This year’s Noise Pop sees a general trend in more noise and probably more pop. It is the 16th annual indie rock festival that attracts the San Francisco swarms to hustle for tickets to sold out shows, where the guestlists are 12 pages long and people flash their passes like so many pieces of fat Kitson bling.
{BEAT BEAT WHISPER}
I start the day by going to Studio Paradiso to see Beat Beat Whisper record a studio session with Daytrotter. This website releases free MP3s of sessions and accompanying short essays by founding editor Sean Moeller.
I first saw this band last year at The Hotel Utah Saloon, just blocks from the studio. Ayla Nereo’s voice was shocking in its starkness, beautiful. Within such a controlled space, the voices of siblings Ayla and Davyd Nereo bounce like those of rare conservatory birds against the walls and through the vacuum tubes. It is sweet folk music.
As I leave, I come face to face with Sam Coomes, the lead singer for Quasi. He has eyes like light on ice. I blah-blah, he blah-blahs, and he stares at me with intense suspicion. Behind him, I can see Janet Weiss. She has a great haircut, bangs and her hair very dark.
{QUASI}
When I walk into the Rickshaw Stop that night, pEoPlEpEoPle are onstage. Antonio Roman-Alcala of Dear Nora plays lead, backed by Trainwreck Riders’ Adam Kerwin, Jesse Sabin, and Tyson Vogel of Two Gallants. It’s fuck-the-system-dipped-in-sugar music, with electric-guitar highs.
This danceable rockabilly feels good, dissolving into well-constructed jam-outs that earn such song titles as sustainable hedonism — and appropriate indeed; Roman-Alcala is finishing a documentary about food politics.
“It was one of a handful of times [Tyson Vogel] has played drums outside of Two Gallants in public since before 2002,” 2G’s manager Dan Kasin tells me later. “To see him in a different setting and band adding his signature drumming style was extremely interesting to me and the fans and friends who were there.”
Little Ones play a set that rubs smiles all over the crowd. The bass player’s countermelodies add uppers to already light and poppy vocals. His use of a hollow-body, which is an electric with a, well, hollow body on the inside, allows for more sustained notes. “I love that [Mark Redding] can smile and sing at the same time,” Misty White says.
White is the wife of Ted Leibowitz. I mention this because he has won two CMJ awards for his internet station BAGeL Radio, one hell of an alternative to illegal downloading or trolling MySpace for bands. It’s continuous radio. Leibowitz has a good radar for upcoming shows, San Francisco’s own kind of Brooklyn Vegan.
Sam Coomes, Janet Weiss, and Joanna Bolme don’t have to be intellectualized or processed or otherwise understood before I can get to the part about liking Quasi. Coomes’ voice isn’t clear through the PA system, which is too bad, because he writes things like:
And I can’t tell you when the storm is gonna endso go ahead and cry but that wont keep you dry.
Coomes and Weiss started Quasi while they were still married in Portland in 1993. They have evolved from a ‘90s sound that newer bands, such as The Silversun Pickups, kind of just emulate.
Weiss was in Sleater-Kinney. She is one of the few drummers to out-fame the lead. Her demure countenance seems striking behind the drums.
“I am a big fan of Quasi,” Leibowitz says when I ask how he liked the show. “They are not for everyone, I know — Sam's lyrics, stage presence, and even his playing can be most confrontational — but a friend turned me on to them about seven years ago, and I have been a fan ever since.”
{THE DODOS}
Before the Dodos show, I trek over to the Phoenix Hotel for some Wolfgang’s Vault pre-party, where Kristen Hersh (formerly of Throwing Muses) plays beside a steamed pool. Hirsh might have 25 years of musical influence, but the crowd — myself included — is too talky to really listen. The Extra Action Marching Band (which is just what it sounds like) made a lot more sense at the Feedm party last year for this type of gig.
I party train over to the former Speakeasy Café du Nord. It’s the “hot ticket,” since people do apparently say stuff like “hot ticket.” We all need to feel important somehow.
The four-piece, LA-based Bodies of Water are too loud in this intimate venue, borrowing from Broadway, Joni Mitchell, and Queen so much that I can’t hear anything else. They aren’t bad, just too abrasive: belted harmonies and melodramatic builds. I like it okay after listening to it for awhile and reading articles about why it’s good.
San Francisco’s Or, The Whale plays next. OTW’s seven members fuse complex four-part harmonies with bluegrass elements, notably in the banjo-driven song "Crack a Smile." But "Call and Response' is the most striking song; it’s about New Orleans. (Yeah, remember that?) The lyrics are somewhat clichéd, but it sounds great. The music overcomes.
I have been listening to The Dodos (then Dodobird) since I got a copy from my friend Matt in 2006. We went to see them a year later at the Twelve Galaxies, and there were maybe 30 people there. Since I left the city:
1. They changed their name
2. The drummer, Logan Kroeber shaved his mustache off and
3. Everyone figured out how fucking great they are.
This is anthem music, people. This is music you listen to really loud while doing 50 MPH over the railroad tracks to ruin your car’s bottom entrails. Meric Long and Logan Kroeber are only two, but make the sound of many, Long’s voice echoing out in layered waves thanks to loop technology. And Kroeber shows how a drummer can contribute to the song independently, rather than just keeping beat and taking the song along. There’s no hierarchy; Kroeber even sits next to Long on the stage. He plays drums in a way that demands attention, changing his technique so as to tear the drumbeat out of the periphery. They play a lot of their new songs from Visiter before indulging in the older, more pop-conscious songs from Beware of the Maniacs, their first record.
{TOO TIRED.}
I stay in Friday night, even though there is a Fader electropop dance party at Mighty. This is probably good because Saturday morning at 9 AM, my friend Lauren Rosenthal calls and tells me to get out of bed. The Mountain Goats are recording a Daytrotter session at Studio Paradiso at 10 AM sharp.
We aren’t actually allowed to watch. Instead, I sit in the adjoining lounge drinking Red Bull with Chris Cantalini of Gorilla vs. Bear, Matt Jordan of You Ain’t No Picasso, Spin Magazine photographer Mischa Vladimirskiy, and Lauren. Someone from the crew says her name from the top of the stairs. “John wants to come down and meet you — something about a bracelet?”
Knowing that he is a Catholic, she gave him a Virgin Mary saints bracelet the night before at his show. Darnielle comes down, hugs her, and thanks her for it, which he is still wearing.
We go to the Pop and Shop Expo and sit in on a forum about getting signed to record labels. “You have to be distinct or you gotta do what everybody loves,” says Cory Brown of Absolutely Kosher Records. He then starts talking about creating your scene or something like that, and I go back to the apartment for a nice, long nap.
{THE MOUNTAIN GOATS}
Conspiracy of Venus is an a capella Leonard Cohen tribute women’s choir. Thar’s a doozy! Beautiful, hip women sing in four parts that resonate as though in a church, except that it’s actually a black box kind of place — The Independent, to be exact. They sing an eclectic mix: Cohen’s "I’m Your Man" and "Who By Fire," "Venus as a Boy" by Björk, two Medieval songs, and "Blue" by Joni Mitchell. The classy outfit busts out with “Acid, booze and ass/ Needles, guns and grass” and I kind of lose my mind. The Tom Waits songs "Soldier's Things" and "Rain Dogs" are both creepy and nice, embracing this familiar San Francisco dichotomy that embraces such as the homeless lineup against sweet pastel buildings.
Tulsa is a three-member band from Boston. To say they don’t sound like My Morning Jacket would be like saying there is no elephant in this room. It is a big, hairy, head-banging elephant that wears flannels from the Wayne’s World 2 era. But the lead singer Carter Tanton has a pleasant voice, and the music is arranged in such a way that each element shines like a prism in light: the picking of the electric guitar; the drummer playing with fuzzy mufflers like bunny slippers on his sticks, reverb pluming out with the pot smoke inside the club. The tunes are mellow and rocking, and Tanton’s voice is honey. I especially like the “Oh, Lonesome Me” Neil Young cover at the end of the set.
David Dondero goes on next. I met him and his manager, Dan Kasin at the Atlas Café a few mornings previous. I tried to talk him into a Whitesnake cover, but to no avail. Instead he plays some SF-specific favorites (he lived here for six years), including "Stuck on the Moon" and "Double Murder Ballad Suicide." The latter is a dark song that makes me laugh (but not aloud), a song about throwing his lover off the Golden Gate Bridge and some other grizzly stuff. At first, Dondero’s style confuses me: I am looking for some hidden irony behind the simple acoustic strumming and regular storytelling yarns. Then I realize that there is none, that Dondero is this really straight-up sort of guy. See, he started playing in 1979. He doesn’t need to hide behind anything fancy. Here is how Kasin puts it: “Some music moves you and makes your hair stand up or makes you dance or rock back and forth. Others just make you stand there. You can't force it. It's there or it's not.”
From where I sit at the merch booth, I get an outside view of what is happening to the crowd. It is packing in toward the front. No one moves in the set break. Rarely has such pre-show tension seemed so palpable. John Darnielle comes onto the stage with Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster — all in suits. Everybody goes nuts. Never have I seen such abandon at the Independent.
The drummer, of Superchunk fame, adds extra energy to an already frenetic set; The Mountain Goats don’t usually play live with drums. Darnielle must have performed some of these songs hundreds of times, and yet he seems to be reliving the process of turning some terrible pain into a joy that breaks his face into laughter and sweat. Some idiot next to us heckles, “Hey John, play left!” and he actually does turn his attention to his left. One highlight is Sax Rohmer #1 from the new album, Heretic Pride. He also plays "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" from The Sunset Tree, and everyone sings along to the part where he says:
And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my faceHoping you don't break my stereo
Because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without
So I think about that,
And then I sort of black out.
Held under these smothering waves
By your strong and thick-veined hand
But one of these days
I’m gonna wriggle up on my land.
Darnielle’s style is chameleon. He will step away from the mic to belt anthem-like or rail on his guitar like a speed freak or get really, really quiet with his guitar on the floor, as though whispering a secret into the microphone. "Dance Music" (from The Sunset Tree) is one of the best tonight because of how he sings it: very slow and in a reinterpretive way. And you can actually understand his vocals, which is so appropriate for someone who really has something to say. He is careful in his words, not just in their choice, but in their execution.
The display of emotion that makes The Mountain Goats so attractive seems quite popular in a city that generally welcomes such, but not within indie culture. Darnielle plays one of his most darkly effective songs, "No Children," last. He is still wearing Lauren’s bracelet when he exits the stage.
[Photos: Akmal Naim; 4AD]
