Mike McGee, Robert Lashley and Cynthia French at the Green Frog - April 7th - The Green Frog

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Mike McGee, Robert Lashley and Cynthia French at the Green Frog - April 7th - The Green Frog


It’s always a joy when Mike McGee returns to town. McGee is one of the finest poets in the country, the only poet to have ever won the National and World Poetry Slams, the originating influence of the popular Kitchen Sessions and the nicest person you will ever have the pleasure to meet. Based now in his hometown of San Jose, California, Mike lived in Bellingham not too long ago and there is always a lot of love waiting for him here.

All of this was present at the Green Frog when McGee took the stage. As a working poet, he has a deceptive ease of delivery. He calls what he does “stand-up poetry”. Often, he catches you off-guard as you realize his conversational comedic  “stand-up” set-up has suddenly morphed into a poem of luminous beauty. After the alliteratively aural acrobatics of “Love Life”, he begins a piece called “Mycrophone” with the question “Is this thing turned on?” The piece unfolds as a heartfelt confession of how comfortable he is in front of a microphone. Then he seems to fight the rhyme for a moment until it bursts forth in a paroxysm of pure poetic ebullience. It’s a virtuoso performance, stopping you in your tracks and fixing you in the high-beams of language. He follows this with “Geez, Us!”, a brilliant hallucinogenic-comedic piece about him hanging out with Jesus, dreaming of the “Four Midgets of the Apocalypse” who “burned down miniature golf courses”, shaving Jesus’ head and the receiving a “Holy Burrito”.

Even though McGee is up on the stage separated from the crowd, he is actively engaged with the audience, listening to laughter and silence, watching the faces for reaction. With each new piece, you feel it is being pulled out of his bag of poems just for you. He calls Jake Werrion up to the stage to perform beautifully sparse musical echoes on guitar during the spoken monologue of “Take No Shit! (A Zoo Story)” which probably made the sorrowful ghost of Spalding Grey smile. He follows this with the powerful and poignant “Dirty Dimes” which details with a harrowing fluorescence a graveyard shift at a Walgreen’s Drugstore, describing a Dantean procession of characters who pass through in quietly desperate caricatures until the tenth customer, a woman dying of cancer or AIDS who pays with a handful of dirty dimes. It’s a powerful piece that takes all the breath away, a sublime synecdoche of the American Dream un-waking. Poetry that rings your bones like a bell.

Robert Lashley rises to the stage, his body language incarnating the Jeremiad, the mournful tenor and meter of his poetry. He tells us this day is the anniversary of the death of a woman he loved. His reading is uncompromising, the language shivering and shaking, a fist raised up in barren rage against time. The death of the loved one weighing down the words, adding black hole gravity to the lost center: “Through light and glass, the world is her laurel. / Her holly seeds filtered all light and shadow. / Sorrow is an invisible city of fabrics / from her, and the world outside.” An unrelenting obsequey performed with an almost violent rawness and fragility.

Cynthia French follows with a wonderful poetic rant about how Jane Fonda ruins everything from drive-in theaters and how one looks in spandex to not being able to set it up for your dying father to win an Academy Award. Her delivery is electric and engaging, laced with a penetrating and self-deprecating humor: “I am a fluorescent sock caught in the rusty chicken-wire fence around the drive-in movie parking lot.” She ends with a humorous story about her move across the country to Bellingham without a physical map that took her far off course of a scheduled poetry reading, which she then drove many miles back to attend. And Cynthia French is that sort of supremely talented poet who would go drive hundreds of miles for poem.

McGee returns with a selection from his most recent chapbook, Romantic Electric Camouflage, which is a “loop of poems” describing the development, denouement and dissolution of a relationship. This new work, while accented with his incisive comedy, is rooted deeper down in poetry. “I Meant to Say” as the first meeting, first impression, is one comedic riff after another, followed by what he meant to say. Imagine a Red Skelton clown trying to tell a woman he meets how he’s not kidding. This is followed by “The Winners”, full of the first bloom of love, a sublime poetic solemnity silencing the laughter: “I am the words in the night / You are the ears I exist for”. McGee takes the audience out into deeper waters with “Knightswimming” - about mid-point in the cycle where he asks the unravelling question: “Did we think we were rescuing each other? / Two anchors at sea?” He tells us the cycle is meant to be looped, when you get to the final poem, it guides you back to the beginning, Finnegan’s Wake, beginning again at the end. This is fine poetry, arcing white hot from page to performance, an absolute pleasure and privilege to bear witness to.

Mike McGee: http://www.mikemcgee.net/
Robert Lashley: https://robertlashley.wordpress.com/
Cynthia French: https://cynthiafrench.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine

EP Review: The Living Arrows - Set You Free

The three pieces (transcending the idea of “songs”) on The Living Arrows EP, Set You Free, resonate like the separate lines of a haiku: each is a world unto themselves but realizing a greater poetic dimensionality as a whole. On the first track, “Set You Free”, Alexandra Doumas’ warm voice, beauty laced with an unidentifiable melancholy, sings you into a poetic, almost mythic, narrative. There are elements of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and also something entirely its own. Traesti Luther comes in on the refrain, the perfect tonal counterpoint to Alexandra. The next piece, “Every Day I Wake”, features the rich sincere vocals of Traesti singing “Every day I wake, I try to lose my mind” over Christian’s Casolary’s captivating drum track and Loren Shaumberg’s engaging knife-like guitar riffs. Their shared vocal dynamics, the lyrical metaphysics, unfold and unfold the song over a sweet jazz-folk musical landscape. The last track, “King, Spring and Stone”, could have easily been born out of the Child Ballads, the vocal interplay between Alexandra and Traesti evoking comparison to Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - the elegant and sparse instrumentation serves as a perfect frame. While there is obvious lyrical talent and accomplished musicianship, what is most engaging is a sense of the unexpected joy that emerges out of The Living Arrows’ music. Whistles, odd vocalizations, giggles, conversation and laughter are all essential elements. This music is the soundtrack for the beauty of waking up on a Summer’s morning, of not wanting the night’s dreams to fade; the prelude to a perfect day.

http://thelivingarrows.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine.

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

Listening to Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts latest release, Screwloose, is like tuning-in to a haunting AM radio station on a summer night where the grass is blue and you are happy lost on the backroads of a 1930s Appalachian Dream. Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Stephen Foster are conjured forth. Bolt’s voice aches and moans with his resonating steel guitar like a strange attractor, owl-wing flutter towards a Blood Moon, at once comfortable and unsettling in its authenticity and rawness. Josh Britton’s slapping bass and Tim Long’s percussive tapping raising up the ghosts of Johhny Cash’s Tennessee Two: somewhere Marshall Grant is smiling. Dancing over it all, like musical lightning melting is Jeremy Sher’s sweet sweet fiddle playing. Every track on the album is fine, a cauldron of inventive original themes such as Made of Metal and Mile After Mile mixed with traditionals that reach out from the depths of the the collective American unconscious. The Gillian Welch song, Winters Come and Gone is given a new and remarkable reading as the involuted elements of the song are turned outwards into the willful convictions of the traditional John Henry. Likewise, the Stephen Foster tune, Angeline the Baker is fused with the dark energy of the fiddle reel, Soldier’s Joy. Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts perform a New-Time Music, dressing the bones of Old-Time Music in a fresh and mysterious skin; creating a thing of beauty, harmony and sorrowful joy.

https://corwinbolt.bandcamp.com/

EP Review: Spider Ferns: Safety

The Spider Ferns new EP Safety unfolds seductively in your mind, laying down layer after layer of resonate musical reference, from trance to surf, jazz to dreampop - music simultaneously bright and shining new and yet as ancient as a fireside dream lullaby. The marriage of music between Kelly and Alton Fleek as The Spider Ferns has created a series of epiphanic sonic landscapes filled with poetic fragments and evocative musical atmospheres. The first track, Stronger Still, sets out with Alton’s fused-out tribal rhythms, icy guitar riffs, and Kelly’s voice like that of deep memory, reverberated and reminding: “When you turn the key.” The next track, Safety, has an elegant clock-like complexity, jazz-inflected guitar over a series of vocal questions that answer themselves in the beauty of Kelly’s asking. The hypnotic and seductive, Worlds Without Fail, with it’s Bauhaus meets Angelo Badalamenti echoes, an opium dream of a surf guitar, is one of the strongest tracks on the EP - entrancing as a ghost. The final track, In Violet Bloom (featuring Audiosapian), has intricate rhythms alchemized with sparse musical phrases and luminous vocals. The five songs on this EP are all beauties, as solid and multi-faceted as diamonds. The Spider Ferns music is music you fall into like a dream, where time and your presence dissolve into a transcendent beauty.

http://www.thespiderferns.com/

This review original appeared in What's Up! Magazine

Ben Von Wildenhaus: Music to make the cartoon moon cry tears

Ben von Wildenhaus, formerly of Federation X and Quaalude County Country Band, looks like used car salesman from 1973 in a rumpled suit, a beat down figure from a David Mamet play. From this appearance comes entrancing atmospheric music that is a cross between Ennio Morricone and Brian Eno mixed with a little Angelo Badalamenti. On his new vinyl release, II, Wildenhaus takes the listener into a reverberated landscape where broken fragments of melody creak and moan like junkyard wind chimes (Bad Lament I, II); where a surf style guitar mixes with Esquivel like sonic elements to reverberate like the theme song to a space-age western where astronauts on horseback lasso aliens; where guitar strings map the desolate territory around a thrumming industrial heartbeat (Al Azif, An Nur); where a sad / angry woman sings Spanish to the sound of mascara running down her face (Tu); and where an organ grinder's monkey plays percussion in a boardwalk fortune teller's booth as a blind man plays violin and an emaciated elephant blows a busted saxophone while the bearded lady smiles at you and all you can see are her three missing teeth (Easy Opium). Wildenhaus's music taps into deep neural frequencies that drop the listener into an autistic fugue state where discrete notes stand on the distant horizon like a herd of wildebeests always threatening to stampede but never doing it . It is music to make the cartoon moon cry tears and every alley cat fall into respectful silence. Beautifully strange. Strangely beautiful.

Ben von Wildenhaus has a record release show on Jan 30th at the Shakedown with Prom Queen.

Zach Zinn at the Cavity Club: A Human Wire Suspension Masterpiece - January 13, 2012

Zach Zinn at the Cavity Club: A Human Wire Suspension Masterpiece

January 13, 2012



An invitation to a new club. More like a burned-out house off of Texas Street. Set-up in the basement. Only Zach Zinn would play a gig like this. I walk in and am drowned in consecutive waves of thick incense and disturbing ambient sound. There are a few signs leading you through the house and down into the basement where there are about 30 people standing around – everyone looking like they are ready to run. Electric weird vibe. Dark anticipation. The odor of humans starting to worry. Across the room is a black plastic sheet. The occasional shudder as those working behind it move around. 15 minutes pass. A few people wander away. Then the ambient music stops and a girl comes out to pull the black plastic down from where it was nailed into the ceiling. And everyone has a hard time figuring out what exactly is it that they are seeing there on the other side.

At first, it looks like Zach Zinn is floating there in mid-air like some sort of absent magician’s trick. But then, you see that he is suspended by a multitude of wires which are hooked into his body. Tiny rivulets of blood trickle over his skin. After an initial inward gasp, a collective murmuring of concern starts to rise in volume. Zach slowly raises and arm and plucks one of the strings. A deep bass note trembles through the room. The crowd shuts up. Then he plucks another string and another until each is resonating and rising through manipulated tonalities, fading over long moments, swirling like water down a drain, suddenly going quiet, always a distant thunder sounding. Zach twists in obvious pain to reach some of the strings. And it dawns on me that he has made himself into a human stringed instrument and he is playing an ambient adagio of his own pain. It is brilliant and disturbing and no one could stop watching and listening for the duration of the 45 minute performance.

It is a rare artist that is willing to endure such agony for their own creation. I bow down to Zach Zinn and his willingness to push the boundaries and show the world something that has not been witnessed before.



Originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine

Jeffrey Foucault - Redlight - September 8, 2012

Jeffrey Foucault - Redlight

September 8, 2012

A few Saturdays back I was walking past the Redlight on the way home and, noting there was space at the bar, decided to go on in and have a couple of drinks. I vaguely remembered that someone named Foucault was playing there. I amused myself for a moment imagining what a post-structuralist folk singer might sound like. A quick online check revealed that Jeffrey Foucault, no relation to the French philosopher, was performing. 

The Redlight is always a good space for intimate shows. Chairs and tables were arranged in a circle around Foucault, who performed without amplification. An appreciative group had gathered around him. Foucault, who grew up in Whitewater, Wisconsin and spent Sundays either going to church or ice fishing (according to his press release), played with a quiet intensity, engaging audience in dialogue and telling amusing anecdotes between songs. In an interview during the Sound Pass Sessions, Foucault spoke of the “magic number for a room” as being the required number of people in the audience to get a feedback look and establish a connection, to have a sense of community. It was clear that the magic number had been reached on this evening. Everyone there felt as if there were witness to a special performance. 

Foucault’s voice has a warm lived-in quality that captures your attention. His songwriting skills, as evidenced on songs such as One for Sorrow and Ghost Repeater, are extraordinary, as is his guitar playing. You sense a narrative thread weaving through his music. You listen closer with each new song to try to figure out its traces. His music explores some of the darker aspects of the 21^st century American Dream with an honesty and integrity to the Word. Think of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Anais Mitchell, Jay Farrar. Here’s hoping that the next time he comes through Bellingham, that magic number of his will be much higher. 

http://www.jeffreyfoucault.com/

Psych Country Review and Spur at The Redlight - Friday, August 24

Psych Country Review - source

Psych Country Review and Spur at The Redlight

Friday, August 24, 2012

At the bar with a glass of blood red wine and the heartbreaking lonely sound of a pedal steel guitar echoing in the evening ambience of The Redlight. Psych Country Review from Corvallis, Oregon is gathering together. Cowboy hats and beards. They start off with an excellent Waylon Jennings cover, Lonesome O'nry and Mean. Big country sound for the small space. Julia Rosen’s vocals spark immediate associations with Neko Case and Maria McKee - hints of Patsy Cline. They follow with another cover, Mental Revenge, and I figure any band that starts off a set with two Waylon Jennings songs will most likely do no wrong. Barry Walker’s pedal steel traces elegant musical lines through Jawsh Holmes excellent guitar work. Ronjon Datta’s boardwork is subtle and evocative. Jake Sellers drumming is restrained but perfect for the small space and is tightly linked with Travis Whitmer’s solid bass guitar. Beautiful country music played from down deep in the soul in such a way that seems to work a weird alchemy, turning pain into expressive joy. 

Third song in, an original, Prisoner’s Dilemma, begins in a semi-dissonant cacophony, Spaghetti Western guitar, Gypsy caravan rhythms before unfolding into a slow burning ballad of betrayal. The band all seem like caged tigers, Rosen’s vocals so strong she probably doesn’t even need the mic, guitar and pedal steel uncoiling riffs around her. There is a feeling however that the constraint of the small room is focusing the music, concentrating it in order to transcend the limitations of the form. One of my favorite qualities of The Redlight is when people are up and dancing, as they are now, the whole place moves: floorboards bending, bar swaying, the walls warping to the deep American Pulse of the Psych Country sound. It is Thomas Hart Benton painting “The Sources of Country Music” come to life. They follow with A Song for Hal, a slow piece with beautiful layers of sound from the bass and pedal steel, the guitar plaintive. Traces of Uncle Tupelo and Gram Parsons. An electric and slightly overclocked cover of Dwight Yoakum’s Guitars, Cadillacs caps off the excellent set. 

Next up is Spur. One of the handful of regular groups that plays down the street at Cap’s. Like the Cherry Blossom Family Delivery, Spur has an intentional laid back, almost drunken, country sound. It’s hard to define – which is one of the qualities that makes it interesting. Songs for broken, lost and lonely souls, soundtrack for the memories that gather together at the bottom of the bottle. They come on, announcing: “We are Spur: cowboy boots and flip-flops, breaking down the barriers.” Start off with an original, Another Train Song, the sound falling together like a gang of drunken cowboys on dreaming horses. They follow with a slowed down cover of Johnny Horton’s Springtime in Alaska: “The song she kept singin' made a man's blood run cold / When it's Springtime in Alaska, it's forty below.” One of those old cowboy songs that no one plays anymore and everyone loves and Spur makes relevant and cool. 

A few songs later a poignant and evocative cover of the Theme Song from the Searchers, full of alienation and abandonment: “What make a man turn his back on home?” The black silhouette of John Wayne in the doorway walking away into the desert. This is Old West Gothic, dark country music, Walker’s pedal steel arabesques are ghosts wailing on the train, Shaw’s alternating bass walking across a dead land in a fevered dream full of doomed cowboy nostalgia, enormous piles of buffalo skulls shivering while Yayoi rings Tibetan bells and Valerie wails on the flute. Kevin’s slow brush on the drums like Shiva’s breath. Shane’s vocals full of lonely laconic hard won wisdom. Then an original by Walker, Don't stop by (my dreams tonight), a song so lovely that it brings to Hart Crane’s Bridge to mind: a structure purely evocative of loss and memory. Next, a cover of Ernest Tubb’s Driving Nails In My Coffin has everyone drinking. Further down the line, an almost signature cover for Spur, Ghost Riders in the Sky, is hauntingly performed in such a way that it could be the soundtrack to Holbein’s Dance of Death. Something beautiful and strange is in the room: weird whistles and chimes, sad stringed instruments and haunting rhythms, music composed of dark fragments of a lost western dream… in other words, Spur.

http://thepsychcountryrevue.bandcamp.com/

Kit Nelson, Shawnee Kilgore and Daisy O'Connor - The Green Frog - August 2, 2012

Kit Nelson, Shawnee Kilgore and Daisy O'Connor – The Green Frog

August 2, 2012

There is some sort of weird nexus between Bellingham and Austin, Texas. Witness the harmonic convergence of Kit Nelson, Shawnee Kilgore and Daisy O'Connor at the Green Frog. Three extremely talented singer-songwriters sharing the steamy stage at the Frog to a happy boisterous crowd. 

Unfortunately, I arrive too late to hear Daisy O’Connor (Bellingham native moved to Austin) or Shawnee Kilgore (from Austin). Both are very talented songwriters and singers. I have heard great things about both of them. And their online music is beautiful. Both have subtle senses of humor and a clever way with words. I am sorry the Junkie show at the Honey Moon kept me too late. 

When I walk into the Green Frog, Kit Nelson in on stage doing what she does best, flirting, taunting and amazing the crowd. It is a warm night, the crowd is sweaty and loud. Kit looks as if she is air-conditioned, having made a deal with the devil to always look collected and cool. She plays an excellent, almost angry, rendition of her ode to an ex, “God Must Have Been in a Rush,” then segues into an fiery “Mama Will You Bail Me Out.” Someone in the audience requests “Wild Horses” and Kit sets down the guitar and plays a beautiful cover. She keeps up the between song banter, yelling at the audience, telling them that they are sons of bitches and having them love her even more. Later, bringing Jenni Potts up to sing a sublime harmony on “Everybody’s Dreaming.” 

Austin seems to have given her a little more edge. Or maybe it was just being back in Bellingham. Everyone in the crowd seemed a personal friend, happy to have her back at the Green Frog. Here’s hoping she and Shawnee and Daisy play a few more shows before they return. 

http://kitnelson.com/

http://www.shawneekilgore.com/

http://daisydobedo.com/

Ken Loaf at the Shakedown Wednesday, July 20, 2012

Ken Loaf as Meat Loaf - Shakedown 2012
Photo by S. Casey

Ken Loaf at the Shakedown

Wednesday, July 20, 2012

Waiting for the spectacle. This evening is all about the magnificence of Ken Loaf. Ken sings Meat Loaf songs at the local karaoke nights. Along with his “producer,” Zach Zinn, he hope to get enough money from this show to attend a Meat Loaf concert. Now, he is standing on the stage ramp at the Shakdown, collecting his thoughts, perhaps working himself up to channel the force of musical nature that is Michael Lee Aday. 

There is method to his madness, allowing the anticipation to build, more shots to be downed. The crowd is drunk and getting slightly unruly. Zack Zinn, master of all things karaoke, is on stage introducing. Then Ken Loaf ascends in all of his majesty of scarves and perspiration, announces he is "ready to rock.” The crowd is chanting: “Let’s Go! Ken Loaf!” over and over. 

It begins... Ken has the suit, the scarf, the hair, the beard, the comportment and gravitas of Meat Loaf down to an art. The red scarf there in his hand like a ribbon of blood. All the drama in his expression: the bulging eyes, the trembling high notes. Ken has an excellent voice. This is karaoke taken to the n^th extreme, karaoke porn. There is something sweet about it all. No trains wrecking at all.  Just one car stopped at the station for a man who is obsessed with Meat Loaf: Ken Loaf. With each song, he gains more confidence, becomes more Meat Loafian. The crowd waving lit lighters, chanting as Ken Loaf takes another shot. “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” shines like a diamond. “I’d Do Anything for Love” is performed as a Mystery Play where the spirit of Meat Loaf is crucified on the form of Ken Loaf and all the beauty and pain emerge as pure song. 

Ken Loaf as Meat Loaf - Shakedown 2012
Photo by S. Casey

Ken Loaf as Meat Loaf - Shakedown 2012
Photo by S. Casey

Ken Loaf as Meat Loaf - Shakedown 2012
Photo by S. Casey

Slacks At Cap’s - May 15, 2012

Slacks - Bellingham - source

Slacks At Cap’s

Tuesday - May 15, 2012

Show up at Cap’s on the right Tuesday for once to see the Cherry
Blossoms and discover that they are not playing. However, the Slacks
are. Perfect. Andre and LP stripped down to drums and guitar. They
start off the night, invoking the soul of the 60s garage punk sound
with “Bye Bye Mind.” A slowly building drum rhythm riff. Aching
vocals. Next song, “Don’t Come Over,” sinks the lo fi sonic aesthetic
hook even deeper. Elements of the Greenhorns. Retro lo fi. Ghosts of
the 13th Floor Elevators. Andre’s feedbacking buzz humming guitar
fuses into perfect fuzzed out sounds. Imagine T-Rex crossed with The
Stooges. Both LP and Andre are wearing shades. Lou Reed ultra-style.
LP’s drumming is immaculate, tight and honed down to a zenlike
simplicity, every phrase like a koan: what is the sound of one drum
thundering?

I swear I can hear Roky Erickson’s soul is screaming with insane joy
somewhere inside of it all. The wail of a forlorn soul in a dark world
full of sex and death, with just this one moment of music offering any
measure of redemption. The crowd at Cap’s is appreciative and
screaming like early Stones’ fans. The song, “You Ain’t” gets everyone
dancing in the aisles. “I Don’t Wanna” with its warm buzz of tubed up
amps is just pure snake hot music. They finish out with a diamond
perfect version of Roky’s “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” Later Andre tells me
that it isn’t complicated, but sometimes it is difficult to make it
that simple. They are The Slacks and you aren’t. My new favorite band
in Bellingham.


http://slacksbellingham.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/SlacksBellingham

Biagio and the Argonauts, Coty Hogue with Kat Bula - Honey Moon - May 12, 2012

Biagio and the Argonauts, Coty Hogue with Kat Bula - Honey Moon

Saturday, May 12, 2012


Sitting outside on the patio of the Honey Moon listening to the plaintive Appalachian styled melodies of Coty Hogue and Kat Bula drift out into the darkening sky. Echoes of the Carter Family and Gillian Welch but unique and distinctive in their own right. Coty and Kat’s harmonies seem of reach deep down into the brain and stir up ancient memories. Family and blood, broken covenants and lonely dreams. The musicanship is excellent, sparse and evocative. Each song seemed to reach a place of haunting beauty before, stilling the capacity crowd into a hushed reverence. Coty was due to record a live album the next night in Seattle. If it turned out anything close to her performance at the Honey Moon, it should be a gem.

After a brief break, Biagio and the Argonauts (Biagio Biondolillo, Anna Arvan, Rabia Magnusson and Kat Bula) assembled their chairs and various instruments. Biagio’s entertained the crowd with surreal banter and puns. “We are Puddle of Mead!” They started off with “Born to Fall Apart” immediately charming the crowd with engaging melody and sweet harmonies. Having recently recorded a full length album (due out soon), they demonstrated an easy familiarity and humor with each other. Biagio is a talented guitarist and singer. At times, I was reminded of Poi Dog Pondering. “Big Money” stood out as one of the biggest crowd pleasers. They finished out the sweet and lovely evening with “Nothing Here” - an evocative and poignant tune. It was another beautiful night at the Honey Moon.



http://biagioandtheargonauts.bandcamp.com/

http://www.cotyhogue.com/home

http://thimblevsneedle.fourfour.com/

Falling Up Stairs - Redlight - May 11, 2012

Falling Up Stairs - Redlight

Friday May 11, 2012


It all begins with beautiful feedback that evolves into a screaming sax solo. Standing room crowd, so much so that it is impossible to tell where the crowd ends and Falling Up Stairs begins. Ryan, Edwin, Brendan and Jonathan suddenly are the ones with instruments. After the squelch of pure and ominous noise, the crowd steps back. These are strange musical keys, whistled tunes of serial killers doing their dark work, Chinese butchers carving the bone with swift strokes. It is all about the slow build right now. A train is coming from far away. The percussion creates a throbbing beat of metal running over the rails. The intimacy of the Redlight leads you to believe that you are sitting in a friend’s living room. But then the music spirals into sublime spaces of complex alienation. The intimate space is suddenly too intimate, inside your skull like a snake of many diamonds, uncurling with each new riff. The crowd is thoroughly entranced, letting the skull snakes unfurl with abandon.

The second piece is heavy funk. Discordant works of music hewn out of some weird firmament. Quick time and mood changes. Imagine John Coltrane as a paranoid schizophrenic on LSD. Absolutely beautiful. Awkward and wonderfully difficult confrontational music. Raw and uncontained. At times, reminiscent of the Dirty Three with all the shifts and changes.

 The last piece starts with the tribal throb of drums with enormous, monstrous and wicked, sax riffs peeling off into the night like dark genies freed from the interior of the instrument. These are occult intensities, weird and uncanny and amazing to experience. The crowd is twisted into musical ecstasy. Rare to witness and be a part of. All together beautiful and strange.


https://www.facebook.com/pages/Falling-Up-Stairs/185651601468287

Sarah Goodin - Honey Moon - January 27, 2012

Sarah Goodin - Honey Moon

January 27, 2012

Sarah Goodin has a voice that will break your heart. It is a voice that opens songs up like a lost jewelry box full of forgotten memories. It is a voice that curls right up in your ear like some favorite childhood animal and suddenly gains access to all of your heartstrings. She is standing there under the soft light at the Honey Moon unassuming and humble in all her words of introduction and thanks. And then, it is as if someone poured honey from the most beautiful and saddest bees in the world directly into your skull and filled you full of the sweetest sorrow you have ever known. It is just beautiful and heartbreaking and everything the music should be. Redemptive. Pure. Without it, life would be a mistake.

 She starts off on the shining new sound system at the Honey Moon with a conversation stopping a cappella interpretation of the eerie eden ahbez song Nature Boy. That was it: from the first few words of the song, the room became utterly quiet to listen to Sarah sing. She is one of those rare singers whose voice conveys warmth, vulnerability and strength at the same time. There is a natural intimacy to her delivery that makes you feel as if she is singing directly to you. As she eases through a beautiful set of songs, Red Right Ankle by the Decemberists (plaintive evocations in “we are bound by symmetry”), Man in the Long Black Coat (like you are hearing it for the first time), Traveling Woman by Bat for Lashes (aching with sorrow) up to Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To (the spectre of Billie Holliday), there is that rare and stunning quality that all great singers have: it is as if each of these songs are hers. Each is performed with such authentic beauty that it takes you just a moment to realize that they are covers. But it doesn’t matter, really. She just owns them all tonight. The stillness and reverence of the crowd in the packed room is impressive. There were points during her performance of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah where the crowd is just brought to a point of utter stillness by The Voice. Her guitar playing is deceptively accomplished, the perfect accompaniment.

 She sang several originals that wetted your appetite for more. She mentioned a forthcoming EP set to arrive sometime in March. She could’ve sold one to everyone in the room this night. One of her originals, No Matter What They Say of Love, sounded like a waltz out of a fevered dream of nostalgia, the ghost of a piano and vast rooms full of mirrors, the whisper of a thousand dances long since completed, memories floating through her melody like the pages of a love letter lost in the wind. Words fail. Her voice and the music transcend. Beautiful.

https://www.facebook.com/SarahGoodinMusic

Sarah Goodin at the Black Drop Coffeehouse

Footstompin Trio, The Cheeps and Chris Con Carne at the Shakedown - June 10, 2011

Footstompin Trio - Shakedown - source

Footstompin Trio, The Cheeps and Chris Con Carne at the Shakedown

Friday, June 10, 2011


Friday night show at the Shakedown. The ghosts of how many clubs rising up from their graves to moan in some sort of wicked benediction for the powerhouse bill of  Footstompin Trio, The Cheeps, Chris Con Carne. I am here mostly for Footstompin Trio because just about every third person that I know in Bellingham told me that I had to go check them out. Supposed to represent everything that Bellingham used to be. 3B and that Xeroxed flyers age represented. Pacific Northwest hard-core hillbilly soul. Had to hear it to believe it.

Walk in late, sadly missing Chris Lamb and Dan Lowinger’s Delta Blues slide steel thunder drum duopolis Chris Con Carne – which I hear puts the Black Keys to shame. What is going on is The Cheeps. Imagine early White Stripes garage punk with a more fuck ass drummer and Leather Pants, lead singer, ripping his throat raw while channeling Roky Erickson in the insane asylum and a Tommy James strung out on a bad speedball run. Just relentless. Whips of sweet noise cracking out over the capacity crowd during favorites “Anything New Please” and “Don’t Cry for Me.”

Next up on the block: local legends Footstompin Trio remaining true to perfect form. Conjuring up the ghosts of Buck Owens, Link Wray and Carl Perkins, the Trio possessed the stage in a manner that made you wonder if the the 3B had ever gone away. Dan Lowinger dominated on vocals and guitar managing to simultaneously evoke Hank Williams and Screamin Jay Hawkins. Stell Newsome spit blood next to him and would have made Dick Dale proud. This was balls-out hillbilly rockabilly that had everyone feeling like someone had spiked the Ranier with White Lightning LSD. Their cover of Jerry Reed's Mr. Wiz lit the place on fire and kept most wondering when Jeff Gray's slap bass was going to spontaneously combust. While Tom Forster’s back woods rhythm took the crowd into some weird voodoo rockabilly trance. At the end, the rousing encore of Wray's Run Chicken Run left no doubt as to who had ripped the bones out of the commodified corpse of modern day Rockabilly and made the skeleton dance.

Thank all the devils down in the belly of Bellingham for the Shakedown and their continuing efforts to reanimate the best of what was and electrify the best of what is. Although ever hopeful bone in your body shivers against it, this sort of show is what makes a great music town. You know every musician in the crowd – and there were more than a few - felt the resonance of that long snake moaning against the brick walls of that old building and thought: this is it is all about, this is worth living for, this is some good fucking music.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-footstompin-trio/id275061985

Originally written for What's Up!