Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
People teemed into the Dark Room Theater, a black box in one of the City’s most colorful neighborhoods (i.e. a paradoxical place of real and fictitious danger). The lobby was littered with nonsensical paraphernalia (manikins, fake chickens, etc.). A one-eyed French Bulldog, Maggie, basked in the attention from adoring strangers. Sketchfest in the Mission, the largest focus of the festival’s freshest talent, was set to begin.
“The Price is Right Theme” played over the PA and the lights dimmed. It was 10:15 p.m. and the second half of the Sketchfest Dozen double feature was about to begin, this time featuring Moshe Kasher and Jessi Klein.
Continue reading “Sketchfest Review: Moshe Kasher/Jessi Klein, 1/20/2012”
Eugene Mirman’s show Pretty Good Friends turned out to be a great start to my SF Sketchfest experience, in spite of the grim start to the evening. At 10:20 it was pouring rain and the line to get in to Cobb’s Comedy Club was around the block. I was umbrella-less, water dripping off my nose and actually thankful that I had forgotten my camera. But then the nice people behind me offered to let me huddle under their umbrella and I ended up meeting some fellow comedy nerds. And to think I was dreading going to a comedy show by myself. Continue reading “Sketchfest Review: Pretty Good Friends at Cobb’s Comedy Club, 1/20/12”
I admit it. When I took my seat in the Marines’ Memorial Theatre last night, I didn’t really know what to expect. I requested this show because I wanted to be a part of SF Sketchfest (last year I saw Maximum Volume with Greg Behrendt and Matt Nathanson with a friend, and there met Gordon Elgart, which eventually led to my writing for Spinning Platters). Furthermore, I was excited to see Colin Hanks, Busy Philipps, and Paget Brewster (to name a few). Though the title probably should’ve tipped me off, I didn’t know I would be seeing a staged production like an old-school radio show, nor that it would be chock-full of familiar (and abundantly funny) faces.
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”
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.
Continue reading “Show Review: Devo with The Punk Group at the Fillmore, 1/14/2012”
Mike Brown is a comedian based in New York. His work shows exceptional polish and his career shows excellent promise. He is performing January 21st at the Purple Onion for the Rooftop Comedy Showcase.
Spinning Platters: Where are you from originally?
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Interview: Mike Brown”
In 2002, three Bay Area comics organized a festival featuring some of their favorite local sketch groups. They dubbed it Sketchfest, and it was a success. The next year, comedy legend Fred Willard joined the event, and every year subsequent year, the event became bigger and bigger. This year’s festival has grown to 2 1/2 weeks long, and features the biggest line up yet, featuring the likes of Eddie Izzard, Amy Poehler, Wil Wheaton, Barry Bostwick, and scores of other people so famous that even your grandparents know who they are. (You may need to ask your grandparents who Barry Bostwick is)
SpinningPlatters had the opportunity to chat with founders David Owen, Janet Varney, and Cole Stratton about the evolution of the festival, the struggles of putting it on every year, where to grab a burrito, and a whole ton of hypothetical situations that were good fun to ask. Be sure to go to SFSketchfest.com to check out the line-up and purchase tickets.
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.
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.