SKIPSTER / ECHOING VOICES OF INDEPENDENT MUSIC IN UPSTATE NY

Early last year I missed Vetiver playing Los Angeles out of sheer laziness, and the situation almost repeated itself last night as I sat around debating until the opening band was well into their set. Maybe that’s appropriate for a band whose casual, near-languid energy is both their defining strength and weakness, but an earlier relisten of 2009’s admirable Tight Knit convinced me.

Their set was actually tighter than expected, ironically benefiting from the schizophrenic setlist that frontman/vocalist Andy Cabic allowed his bassist to “guest write.” Cabic wryly noted how they seemed to awkwardly alternate between electric and acoustic, cover song and original; fortunately, the approach doubled as a healthy way to keep their roots folk audience from getting complacent. Tight Knit highlight “Sister” lost some of the rhythmic snap it has on record; otherwise the band were exact in their recreation of the album’s sound, and certain songs — mainly the labored white-funk of “Another Reason to Go”— were stronger in this context, given actual bodies to bump around. Cabic’s a potent vocalist, too, substituting the studio’s smooth edges with a contoured lilt that feeds into his troubadour aesthetic. It’s already hard to believe this band emerged out of the mid-decade “freak folk” scene: they feel eternal in their reliability, shuffling from one literate bastion to the next like a comedown lullaby for the frantic and hype-hungry.

Camera Obscura: Rochester, NY 11/23/2009 @ the German House

It was a spacious venue, the German House:  a towering ceiling, classy balcony, shitty beer choices, people well spread out–making it easy to move through. What more could you ask for on the night before Thanksgiving? The air smelled of a base-note essential oil as Camera Obscura nonchalantly took their place on stage, opening with “My Maudlin Career”, also the title of their latest album. Maudlin, meaning foolishly sentimental, wittingly mirrors the feel of their songs: desperate and peppy with sock-hop-esque tones that suggest surfing, or perhaps pining for waves.

A band from Glasgow, Scotland, Camera Obscura had their way of engaging the Rochester crowd. “That was the second song–are you drunk?” Tracyanne Campbell, the band’s lead singer responded after a shout-out request. During the song, “Come Back Margaret”, the band cohesively executed a specific clapping pattern, of which the crowd enthusiastically mocked. The energy was high. Shadows danced on the hard-wood floor in shades of blue and red. And then, without warning, Tracyanne got feisty, pausing the song “Pen and Notebook” to say, “If we’re going to do a quiet song…shut the fuck up,” to the crowd below. People were getting rowdy. She was on top of her game. She even added a courteous, “no offense”. (see video below)

The instruments in the show ranged from guitars to an organ and a trumpet, all haunting, all played like your favorite mix tape. I have to give extra credit to Kenny McKeeve for his backup vocals–I’ve never heard better “Ooh Ooh Oohs”.
Visually, the band was refined and polished. Their look encompassed the fifties’ style: women in vintage dresses, men in chic vests, depicting gender roles. Diners, drive-in movies, sentimentality–a sister’s social agony.
Between songs, the band thanked some folks for a delightful Thanksgiving dinner, and on the topic of the holidays, introduced a wintry single–a Jim Reeve’s cover titled “The Blizzard”. (For those of you who aren’t my grandmother, Jim Reeves was a twangy country singer in the 50s.) Pitchfork features “The Blizzard” here: http://pitchfork.com/forkcast/13616-the-blizzard-jim-reeves-cover/ so give a listen while looking at a pretty illustration of snow falling on a rustic house, taken from their EP.

Camera Obscura ended the evening with “French Navy”, a song that is arguably the best on My Maudlin Career. Two minutes later they regrouped on stage for their encore, playing, “Let’s Get Out of This Country”, and “Razzle Dazzle Rose”. The trumpets left us happy in the crowd, satisfied, some might say full. It was a musical feast and I’ll say it, catching this show was, in fact, “lucky as a four-leaved clover”.

Lori DeGolyer, photo: J. Sorel

HOLIDAY SHORES:
11/20 @ MOHAWK PLACE, BUFFALO, NY

We last caught Florida’s Holiday Shores sandwiched into a 20-minute set during one of CMJ’s infamous day-parties, so the eleven minutes of breathing room afforded during Friday night’s showing at Mohawk Place were appreciated. Coasting on lead singer Nathan Pemberton’s sweetly reverbed barks and wails, the band are quick to molt any impetuous reputation of belonging to the summer’s alleged “surf rock” and/or “chillwave” movements. Their music is simply more dynamic, more interested in boiling discontent and ebbing misconstruals into increasingly nerve-wracking wall-of-sound gestures. A closer comparison might actually be Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest,” with Pemberton’s restless and inviting lyricism replacing that band’s vagueness — the moment in “Errand of Tongue” where the music drops out beneath him as he croons “I was left up on the tower / searching for my native tongue” stands among the rare goosebump moments of 2009. The band snap particularly well alongside each other during “Edge of Our Lives,” too, another highlight during which they tornado into separate frenzies only to reunite in crescendo moments later. Heavily percussive and with an attention to rhythm that ignites during their live performance, they’ve proven themselves here as one of our favorite live acts in rotation. What happens when someone allows them to unspool this kind of ambition for a full hour?

Setlist:
“Bradley Bear”
“Days Drag”
“Reruns”
“Phones Don’t Feud”
“Edge of Our Lives”
“Errand of Tongue”

Columbus’d the Whim it out now via Twosyllable Records. Stay tuned for a full interview next week!

mike spreter, photo: Pete Legasey from Holiday Shore’s Boston show

LADY PILOT, NOT AFRAID OF DYING:
NEKO CASE IN ROCHESTER, NY

Neko Case has day-old donut smeared on her jeans tonight. She’s just drifted out of one of her signature ballads, floating on wanderlust and an elemental understanding of Americana, and she looks down from the spotlight and notices that morsel of donut. Being Neko Case, she shatters the audience’s illusion that she exists like a spirit born out of Washington forests, turning her dirtied pants into a piece of stage banter before she gallops into her next song.

The lurching contrast between the noirish reveries of her music and the blunt, vaguely sarcastic way she engages her audience is representative of my three experiences with Neko’s live performance, and perhaps an indicator of why I’d gladly pursue a fourth. The records are one thing, mood baths that painstakingly balance her radio-pop and more animalistic songwriting tendencies, but the live show’s equally essential with its tonal melding and subtle bravura. There’s so little attention called to the effort involved in performing this music — no guitar flourishes or excessive coughing, no indulgent clarification of what each song is “about” — that it’s easy to miss how memorable everything is until you’ve already been ushered into the street.

Much was made of this being an unofficial “make-up” show for the planned outdoor concert in Buffalo that Neko was forced to cancel earlier this year, so it was expected that the main setlist trotted out as many highlights off Middle Cyclone and Fox Confessor as it could condense into seventy-five minutes. Opener “Things That Scare Me” was a particularly welcome start for fans of Blacklisted, initiating the stage projections with a clip of headlights hazily piercing the dark of some middle American interstate. These continued throughout the set and were neither as intrusive nor as pretentious as the image “stage projection” evokes, alternating between folk animation similar to the Fox Confessor artwork and other abstractions.

Highlights included the gorgeously brief “A Widow’s Toast,” introduced by back-up singer Kelly Hogan as “one we don’t play very much”; “Deep Red Bells,” whose precise melodic shift always doubles in electricity in the live setting; and “Fever,” one of Middle Cyclone’s strongest tracks and one during which Neko was joined onstage by opener Sarah Harmer.

Most striking of all was the first encore song, the hushed “Vengeance Is Sleeping,” where an acoustic guitar ebbs and swirls around confessional lyrics (“I”m not the man you thought I was”) in the finger-picking style of Leonard Cohen and Marissa Nadler. Long-praised for her obviously stunning vocals, moments like these confirm Case’s talent as extending far beyond her vocal range. By the time she collapses wearily into the song’s final line — “I”m not the man you think I am,” repeated to emphasize the change in tense — she’s made a succcessful argument as one of the era’s purest and discreetly moving songwriters. Certainly Rochester was wise to showcase that vital, ambulant talent, no matter what she had for dessert yesterday.

Mike Spreter, Photo: Andrew Walker

Setlist:
Neko Case in Rochester NY: 11/8/09
“things that scare me”
“maybe sparrow”
“at last”
“people got a lotta nerve”
“i wish i was the moon”
“hold on, hold on”
“i’m an animal”
“middle cyclone”
“the pharaohs”
“polar nettles”
“deep red bells”
“a widow’s toast”
“margaret vs. pauline”
“prison girls”
“the tigers have spoken”
“fever”
“red tide”
“don’t forget me”
“this tornado loves you”
–
“vengeance is sleeping
“lady pilot”
“train to kansas city”

What is the most surprising venue you’ve ever stumbled into?  For me, it was a place I had to drive past three, four times before I could figure out if this was a show or a sly ruse by Pollstar and Skipster to get me possibly kidnapped, definitely lost.  On Tuesday night, Karl Blau, LAKE, and local band Counter Pursuit played a show in the attic of Castle Rockmore in Syracuse, and although from the outside, the venue is a large, non-descript house with nary a sign or marker, inside was a welcoming environment for people wanting to see some decent music on a week night.

Full disclosure time.  I didn’t see Karl Blau play, although he was the headliner, I guess.  I was really there for LAKE, and because of a scheduling snafu by the opener, LAKE had a half an hour, six song set, and I had to leave.  But the short LAKE set I saw was enough to convince me to go back to the venue and check out more of the bands they bring in, most of which I don’t know but apparently would like to know.

LAKE were like a really early Broken Social Scene on valium.  A little groovy, a little girl harmony, and a lot of quiet pop and fading guitars.  They even dedicated one of their songs to the black squirrels we have in Syracuse that don’t exist in the Pacific Northwest.  The 40 or so people in attendance appreciated their laid-back demeanor almost as much as their indie-lite music, which had patrons nodding along to most of the set, and even shimmying a little on a song one of the female singers (the one that sounded like Feist, not the one that looked like her) simply called “funky.”  They closed the set with a request, a song from their first album, and after the three-minute fade in/fade out piece of airy twee, the set was over.

I was surprised to be there, that this show in this place even existed.  And with the ethereal quality of the music and the slow fade into silence, walking out of the giant old house, I wasn’t even entirely sure that it did.

Drew Nelson

Sometimes, a totally solid show is enough.  On Friday night at the Main Street Armory in Rochester, Silversun Pickups put on a show that could be categorized in just that way – solid, and thus perfect.

I doubt anyone had their lives changed in the cavernous, smoky hall used for everything from National Guard Drills to boxing matches.  Likewise, I doubt the Pickups converted a group of curious onlookers into a devoted fan base.  But what they did do was please the surprisingly adoring sing along crowd and give a genuinely humble and thankful performance.  The band name-checked the Bug Jar, the tiny 200-capacity venue in Rochester that they played way back in 2006, when they OPENED for Viva Voce.  And the crowd roared with appreciation, with well more than 200 out on the floor acknowledging that yes, they were there that night.  Liars.

The appreciative crowd and the band’s quid pro quo attitude weren’t the only positive aspects of the show.  The sound was killer, to my surprise, but I suppose a giant concrete room would do well with the reverb maelstrom coming out of Brian Aubert’s amps.  The sound guy also did particularly well with volume control in a venue that seems a little unwieldy.  Never ear-splitting, all the instruments were distinguishable from pretty much any spot on the floor, and the reedy voices of both singers were loud enough to float over the sound.

The major plus for me was probably a huge downer for some of the devotees in the audience.  The set list.  For me, Carnavas was good.  Mostly a great song surrounded by some inferior material that was slapped together to prevent it from being an EP.  Swoon is an ALBUM, though, and I was thrilled that the band basically played through the entire 2009 sophomore effort.  Do I remember every song?  No.  But I do know for a fact that they played seven of the ten songs on the album, which comprised a large chunk of the less than 90 minute set, and those were the moments when the whole band, not just Aubert, were at their most compelling.  And even though the crowd flipped for “Lazy Eye,” even those 200 devout fans and 500 or so liars in the audience agreed, giving surprising support for a band playing essentially an entire new album live.

Show Highlights: Panic Switch > Lazy Eye to end the main set.  C’mon, they’re singles for a reason.

Not So Much:  Cage the Elephant.  I’m sorry, but really.  Their hit sounds like a louder pretentious version of “Cowboy” by Kid Rock.  And, don’t close sets with covers, it makes a band seem to lack confidence in their own material.
Drew Nelson

skipster writer Mike Spreter covers the final day of Rochester’s Indie Festival

Walri benefited from the festival’s largest crowd to-date: perhaps because it was Saturday night, but they’re also one of the area’s most well-loved indie bands. “Walri are multiple walruses,” explained their vocalist with gentle self-mocking, and that premise holds true: they play the sort of melancholic indie pop that you might imagine describing a walrus, with silly, seemingly playfully referential lyrics skating over the deeper afflictions necessitating those pleasant diversions. More Skipster coverage on them to come.

Over in the confessional booth known as Boulder Coffee Co., Geneseo’s New Socks’ hushed strumming offered an immediate and muted follow-up to Walri’s opening slot. Perhaps the surprise of the festival — I had neither seen nor heard nothing of them prior to walking in — they somehow managed forty minutes of pointedly suburban campfire folk without sounding cloying or desperate. Kimya Dawson’s anti-folk crew are the obvious point of comparison, and if New Socks don’t deviate too much from that model, they are working at its highest level. Their cover of Animal Collective’s “Peacebone” was excellent, too; few would try to transpose Avey Tare’s yelping over acoustic guitar without the shield of electronic effects, but lead singer Ben Morey succeeded where numerous would-be YouTube celebrities have failed.

After an extended intermission, I returned to the Bug Jar for the festival’s climactic Neutral Milk Hotel Tribute, whose band featured Walri as well as students from the Eastman School of Music. The show began with the band marching through the front doors of the club and onto the stage as they performed Neutral Milk’s instrumental “The Fool,” a rousing processional that sounds simultaneously like a Scottish death march and the theme music to Alice’s descent into Wonderland. This immediately begged the question: how badly would someone have to fuck up these songs before you stopped wanting to hear them? I never figured this out, but this 45-minute run-through of the inimitable In the Aeroplane Over the Sea acted as a giant panacea for Rochester’s indie scene, uniting the crowd in ecstasy behind crashing horns and lyrics like “Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies.” How much damage can a crippled economy really do to a city where apparently everyone can sing along to every goddamn second of this album?

more info on the Rochester Indie Fest can be found at www.rochesterindiefest.com

Skipster writer Mike Spreter covers the second day of Rochester’s second Indie Festival which took place last weekend at venues across the western NY city.

First on Friday were Cavalcade, a band I had seen open previously at the Bug Jar. They, too, were beset by the Thursday crowd’s irresolvable meekness — “Is everyone saving their dancing for later?,” the frontman asked at one point — but their music’s promising even with the least active participants. Their classic-rock influences are readily apparent, but the way they engage that formula is certainly fresh — their percussive, dynamic rockers collapse into tempo changes whose groundwork has been laid throughout the song, unifying the divorced ballad/rocker dynamic that makes other similar bands sound detached. We’re provisionally naming them Rochester’s second-most-exciting live act.

Argus Eye were second for the night and, in the tradition of hyped local music, their instrumentation impressed while the lyrics occasionally faltered. They opened with one epic, chord-shifting maelstrom but were wise to settle down into easier-digested blocks of shoegaze for the remainder of the night, stumbling only when their songs issued rote proclamations against materialism and other Occidental tragedies. A solid set nonetheless, and their distinction between “new” and “old” material implies they’ll only be growing stronger. And, yeah, I’m not exactly pimping capitalist greed either.

I also caught a few minutes of Swati after escaping the coffee house where Argus Eye performed. The atmosphere there was lethargic and awkward, even compared to the previous where half the audience was buzzed on beer and the other on caffeine. As I walked in, a drunken audience member asked some irreverent question about Swati’s music, apparently aiming to enliven the show’s interactivity. This prompted Swati to give a quick reply before lapsing into her next song: no harm, no foul, no interest.

I arrived late to Hotel Reverie’s early set on Thursday. Unfortunate considering they’re currently our favorite band in the Rochester area, but I nevertheless come bearing good news from their camp: the band will be heading into the studio to record new material next month after playing a few local dates, including one at Ithaca’s newly-opened The Shop on 10/15. That’s a welcome surprise considering their 13-track debut album’s only been circulating since last year. The songs on that album, Strangers & Music-Makers, are the sound of half-drunk insomniacs stumbling briefly into the light, ringing with a clarity of emotion and need that’s soon going down the drain. Hopefully we can expect more of the same from the follow-up.

My first proper show was Lee Nestor, a singer/songwriter in the earnest vein of Mary Chapin Carpenter. Nestor’s set was mostly innocuous, comprised of vaguely empowered guitar rock that might have played better to a fuller weekend crowd; regardless, Thursay’s scattered and hesitant audience persevered, finally claiming Nestor’s late-breaking stage-crawl antics as reason enough to come within twenty feet of the stage. Perhaps it was Nestor’s stage banter about staying home on the couch and generally being a mother that broke the ice.

Next were the Atomic Swindlers, whose performance qualifies as the most bizarre of the three-day festival. Their hourlong set featured a dangling screen where fragments of the band’s lyrics — most of them stock phrases littered with astronomical verbage, e.g. “galactic dreams! funky meteor!” — were projected. There were other images, too, but the comparatively poor resolution made the experience as a whole distracting. The band themselves play upbeat power-rock anthems straight out of the 70’s; again, they seemed an odd fit for the austere pre-weekend crowd.

After an extended soundcheck during which the promise to deliver multiplied every three or four minutes, Josh Netsky commanded the night’s final hour in the German House basement. Netsky’s holistic approach to rock necessitated some switching between acoustic and electric, lending the set a nice diversity. If his vocal delivery seems borrowed from nasally Clem Snide boss Eef Barzelay, the songwriting itself is appreciably less self-aware, sometimes dipping into the doe-eyed wonder of recent indie breakout Girls. Netsky finds particular success on genre-specific songs; the straightforward Americana riffs and self-described “rock and stompers” played with the sharpest focus. He performs next in a headlining role at Rochester’s Bug Jar on 10/15.

more on rochester indie fest @ www.rochesterindiefest.com

hollands live in Ithaca at the Nines on 9/25/09. see their contribution to the skipster museum.

photos by michael grippi