Concert Reviews – Page 7 – Spinning Platters

Noise Pop Show Review: The Flaming Lips perform The Soft Bulletin at Bimbo’s 365 Club, 2/21/2012

Everything's explodin'! (photo by Paige K. Parsons)

Twenty years. For many fans in the live music scene, this is an impossible amount of time to fathom. The concert demographic, wide as it might be, generally seems to fall between teens and people in their 50s, and if you go twenty years back, you’ve got a whole group of people who weren’t even born yet, to those who were solidifying their first solid years of adulthood. The amount of music, live or otherwise, that has been recorded, performed, and otherwise created in that timespan is magnificent in its breadth and depth. For twenty years, the Noise Pop Festival has helped to bring acts of all leagues and backgrounds to the San Francisco music scene, peppering venues with marvelously-clashing lineups and intimate gatherings that blow the minds of even the most seasoned veterans of the club-hopping world. After twenty years, it’s good to know that the Bay Area can still be stunned, which happened when the Noise Pop folks pulled out their trump card of the 2012 lineup — The Flaming Lips were making an appearance at the barely-700-person-capacity Bimbo’s 365 Club, and were performing their magnum opus The Soft Bulletin from start to finish.

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Show Review: Andy Grammer with Ryan Star and Rachel Platten at Great American Music Hall, 1/15/2012

Until recently, I barely knew the names Andy Grammer or Ryan Star. Rachel Platten, however, was a name I knew – I’d just seen her open for the musically delicious Keaton Simons back in October. Adorable, charming, and a catchy singer-songwriter, I made a mental note to review her set next time she came to the Bay Area. Which is how I found myself researching the likes of Ryan Star and headliner Andy Grammer last week, in preparation for last night’s show at SF’s Great American Music Hall. I knew a song or two from each guy (“Start a Fire” and “Breathe” from Mr. Star, and last year’s catchy hit “Keep Your Head Up” from Andy), all of which I liked enough to get excited to discover new tunes. As it turned out, the show would exceed my expectations tenfold. Continue reading “Show Review: Andy Grammer with Ryan Star and Rachel Platten at Great American Music Hall, 1/15/2012”

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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Show Review: Over the Rhine at Great American Music Hall, 11/15/11

San Francisco’s disproportionately large population of ex-Ohioans once again flocked to Great American Music Hall to see the Buckeye State’s finest cultural ambassadors – Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine – perform another exquisitely drowsy set of their infinitely soothing jazzy Americana.

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Show Review: Brandt Brauer Frick with Psychic Friend and James & Evander at Rickshaw Stop, 11/11/2011

An age old argument in music is this: is this band better live or on record? Electronic music seems to be the ultimate fertile ground for this argument because essentially the live show is the record plus lights, isn’t it? Well, not if it’s done right.

Brandt Brauer Frick perform in two different varieties. There’s the Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, an 11-piece combo that plays the material as written on composition paper. Then there’s the core trio, which leave the paper at home, and take chances on stage. Is this electronic music done right? Continue reading “Show Review: Brandt Brauer Frick with Psychic Friend and James & Evander at Rickshaw Stop, 11/11/2011”

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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