setlist – Page 24 – Spinning Platters

Show Review: Barenaked Ladies at Wente Vineyards, 7/20/10

BNL Four — Why do I get the feeling that something's missing here?

The Barenaked Ladies are playing just about everywhere they can in the Bay Area this week. On Monday night, they were at the Mountain Winery and tonight they play at The Regency Center (with discount tickets available on Goldstar), but last night they were at the Wente Vineyards in Livermore. With a ticket price hovering in the $200 range, the audience mainly seated at tables for their catered dinner, and a charity auction before the show bringing $3000 for a single autographed bottle of wine, I had concerns that the show might feel an awful lot like dinner theater. And when they played “If I Had a Million Dollars,” and asked folks to sing along, my friend leaned in close to me and said, “I think a lot of people here HAVE a million dollars.” Continue reading “Show Review: Barenaked Ladies at Wente Vineyards, 7/20/10”

Show Review: An Evening with Primus at the Great American Music Hall, 7/18/2010

those damn blue-collar tweekers. (photo by Sassy Monkey Media)

In today’s concerting world, most shows are focused more firmly on spectacle than on musicianship. We expect the bands to be at the top of their game, of course, but in case they aren’t, we’ve got pretty lights, soaring lasers, mystifying fog, and, sometimes, hurricanes of confetti to wow us and give us something to rave to our friends about. While the spectacle can be rather fantastic from time to time, it’s always refreshing to see the band pack up their light show, deflate the floating spacemen, and dismantle the fog machines, in favor of a rock-solid performance that focuses on what a concert is, truly, about: the music. The bands that are able to take all of these steps, cast off the grandeur, pack themselves — and several hundred feral fans — into a club, and rock the foundations as hard as they would in an arena, are truly wonderful to behold, and tonight’s performance by Bay Area native titans Primus was certainly no exception.

Continue reading “Show Review: An Evening with Primus at the Great American Music Hall, 7/18/2010”

Show Review: Built To Spill at Slim’s, 7/15/2010

Frontguy and basketball enthusiast Doug Martsch at work.

Had Built To Spill been resting on their laurels?

The two previous albums before the current There Is No Enemy LP displayed what could be construed as the gentle complacency of an aging NBA star on a team going into the rebuilding process: a few gems here-and-there to remind us what they were capable of, but a general sense of the motivation just not being there.

Doug Martsch‘s band had released several albums and tracks widely regarded as classics: the Perfect From Now On LP; songs like “Car,” “You Were Right,” and the gorgeous, haunting “Randy Described Eternity.” He’d spearheaded and mastered his own brand of good-natured wide-striding heavily-layered swirling guitar-heroics-based indie rock. Now what?

What would it look like if Boise’s second-favorite export had something to prove?

San Francisco got the answer when Built To Spill took the stage at Slim’s.

Continue reading “Show Review: Built To Spill at Slim’s, 7/15/2010”

Show Review: Wakey!Wakey! with Wave Array and Doom Bird at Hotel Utah, 7/14/2010

My favorite Billboard chat was always the Heatseekers Chart. Defined generally as the best selling new artists, it was always the place to go if you wanted to hear someone before everyone else heard them. Blogs such as this one have pretty much destroyed the value of this chart, as now to hear someone first, you need to be the first person to Tweet about them. Well, I still enjoy this chart, and tonight, it led me to Wakey!Wakey!, a Brooklyn band that recently held down the #1 slot with their album, Almost Everything I Wish I’d Said the Last Time I Saw You …, as they played their first ever show in San Francisco. Continue reading “Show Review: Wakey!Wakey! with Wave Array and Doom Bird at Hotel Utah, 7/14/2010”

Show Review: Tool with Jello Biafra And The Guantanamo School Of Medicine at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 7/12/2010

no one is innocent (photo by Shannon Hazelip)

I will preface this review by stating a fact which, while well known to my friends and colleagues, is not widely expressed within my concert reviews, given their number and the scale of the bands that I go to see. This fact is a simple one: I loathe arena shows. I’m more specifically referring to any venue that seats over 10,000 people, although 7,000 — the capacity of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium — is pushing my limit to a mild degree. The fact of the matter is, however, that there will always be certain bands that are far, far too big to play in small clubs, large theaters, or even modest amphitheaters, and these bands will be reason enough for me to go, no matter the size of the venue. These bands will be the driving force behind the show that they put on; this is no festival with twenty acts, nor a set of competing giants wrestling for the title of “biggest rock god ever”. This is a band that has been around for nigh-on twenty years; in fact, the singer was heard tonight saying, “Pop quiz: how many of you are under 21? Really? Well, you weren’t even alive when this song was written.”

Who would this be? Tool, of course.

Continue reading “Show Review: Tool with Jello Biafra And The Guantanamo School Of Medicine at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 7/12/2010”

Show Review: Marina & The Diamonds at Popscene, 330 Ritch, 7/8/10

Marina&band — Marina & the Diamonds - Stripped down

Four songs into the set, Marina Diamandis, the songstress that is Marina & the Diamonds (the Diamonds being you, the fans, duh!) announces boldly that this is “the last chance you’ll get to see me like this.” Whether or not this is true, at this moment in time, Marina & the Diamonds is bigger than the packed dance floor of Popscene at 330 Ritch. Of course, Popscene is notorious for giving you the opportunity to say “I saw them when” but could Marina really back up her claim that she will be one of the greats, or will she just fade out once popular culture is done with her? Continue reading “Show Review: Marina & The Diamonds at Popscene, 330 Ritch, 7/8/10”

Show Review: Goldfrapp at The Fox Oakland 6/26/10

Alison Goldfrapp. Photo by Kara E. Murphy.

With everything that’s been going on lately on the job interview and contracting front, it’s almost a miracle that I found the time to get this review posted. I’m thrilled with the photos I took for the Goldfrapp show at Fox Theater this past Saturday evening and I’m hoping the words in the post can do the incendiary performance some justice.

Continue reading “Show Review: Goldfrapp at The Fox Oakland 6/26/10”

Show Review: Ani DiFranco at Ex’pression College For Digital Arts, 6/24/2010

Ani DiFranco played a set of new unreleased songs before a tiny audience of mostly students at Ex’pression College Of Digital Arts in Emeryville.

Opening with an atonal labor song from the 1930s that she’d written new verses for, DiFranco invited the crowd to sing along. Continue reading “Show Review: Ani DiFranco at Ex’pression College For Digital Arts, 6/24/2010”

Show Review: Iron Maiden with Dream Theater at Concord Pavilion, 6/20/2010

Bruce Maiden — He not only sings, he also flies the plane from gig to gig. Really.

Bruce Dickinson, British Airways pilot and lead singer of Iron Maiden, looked out into the crowd and commented on how many people were there at this sold out show.

“They told me there’s 12,500 people here tonight. Last night, we had 25,000. That’s a lot of people for an Iron Maiden concert. Perhaps we’re getting some spillover from Christina Aguilera canceling her tour.” Some laughed while other booed. It’s not spillover. For reasons that are apparent if you’re a fan, and ones I’ll explain to you, Iron Maiden has survived as a huge draw long after other metal bands have faded away. Continue reading “Show Review: Iron Maiden with Dream Theater at Concord Pavilion, 6/20/2010”