Sleepy Eyes of Death at Bumbershoot ::: Photo by Marcella Volpintesta for Sound on the Sound

This week Seattle’s Sleepy Eyes of Death spilled the beans on their plans for coming back into the performing fold after taking a short break to record and recharge. Today they posted a song from a forthcoming record on their myspace, a record that they’ll separate the release of on Friday April 30th at Neumos in Seattle, with Feral Children and Talkdemonic. “Data Grave” is the name of the new track, and it’s the lead track from Toward a Damaged Horizon which will be officially released Tuesday, May 4th.

You can get tickets early to the record release show via Neumos new web ticket vendor eTix.com.

It’s a weekend of celebration for fellow music bloggers and friends: Ear Candy and Back Beat Seattle. Both blogs are celebrating milestones with some kick ass local bills and you could make a full weekend of their shows alone.

First up on Friday night is Back Beat Seattle. Back Beat is celebrating the site’s one year anniversary with a genre bending banner bill at The Blue Moon with Blood Red Dancers, THEESatisfaction and What What Now.

Meanwhile, Ear Candy has a double header of sponsored shows this weekend. Saturday they’ll be celebrating at The Sunset with a great bill featuring People Eating People, We Wrote The Book on Connectors and Spanish for 100. Not only will you be enchanted by Nouela Johnston, you should hear the Ear Candy Theme Song, as We Wrote the Book on Connectors were commissioned to write it.

Ear Candy’s celebrations continue on Sunday night with the official Ear Candy Birthday party at The Nectar for a weekend ending dance party. Imploring to shake your ass for Ear Candy will be No Fi Soul Rebellion, Katie Kate, Lisa Dank and Queerbait!.

Happiest Anniversary to Back Beat and happiest birthday to Travis Hay of Ear Candy. Here’s to many more years of blogging and supporting local music!

Got to give the good folk over at Aquarium Drunkard full credit for turning me on to this treasure chest of gems.  Mississippi Records is venue/record label in the mean streets of North Portland, Oregon, and unbeknown to me purveyors of absolutely brilliant mix-tapes stuffed to the scaly gills with unknown finds from across the great, starry expanse of musical history.   Even better, the newly-discovered, absolutely-brilliant website Rootstrata is converting each and every one of these mini-goldmines (37 at last count) in to download-easy .zip files for your, and especially my, enjoyment.

I’ve downloaded two so far, the inaugural edition and an AD-recommended comp, and both have been playing almost non-stop on my tinny speakers for the last two days.  I can only believe, have faith even, that each uploaded tape will be a similarly delicious experience.

Mississippi Records Tape Series Vol. 1 - House of Broken Hearts

Some years back, I had a bit of a brain meltdown, when, for the first time, I heard a little band out of Minnesota called The Wars of 1812.  Working at a record label at the time, I shoveled the bands music on to the desk of my boss, threw it any and all who would listen, and generally existed in a blissed-out coma of Wars of 1812 good.

Turning on Jagjaguwar’s new signee Peter Wolf Crier, there was a tinge of familiarity, a hint of softly hidden memory.  I thought, “It sounds like Woods, but with a little more cheer.”  But it wasn’t thought, it was the vocals, the winding, sunshine-y vocals that brought me back.  Back to Peter Pisano, a member of The Wars of 1812.

Now, with cohort Brian Moen, he’s branched out to form Peter Wolf Crier.  It’s a bit like a campfire song, a lilting tune to share around the fire, drunk on whiskey and smoke.  You can hear it bouncing off the trees, the stars clear in the sky above it.

Peter Wolf Crier - Crutch & Crane

I don’t do a lot of drugs anymore.  The occasional puff, a stray thought about things harder.  I imagine though, if high as a seagull on some purified strain of narcotic, and in a haze of concentric color circles, voices melting in to babble, I floated in to a room where Spectre Folk was leaking from the speaker boxes, well, I’d be content.

I’d melt in to the floor as this droning, softly-spoken bit of psych-rock spun in to the atoms that bobbed and weaved, quite visibly, in front of my eyes.  Feel the softly shaking drums and the wavering vocals of Magik Marker’s drummer Pete Nolan crawl in to the wide open pores of my skin.

In the morning there’d be a puddle of flesh and bone and organs, my clothes piled neatly on top.

Spectre Folk’s new album Compass, Blanket, Lantern, Mojo is out now on Arbitrary Signs.

Spectre Folk - Sat Around For Peace (This Time)

Because I’m a Northwest kid, most of Death Cab’s early efforts were notable records in my life. And Give Up via the Postal Service with Jenny Lewis associations is on another level even. Thus Chris Walla and Ben Gibbard and friends have been a significant presence in Northwest rock for nearly a decade now, and no doubt a significant influence on my perception of where the music is headed and what I like. At this point in my mind they’ve made their mark on the “Northwest Sound” just as much as bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney and Murder City Devils all have. Thanks to Owl City and a #1 spot on the iTunes and Billboard charts for whatever period, we’re all now painfully aware of the fact the Gibbard has been in the game for nearly 15 years and has spawned imitators, just as the other aforementioned bands have as well. This is all to say that it’s always nice to see when a band is building on what came before them and is remaking a sound for themselves, instead of simply repeating it back verbatim and unadorned. Colonies are the that band I’m speaking of in the context of Northwest modern rock, and their new record Thirty Thousand. In it they’ve harnessed their own perspective onto the roaming herd of the last decade of Northwest influences.

Instead of being imitators, they’ve largely taken their favorite elements of Death Cab or Built to Spill or New Pornographers, and re-purposed them to support a modern melodical pop point of view, featuring with vocal harmonies not unlike those of the the Local Natives. Guitar-wise in certain intro’s and breakdowns it sound’s like they love Built to Spill as much as I do, while In a number of songs they’ve replicated Gibbard’s loping style of arpeggiating his electric. They even recreate some of the same tonal qualities that Death Cab achieves, which is an element I also absolutely like. Despite references aplenty the one thing that remains constant throughout is vocals that remain consistently pop and adventurous with the melody.

I happen to think these guys are ably carrying the torch of Northwest rock into the next decade, and this is something I don’t say lightly. Stream Thirty Thousand right here, and see if you don’t agree:

If you like what you hear you can catch Colonies at Neumos March 25th with Conservative Dad, Lemolo, and the Mopes. I’m definitely going to be there.

Grand Hallway with the Seattle Rock Orchestra & Perkins School Choir ::: photo by Abbey Simmons

It has always seemed to me, the crux of orchestral pop is you rarely have the orchestra to fulfill even your genre’s name, much less the potential of such an immense sound. With eight full-time members (and about 16 instruments between them), Grand Hallway was already much more successful in fulfilling the promise of orchestral pop than most who undertake it. However, having seen the band around town over the past couple of years, I couldn’t help but long to hear the band’s sound fully realized, with a slew of strings and horns accompanying. That longing was abated Saturday night during two sold-out shows at the Triple Door, where Tomo Nakayama’s songs and the sweeping landscapes he painted on Promenade came to life with a full orchestra and childrens’ choir.

It took hearing those songs in their grandest form to appreciate the small intricacies and simplicity that makes Grand Hallway such a delight. At the heart of it all, in the cradling of complex orchestration, shone Tomo’s songs. Where poetic tunes like “Raindrops” and “Blessed Be, Honey Bee” left little doubt that if Tomo and Grand Hallway are determined to write the perfect song one day, they will. Having heard them with the able bows of the Seattle Rock Orchestra and the soaring sound I always longed for, I am even more eager to return to just Tomo and the seven other gifted musicians that make up Grand Hallway. I left the Triple Door satiated, but now longing for the small-scale symphony of pedal steel, accordion, violin, guitar, and Grand Hallway’s multitude of multi-instrumentalists, for their own internal choir, and those songs, the potential of which are as immense as any orchestra.

Grand Hallway is making their way down the West Coast and east to Austin this week, without the orchestra in tow. Clearly, I still highly recommend you check them out:

3/12/10 - DOUG FIR, Portland, OR
3/13/10 - THE BOUQUET, Boise, Idaho
3/14/10 - KILBY COURT, Salt Lake City, Utah
3/15/10 - HI DIVE, Denver, Colorado
3/16/10 - LOW SPIRITS, Albuquerque, New Mexico
3/18/10 - SXSW: ST DAVID’S HISTORIC SANCTUARY, Austin, Texas
3/19/10 - SXSW: VORTEX THEATER (Acoustic set) Austin, Texas
3/20/10 - SXSW: BEAUTY BAR (Seattle Party) Austin, Texas
3/22/10 - THE PERCOLATOR, El Paso, Texas
3/23/10 - THE RED ROOM, Tucson, AZ
3/25/10 - SILVERLAKE LOUNGE, Los Angeles, California

See more videos and photos from Grand Hallway with the Seattle Rock Orchestra:

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I’ve been digging through the detritus of a dead person’s life (no one of any relation or, strangely enough, even friendship) over the course of the last two weeks.  It has been a dusty perusal of era after era after era long gone.  We’ve found teeth, World’s Fair 1939 memorabilia, and a pair of ladies underwear I could’ve worn as a vest.  Each day, covered in grime, I step in to the light of the modern day and everything seems a little too new, a little too fresh.

Amongst the many, many new ventures by Sub Pop, this little band Happy Birthday (Kyle Thomas of King Tuff’s new schtick) stands out as particularly apt to my meander through the decades.  It’s new and fresh and grating, but when the song hits thirty or so seconds, all of sudden I’m standing in Mary Pini’s closet amongst Spyderknit sweaters, gold coins and the urge to spin my date in one skirt-swooping spiral.

Or maybe I’ve just been inhaling asbestos and rat fecal dust for a little too long.

Happy Birthday - Girls FM

Free Energy ::: Press Photo

First impressions are meant for job interviews, not the music business. In case you’re like millions of other Americans and myself, you forgot what it’s like to go to a job interview. Let me refresh your memory. A job interview is when you dress up, go to the location of the job you are applying for and proceed to tell the person (or people) interviewing you why you should be hired. You’re the best. You work really hard and never sleep. You say your prayers and eat your vitamins. You’ll say whatever gets you a paycheck. Sometimes the gamble pays off but more often than not, especially nowadays, you’re just not what they’re looking for.

So when I saw Salmon Thrasher’s first show at my neighborhood bar, Café Racer, I didn’t let my first impression of them be my final one. It was a weird show. There were some technical difficulties, the songs sounded like they were still coming together and I remember at one point, a piece of the ceiling fell down upon them during their set. Sigh. Why is it that first shows always feel the weirdest? Flash forward a couple months and this band is legit. They sounded especially tight on Chop Suey’s stage. Chugga-chugga-choo-choo they were a well oiled machine. The only thing I ask is when they are done putting together their album; I want them to use a salmon shredding a half-pipe on the cover. If you’re going to use a name like Salmon Thrasher for your band, you’ve got to take advantage of all the literal imagery you can to represent your band.

Next on stage was Philadelphia’s Free Energy, a band who is currently on tour with the night’s headliner, Foreign Born. Now before I completely rip this band to pieces, I want to start with the positives. These dudes can all play their instruments, the lead guitarist in particular. They write songs that sound great. What I mean by that is, the songs they write sound good, but the actual songs are pretty forgettable. When you listen to this band on Myspace you think “I mean this isn’t the worst thing ever, just kind of sounds like a band that really likes the Strokes, playing Battle of the Bands in suburbia somewhere…” I mean we’ve all heard bands like that. However, the thing that really hurts Free Energy is their live show. Too much posturing, at points I thought I was watching (and I’m totally_fucking_serious) the Jonas Brothers or a skinny jean version of Hanson. It was one of the most inauthentic performances I’ve ever seen. Rock n’ roll should never be this harmless, especially if you’re from Philly. At times I felt completely emasculated just watching these dudes. And it’s sad, because bands like this get to play good shows and huge festivals like SXSW, all the time. And for what..? Because they might have some sort of mass appeal that in all probability won’t actually be realized? Sure, bro. Free Energy might want to do something about this little problem of theirs. Maybe they should just become the Beatles and stop touring? All I know, judging from the other night, onstage they look like some guys who are in a band for the sake of saying that they’re in a band. So I guess it was fitting that they played a show on Capitol Hill. With all that being said, I’m not going to let my first impression be my final one. If I have a chance to see Free Energy again, I’ll take that chance. I wouldn’t mind them proving me wrong.

Foreign Born were much different than the rock n’ roll switchblade riot that is Salmon Thrasher and the Hello Kitty pop of Free Energy. They had this “We kind of sound like Yeasayer, if you’re really not into that first Yeasayer album,” thing going on. The lead singer kept on reminding of Bono. I blame it on the hat he was wearing and the acoustic guitar he was strumming in the forefront. At one point he was harassed by a drunkard who was wearing an Ozzfest shirt, and needless to say, the Ozzfest guy was obviously at the wrong show. Foreign Born was certainly different and interesting. “Vacationing People” was my favorite song that they played. The band has a lot of elements within it, but none of them go outside their boundaries. I say that to mean they’re completely complimentary: everyone is doing what they have to do to make the song sound as good as it can. I can appreciate that because it’s much easier said than done, and especially when egos can potentially get in the way. Foreign Born, I salute you.

I find myself so often times stuck in a rut(?) of drone-y fuzz, and sharply punctuated garage rock, and thus when I a simpler bit of music catches my ear, I’m almost required to post it.  Pitchfork turned me on to this Perfume Genius project by Mike Hadreas (a man I know nothing about) and the puddle underneath my feet is slowly growing bigger and bigger as a melt down in to it.  It’s reminiscent of The Mountain Goats and Daniel Johnston in it’s unchecked waver and . It’s an epically told story of just about nothing.  But Hell, when your nothing consists of Joy Division, weed, and a lovely man named Mr. Peterson, you’re contracted by the state of piano ballads to write a somber jingle.

Perfume Genius - Mr. Peterson