Jenny Lewis can sing

That may seem obvious, but listening to her records doesn't do her voice justice. She can really sing, and her show at the Wexner Center Saturday night proved it. Full review coming soon. For now, more pics from the show here.

Free Grievances

If you're a person who has thought, "That band Titus Andronicus sounds interesting, but not interesting enough to pay for," or, "I really wish I had a job and/or steady source of income so I could afford that Titus Andronicus album," then today is your lucky day.

The Glen Rock, New Jersey boys' 2008 debut, The Airing of Grievances (which was picked up by XL Recordings and re-released this year), is available as a free download today only.

The Decemberists with Blind Pilot - LC Pavilion, 6-1

Conventional wisdom says that once a band jumps from an indie label up to the majors, the band satisfies its new corporation and larger audience with a more mainstream version of itself—something safe, with all the edges smoothed out. The Decemberists proved that notion false on 2006’s The Crane Wife as Colin Meloy, the band’s singer, songwriter and driving creative force, traded in some of his Brit-folk tendencies for a more grandiose vision, accompanying a bizarre Japanese legend with a (somewhat) unexpected dose of prog rock—keyboards, noodling guitars and all.

It wasn’t just a novelty experiment, either. The Portland band’s second outing on Capitol is this year’s The Hazards of Love, an audacious, ambitious, riff-heavy rock opera with a storyline about a woman named Margaret and her lover William, the son of a forest queen. There’s not an obvious single on the album; it plays more like one long song, titles merely indicating the tale’s progression. Not your typical major-label product.

Monday night at the LC Pavilion, the Decemberists played The Hazards of Love from start to finish, no breaks in between songs, no banter. For someone who wasn’t as familiar with Hazards going into the show, it felt a little lengthy and lacked some energy during the slower tunes. But for the most part, I was enthralled by the epicness of it all.

Meloy still has his Victorian Literature professor persona, but watching him was like realizing that not only does your nerdy college prof listen to Deep Purple and the Who, he can rip it up just like them, too, bounding around the stage pseudo-shredding and head-banging. And wow, the metal. The Decemberists threw in some rafter-shaking, low-end power (guitarist Chris Funk was a treat) that make you forget this band ever played folk ditties like “Eli, the Barrow Boy.” They’d never fit into Rock on the Range or anything (fortunately), but if this were the ’70s, people would just assume the Decemberists made sacrifices to Satan, or at least had an unhealthy obsession with Lord of the Rings.

Adding to the theatrics of it all were female singers Becky Stark (aka Lavender Diamond) and Shara Worden (aka My Brightest Diamond). Stark came out dressed in all white and accompanied her singing parts with flamboyant gestures and dancing, as did Worden, who stole the freakin’ show every single time she stepped up to the mic. Her manic stage moves were captivating, and her voice, oh man, her voice. During “The Wanting Comes in Waves,” as she belted out “Consider it your debt repaaaaid!” the whole crowd spontaneously cheered in admiration and excitement. I find Meloy’s affected, overly enunciated vocals mostly endearing, but Worden was still a welcome reprieve.

After The Hazards of Love was completed, the band took a long break before coming back to play favorites like “Leslie Anne Levine,” “We Both Go Down Together,” “16 Military Wives” and “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then).” All sounded great, demonstrating the depth and diversity of the band’s catalog. Before the encore, Worden and Stark returned to the stage for Heart’s “Crazy on You,” a fun cover that may have been my favorite song of the night. It also made me really want to hear Worden front a real-deal rock ’n roll band—something a little less, er, arty, than My Brightest Diamond.

The band ended the show with “Sons & Daughters,” a song with wonderfully quirky instrumentation: bouzouki, accordion and hurdy-gurdy. As the crowd sang along to the refrain, “Hear all the bombs fade away,” it was a good reminder, along with “16 Military Wives,” that Meloy can do topical material (remember Iraq?) in addition to proggy tales of unrequited love and folky Civil War ghost stories. With the Decemberists, you can have your johnnycake and eat it, too.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least briefly mention opener Blind Pilot, also from Portland. Israel Nebeker’s buttery vocals sound even better live than on the band’s lovely folk-pop debut, 3 Rounds and a Sound. It’s probably a bit too breezy for those who only like the Decemberists at their most ELP, but Nebeker’s uncommonly good songwriting shouldn’t be ignored. Expect to hear lots more about these guys in the future.

More pics

Recording

Wrote a cover story for this week's Other Paper about professional recording studios and home recording. You can read it digital-style here.

(Side note: Not sure why the sub-head for this story ended up being "Recording studios struggling in DIY era." Kinda oversimplified and a little misleading.)

King Khan & the Shrines - Wexner Center

I’ll admit that when I first heard about King Khan and the Shrines, I wrote them off as another gimmicky band with a retro schtick. It all seemed like a big joke—the outrageous costumes, the sweaty, man-boob-bearing bandleader, the various genre-aping from the ’60s.

But last Thursday at the Wexner Center, I became a believer. I was putty in Khan’s hands, and from the looks of it, the rest of the crowd was, too.

After removing the aforementioned preconceptions, listening to King Khan and the Shrines is like rummaging through a box at Used Kids and discovering a dusty LP with a faded cover image and browned record sleeve, putting it under the needle and realizing you’ve just discovered an unfairly discarded relic of yesteryear. Eric Khan, the Montreal-born son of Indian immigrants, audaciously borrows from classic soul (think James Brown and Little Richard) and filters it through the Rolling Stones. It’s garage rock/punk with boundless enthusiasm, not unlike Vice Records labelmates the Black Lips, but with more bombast, theatrics and a sense of humor that could make robots chuckle.

Khan’s lyrics aren’t just tongue-in-cheek. They’re completely over the top, which matched his leopard-skin coat and the band’s matching gold-and-black outfits (including Bamboorella, a go-go dancer who gyrated with pompoms throughout the set). This is a guy who wrote a chorus that goes “My baby’s fat, she’s ugly/She’s fat and she’s ugly but I love her.” You can find that one, “Took My Lady to Dinner,” on The Supreme Genius of King Khan and The Shrines, which Vice released in the U.S. last year as a best-of compiled from his previous internationally released material. (Vice also released What Is?!, featuring some of the same tracks, last month.)

It can be pretty hilarious (and raunchy) but this wasn’t a comedy show—even when Kahn came out shirtless for the encore, beer gut flapping, with a golden cape and battle helmet. The band played some great tunes, and played them well.

While Wexner Center crowds are usually pretty tame, Khan had the Black Box on the Mershon Stage going nuts the entire time. I’ve seen a little bit of moshing here and there when punk bands play the Wex, but this was a whole other level. A room full of twenty-something white dudes (and some women scattered throughout) freaked out to the Shrines like college girls at a fraternity party do when they hear “Come on Eileen.” Insane. I even saw a guy up front smoking a joint and then attempt to pass it to Khan, who either ignored it or pretended to ignore it—a prudent move, since security was all over it.

The Shrines—all 10—were no less tame. The keyboard player made Jerry Lee Lewis’s antics look tame, and the guitarist was never stationary for more than a millisecond. I loved the double sax attack, plus trumpet. Songs like “69 Faces of Love” just scream for that horn section. I didn’t hear the percussionist much, but his oddball stage presence just added to the ambience. “Land of the Freak” revealed Khan at his James Browniest, and “Welfare Bread” (“You don’t have to pay your bills anymore now/You just have to eat my welfare breaaaaad”) sounded most like authentic doo-wop.

The shout-out to the New Bomb Turks, “Columbus’s finest,” probably scored him some points with the crowd, but there was no ingratiating needed. Khan was indeed king.

John Doe and the Sadies - Rumba Cafe

Decked out in a sharp-looking brown suit, John Doe welcomed the Rumba Cafe crowd to a “country-western Sunday jamboree” on Mother’s Day evening. And that’s pretty much what it was, as Doe led his backing band—immensely talented Canadian roots-rockers the Sadies—through a set of songs by country royalty like Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard.

Doe got his start back in the late ’70s playing bass and sharing vocal duties in X, one of the most influential and critically celebrated punk bands to come out of Los Angeles. Cult followers of X shouldn’t be too surprised to see Doe leading a country jamboree. X routinely used dashes of country and folk in its punk-rock recipe, and when the band reincarnated briefly as the Knitters (with Dave Alvin on guitar instead of Billy Zoom), it was more Carter Family than the Weirdos. And Doe’s first solo outing, Meet John Doe, cast off all punk leanings for a rootsy vibe.

Fast-forward almost 20 years, and the 55-year-old Doe has finally put out an album of almost entirely classic country songs. Country Club, released last month, pays tribute to the big boys, but Doe’s distaste of melodrama and the Sadies’ fiery musicianship and knack for nostalgic-yet-subversive arrangements allow it to be much more than a cover album.

The live show rose far above any cover-band cliché, as well. The band kicked off the night with Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone,” speeding up Cash’s signature boom-chicka-boom into a rollicking number. Doe’s worn voice was rich as a strong cup of coffee, and it fit this song and all the others perfectly. He joked that his acoustic guitar’s strings were just there to protect the finish, but it still added a nice texture.

The real guitar work, though, came courtesy of brothers Dallas and Travis Good. This was my first time seeing the Sadies live, and good golly can they play their instruments, which made instrumentals like “Sudbury Nickel” just as interesting as the other tunes. (It helped to have a near-perfect sound mix, too.) The brothers’ vocal harmonies also were spot-on; Dallas even took lead on a couple of tunes and showcased a shockingly good baritone.

Everybody on the stage was a showman, too. Doe has had decades to master communicating to a crowd, not to mention dozens of bit parts in movies and TV shows, and the Good brothers played all their parts with panache—even meeting at center stage to play each other’s guitar at one point.

Whatever kind of country floats your boat, John Doe and the Sadies played it, albeit filtered through their own signature sound. There was ’70s Nashville (Tammy Wynette’s “‘Til I Get it Right”), outlaw country (a smoking version of Waylon Jennings’ “Stop the World and Let Me Off” and an ever-so-slightly psychedelic take on Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night”) and Bakersfield honky-tonk (Haggard’s “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good,” with the timely line, “Wish a Ford and a Chevy could still last ten years like they should”).

While Doe mentioned a few different times how disconcerting it was to have the sun shining through the window while the band played (it was an early show), the whole experience was anything but disconcerting. Rather, it was one of the most fun, refreshing shows I’ve seen this year.

Playing catchup

Long time no post. Above are some late reviews of recent concerts.