One Week in Loud Town
CityBeat's musical core sample
SATURDAY
Tha Alkaholiks
(Crash Mansion)
Experimental grungy blues probably best describes this local band’s sound. They’ve been a mainstay on the rock scene in L.A. and beyond – this is certainly a band to keep your (bloodshot) eye on. (GP)
Biblical Proof of UFOs
(Zen Sushi)
Set to help open Club Vamped at Zen Sushi, this Cleveland trio plays hard and jazzy, like a Traffic informed by grunge nihilism instead of hippie whimsy. How much difference that makes can be gauged by any MySpace idler. Play “Paranoid Akroid.” Play that fucker loud. (RG)
Blisses B
(Genghis Cohen)
This quartet of musicians from San Francisco plays experimental rock, but don’t let that word fool you. These dudes actually know how to play their instruments, and you can eat Chinese food while you’re at it. (GP)
Junior Brown
(Key Club)
The late music critic Buddy Seigal (known to audiences as the Beat Farmers’ Buddy Blue) once sneered at my taste in music (as all music critics eventually must), “BR5-49 is to Junior Brown as the Monkees were to the Beatles.” Okay, first of all, deriding me in SAT-question form? You’re awesome. Second, what the fuck is wrong with the Monkees? Nothing! Neil Diamond and Carole King wrote their songs! Their songs were about the soulless death of suburban living! And they were adorable! Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! Third, BR5-49 may have been a Nashville band, and they may even have been put together like the Spice Girls, but those bitches could play, and they loved their music, and you could walk in and request something like Bobby Helms’s “Fraulein” (burning up the Army base jukeboxes throughout Europe in 1958), and they would play it, because they knew it, and from then on they’d play it when you walked in, and you wouldn’t even have to ask! Also, they were really, really nice to old ladies!
My point is, Junior Brown is great, and you probably want to hear a story about him! So I was “dating” my super-hot, looked-like-Chris-Isaak mechanic for 10 months (on my lunch hour), and he and I were busy not talking one night when we saw Junior Brown on the teevee and were both blown away by his slide guitar. Soon after that, Junior Brown was coming in on tour, and so I called my mechanic and said, “Hey, Junior Brown’s coming! If I can get tickets, do you want to go?” and he goes (super mean and snotty), “I would think you would ask me if I wanted to go after you had the tickets!” so then I didn’t get tickets, and I put in my newspaper column how I didn’t buy tickets (they were expensive), and then Junior Brown’s wife saw it and called my paper and gave me tickets, and I went, and I didn’t take my mechanic. He was a dick! This will be a great show. Highly recommended. (RS)
DARKER MY LOVE
(The Echo)
Upfront Bias Dept.: I think Darker My Love is the No. 1 rock act going in L.A. Clubland today. Considered apart from the source material – a self-titled 2006 debut which made a superior pastiche of late-1960s guitar-psych and next month’s follow-up un-enigmatically titled 2, which makes a startling improvement on it – but for the bravura of their live set. I bid unbelievers to their live set available on Spaceland Records, especially the bliss-bomb of a finale, “Summer Is Here.” As if making stylistic advances on the likes of Jefferson Airplane isn’t enough, they recontextualize the hallucinatory shimmer they share with Ride, Swervedriver and countless more into an elegant, energetic drive these five fellows share with no one. Slotted for the Dandy Warhols tour this fall, they came near to detonating the Echo when they finally went on last Friday night. Mooby and I were already late when we split for the park for some high-voltage booj, returning to insert ourselves into a dense packing of rock snobs and hipsters. Their early gigs here and at Spaceland were marvels of proggy meander, but the new stuff is thick with melody and funky hooks, like some compound of Rare Earth and the cubensis that grows in it. All cranked up to Live at Oxycontin Amphitheater levels and interspersed with de minimus banter, this was indeed rock music as our primitive ancestry used to do it. Tim Presley and Rob Barbato began a year-long stint with the Fall in mid-2006, doing their last show over a year ago, before cranking D My L back to life, and their time with Mark E. Smith seems to have given them a fine feel for chaos. A telephone chat with cracked-out Tim Presley yielded little more than confirmation by word and manner than he really is related to the King. (RG)
darkest hour
(Music Box @ Fonda)
is hellish spawn of death metal and hardcore punk, which is not unlike a peanut-butter-and-epoxy sandwich for the ears. Their albums have titles like Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation; fair enough warning for a sound excruciating enough to warrant play over Radio Gitmo during naptime. They appear tonight with the earshred likes of At the Gates and Municipal Waste. (RG)
Dusty Rhodes & the River Band
(Key Club)
Orange County songsmiths behind unrelievedly poppy odes like “Dear Honey” (“I drank away all my money; I spent the night on the street”) that are a little Poguesy, a little spaghetti-scene-from-Lady & the Tramp. Absolutely delightful; you can never have too much mandolin or accordion. Recommended! (RS)
Kenny G.
(L.A. Jazz Festival @ the Greek)
headlines a posse including Will Downing, Angie Stone, and the Escovedo Family (with Sheila E.!) but all we can think is Kenny G.? More like Kenny Gay! And that is not very nice, and also is homophobic. We are sorry. (RS)
Goldfinger
(The Wiltern)
They’ve been around doing their punk-ska thing for quite a little while, delivering sweaty mosh-pit shows with songs like “Handjobs for Jesus.” And if you’re really into that kinda thing, Big D & the Kids Table will be playing this show, too. The slightly more reggae, rocksteady-oriented band has a gentler take on ska, and will be playing songs off their last album, Strictly Rude. (GP)
Wanda Jackson
(Knitting Factory)
The rockabilly queen has been recording for 54 years, and the chick still looks hot. She “toured” with Elvis; she was the first female rock & roll singer; and these days she’s recording with folks like Dave Alvin, Lee Rocker, and the Cramps – mere puppies at the feet of her jet-haired grande dame. Her set at the Hootenanny two years ago was a masterpiece in septuagenarian sex appeal – but not in a gross, Raquel Welch, tight-dress-on-an-old-lady way; instead, in a not-trying, just-embodying manner where you sing about sex, and you tell us about fucking Elvis, and we like it. She is in neither the Rock & Roll nor the Country Music halls of fame. Somebody should sic Diana Ross on them. Justice must be served! (And slapped.) (RS)
Less Than Jake
(The Wiltern)
Junior high kids from the Midwest are finally jamming out to Less Than Jake, but in reality the band recently released their seventh album from their own record label, first emerging as a ska punk band but settling on a more commercial sound. Their cross of a pop-punk sound with a horn section and the lead singer’s gritty vocals keeps this band going. (HP)
Diana Ross & the L.A. Philharmonic
(Hollywood Bowl)
All hail the Bitch Queen of R&B! Lady sings the blues wondering where did her love go (because nobody likes her) all while probably slapping a ho (Mary Wilson, shoving onstage). Good tunes, though. Motown. Right on. (RS)
Underground Party # 1
(Venue TBA)
Unknown as we go to press is the location of this widely anticipated exercise in pre-playa debauchery thrown to raise gas money for some artcar or other at this year’s Burning Man. Shuttle starts at 9:30 at the usual streetcorner downtown, then it’s off to a locale rumored deep in some warehouse district rathole that hasn’t seen a taxi since John McCain absorbed his last truncheoning from bored Communists. There, the music is DJ, but you are the live entertainment. Adventure! Romance! Intrigue! Cops! The music shuts off at 7 a.m., but you are welcome to crash in the chill space ’til the security guards show up Monday morning. (RG)
Underground Party # 2
(Venue TBA)
Same as above, but at the cool space in the Valley minions of J.Q. Law haven’t found yet. (RG)
Dwight Yoakam
(Greek Theatre)
He can keep his hat on. (RS)
Published: 07/23/2008
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