Hey, look! Another episode of Live Eye Tv…Haves a looksy. New codec, too! MPEG 4. You know what that means, videos “to go”!! More on that later, though! Also, free DVDs comin soon for Seattlites, but thats all we can say…For now, live music from The Black Angels, Xiu Xiu, Daughters, Psychic Ills, and Intelligence…plus music videos from Menomena, Chin Up Chin Up, CSS, FRUSS, Blonde Redhead, and Scott Walker. Did we mention that Turk and Jim are back, minus a dimension and some clay? Well then, Turk and Jim are back, minus a dimension and some clay. Wanna know more about the bands on this episode…follow the link to “moresville” after the video list!!
The Black Angels
Like gravity seduces a missile to Earth, The Black Angels’ Passover hit the scene in April of 06, with 10 tracks of paranoiac psych rock that turned bedroom ceilings and dark clubs into carpet bombed deserts and land mined jungles. No need to read the song titles or liner notes here to draw the lines between Iraq, Vietnam, and the pissed-off but powerless witnesses to a fucked up world. With their drone machines. Timeless in their sound is the sense that unease and creeping wartime dread are banging down the doors, and waking up to it and cranking the reverb is only the beginning of the struggle.
It’s all death and doom, you see, but delivered with the kind of startling, jangled passion and pounding groove that hooks headline junkies and reality-agnostics alike. Then sends them running for their Xanax. With vocals peeling across sine waves, oscillating between nervous dirge, and wiley psychosis, the compliment is heavy, fuzzed-out guitars, a Farfisa appropriately conjuring 60s psychedelia, and thudding, repetitive knells of the rhythm section. This isn’t your 90s space rock, friends, this is fighting music.
And yet, what would one expect from a set of musicians who live in a haunted mansion, where one band member was raised in a cult, and another in a funeral home? Proof that Texas is capable of exporting more than big hair and international tragedy, The Black Angels call Austin home. Formed in May of 04, they are Alex Mass, Stephanie Bailey, Christian Bland, Jennifer Raines, Nate Ryan, and Kyle Hunt. Prior to the full length on Seattle’s indie Light in the Attic Records, the band self-released a 4–song EP in October of 05. They’ve toured the US and EU extensively, notably a stint with psych luminaries Blue Cheer. Unstoppable at SXSW they’ve no doubt made hometown fans proud.
Live, the band comes on like a rolling fog, not so much assaulting the crowd, but surrounding it, the wash of distortion closing in from behind, tambourines leading us into the dunes, lyrics deployed from beneath a sly, hat-shielded Mass. One might correctly say that the trip into this heart of darkness is not so much a call to arms as it is a pulling back of the curtain. We’re already there in the thick of it, and the marching band is plugged in.
Live Eye TV had the good fortunate to catch the Black Angels at Neumos in October of 06.
-Anita Fang
Xiu Xiu
Before seeing Xiu Xiu live and in person, one probably wouldn’t describe their sound as ‘hypnotic.’ A look down over the crowd attending Xiu Xiu’s latest stop over at Neumo’s in Seattle, however, might have you second guessing the charismatic powers of Jamie, Caralee and Ches. Their live set, much like their recorded work, is hugely dynamic, spastic, sometimes soft and always intense. Most strange is the reaction of the audience to the frenetic on-stage theatricality of the band, which is downright respectful and reserved. Entranced, the kids just bob and sway in place like zombified hounds. Is this a homeopathic reaction to the angular and dexterous spectacle on stage? Is there some new club drug I don’t yet know about? Whatever…Its Xiu Xiu rock rock time time again.
-Cristal Gales
Daughters…Dicks, Dears
Correct me if I’m wrong, don’t want to start a bum rumor here, but I thoought the other night I saw that Alexis Marshall had shaved his head in lieu of a neck beard, and was selling his sweaty locks on E-Bay. Something about peeing in someone’s Wheaties and covering court costs. You might want to check me on that one, as I just got a load of Ambien from a friend, and have been way into trying to sleepwalk or have on of those other “complex sleep related behaviors” happen to me like, sleep driving, and sleep sex, the one I’m really hoping for. Wha, I never got to sleep walk as a kid, and I always felt jiped, so you can’t blame me for being a little interested. Anyways, as for Daughters they continue to offend good sense in alarming ways on Hell Songs. Like their earlier effort, Canada Songs, these short blasts of shredded metal, bore into you with math like precision, while the rhythm section pummels you like a couple of gas huffing thugs on a late night binge. However, a tactical shift on the new album finds singer Alexis Marshall eschewing the screamed delivery that brought earlier songs closer to the Locusts work, or that of Arab on Radar. Now we find a vocal delivery somethin’ like David Yow’s, or Shannon Selberg in Cows, drunken howls and lysergic yelps punctuating Marshalls’s morbid rants. Most of the songs still clock in like a car crash, with swarms of nauseating guitar provided in blurs of hysteria, by Brent Frattini and Nicholas Andrew Sadler. Jon Syverson’s drums, and Samuel Moorehouse Walker’s bass, blast double time flurries and provide a menacing structure on which the band hangs their mangled tapestries of alienation. On Hell Songs, you might say Daughters loosen up a little, they stop trying to out math their pedigree, and they get stoned on a bluesier boozy vibe. This is most evident on their long song “Cheers, Pricks”. It’s a kick ass direction for them to move, as it has more room for a haunting and, nay I say it, a tortured ambience to develop. Anyways, should still be enough scum there for the suckers. Maybe ear sores ain’t your thing, but if you like the abuse you might just find this tasty, you little pig.
-el wood
Psychic Ills…I’ll Have Anotha, Brotha
On their debut, Dins, Psychic Ills delivered an acid masterpiece full of wavy fuzz and bleary eyed drone, an album mining familiar psychedelic, scorched terrain, but one that allowed them to find their own way through fields of feedback and delay, with their chorus petals fully intact. Swells of shimmering guitar pulse like melting rain, while Brian Tamborello’s dub-y beats, and Elizabeth Hart’s bass, throb everything forward all sweaty through weird doors. The album is full of spaced out pastures of simmering gold lava, via Tom Gluibizzi’s guitar and key twistings, and these loop and smoke, giving way to chugging trancey jams; like the way the song “Electriclife” showers you in beautiful mangled bells, only to give way to an ecstatic drone jam in which singer Tres Warren intones over and over somethin’ about his “electric, electric eye”. The band seems young in all the right ways, and with youth comes abandon, and the ability to blaze new paths with old suitcases. Sure, you could dump out a bowl full of names they’ve probably smoked on like Spaceman 3, Skullflower, Can, This Heat, My Bloody Valentine, etc. etc! However, their reliance on an experimental and improvisational aesthetic, a fearlessness in facing the expansive void that rims each sonic voyage, propels them forward, and earns them the right to be the sonic pilots on your next Transcranial forays! It will be interesting to see where they can go from here, as certain pitfalls are evident, like burning out and fading away, or worse yet taking the safer more travelled routes into these songs. I guess only the ticking of time on a melting clock will tell. Till then, can anybody help a brother get a hold of some good blotter. For reals man, where’s the stuff that’s not bunk?
-Iggy Pot
Intelligence
The Intelligence is a Seattle thrash-pop band of revolving members that mainly centers around Lars Finberg (former AFrames drummer, Dipers bassist). Lars writes the songs and plays most (often all) of the instruments on the recordings. They have a sound that is just fucked up enough not to be pop, and leave you with the feeling that you blacked out the night before on diet Schlitz and Nyquil and had a nightmare that Mark E. Smith sang lead vocals for the Turtles.
The band began with the 2000 release of a 7″ on Dragnet Records called “Girlfriends and Boyfriends” (all Lars + a guitar track by Mike Wurn on ‘I fall to pisces’). But it was the badass 2004 full-length “Boredom and Terror” (which Lars recorded by himself using cheap Casios, his kid’s toy drum set, and a 4-track, while sitting in his bed watching Friends re-runs) that really defined that clunky, low-fi, awkwardly catchy Intelligence style.
The current line-up includes former members of Popular Shapes and The Pulses and looks somethin’ like this Lars Finberg, Trent Vernon Coahran, Shannon McConnell, and David Ramm. Look for their new one, “Dueteronomy”, due out in September or check these old gems:
Girlfriends & Boyfriends 7″ (Dragnet Records, 2000, BUST 02)
split (w/ Popular Shapes) 7″ (Dirtnap Records, 2003, ZZZ 26)
Test 7″ (S-S Records, 2004, SS 009)
Boredom And Terror LP+CD (Narnack Records, 2004, NCK 7015)
Boredom And Terror CD (Dragnet Records/Omnibus Records, 2004, BUST 07/OMNI 043)
Icky Baby LP/CD (In The Red, 2005, ITR 122)
The Intelligence 4-song12″ (In The Red, 2006, ITR 123)
Randi Roadz
Scott Walker’s “The Drift”
Ex-patriot, recluse, meat-player; from the vocal and songwriting talent of the 1960’s dark crooner/pop icon Scott Walker comes The Drift. With his most anticipated album since 1995’s Tilt, Walker finds us finding him at his most minimal and deft. His approach to music and poetry is historical and relevant with atemporal sonic and subconscious outcomes. Stark, spacious and brooding unto the surreal, The Drift comes upon us as in a nightmare, with familiar words turned inside-out and visceral, hyper-real sounds culminating in a composition that is both amazing and terrifying. Jesse, the first video from The Drift, illustrates brilliantly the album’s kaleidoscope of abstract starkness.
