Another Concert Death-Week

Living Colour the night before Loretta Lynn??? And Thee Oh Sees the night before Living Colour??? "Rocktober" indeed! My next concert death-week begins with Thee Oh Sees at the Rickshaw on Oct. 16, followed by Living Colour at the Commodore and L-Double at the Boulevard Casino. This week will truly be the "BEST IN THE WOOOOOOOOOORLD!!!!!!!!!!"

Vancouver Weekly's Best Albums of 2013: Mid-Year Round-up - Run-Offs

Since my pitches for Thee Oh Sees' Floating Coffin and Waxahatchee's Cerulean Salt didn't make Vancouver Weekly's mid-year round-up of the Best Albums of 2013, I'm posting my mini-reviews here. At least my vote for the Courtneys self-titled debut album passed. Click here for the full list, and read on for my blurbs:

Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin (Castle Face Records, April 16)

San Fran's hyper-prolific garage outfit Thee Oh Sees returned this year with Floating Coffin. It's meaty - a thick, bubbling stew of bloody psychedelia, cavernous claustrophobia and hypnotic, mangled riffs that burst like stressed sutures. Though it's one of the band's rare releases primarily written as a group, it still creeps and crawls the way only Thee Oh Sees can before tearing your flesh from bone.

Stand-out track: "Toe Cutter/Thumb Buster"

Waxahachee - Cerulean Salt (Don Giovanni Records, March 7)

Bedroom pop songs sung with enough obliqueness as to never quite feel confessional. A single guitar is mostly all Katie Crutchfield needs on her doleful second album Cerulean Salt, but bassist Kyle Gilbridge and drummer Keith Spencer make little rock gems like "Coast To Coast" possible, even lifting the album's spirits a bit, at least musically.

Stand-out track: "You're Damaged"

Secret Show Tonight and a Topical Re-Post

Calvin Johnson, one of my favourite musicians of all time whom I refer to for the first time in this post, is playing a "secret" show tonight at a place called "the Mansion." After my friend and I spent the majority of a week asking every relevant person we knew, I'm preeetty sure we've nailed down the unlisted, likely unconventional "venue."

Not that a couple of cool kids like me and my equally chronically black/leather jacket-clad friend would ever get denied at a secret show, but "I Was Denied" by Thee Oh Sees is pretty much how I envision the possibility, depending on how one interprets getting "fucked up." I try re-posting as seldom as possible, but the song is just too damned topical:



I flew right by
And surveyed the scene
I was denied
It felt like a dream

And so, I flew away
With a friend of mine
I got fucked up
Sufficed to say

Oct. 6, Oct. 6, Oct. 6, Oct. 6, ...

If "I Was Denied" by Thee Oh Sees  doesn't make you want to abandon all brain, shake until you break and rock like the world is ending tomorrow, ... I don't know how to end this thought without saying something ignorant or disparaging. These people know what I'm talking about: that crashing chorus of relentless guitars and "la-la la la la"s, steady primitive drumbeat and a riff so catchy, not even the Loch Ness Monster could escape its clutch.

One More For Good Measure

Thee Oh Sees: Pure-Bred Rock-and-Roll

San Fran's Thee Oh Sees are possibly the best ROCK-AND-ROLL band today, and they'll be hitting the Rickshaw Theatre here in early October. Sure, it won't be as intimate as their New York show depicted in Pitchfork's +1, but it's going to be REALLY fucking good. Need proof? Just watch my two favourite videos from Thee Oh Sees' KEXP session from a couple of years ago, and come rock with me in October: