Jonathan Pirro – Page 9 – Spinning Platters

Show Review: Devo with The Punk Group at the Fillmore, 1/14/2012

While there is all manner of serious business involved in a tour, a concert, or even a single small show at a tiny club down the street, there’s no reason to think that the performers involved can’t have a sense of humor about their craft. To enter a career where one spends a great deal of time under a many-headed microscope, subject to all form of criticism and judgment, it’s a stifling gig to churn out a repetitive set, stick to the shadows, and keep your eyes to the floor as if you’re just waiting for the experience to end. It makes far more sense to abandon that sense of self-severity in the name of fun and celebration, to embrace the rock concert as the spectacle it has always been revered as, and to explode with enthusiasm for every minute of the evening. This is a job best suited for seasoned veterans, as well as musical acts that decide to live outside the realms of defined genres and formulaic sounds — and the Akron, Ohio quintet known as Devo proved themselves more than up to the task.

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Show Review: Infected Mushroom with Dyloot, Dissølv and Liam Shy at the Fillmore, 12/23/2011

Amit Duvdevani conducts the crowd at the Fillmore

When you’re an internationally-successful musical act that bends and shapes a genre as complex and intricate as psytrance, how do you keep your work from becoming stagnant, in this ever-shifting world of electronic music with its seemingly endless count of subgenres? You’ve got a lot of competition in the field as 2011 draws to a close. There are the arena-filling behemoths like Tiësto and deadmau5, whose light and projection show rivals that of a second-world country’s first celebration of independence. There are the up-and-coming acts, who manage to pack a dancefloor with just a simple mixer and/or MIDI pad and a laptop chock full of cutting edge software and samples. To break the mold of the constant onslaught of knob twiddlers and fader pushers, it becomes necessary to add a human element and violently active energy to your stage show. It therefore should come as no surprise that Israeli psytrance heavyweights Infected Mushroom decided to move out from behind the keyboards and up to the front of the stage a few years back, and their November appearance at the Fillmore proved that their dynamite performance energy hasn’t dwindled in the slightest — if anything, it’s gotten even wilder than before.

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Show Review: Peter Murphy and She Wants Revenge with Hussle Club and Reckless in Vegas at the Fillmore, 12/4/2011

When one dips into the dark nebula of the world of post-punk, they are likely to find a world that seems to live between a variety of different spaces that make up the more solidly-defined genres of classical music. Songs can shift in intensity unexpectedly, from a thrashing fury that encourages stomping and raised fists, to a slow, steady groove that tempts even the toughest of those aforementioned rockers out onto the dance floor, and often times the two are well intertwined. It is one of the only genres that can be accurately applied to a band and not immediately subject them to a small pigeonhole of a classification, for enough acts have graced the scene throughout the decades that the label “post-punk” is sure to conjure up a plethora of images in one’s mind at first thought. Therefore, as a nod to how wide the span and definition has shifted over the last 30 years, two acts were chosen to kick off December at the Fillmore with an evening of shadowy, danceable mayhem: the Los Angeles duo known as She Wants Revenge, and Peter Murphy, best known as the frontman of Northampton goth rock godfathers Bauhaus.

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Show Review: Plaid with John Tejada and Portable Sunsets at The Mezzanine, 11/25/2011

Plaid is the Welsh word for PARTY — Andy Turner and Ed Handley of Plaid

It’s never an easy task to put on a show in the middle of a holiday season, especially when the date of your performance falls on the oft-proclaimed “Biggest Shopping Day Of The Year”. How many people are going to be willing to stay out for many more late hours, dancing the night away and reveling in swirling shadows and heaving colors, when many of them have inevitably been up since the crack of dawn? It stands to reason that you should bring something special to your show, something that will keep the evening interesting for the full duration — acts and performances that are ready to shift at the drop of a hat, and keep your audience enthralled, but not so boggled that their desire to dance is interrupted. In short, you’ll need to throw a party — a slightly experimental one, in fact — and for the duo of Plaid, this is done with a combination of brilliantly crafted sonic creations and a host of openers that held the dance floor down solidly by themselves.

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Show Review: An Evening with Pink Martini featuring Storm Large at the Paramount Theatre, 11/20/2011

Storm Large fills in brilliantly for China Forbes

It’s very easy to get lost in the concert scene with a want to see the greatest technological innovation in stage design or the wildest antics ever displayed by an up-and-coming act — so much so that the music, quite sadly, sometimes gets lost in the struggle. Venues are built with impressive sound systems that make the foundations shudder and quake, and incredible arrays of lights, lasers and smoke work in tandem to paint a dazzling dreamscape over the faces of the musicians onstage — and that’s not taking into account any props they may, themselves, throw in for an extra layer of excitement. While it’s probably more common to forego a want of musical satisfaction in the face of a bombastic display of utter chaos that takes us to another world, it is important to find those special acts who take the stage with a minimum amount of fancy arrangements and eye candy, instead devoting their attention to their elegant sound that rings gloriously about the ears like a breezy summer susurrus rather than a blistering sirocco. To these expert talents, we look to the Portland collective known as Pink Martini to bring us back to a world of music so often heard in our daily lives that it seems impossible to fully appreciate it on a stage, or in a tremendous theater like the Paramount in Oakland — and they rise to the challenge magnificently, particularly with frontlady Storm Large taking a new place at the helm.

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Two Evenings with Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman: The Brava Theater and the Palace of Fine Arts, 11/2/2011 and 11/4/2011

If there is one subject that art constantly draws its attention to, it is love. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, utterly perplexing and impossible to define or simplify, and poets, painters, writers and musicians the world over have attempted its expression for a long as human history can recall. It is a funny concept, because it often takes the joyful, numbing jitters one feels in moments of tender intimacy, and pairs them up with the glorious, whooping sensation of a fiery passion to run to rooftops and scream your newfound devotion to the world below. Artists who know and have felt these moments of indescribable sense have done their best to bring forth their craft and communicate both sides of that spectrum, and everything in between, in their chosen mediums. It stands to reason, therefore, that two artists, both experts at their craft and both devotedly, passionately in love with another, will craft some of the most fantastic, loud and rambunctious work, while also taking moments of elegant poise, and charmingly stumbling between the two along the way. Such a scene was set and displayed with jubilant wonder by the couple that graced San Francisco with their presence for two separate nights: literary and screen writer Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Stardust and Coraline; and his wife, mindbending songmistress Amanda Palmer, the frontwoman of The Dresden Dolls.

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Show Review: Mastodon with The Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang at The Warfield, 11/3/2011

With a musical movement like metal, being significant, staying relevant, and still having room to experiment while perfecting your craft is always a difficult combination of skills to possess. The genre calls for solid commitment to unyielding volume, viciously downtuned notes and hellish distortion, with vocals that span from the powerful to the deranged, and lyrics that cross a general spectrum of darkness, mayhem, and more-than-mild discontent. To introduce any additional elements into this equation makes a solution extremely difficult to arrive at, but for the Atlanta metal masterminds of Mastodon, experimentation is simply the bolt of lightning that breathes life into their compositions, which have not at all dwindled in their ferocity from album to album.

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Show Review: The Soft Moon with Led Er Est and Chelsea Wolfe at The Independent, 10/31/2011

Luiz Vasquez and Justin Anastasi of The Soft Moon

One night a year, the darkest of spirits and the most mysterious of characters are summoned into the world at large to frighten, to amaze, to baffle, to worry, but definitely to excite the forces of peace that remain calm for the other 364 days. Rarely is there a better occasion for the spooky and the sibilant to make themselves known than on Halloween Night. In accordance with the popular holiday adage, however, it is always best to have some treats to go along with your tricks, and for the haunting act known as The Soft Moon, there was no better occasion to host their showcase of apocalyptic rhythms, droning dance pulses, and howling shrieks, all while bathed in a hellish display of strobing lights and unearthly projections. If ever there was a band better suited to usher in a new movement of smartly dark and morbidly interesting music, it would definitely be this San Francisco trio.

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Show Review: Anamanaguchi with Starscream, Knife City and Crash Faster at Slim’s, 10/30/2011

Returning to San Francisco to shake the OTHER venue on 11th Street

With access to thousands upon thousands of songs of every solidly-defined or unclassified musical archetype that exists on this great planet of ours, rock music has entered a new world of sonic exploration that was only experimented with in years past. The concept of “fusion” and the blending of genres has been a staple of pushing the envelope in music, but for many years it was still almost taboo to mix certain instruments, compositional methods, or even the fans that followed these musical movements. Today, with ancient horn sections bellowing their way into foggy punk rock and string sections going toe-to-toe with electronica, it isn’t hard to understand why the Brooklyn chiptune-punk quartet Anamanaguchi is successful enough to come to the Bay Area twice in one year and sell out two of the most popular clubs in the SoMa district of San Francisco.

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Show Review: Shpongle Live Halloween Ball at the Fox Oakland, 10/29/2011

We can take this huge universe and put it inside a very tiny head — Simon Posford and his band of psychedelic freaks and phantasms

October 29th, 2011. Possibly one of the biggest party nights of the year, thanks to the world-recognized holiday celebrating the bizarre, the underworldly, and the otherwordly, just around its corner. We’re speaking, of course, of Halloween, and in addition to being a fantastic occasion for costumes, candy, and chaotic parties, it’s also one of the best opportunities for live shows, allowing artists to come out in a blaze of style and passion with something unique and special for the night when spirits walk and demons dance. The Fox Theater in Oakland is no stranger to guests of many colors, persuasions, and strangeness, and with stiff competition to draw in concertgoers tonight — with deadmau5 taking residence at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, Primus rocking the streets of Berkeley at the Greek Theater, and the Damned keeping the San Francisco punks packed to the gills in Slim’s — it seemed only fitting for them to play host to one of the most anticipated acts of the entire year: Shpongle Live, the full-band-plus-dancers-and-more ensemble to masterfully color the otherworldly psybient music of UK psytrance masters Simon Posford and Raja Ram.

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