plaid shirts, t-shirts desperately attempting to be ironic, dark jeans and retro shoes. But sometimes you get surprises. Animal Collective attracted a high number of hippies and teenagers. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs got a surprising amount of people on dates. And Ben Folds got someone desperately wishing he hadn't been fooled into going and opting for getting drunk over running head first into the nearest wall (okay, that was just me). So what did Blitzen Trapper get? College girls who stepped out of an Urban Outfitters catalog and middle age people reliving their 70s folk days. The former made this crowd, admittedly, one of the better looking crowds I've seen in a while. The latter just made for good people watching. If you look at the picture (top left), you'll see the three characteristics exemplifying this latter group -- the bald spot, the premium beer (over the $3 PBR tall boy) and hush puppies. Unfortunately, most of this latter group left half way through the show. Did it get too late? Was the music not what they thought? Were they embarrassed to wear hush puppies in public? I suppose I'll never know.

Oh yeah, and there was a show, too. BT played in the lower level of the Pabst Theatre. Again, Animal Collective sells out the entire Riverside, but bands like Peter, Bjorn and John and Blitzen Trapper can't even sell out the lower level of the Pabst. I don't get it. On the bright side, I was able to walk up ten minutes before BT took the stage and buy a ticket for the bargain price of $10 (gotta love Milwaukee). At first I was hesitant to see BT because my friend told me how folksy and boring they were live at Pitchfork. After seeing them at the Pabst, I can see his point, although I liked them live more than he did. BT is best seen in an indoor venue with chairs and good sound. The Pabst has each of those things. The band sounded great, in part thanks to the good acoustics at the Pabst (the band did the obligatory "This place is so nice!" remark on the theater). I also appreciated the band weaving in their hits throughout the set rather than wait until the "encore" or the end of the set. And although the music was good, would it kill them to develop some banter and stage presence? It's not like it's their first tour. A lack of banter isn't necessarily a bad thing, but here it did leave me a bit bored at times, which allowed my mind to wander to such important things like "Why would one buy hush puppies?", "How much would I hate myself if I wore hush puppies?", and "Why does that one guy in the band look like he's either someone's dad or a reject from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour?"

That all said, I enjoyed the show. Apart from the quality performance and good people watching, I was able to better appreciate the unintentional comedy inherent in the background animal noises on "Furr." You can't beat all that for $10 on a Monday night.

I'm ranting: Law and Music - a missive

Larry Ribstein, law professor from my alma matter, posed an article on his influential blog Ideoblog, in response to UCLA’s Stephen Bainbridge's discussion of DRM on the Kindle as it relates to academic text books. Brainbridge mourned the possible loss of his future textbook royalties: "[T]he used book market takes a huge chunk out of my annual royalties. The drop off from the first year of a new edition to the second can be as high as 30%, for example. I can’t imagine the hit my royalties would take if e-books of my texts were available without strong [digital rights management]. But it seems safe to assume that anything remotely resembling an e-book Napster would be a disaster from my perspective. . . ."

Larry's response is linked above, but here in pertinent part, is what I take exception to: "Kinda reminds me of what I said four years ago about the effect on the music industry of digital music. I observed that live and recorded performances were to some extent substitutes, so we should expect the prices of both to be falling in the digital era. Yet live shows were getting more expensive. Why?"

Well, here's why, and why it's a good thing:

Dear Larry,

As an avid music fan and author of a music blog, I've attended 50-100 live shows a year for the last 15+ years, and from my, admittedly anecdotal, perspective, the cost of live shows, on average, have not increased to any material degree. Yes, I agree that top-tier, stadium and large arena, mostly top-40 and nostalgia acts have indeed demanded far more money for a ticket (not to mention astronomical service and ticketing fees) over the years. However, smaller and mid sized venues and non-top 40 national touring acts are more or less charging the same dollar-for-dollar ticket that they were in 1994. I have the ticket stubs to prove it.

Why haven't we seen the prices of top-tier venues/acts fall along with the "Napster-ization" of digital music? Because they're not substitutes. The days of a handful of large record companies driving demand via a one-way channel of pay-for-play and marketing-driven supply have largely disappeared, as a direct result of the loss of physical media. Because recorded products are now essentially margin-negative, any hope of maintaing any revenue has to come from merchandising and live performance. The proposed merger of TicketMaster and Live Nation is strong evidence of this, leaving the music industry fragmented between the top-40 set, able to generate profits with large-scale, summer blockbuster proportioned tours, and everyone else.

This is good.

The "have nots" in your analysis have been liberated from the industry-driven monopolistic atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s into a more egalitarian and open model of artist-driven promotion/booking/performing/business running. This means far less profits for anybody not at the top, but far more money to be had when seen from the perspective of the whole pie. No longer are large individual slices being consumed by a handful of record companies, with crumbs eventually working their way to a limited number of artists. Instead, thousands of tiny slices are being consumed by the artists themselves, or at least shared more equitably between individual artists and small record labels. I believe this is better for everybody other than the few large labels and promoters. It is certainly better for the art of music, and therefore far better for fans. The demand side of the music economic is once again strong. It is inevitable to happen with all media (see, e.g. newspapers vs. bloggers). Profits will eke out, just in different ways and channels. Ultimately, in my opinion, for the betterment of the larger whole.

Sincerely,
Horsie Sauce

Stellastarr* @ Double Door 7/23/9

This was decent banter away from a perfect show.

Oh, okay, I can write more.

I can't believe I haven't seen Stellastarr* before (ridiculous asterisk and all). I'm even more astounded that they consider themselves New Wave/Pop/Punk. The ultra gloss engineering evident on record could be new wavy, I suppose, but I consider this band and Interpol to be almost interchangeable. Not to say that I'm not a big Stellastarr* fan (again, that * isn't to denote a footnote, they insist on including it in the same way that Bambi down at the Admiral insists on making the "." over the "i" in the shape of a heart), because I am. I fell hard for the song "Jenny" when I first heard it, though I'm a little surprised that most fans consider "My CoCo" to be their true masterpiece. Anyway, much like Interpol, the Stellastarr* experience is basically the same live or on record. There's little in the way of banter, and essentially zero deviation from what was recorded. It makes for an instantly recognizable and enjoyable experience, but I typically prefer a little less polish, effect, and over-engineering in my live shows. I like a little jam-out, a little, if not improvisation, subtle change from the record. That said, Stellastarr* put a lot of emotion into the live set, so much so that as they worked their way through "Jenny", I wondered whether Shawn Christensen would belt out the signature "JENNY! JENNY! JENNY I'D BET YOU'D MAKE YOUR MOM SO PROUD I NEED MY CELL!" After all, he has to scream that out every damn night, so where to get that belly fire and sell it as emotion? No worries, though, as he did it, and it was believable. Now if they just add a little banter or crowd interaction with the flawless performance and apparent emotional purging, this would be a can't-miss act. As it stands:

Value/Cost = $12/15 = 80% = B