Sound Stories & Interviews

Changing from one performance venue to another can be a tricky thing, even for the most experienced music impresarios. While they may make a site switch in order to offer their audiences a more quality experience, not all their patrons are sure a change of scene is always a good thing.
Such is the case with Jazz at Joe's, the regular concert series originally held at Just Joe's Music retail shop south of town, then moved to the Cascade Theatrical Company, and now based at The Old Stone Church.
The first change from store to stage went smoothly. Just Joe's (the store) was simply too small to hold an expanding audience. The theater-to-church came when Just Joe himself, Joe Rohrbacher, decided the time had come to move on to other things and turned his concert series over to native Scot, local computer whiz, inventor and funk musician (with his band Raise the Vibe), Duncan McNeill.

The members of Orgone are in Las Vegas, which seems like it would be the perfect spot for an eight-piece, dancefloor-conquering funk and soul collective to play four consecutive nights of shows. Well, yeah, that hasn't exactly been the case.
Sure, this Los Angeles-bred band likes to party, or at least provide the soundtrack for parties, but Vegas isn't really their speed, guitarist and co-founder Sergio Rios tells me late on a Friday afternoon. Soon, they'd be heading down for their third night playing in a casino lounge, where he says the stage is tucked behind the bar and the management insists that even the band must obey a dress code that forbids the wearing of hats. The shows have been OK – not exactly as raucous as their typical performances – but Orgone is mostly enjoying the downtime in their high-rise hotel.

The sophomore album from New Jersey lo-fi pop group Real Estate continues creating the iridescent analog landscapes of the band's self-titled debut release, but much of the haze that kept the first album feeling a little stuffy is replaced with a sunny, hot-air-balloon-ride sound. The beach-influenced guitars of members Martin Courtney and Matt Mondanile remain, though this time crisper, filling each song with poppy melodies.

Sitting outside of a downtown Bend coffee shop, the four members of Harley Bourbon are talking about the name of their band, which also happens to be the name of one of their favorite drinks. The band, you see, is a raucous indie-folk-meets-punk-rock quartet and the drink is a seemingly weird mix of orange juice and Jim Beam that these four young local musicians insist is delicious.
Orange juice and Jim Beam? Really? Let's get back to that band name.
“Motorcycles and bourbon. What's more American than those two things? Remember when you were a kid and you wanted to be a cowboy? This is my way of doing that, I guess,” says guitarist and songwriter John Forrest, getting a laugh from longtime friend and fellow guitarist Collin Rhoton, with whom he's been collaborating since they were bored 14 year olds growing up in the coastal town of Ocean Shores, Washington.
Now, at age 22, Forrest has no aspirations of becoming a cowboy, but has quickly made Harley Bourbon into one of the more engaging young live acts on the Central Oregon music scene. And all of this has happened quite quickly. While at first it was just Forrest and Rhoton, Boxcar String Band bassist Casey Cathcart soon joined the band, cementing the strong friendship between the two bands. With the sound growing, Forrest and Rhoton figured they should add some percussion, and they didn't have to look far to find it. Both Forrest and Rhoton are cooks at Flatbread Community Oven and when they heard that one of the servers, Maxine Roach, played the drums, they soon had a rootsy, but raging, acoustic rock band.

If you were at the Church of Neil on Saturday night, you saw the musical range of local singer-songwriter Anastacia, who donned a floppy Neil Young-esque hat and ripped through some amazing covers, including a roaring version of “Old Man.”
That was impressive, but it's not exactly what you'll hear on her new EP, Where the Road Meets the Sky, a six-song collection that showcases her silky voice and poppy songwriting chops.

As a man who wears a mustache year round, I had to ask Dave Bruzza, the guitarist for Greensky Bluegrass, if he had any special grooming plans for “Movember,” the unofficial moustache solidarity month currently underway on a lip near you.
“Nothing special. Every day, it's always mustache time. I am a fan of the mustache,” says Bruzza who also shares in the vocal and songwriting duties for the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based band that hasn't been through Bend for a couple of years.
While the noble mustache is becoming more and more commonplace these days, it still says, “Hey man, I'm for fun, I'm for good times,” which is a fitting for a member of a fun-loving bluegrass band that dips its toes into a number of genre pools.
It's not as if Greensky Bluegrass has invented a new brand of music – they haven't. The new-grass movement, which first gained traction in the late 1960s as elements of rock and roll were blended with traditional acoustic bluegrass music, remains very popular today. If the progressive bluegrass torch was first lit by the likes of John Hartford, bands like Yonder Mountain String Band continue to carry the torch today.

Scott Fisher has just sent me an email, like he said he would in the half-hour interview we'd had over the phone the previous day. We talked mostly about his new EP, Sunnyslope Ave., but the two songs he's sent in this message have nothing to do with that. Rather, he wants me to listen to a charming bossa nova cut with French lyrics and a sludgy post-grunge song.
Why has this former stalwart of the Portland music scene (now living and working in L.A.) sent me music so far from the ambient indie pop found on his new album? Fisher is, you see, trying to show me what he's been doing in the four years since we last spoke, mostly because I keep asking why the hell he's taken so long to follow up 2007's excellent Step into the Future. The two songs are samples of the songwriting and producing he's been doing for television shows. That bossa nova thing? It could be heard in an episode of Brothers and Sisters and was also featured in a film. And the grungy rock cut was featured, as Fisher puts it, in “a vampire show”… of course.

When I tell people I hate bands that have numbers in their names, I don't feel I need to explain my reasons (blink 182, Sum 41, Maroon 5). But I trip myself up because M83 formed in the early part of last decade, and I rather love the imagination of Anthony Gonzales (who essentially is M83). When he releases an album, it's grand-slam material, and Hurry Up, We're Dreaming may be his biggest “hit” yet.
With 22 tracks, this gorgeously packaged double album has more than 70 minutes of melancholy tinged fantasy, daydreams, frogs, neon lights, stars and heavy hearts. Hurry Up sounds like an M83 record, but Gonzales' vocals are commanding, the anthem's fanfares are bigger, pop moments and choral responses brighter and the somber, spaced-out ambience links it all together for a seamlessly cinematic album.

Mastodon fans were getting itchy: the Georgia band put out its magnum opus, the progressive and heavy Crack the Skye in 2009 – a monolith of layered, experimental, progressive genius. How could the band possibly follow that up? Could they possibly do better?
The band's newest, The Hunter, isn't better. There are moments when it is great, moments when it is groundbreaking – but many, many moments when it feels like the band is stumbling, the weight of the last record too heavy for them to carry again.
If The Hunter proves one thing, it's that Mastodon is comfortable with their manhood. They aren't too metal to write pop music, talk about love or construct lyrics around cheesy rhyme schemes. Songs like “Curl of the Burl” and “Blasteroid” even show the band harmonizing between the usual guitar noodlery.