Category: Arts

Last night I went to the Three Dollar Thursday at Old Ironsides, or as I like to call it, “343,” since you get three bands for three bucks. (I shoulda had a career in ad writing!) Anyway, the bands were Bright Light Fever, Prieta and Broken Poet. Broken Poet offered up with a serviceable, if unremarkable, set of poppy punky music. It was OK, just not all that exciting. Bright Light Fever is one of the few bands on the local level right now who seem capable of getting a label deal from somewhere. They are tight and have some cool songs in the modern indie rock vein. To me, they sound like Hot Hot Heat only more rockin’.

But the band I really wanted to see was Prieta. Continue reading “Prieta is not a car”

I saw Phillip Flathead when he opened for Justin Farren at the Fox and Goose months ago and plunked down the five bucks for his CD because it was cheap, but I wasn’t impressed with his performance. Playing solo, he fit in with any number of folk tinged Bob Dylan emulators that you can find in your friendly neighborhood coffee shop. He didn’t hold a candle next to Justin Farren’s wry humor and humble charisma. But Justin Farren has enough of a following in Sacramento that the venue will fall mostly quiet when he starts playing. Phillip Flathead had to contend with the beer soaked echoes of a crowd giving little attention to a guy they didn’t pay to see. It’s hell being an opening act.

It turns out that Phillip is excellent with a band behind him, making his self released album Four Track Mind well worth the cost of a burrito that I sacrificed and more. Playing with a band expands his songs from standard guy with a guitar fare to pleasant guitar and banjo-centered folk spiced with funk bass when he feels like throwing it in (“Slide on By.”) Other songs, like “Hollow Days” would lose its impact without the background strings. Continue reading “Album Review: Phillip Flathead – Four Track Mind”

Never had I ever listened to Man Man before I stepped into the Blue Lamp the Friday they were playing, which is something I don’t do for shows in Sacramento that cost more than 5 dollars. But I had found the band during a night spent trolling about on Wikipedia looking up the bands listed on the slip handed to me post-TMBG show and the description was promising. A band that dresses up in war paint and doesn’t take breaks during the set sounded worth it to me, so I put it on my concert calendar. Lo and behold, the next day dear sweet Stickie sent out an e-mail informing me that they were “highly recommended.” Chalk another one on the board for Man Man. Continue reading “Controlled Chaos: Man Man at the Blue Lamp”

Be Brave Bold Robot understands you and your twentythirtysomthing heartaches, your existential angst, your weekend drunks and all that whatnot. Shelling out a few bucks for their self-titled album, you’ll see how much as they throw their hearts down on the bare wooden bar top to point out all its scars. The problem is that they really don’t make me care. Instead they throw about songs that vary from maudlin and melodramatic to so saccharine that it’ll make your teeth hurt.

Within the album we have “Gamma Rays” in which lies the revelation of eating pancakes with Grandma, “Shun-shine” a tiny footnote of a song that illustrates how much songwriter Dean Haakenson can drag out a simile and then slap you in the face with it, and “Secrets,” Haakenson’s four and a half minute spoken word track carries the prize for the most odious of lines, with meaningless quotes like “he had the practiced stubble of a civil engineer” and the irritating paradox “silent din of the darkness.” The last is as unnecessary as it is irritating because it’s a prologue, set to explain the premise of “The $1000 Grape Drive-By.”

But BBBR can play and “Those Things” boasts a plunky banjo climax sweeping you into the story of a night out to meet girls. If Haakenson reins it in a little bit, their second album will probably be worth the money you didn’t pay for the first.

For me, the first indication of what the evening was going to be like came whilst arriving at the back of the line with TMBG ticket in hand. As I neared the doors, taped to the wall was a sign on paper that could have popped out of any printer you or I bought proclaiming, approximately “This show 14+, by request of THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS.” Which goes to show what kind of guys TMBG are. These are the guys who managed to put out children’s albums and not lose their fan base because their regular albums sound a bit like children’s albums – if the child in question is the baby from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. That the heavily adult audience gave an extended “yeah!” when the band launched into “The Alphabet of Nations” only goes to show that fans found the children’s albums another acceptable entry in the TMBG discography. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Continue reading “They Kind of ARE Giants”