Sound Check

She & Him
Volume Two
Merge Records

I guess what I find most enjoyable (and yes, I've seen the commercial promoting the “fabric of our lives”) about She & Him is how refreshing the duo's sound is in an age of tiresome indie-kids trying to crank out the already-been-done jams of Pavement. Young movers and shakers will still label what She & Him do as indie-folk/pop, but this nostalgic project is more aimed at resurfacing early AM radio than using it as a building block for something trendy. Volume Two (not shockingly, the follow up to 2008's Volume One) is a collection of 13 songs that convincingly show that actress/songwriter Zooey Deschanel's (She) voice is full, confident and nearly as bold as country giants Loretta or Emmylou. The producing and impeccable arranging of M. Ward's (Him) gives nearly every song the chance to lift off, closing the gap between the soulful sounds of Motown and the twang of Nashville.

At Saturday's Portland Indie Invasion, there was something different, something special, and something fun – all the qualities needed for a solid show.
First up was the “something different,” which meant a set from father/daughter duo Alexandra and Hilary Hanes who performed as Tortune and took the stage to share their brand of self-described death pop. An innocent-looking Lex headed the duo on guitar and vocals and brandished some stellar pipes in near opera style while Dad plucked away at the bass and pressed play on the drumbeats.

OK, so I'm pretty damn sure that Larry and his Flask are opening some East Coast shows for Dropkick Murphys.
How do I know this? Here's the story:
Central Oregon's own acoustic Americana-meets-punk band is pretty much always on tour – the exception being their recent stay in town where they've been playing a string of local shows, including a Wednesday night residency down at Mountain's Edge.
So it wasn't a surprise to see that their MySpace page now features a long list of shows as far off as Virginia, keeping the boys on the road well into mid-March. But then I started noticing the venues they were playing: House of Blues (Atlantic City, Dallas and Orlando), Austin's famed Stubb's and a few other high-profile names. These are big rooms – larger than the clubs, bars and living rooms LAHF has made a career out of playing for the past several years.

New Year's Eve was a hotbed of musical offerings here in Bend. Armed with beer-and-scotch energy, Sound Check made it to a few places before ending up at the inevitable mosh pit of drunken people that was Corey's at 1:30am.
First up was Silver Moon Brewing, which was jam packed with revelers for the Blue Moon Bash. We didn't make it in time to hear Eric Tollefson but Mosley Wotta rocked it, as he always does. Joined by his brother Eric on backup vocals, he cycled through tunes such as “Love, Pain, Growth,” “Front Porch” well as a new track entitled “Big Head Small Town, during which MoWo blew up a condom to the size of a hot air balloon (always wanted to do that), presumably to symbolically illustrate the song.

It was the night before Thanksgiving and the fake bodily fluids were flowing throughout the Midtown, where we sent photographer Ben Murphy to document the almost-annual show from alien shock rockers GWAR. The band arrived on stage, each member in their now-infamous costumes and proceeded to play largely filthy rock and roll music, but most of the fun was to be had in taking in the giant inflatable robot aliens and, again, getting covered in goo. Here are some sights Murphy captured at the show.

Sound Check spent much of Saturday night not really looking at Poor Man's Whiskey, but more looking around the band at all the lasers, movies, lights, fog and the brightly colored wigs of our fellow concertgoers who'd packed into a sold-out Domino Room. Oh we saw the band – adorned as the characters of the Wizard of Oz, which included guitarist Eli Jebidiah's gratuitously short Dorothy dress (or not-so-gratuitous, depending on how you feel about the male thigh) – there was just a lot going on.

There was a moment at the Bend Roots Revival on Saturday night as Mosley Wotta was rhyming over the sounds of Empty Space Orchestra when Sound Check looked around and thought, “Damn, this is kind of crazy.”
Not the bad kind of “crazy,” but the sort of wow-there-are-is-a-ridiculous-amount-of-people-here-just-to-see-local-music sort of “crazy.

Sexy dancing and crowded clubs. That's what this column will be about this week, because, well those two things are what have been cemented in the mind of Sound Check… and we just can't shake them free.
The crowded club side of things stems from Thursday night's incredibly well attended G. Love and Special Sauce show at the Domino Room. It was already getting cozy in the D. Room when local Eric Tollefson impressed us with a shockingly rocking, pleasantly bluesy set to open the show. But by the time I returned to the venue after crossing the street to check the score on the Oregon/Boise St. game and then see the subsequent “punch heard 'round the world,” things were different. First off, there was a “Sold Out” sign on the door and secondly, you could hardly move in there.

Denson’s Tiny Universe in a big crowd…with beer!

Sound Check found itself over in Portland for the weekend, celebrating the long-standing tradition of inexplicably going out of town for each Independence Day weekend. While long lines of recreation vehicles and non-recreational vehicles full westsiders passed us on Mt. Hood as they headed east, thus did he head west and right into the middle of the Waterfront Blues Festival.
We dropped our two cans of food and ten bucks at the gate and promptly joined, oh, probably about 50,000 other fans inside Tom McCall Waterfront Park. We staked out a postage-stamp-sized spot near the stage just in time to see the funk machine that is Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe hit the stage and promptly get at least 20,000 asses (maybe more) moving, despite the 95-degree heat. The last time we saw Denson in action, it was the Domino Room with his other crew, the Greyboy Allstars, so it was certainly a change to see him in front of about 50 times as many sets of ears.

That ain’t the real axl.

We’re still icing our eardrums after a busy weekend of live music and figured we would have recovered by now. But hey, it’s a good sort of hurt, you know? The sort of pain that you can put up with if it means you get to see the sort of bomb-diggity shows we did since last week’s riotously awesome and overtly self-aggrandizing edition of this column.
Thursday night we made a stop at Boondocks for a completely costumed set by Appetite for Deception, a, you guessed it, Guns N’ Roses tribute band that we graded as such. Dress: B+…Excellent pant tightness, great bandana usage, only knock was the gratuitous Axl costume change – into polka-dotted tights nonetheless. Vocals: A…that dude really sounded like Axl. Arrogance: C-…when we go to see a GNR tribute, we, as an audience, expect to be treated with little, if any, respect. These Appetite guys were like friendly crossing guards.