Palace of Fine Arts – Spinning Platters

Show Review: Lindsey Buckingham, JS Ondara at Palace Of Fine Arts, 10/9/18

Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham tours semi-frequently. Every few years, you generally can expect him to hit the road, playing a nice assortment of his eccentric solo work and hits from the Fleetwood Mac catalog. In most instances, this would be a pretty inconsequential tour. However, this being 2018, that means there’s gotta be something incredibly weird and divisive. In this case, the abrupt firing / quitting / temporary leave of Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac, followed by both Buckingham solo and a Buckingham-less Mac hitting the road AT THE SAME TIME, often times playing the same market only a few weeks apart.

So, yeah, this makes the current solo tour much more interesting. Is he going to do a full set of Fleetwood Mac hits, complete with his signature guitar work? Is he going to disregard all of their nonsense, and just play his solo work? Are we going to get a long, heated monologue about how awful it is working with Mick Fleetwood? Continue reading “Show Review: Lindsey Buckingham, JS Ondara at Palace Of Fine Arts, 10/9/18”

Show Review: Zola Jesus with JG Thirwell and Magik*Magik String Quartet at Palace Of Fine Arts, 9/26/13

I distinctly remember my first experience with Zola Jesus. She was a side effect of my obsession with trying to see every Canadian band. It was July of 2010, and I was set to enjoy Wolf Parade, not knowing that they would be splitting not long later. Zola Jesus was the first of two support acts, and a most surprising one before a rock band. Zola Jesus, the nom de plumb of Nika Roza Danilova, was the most unassuming frontperson. She was backed by a pair of synth players, and simply stood their and let her voice handle all of her performance duties. It was fantastic and beautiful, and very brave. I enjoyed the set immensely, and, somehow, forgot about her a few months later.

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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: Transatlantic at The Palace of Fine Arts, 4/18/10

TransatlanticTop++ — The return of the Neal Morse face! Yes!

Everything you really need to know about Transatlantic’s virtuoso performance on Sunday night at The Palace of Fine Arts can be summed up like so:

Six songs, three-and-a-half hours.

If this doesn’t appeal to you, you’re probably done reading. If the thought of such things makes you grin uncontrollably for hours, then this review is for you. Read on, prog nerd. You’re among friends here.

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