Music

the fleet fingers will be out in force at new monsoon. If you're a fan of open-ended electric jams and happened to miss New Monsoon at last year's inaugural 4 Peaks Festival in Tumalo, here's your chance to totally redeem yourself and strike a blow for sustainable living at the same time.
San Francisco's jammin' rock quintet will play a special benefit show for 3E Strategies next week at the Summit Stage and Saloon. New Monsoon has been transforming audiences across the country into dedicated fans with its inventive musical exploration and straight up down home rock-n-roll that is served up on a relentless touring schedule.
The band just released a new album, New Monsoon V, and is a staple on the summer festival circuit, from Bonnaroo to Summerfest, including a stop in Tumalo last year where they headlined the 4 Peaks Music Festival. They can also hold their own on a solo bill, which they proved in January '07, when they played to a sold-out Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Unfortunately the band has a schedule conflict and won't be able to return to 4 Peaks, so fans will have to strike while the iron is hot next week at the Summit.

proper robot technique. Blue Turtle Seduction is about to release a new record called 13 Floors and after drummer Adam Navone describes the idea behind the title, it seems that this album's heading may be the most accurate description of the South Lake Tahoe band that you're likely to stumble upon.
"It's got 13 songs on it. Each song is its own floor of a building; there's payroll, and the mailroom and all this different stuff. One floor is hardware, the next is lingerie, ya know. It's a cool analogy," Navone says.
What Navone is getting at here is that Blue Turtle Seduction is a band that one could spend the better part of a fortnight attempting to classify, and still come out with nothing to show for it but a migraine. I knew of people who were advised to go see "this killer bluegrass band called Blue Turtle Seduction," only to head out for what turned out to be a night of funk-filled rock, left wondering what trunk the aforementioned bluegrass band had been stuffed into. The thing is, however, that BTS can play bluegrass, and they can play it well, but they're not a friggin' bluegrass band, or a rock band, or a funk band, which is something Navone thinks fans up and down BTS' tour trodden West Coast path (Navone is visiting friends in Florida when he calls into the Source, describing his vacation as his "first week off the road since Christmas") are starting to grasp.

What did you expect? A color photo?Perhaps the most fitting way to describe the Wiyos, a trio of Brooklyn old-time music specialists, is as follows:
"Hey there, mac. These wild boys of the Wiyos, are real crackerjack wiz kids, ya see. They play the swing and the jive and the rest of it like a real barrel full of bullies, they do. They're sweeter than rhubarb and hotter than the temper on a redheaded Irishman, ya see, mac. They toot and strum and really just keep it dandy, and you can take that right to the bank there sports fan."
That, as you may have guessed, was my best impression of how I've always imagined the average 1930s journalist spoke (gleaned mainly from the few Ruth-area, hardly intelligible baseball game radio broadcasts that I've heard in snippets on ESPN Classic). The Wiyos are not from that era, but they do damn good job of making music that might convince some they were post-Depression troubadours clicking a washboard and plucking a washtub bass on a street corner asking only for pennies and spare johnnycakes.

Listen to enough bluegrass and you’ll be Living in a Band down by the River.The first time I saw Yonder Mountain String Band was at Portland's Roseland Theater in 1999. They were opening for Leftover Salmon in a room that seemed much too large for their acoustic instruments, and I remember the band's infectious enthusiasm was hitting my group of friends at the back of the room with full-force.
We were all blown away, and after their show, when we spied mandolin player Jeff Austin standing near the bar we decided to introduce ourselves. It was a forgettable meeting, to say the least, as we practically threw ourselves at the poor guy, telling him how "awesome" we thought the band sounded.
It would be another two years before I had the chance to see Yonder Mountain perform again, this time on the East Coast in Asheville, N.C. at a little rock n' roll dive called Stella Blue's. This time, we caught Jeff in front of the venue a couple of hours before show time. He was on a payphone, and we boisterously approached him, not even considering he might want some privacy for the phone call.

You don't see punk faces like that these days.The Subhumans have been pushing buttons for a quarter century, letting their frustrations with the world loose on stage while challenging audiences to rethink their values. The guitar riffs are infectious, the bass lines are distinctive, and the beats are furious, keeping new generations interested in the band's music. Singer and lyricist Dick Lucas (although he prefers just Dick), with his thick accent and British slang, still has something to say that's worth hearing - a rarity in punk rock these days.
 
The band has taken its share of time off from the music scene, twelve years in fact. But almost a decade since recording their last full-length studio album, Dick, Bruce, Phil, and Trotsky kicked out another disc, fittingly dubbed Internal Riot. The sound on the album is the continuation of the youthful energy and political discontent that fueled the Subhumans more than twenty years ago. Though the entire new album was recorded last year in a matter of 10 days, much of that music was written a good 20 years ago. The West Coast tour promoting the new album, which was released just this past August on the band's D.I.Y. label, Blurrg, stops Saturday night at the Domino Room. But before they show up, we thought we'd get a few words from Dick.