Last night at Bottom of the Hill: From Monument to Masses, Tristeza, and Hood, featuring Why? from Anticon. One word: WOW.
FMTM played some new material, and fantastic renditions of some classic tracks. The sound system was definitely on their side last night, after the guitar was brought up to the right level, and the crowd was amazingly enthusiastic. I think they got the most applause of the evening, which was kind of crazy, since they were opening. I picked up one of their new t-shirts, which looks great.
Tristeza….well, they were OK. They were certainly doing some interesting things, but there wasn’t enough variation in their set to keep my interest for the entire time. I found myself wondering if each song was going to be their last, which is always a bad sign. It’s a shame too, since they’re talented musicians and they sounded great…but something about the set just wasn’t there. Not enough dynamic or textural variation, I guess. Watching their Rhodes player play his volume knob like an instrument was fun though.
Then came Hood…I’ve been excited to see them for ages. I always think of them as a somewhat mellow band, and on record, they sort of are. They have a lot of drifting, almost ambient songs, and when they rock out on record, it’s a sort of restrained, distant rocking. But last night they put that image to rest. They came on stage and proceeded to rock the crowd with lively, dynamic version of their songs, mostly from Cold House and the newest album, Outside Closer. Many of the tracks were played along with a backing track of some sort, to capture the crazy textures, sampled parts, and of course that synth bass riff on “You Show No Emotion At All”. But they also brought along several unusual instruments (flute and melodica, most notably), to make several of the tracks truly complete.
And speaking of complete, they even brought Yoni Wolf (aka Why?) on stage to handle his backing vocal parts on several of the Cold House tracks. That was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. I’ve been loving Why?’s work with cLOUDDEAD, on his own, and with Fog’s Andrew Broder as Hymie’s Basement.
Hood’s drummer was the true show stealer though, with his insane drum work on “They Removed All Trace That Anything Ever Happened Here”, playing with hands blurred on two snare drums and several cymbals.
On a down note though, Hood was apparently robbed of all their tour money while on stage in Portland the night before. During their encore, the offered to play requests for cash, and managed to play some very amped up “White Stripes Style” versions of some old fan favorites. I bought their tour-only CD-R, and hopefully plenty of other people stocked up on the import CDs they brought with them, to help them get through the rest of the tour.
Anyways…new subject.
I mailed out the first batch of 10 remix kits today. They got sent all over the country, from the Pacific Northwest, to Southern California, to Texas, and New York and Massachusetts, among other places. It’s exciting to have this much interest in my EP so far. I’m still trying to figure out what I can do to drum up some more though. I have a few ideas that I’ll be working on int he next little while.
I also started trying to teach myself Ableton Live today, with the aim of getting together some live versions of some of my songs, so that I can start playing these songs out. If I can do that, I’d love to try to get together a brief West Coast tour-type of thing. I’m sure with my contacts I could set up a handful of shows over the course of week or so, and play up and down the coast.
And one last note…I finally turned off the comments on this blog. I was deleting 10-60 spam comments per day, easily, and receiving almost no actual comments. The comment system long ago ceased to be worth using, and besides, it was apparently causing a little too much stress on the PanicNow server. So comments are gone. If you want to talk to me, hit up the contact page.
More later…
