Here's a worthy-sounding event: In recognition of the fact that the U.S. has been at war with Iraq and Afghanistan for 7 years, more than 350 area musicians (mostly classical and featuring members of the Oregon Symphony) will perform 24 consecutive one-hour concerts, beginning at 7 pm tomorrow, in the WK atrium. Bluehour will be open for the duration, in case classical music makes you hungry. (FINALLY. I can't tell you how many nights I've lurched awake at 4 am, simultaneously wracked with guilt over U.S. foreign policy and craving white truffle risotto.)

As obviously important as it is to stay mindful of what's happened internationally in our name, I gotta admit I'm equally impressed that for once the City that Sleeps is offering me something to do after 2 am. I plan on making it down. The O's writeup is here; schedule here; press release after the jump.

Stranger editor Eric Grandy in this week's paper:

...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD, FUNERAL PARTY, MIDNIGHT MASSES

(Berbati's Pan, 10 SW 3rd) Holy shit, I just found out that dude from ...Trail of Dead used to be in Mukilteo Fairies! Awesome (and weird). Or did everyone already know that? Oh well, I didn't. In any case, ...Trail of Dead, what have you done for us lately? Well, there were a few years of floptacular albums and embarrassing on- and offstage personal squabbles in the wake of the critically acclaimed Source Tags and Codes, an album which is actually legally impossible to mention without using the word epic. There was that opening slot on a tour with literal cartoon-metal band Dethlok. More recently, there's the band's new album, The Century of Self, which blessedly pares down the orchestral bloat of the band's recent output to make for a fairly rousing record, if not a legally binding epic, with just the right amount of would-be fantasy prog dabbling. Also, when they're in good form live, they really do tear shit apart. EG

He nails it. It's tragic things went from this:

To this:

Sad, sad teenage poetry. Grow up. It's a rough and tumble world out there and those with teeth survive, which your music once reflected. It's as if, emotionally, the band aged in reverse. Musically, however, the Trail of Dead have evolved something like the American auto industry or economy as a whole. In the early 2000's, riding high on the dot-com boom (when they released the fantastic Source Tags) the Austin band thought they could keep growing, not just in popularity but in sound and scope. Epic energy turned into bloated arrangements and meandering, overwrought ballads with silly baroque imagery few could relate to. All that double drumming and string sections weighed down the once nimble punk band. Trail of Dead were caught building big fat Oldsmobiles in a Prius world.

But let me clarify (and again agree with Grandy): Trail of Dead can be awful compelling live (I remember a thrilling show at Dante's years ago where the drummer almost managed to ram his cymbol stands through the parts of the red glowing plastic stage the used to have and another decent one at that ballroom across from Doug Fir).

So I am going to this show, holing out hopes for a few old hits and that, away from the overblown studio production and self doubt, a few of the new tunes might soar as well.

I almost forgot! Thank you, sun. Hey, what are you doing this weekend?

Saturday, I'm gonna run a 5K race, then drink heck of mimosas and go see this house show. It's going to be so cool because a) the lineup consists entirely of rad local bands and b) proceeds go to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. Not to get all political on your asses, but hells yeah those kids need some relief.

Total Bros and Fuck You Safari are two fairly new collaborations between various members of the house show circuit, sure to be noisy 'n fun. Headlining are doom-glam all-girl rockers Purple Rhinestone Eagle (pictured), a damn hardworking group about to launch a several month US tour. Catch 'em before they leave.

The band I'm real excited for is Nucular Animals (I swear that's how they spell it). Their synthy-pop doo-wop loveliness makes me forget there's still weeks left of winter, and their album (out on Seattle's awesome Aphonia Recordings, which specializes in "the more bizarre aspects of pop music") also has some darker-tinged tunes that I'm thinking will make for a rather entertaining performance.

LISTEN:
Nucular Animals — La Dead a Bamba

Show details at PC-PDX.com. I'll be there. Now wish me luck on that 5K. If Fred and Toody can do it, dammit, so can I.

With everything else that's going on, don't forget about the Northwest Film Center's Reel Music film festival, which continues through the end of next week. Out of the movies I was able to preview in this year's lineup, my favorite screens Saturday night. It's called The Wrecking Crew, and it's about the group of LA studio musicians who played on damn-near every single friggin' record that came out of California in the 1960s. Here are some clips* from the movie, and an interview with director Denny Tedesco, son of legendary session guitarist Tommy Tedesco:

The Wrecking Crew screens 7 pm Saturday night at NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium, in the basement of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park). It, along with the two Superman Orchestra performances Friday at 7 pm and Saturday at 2 pm, promise to be the highlights of the Reel Music festival. Also, I should like to add that Nancy Sinatra's legs were pretty much the best things ever.

*UPDATE: Oops, originally posted the wrong YouTube clip, which was the official trailer of the movie with nary a glimpse of Nancy's gams. Here's the proper one, complete with interviews with Tedesco and some of the musicians who made up the Wrecking Crew playing at the Nashville Film Festival.

LISTEN:

The Moondoggies - "Changing"

MERCURY: How does living in the Northwest contribute to the Moondoggies sound? I feel like there is a connection, but I'm not sure how to articulate it... You have the tall trees on the album cover, for instance. But the Moondoggies couldn't have come from Phoenix, or Brooklyn, I don't think.

MURPHY: I don't know if that's so true anymore. The fact that we have access to unlimited music from everywhere doesn't really allow for regional sounds in the states that are as clear. And there are more "rootsy" bands—as journalists have decided to refer to them—in all areas... including Brooklyn. Department of Eagles is a Brooklyn group. There might be preferences for sure; for instance, country music having a stronger influence in certain areas of the country.

Chico troubadour Pat Hull, along with his band, was one of the many reasons I regretted moving away from my formerly tranquil college hovel. Along with an inherent talent for songwriting, Hull's unassuming agenda provided him audiences with literally every type of band and showgoer lurking in the pubs surrounding CSU, Chico (including my own abomination, the Ramones cover band, Pinhead). Immediate reactions were to Hull's Neil Young-huffing-helium vocal range, but after those early assessments, we all realized that he was a goddamn genius (Sample lyric: "I will not forget the days that we spent struggling for more/I will not forget the ways we ruffled this town's feathers with our thorns." from "Tractor").
Lucky for me, Portland seems to have a magnetism that draws some of my favorites right to my backdoor.
Hull, whose move to Chico from the East Coast helped usher in a new renaissance for Northern California grassroots singer/songwriters, operates within an approachable milieu, trading tenor vocals with plodding, melodic finger-picking to accent his obvious ambition to grow in both music and in life. To put it even more personally, Hull's tune "Paint Me A Picture" provided a shockingly effective emotional bridge between myself and my long-distance girlfriend earlier this year. "Whaaaaaaaaa!!!!" says you, but it isn't often a local singer commands my heartstrings so deftly.
His album, Yes is available on iTunes, as well as being available via Chico-based music management collective Recrux Records, and the band is snaking its way up the coast to share. Check out the video at the end of the post and go, go, go to these shows:
Nov 21 2008 8:00P
The Kenton Club w/Prick and the Burn Portland, Oregon
Nov 23 2008 9:30P
The Laurelthirst w.Tchotchkes,Portland, Oregon
Nov 25 2008 6:00P
Mississippi Pizza w/ Mcdougall Portland, Oregon

The indelible cello skill of songwriter and virtuoso Ben Sollee will be on display this Saturday, November 22nd at the Hawthorne Theater. Sollee's latest full-length Learning To Bend (not to mention his EP released this year, Something Worth Keeping, which featured My Morning Jacket's Jim James), exhibits diverse arrangements, with both jam-worthy compositions and folk-ish storytelling tendencies to reveal a tender and hugely talented songsmith (see Sollee's diss track "Dear Kanye" for further immersion of his worldly awareness, not to mention his apparent brass pair of balls!).
Sollee's ambitions have yielded him accolades like being named one of NPR's "Top Ten Unknown Artists of 2007" and PASTE's 25 Best of What's Next in September of this year, along with having been coupled with equally adventuresome musicians Otis Taylor and with the Sparrow Quartet (featuring banjo wizard Bela Fleck).
If any of you regulars to the Hawthorne Theater are anxious to give your pit skills a rest, and hold deep down an affinity for eccentric songwriting (or even harness the Gothic morbidity inherent in listening to anything with a lead cello), get the hell down to the corner of 39th and Hawthorne this Saturday.

Kicking your cat Friday off in style--AND keeping it oh-so-relevant--here's a picture of DJ Anna the Cat, courtesy of local musician Corrina Repp. Corrina's band band Tu Fawning is playing the Doug Fir this Sunday with the Nick Jaina Band (anyone else have a total rock star crush on that guy?) and That One Dude From Blind Pilot. 9 pm, $10.

If you like loud, dirty, raucous rock and roll, you're in for it Saturday at the Twilight, as described by Toby Carroll in this weeks paper:

WOODS, METH TEETH, THE BLIMP, MOM, EAT SKULL

(Twilight Café and Bar, 1420 SE Powell) Ominous and catchy, lo-fi and expansive, New York's Woods land firmly in the outsider school of indie rock. This is heady stuff, less concerned with the perfect hook—though their hooks can indeed be memorable—and more with constructing dense, obtuse sonic structures. (Or, the concise version: Remember when indie rock felt weird? This band does.) Experimental without heading into psychedelia, the band is equally comfortable making noisy pop and delving into tape-loop explorations. TOBIAS CARROLL

There's something I'd like to add: Don't miss The Blimp, four all out weirdoes from Eugene, led by Lucas Gunn, little brother of The Hunches guitarist, Chris. The Blimp are virtuosic thrashers. Gunn studied guitar under Captain Beefheart's Zoot Horn Rolo and it shows. That said, they burn hotter and brighter, less on the jazzy end, more on the standing in a trash can or on top of a number of un-eaten pizzas angle. The drummer is a real maniac and they're all loud as fuck. Add theremin, maybe a little trumpet, some dissonance and some classic, stomping rock and you're in for some inner-ear damage--dudes who truly could give a shit about what you think of them. Thankfully, what they're doing is pretty fucking awesome.

Plus there's Meth Teeth's prog and Eat Skull's buzzy two-chord whomping. So if you like guitars, cheap beer drunks and volume, what more could you ask for?

A regrettable part of being a music journalist is the inevitability that you WILL miss the boat on a lot of great bands, and a lot of great musicians. If you think about it, there's no way possible to keep up with it all, and I've taken in the past few years the route of the "classics" - mainly '70s and early '80s punk rock and late-'60s folk and psychedelia. It's embarrassing to engage in discussions about a lot of bands who've come out in the last five years and have no idea what I'm talking about; or even bands I was supposedly required to drool over in the late '90s but for one reason or another (AHEM! alcohol...) I spent my time listening to nothing but hardcore. So it's with a sense of equal parts regret and elation that I FINALLY (earlier this year) listened to Eric Bachmann and Archers of Loaf. Always heard the name, never heard the music. And I will be the first to declare (for the billionth time in my fledgling journalism career) that I was a lout for having turned a blind eye to their wonderful musings.
I bring this up because I'm going to go see Bachmann's Crooked Fingers this Sunday, and if I'm not singing along to every goddamn word, DO NOT call me out on it. There are too many bands and too many labels and WAY too much shit happening for me to pretend I'm on top of it all. SO BACK OFF. And check out this Crooked Fingers vid I found and liked:

Tonight, quite possibly the Earth's most dominate and dizzying drummer will bring his 45-minute concerto "Necromancer" to the Doug Fir stage. Zach Hill's potent ability to boggle you with what sounds like tripleted bass pedal work and frantic tom, snare and hi-hat battering hits you like a Humboldt bong rip. And although I refrain from toking GANJ, I can definitely see how experts compare Zach Hill to the likes of Buddy Rich and Keith Moon. Check it out for yourself here in clip from a performance with his seminal NorCal duo Hella: