Show Reviews

Hey, look at that, something new.

So in the past two weeks, I have been to three shows. Alkaline Trio (5/1), Polkadot Cadaver (5/6), and ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and Surfer Blood (5/11).

All I can say is wow. Holy shit. What amazing concerts. Not only did every band blow me away, but each had an open that was unknown to me that also succeeded in blowing me away. If you ever get the chance to see any of the bands I mention in the following, TAKE IT.

First: Alkaline Trio with River City Extension

This show took place at the Recher Theater in Towson, Maryland. The venue is pretty solid, there's a huge space for people to stand, a couple of bars, a mid-size stage and a guardrail. The floor fills up rather quickly, but it is Alkaline Trio and it is Baltimore (read: every wanna-be teenage in the tri-state area was in attendance).

After the standard 45 minute wait from doors, River City Extension comes up. I'll be honest, my first impression of this band was less than positive. From the looks, it was nothing more than a bunch of hipsters, most of whom looked like they wouldn't be doing more than standing there with an aloof sneer. I have never in my life been happier to be proven wrong. This band is phenomenal. They have an incredibly unique sound and unimaginable energy. This group has, among your typical instruments, a cellist, a trumpeter, and a second percussionist. And it's very rare that I see a group feed off each other as these guys managed to. The first song threw me for a loop because I simply wasn't expecting the sound they had. After that, I was hooked. The band reminds me a bit of Mumford and Sons, in that it has a bit of an English folk feel to it. They manage to build upon that sound by incorporating other instruments, incredibly drums and pure energy into every song. By the time they finished, I was pumped and ready for Alkaline.

Alkaline, to no surprise, rocked it. This was my first time seeing them, but I've been a fan of their music for something like eight years, so it was just awesome. They played quite a few well known songs and did so with energy and a sense of humor. At one point, Dan decided he wanted a drink, so Matt drops his guitar, walks off stage, and comes back a couple minutes later with a bottle of Grey Goose and a Monster. The band was joking with each other and the crowd the entire time and it made for a very personal and enjoyable performance. I especially love it when a band as big as Alkaline Trio does something like that, because it shows that their fame has not really affected them and they simply love what they do.

River City Extension
Alkaline Trio


These next two shows took place at the Ottobar

Polkadot Cadaver and Eat Your Neighbors CD release party with To the Fight!, Asexual Woods, and Groundscore

This was yet another case of VERY solid openers. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Polkadot Cadaver, look them up right now. It is some of the best metal you will find. I've been excited for this show for months and was really looking forward to the new CD (review to come).

I'm going to have to skip on reviewing the three openers, simply because my memory seems to disagree with fact. A trait I recall about one of the three seems to coincide with a different one. So rather than confuse and discredit myself, I'll allow you to make your own judgements on the three openers. The long and short of it is that all three bands are good and worth checking out.

On to Eat Your Neighbors. This is a Baltimore band I had heard of, but never really listened to until this show. They're in a fairly similar vein to Polkadot Cadaver, that is fun alt-metal. The guys put on an awesome, energetic show. I'd say around half the crowd was there for them and was singing along to many songs. They played some rare songs and while I'm not familiar enough with the band to appreciate that, it was still pretty cool. One of the songs was from the band's early days and while it was stylistically different, it was still quite good.

Pdot definitely took the show home for me, though. It was easily one of the most fun concerts I've ever been to. Any song that wasn't new, the entire crowd knew all the words to and was singing along. A particularly awesome personal moment: during "Bring Me the Head of Andy Worhol" I got to strum Jasan's guitar while he was on stage. Awesome. The new songs were pretty goddamn good, in the same vein as Purgatory Dance Party, but I'll get to that in another post.

Asexual Woods
To The Fight!
Groundscore
Eat Your Neighbors
Polkadot Cadaver

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead and Surfer Blood with the Dialogue, Weekends and True Widow

Man, this has just been such an awesome month for concerts. The openers were not as strong this time around, however.

The Dialogue wasn't bad but I honestly found them to be a bit boring. I wasn't really brought in by the music and ended up playing on my iPod for about half the set. Again, not bad music by any means but simply something I did not find personally captivating. I would be willing to give them another chance though, if it ever came up.

Weekends I am torn on. In some ways they were energetic and unique, but in other ways I just wasn't into it. Its a two man band, one guitar and a drum set. Both members play both instruments, I believe just one of them sings. What threw me off about this band was the consistent use of a tape echo for the vocals. The music was pretty enjoyable, but the fact that they used a heavy tape echo on every song really spoiled it for me. I couldn't make out a single word. I'm currently listening to a song on their myspace and it's not half bad, so I'm going to have to chalk this one up to "I'd have to see them again to make a fair judgement call." It definitely wasn't bad, but there were enough negative things at the time to distract me.

True Widow was AWESOME though. I was not expecting a shoegaze band at all. Especially an awesome one at that. Really awesome droney guitars and songs, good drums, really everything a good shoegaze band should have. Including members only moving when they wanted a drink of beer. This was easily the best opener.

Surfer Blood was incredible. I've been a fan of these guys for years, so it was awesome to finally get a chance to see them play. Almost half of their set was new songs, and man oh man did they nail them. The new songs actually manage to top Astrocoast, so I cannot wait for the new album. Super energetic, great music, reminded me why I love the band.

Trail of Dead (fuck the full name) was astonishing. There is no other word to describe their set. Just wow. It was one of those rare instances where the crowd just became a single entity of energy. The band would just jam and rock out as people screamed and cheered. People would mosh, sort of (it wasn't quite heavy/ violent enough to really be moshing. At least not after the PDot show). The lead singer/ guitarist jumped off stage at one point and just played in the middle of the crowd. I admit I've only been a casual listener of this band until now but after seeing them play...I clearly need to get more involved with knowing what they play.

The Dialogue
Weekends
True Widow
Surfer Blood
Trail of Dead

So there you go. Brief reviews of the shows I've been to this month. Expect reviews of the new Polkadot Cadaver, This Will Destroy You, Explosions in the Sky, and Manchester Orchestra in the next few days. Please check out all the bands mentioned, I'm sure they would love your support.

This is probably the only hip-hop album I'll ever review

Lupe Fiasco - Lasers

Disappointment. That's pretty much the best way to summarize my feelings of this album. I remember when I heard Lupe for the first time. I was shocked to hear rap through a mainstream source with someone who could actually carry a beat. Not only that, but he was rapping about ACTUAL stuff, not going to the club/fucking bitches/other stereotypes.

So yeah. Anyone familiar with Lupe knows that Food and Liquor and The Cool are DAMN good albums. The same cannot be said for Lasers, unfortunately.

The first track starts off with an autotuned hook. As soon as I heard this, my hopes dropped a bit. I absolutely despise autotuning. The only times it works, for me, are certain kinds of techno and T-Pain. But I listened on anyway.

For the majority of the album, Lupe just doesn't seem into it at all. One thing I really liked about prior albums was the passion I could sense in that he really cared what he was rapping about. Here, its not the case. He also just comes on really strongly with some of his ideas. Namely political ones. In "Words I Never Said" he makes a lot of references to the Middle East. That would have been more appropriate four years ago. He attempts what I'm going to assume is irony in this song, in that it's called "Words I Never Said" but the lyrics juxtapose this with "Words I Should Have Said." It's a mix of coming on way too strong with his opinion and trying to say what he thinks people want to hear.

I also noticed a few instances where he pretty much rips off other songs. I know it can be popular to sample songs in hip hop, but this definitely wasn't the case. In "Don't Wanna Care" part of the beat sounds pretty damn identical to "Down" by Jay Sean. In "Show Goes On" he BLATANTLY rips off Modest Mouse's "Float On." Hey look at that, the titles are even similar.

Lupe reminds us just how liberal he really is with "All Black Everything" again just saying what people would want to hear. Mind you, I am an independent, but it just annoys me to hear over the top anti-war/other stereotypical things in music. Politics and music can definitely work, there are PLENTY of good anti-war songs. But there's a thing called subtlety. If you're over the top, it's going to be annoying and just not work.

There were a couple good songs though. "Coming Up" was really good, it was probably the first song on the album I genuinely enjoyed. "Never Forget" was a great song, really the only one that struck me as classic Lupe. John Legend did some guest vocals on that song and at first I thought it was Russel Brand. For a moment I thought the album had ended and a song from Get Him to the Greek had come on. Still good though, I was able to tell the difference after a moment. That's not meant to be criticism at all, it just made me laugh so I figured I would share.

Anyway, all in all, the albums mediocre at best. I want to give it a second listen to try again, but I honestly do not see it as a keeper. Lupe's fame has gone to his head. I've known this for a while. It's a shame and hopefully he'll bounce back to his old self, but the album just wasn't that good. It wasn't terrible by any means, but I guess I just expected a lot more. I was quite excited for this album and currently I feel pretty let down.

But still, here's a link, judge for yourself.

http://fileserve.com/file/3JyHyXZ/Lupe_Fiasco-Lasers-2011-H3X.rar

Arcade Fire: Album of the Year

First off, I'd like to give my congratulations to Arcade Fire for winning album of the year. It's always nice to see a good band get some well deserved recognition.

I really don't give two shits about the Grammys or any award show, but when something that's apparently underground (I had thought the band to be fairly mainstream, but I'll address that in a moment) wins over utter shit such as Lady Gaga, it brings a smile to my face. To me it says that some part of the music industry still cares about actual music, not just pop bullshit that sells. I think Eminem was a contender too, which I would have been okay with. Recovery was a pretty damn good album.

Which brings us to http://whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com/

What gets me is the reaction that has come as a result of this. For starters, you people care way too goddamn much. It's a fucking award show. I doubt any of the artists who lost care as much as you seem to.

You're not familiar with the band. Okay, that's cool. You're a purebred MTV clear-channel zombie. I don't expect you to know what real music is beyond the shitty overproduced pop you bend over backwards to receive. But to start a blog asking who the band is? Just google it, it's honestly not that hard. It makes you look like a simpleton.

But wow. Some of these posts are just baffling. Most people are incapable of even spelling the band's name correctly, and more seem to have the album name confused with the band itself.

It all comes down to opinion, of course, but the moron who said that Gaga is better needs to clean his fucking ears. I'll admit it, I actively avoid Lady Gaga like the plague that she is, so this might not be the most fair assessment of her, but since I'm not a fan of hers, why should I care? Lady Gaga is the absolute epitome of shitty pop. It's at least partly autotuned (which is a trend that really needs to go away), writes simplistic songs and uses shitty beats. My biggest quarrel with her though, is her fucking act. The woman honestly needs to get over herself. She is not unique, artsy, or any of the pseudo-bohemian intellectual shit that she claims. Want to fight that? Look at all the shit Madonna did sixty years ago when she was culturally relevant. Now look at Gaga. There's quuiiiiite a few similarities. Well, okay, Gaga made everything twelve times bigger so that people wouldn't notice, but whatever.

(Post writing the article side note: coming out of an egg? That's just fucking stupid.)

When you do things for the sake of doing them, it's almost always a waste. Something is unique when it's NOT ripping off what's done before and it's pretty good to actually make a point. Granted, it's fashion, but still. Get off your high horse and stop acting like you're this amazing fashionista goddess and go back to fantasizing about sucking off Worhol while Picasso jacks off in the corner.

Anyway. Back to the point. I was honestly surprised by how few people seemed to know about the band. I was under the impression that Arcade Fire was at least somewhat mainstream, I was almost certain that "The Suburbs" or "We Used To Wait" had good exposure. But still, people are up in arms about someone with actual musical talent winning an award. DEAR GOD NO! WE CAN'T HAVE THIS!! THE BRAINWASHED MASSES MIGHT WAKE UP AND STOP BUYING INTO THE EFFORTLESS SHIT WE SELL THEM!! (by the way, if you want to comment about how hard it is to make a top 40 hit, watch this: http://www.wimp.com/popsong/. It really is quite easy to make a pop song).

Sarcasm aside, one more post from the blog that struck a negative chord with me was the post that stated that the winner of album of the year should be known by everyone. By that logic, the quality of music has NOTHING to do with whether or not it deserves an award. To an extent, yes, something good will be exposed to a large number of people. But shitty pop gets far more exposure because it's what sells. Speaking in a strictly musical sense, those songs are not very good. Vocal talent is less than present with autotuning, and the beats are simplistic. I do get that market, even though I'm not a fan. People like simple music because it's catchy and they can dance to it.

However, popularity has nothing to do with how good music is. Hipsters take the opposite approach the aforementioned guy, in that the less people who know of an artist make that artist better. But both are wrong. The number of people who know of an artist and how good that artist is have NOTHING to do with one another. Music isn't some fucking popularity contest.

Anyway, to summarize, I'd like to congratulate the band again on the win. It's nice to see some integreity in what I perceive to be a dead industry. I think people are fucking stupid for hating a band simply because they're too brainwashed to have heard of them, but whatever.

If you want to check out Arcade Fire, start with Neon Bible. An absolutely amazing album. Suburbs is damn good too, but I'm usually a fan of chronology. And yes, I do know Neon Bible is the second album, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you to check out a bands entire discography to prepare for one album.

Attendance is Mandatory

Dog Fashion Disco is playing a two day reunion show to commemorate the releases of Anarchists of Good Taste and Adultery. You need to go.

That's pretty much it.

www.razortowrist.com

Buy your tickets while you still can