Some Thoughts from the Capitol Hill Block Party
Wow, they could really use some walk-lanes through the wall-to-wall crowds. Just enough for people to pass by without bumping and/or grinding everyone they pass along the way.
Kind of wish I'd headed to Truckasauras instead of Menomena, but at least I satisfied my curiosity re. the latter band.
Maximal music ought to take up as much space as possible. Girl Talk just felt weird in the open air, with a decent but certainly not great soundsystem. The main delight of his mashups is the precise moment when one song crosses over onto another, that locking precisely into place like a puzzle piece, which was pretty much absent yesterday. That loss of clarity means you pretty much just get the most audible layer at any one time, so it played much more like a DJ set than laptop wizardry most of the time. At least that's how it sounded where I was standing. Music that looms so large just feels indecent when it's outsized by buildings and clouds.
Oh man, The Dodos made the weekend for me. At times they felt like a link between the more rhythmically talented post-punks and the tribal folk weirdos, a really nice sweetspot if you ask me. Intense but joyous.
Throw Me the Statue have some nice songs, and on record it sounds like maybe Robert Pollard is singing, but tonight the vocals were just not there at all. Granted, the sound was generally a bit off for their set, but I was just baffled by how small and weak the singing was. With most bands I'm happy to settle for a better sound on record, but since Throw Me the Statue is a local band who also seem like great people, it's kind of a shame.
Listening to Ys this week, I was struck by how incredible it would be if Joanna Newsom and Fleet Foxes put out a split (double?) EP where they covered each others' songs and also collaborated on some sprawling new epic. This would work particularly well since the two seem to occupy different regions of the same strange folky planet; Fleet Foxes' forthright, reverberating harmonies and guitars occupy a different place sonically from Joanna Newsom's mewling solo vocals and lilting harpistry, but they'd fit together so nicely.
Another 2006 album I underrated but re-heard this week is International Pony's Mit Dir Sind Wir Vier, which sounds absolutely perfect now. More precisely, it sounds like the soundtrack to sitting at home during the morning in late fall, looking out a frosted window with no particular plans to go anywhere. Kind of like the beginnings of my long November-January breaks in college. I think I ignored it when it came out because it didn't fulfill my expectations of sounding exactly like the single version of "Our House," but thankfully that period has ended.
Kind of wish I'd headed to Truckasauras instead of Menomena, but at least I satisfied my curiosity re. the latter band.
Maximal music ought to take up as much space as possible. Girl Talk just felt weird in the open air, with a decent but certainly not great soundsystem. The main delight of his mashups is the precise moment when one song crosses over onto another, that locking precisely into place like a puzzle piece, which was pretty much absent yesterday. That loss of clarity means you pretty much just get the most audible layer at any one time, so it played much more like a DJ set than laptop wizardry most of the time. At least that's how it sounded where I was standing. Music that looms so large just feels indecent when it's outsized by buildings and clouds.
Oh man, The Dodos made the weekend for me. At times they felt like a link between the more rhythmically talented post-punks and the tribal folk weirdos, a really nice sweetspot if you ask me. Intense but joyous.
Throw Me the Statue have some nice songs, and on record it sounds like maybe Robert Pollard is singing, but tonight the vocals were just not there at all. Granted, the sound was generally a bit off for their set, but I was just baffled by how small and weak the singing was. With most bands I'm happy to settle for a better sound on record, but since Throw Me the Statue is a local band who also seem like great people, it's kind of a shame.
Listening to Ys this week, I was struck by how incredible it would be if Joanna Newsom and Fleet Foxes put out a split (double?) EP where they covered each others' songs and also collaborated on some sprawling new epic. This would work particularly well since the two seem to occupy different regions of the same strange folky planet; Fleet Foxes' forthright, reverberating harmonies and guitars occupy a different place sonically from Joanna Newsom's mewling solo vocals and lilting harpistry, but they'd fit together so nicely.
Another 2006 album I underrated but re-heard this week is International Pony's Mit Dir Sind Wir Vier, which sounds absolutely perfect now. More precisely, it sounds like the soundtrack to sitting at home during the morning in late fall, looking out a frosted window with no particular plans to go anywhere. Kind of like the beginnings of my long November-January breaks in college. I think I ignored it when it came out because it didn't fulfill my expectations of sounding exactly like the single version of "Our House," but thankfully that period has ended.
Labels: Music
Posted on Saturday, July 26, 2008
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