Live Last Night: Raphael Saadiq at the 9:30 Club

He is the real damn deal. Reviewed for Post Rock.

On Stage: Digging into Shakespeare

I previewed Jon Spelman’s one-man, one-musician show with Tina Chancey, Digging into Shakespeare, for WashPo Weekend. Sounds like it’ll be worth a look-in.

Blatantly Pornographic: A.C. Newman and Five Other People at the Black Cat

Why not introduce the band, Carl? Reviewed for Post Rock.

A. C. Newman at the Black Cat, Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The Setlist

01 There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve
02 Miracle Drug
03 Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer
04 Prophets
05 Secretarial
06 The Heartbreak Rides
07 The Cloud Prayer
08 The Palace at 4 a.m.
09 All of My Days and All of My Days Off
10 Young Atlantis
11 Drink to Me, Babe, Then
12 The Collected Works
13 The Changeling (Get Guility)
14 Submarines of Stockholm
15 On the Table

ENCORE:

16 Come Crash
17 The Town Halo

St. Patrick’s Day at the 9:30 Club with the Pogues

Shane MacGowan, still upright on the second of three nights at the 9:30 this week. Photo by Erica Bruce.

The world’s greatest wedding band, says I. Reviewed for DCist.

Morrissey at the Warner Theatre

Misery is his schtick

A nice way to get acquainted with the Pope of Mope, I must say. Reviewed for DCist.

Morrissey at the Warnter Theatre, Saturday, March 14, 2009

The Setlist

01 This Charming Man
02 Billy Budd
03 Black Cloud
04 Let Me Kiss You
05 How Soon Is Now?
06 I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris
07 How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel?
08 Ask
09 Seasick, Yet Still Docked
10 Something Is Squeezing My Skull
11 Death of a Disco Dancer
12 You Say You Don’t Love Me
13 It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore
14 The Loop
15 Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself?
16 Best Friend on the Payroll
17 I Keep Mine Hidden
18 Sorry Doesn’t Help
19 The World Is Full of Crashing Bores
20 I’m Okay by Myself

ENCORE

21 First of the Gang to Die

Live Two Nights Ago: Modest Mouse, or Please Explain It to Me: Modest Mouse (Live)

Reviewed for Post Rock. I still like some of their records, but live, this band is just a headache that won’t go away.

Modest Mouse at the 9:30 Club, (the wee small hours of) Saturday, March 14, 2009

The Setlist

01 The View
02 Interstate 8
03 Dashboard
04 Here It Comes
05 Tiny Cities Made of Ashes
06 King Rat
07 Custom Concern
08 3rd Planet
09 The Whale Song
10 Black Cadillacs
11 Broke
12 We’ve Got Everything
13 Fly Trapped in a Jar
14 Blame It on the Tetons
15 Paper Thin Walls
16 Bury Me with It
17 The Good Times Are Killin’ Me

ENCORE

18 Satin in a Coffin
19 Satellite Skin
20 Parting of the Sensory

Live Last Night: Bettye LaVette at the 9:30 Club

Sadly, Bettye did not wear that belt at the 9:30 last night. Reviewed for Post Rock.

Bettye LaVette at the 9:30 Club, Monday, March 9, 2009

The Setlist

01 The Stealer
02 Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am)
03 Choices
04 Joy
05 My Man, He’s Loving Man
06 You Never Change
07 Let Me Down Easy
08 He Made a Woman Out of Me
09 The High Road
10 Souvenirs
11 Somebody Pick Up My Pieces
12 Your Turn to Cry
13 Talking Old Soldiers
14 ?

ENCORE

15 Close as I’ll Get to Heaven
16 Before the Money Came (The Ballad of Bettye LaVette)

U2, Rolling the Dice on FedEx

U2 announced deets of their U2360 Tour this morning, and I wrote it up for DCist. FedEx Field, with a unique stage setup that Live Nation chief Arthur Fogel says will increase its 91,000 football-game capacity by 15 to 20 percent. So that’s more than 100,000 tickets up for grabs. Only 10,000 are promised at the entry-level price point of $30.

You can’t accuse U2 of being timid! They had no trouble selling 40,000 tickets (two nights at the Phone Booth) on both the 2001 Elevation Tour and the 2005 Vertigo Tour. But 100K-plus seats, in a bum economy? You know I’m rooting for you, Fellas, but seriously: McGuinness signed off on this?

So, was Watchmen awesome?

Word. As an experience, meeting some friends at the Uptown last night to see Watchmen at midnight-plus-one (though it was more like midnight-thirty-five by the time all those sweetass trailers for Public Enemies and Star Trek and Wolverine and Terminator: Salvation, plus some trailers for other, seemingly less sweetass movies, were done) was, as you say, awesome.

But the movie? Also largely awesome. I think. Certainly I’m looking forward to seeing it again and reveling in all the minute, Blade Runner-level visual detail in which Zack Snyder and his people have rendered this world. And I’ll watch the aleady announced DVD cut of the picture, which reportedly expands the theatrical release’s two-forty run time by another half-hour or so. I do have the feeling this thing might play awfully slowly when I see it again, even though the film’s biggest problem is that its final third just hurtles along too damn fast. Maybe Watchmen would have been better brought to the screen as an HBO miniseries.

Alexandria DuPont diagnosed the movie’s pacing issues with her typical rapier wit and lacerating insight. (She also says that Matthew Goode — who plays Ozymandias as Ziggy Starust-era David Bowie — “dropped a charima bomb” in another movie. Wow.) The other reviews I’ve found insightful today are Roger Ebert‘s and Andrew O’Heir‘s (both strongly favorable), and Philip Kennicott’s (thumbs-down).

io9, Gawker’s sci-fi and comics blog, has a ton of revelatory Watchmen-related posts. In this one, screenwriter David Hayter reveals some of the inane studio-suggested changes he managed, heroically, to prevent.

This one discusses one change Hayter was inclined to make, without even being asked: Going with a much more restrained, less bloody climax than the comic’s. I don’t mean that the specifics, though not the tone, of the ending have been changed — we all know that by now. I mean that the film spares us the book’s long, lingering shots of the apocalypse that befalls New York City. Wanna guess why? 9/11 sapped the will of anybody, even those fully invested in being faithful to Moore and Gibbons’ vision, to put that onscreen. This is one of Ms. DuPont’s big problems with the movie — that “the part where we see and feel the consequences of Veidt’s actions” has been neutered — and you can see her point. But Hayter’s wins, at least for me. If you really want to see these Dave Gibbons drawings rendered in the same kind of photographic fidelity with which Snyder has reproduced so many other panels from the comic, well, you’ve got a stronger stomach than I do.

io9 also gives us a roundup of what elements from the comic have been eighty-sixed entirely. The dumbest one? Laurie’s smoking, one of the behaviors that humanized her in the book. She never lights up in the movie because — says Snyder — Warner Bros. muckety-muck Alan Horn dislikes smoking. Hey, so do I, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna sit still if somebody tries digitally to pull the butt out of Bogey’s mouth in The Maltese Falcon. After all the battles Hayter and Snyder won — the length, the complexity, the R-rating — smoking is the thing he can’t get through? Alan Horn deserves lung cancer. What an asshole.

Watch-day!

I’m going to see Watchmen at midnight , and I can’t wait. Actually, that statement is demonstrably false, because I’ve been waiting for this movie ever since I read (retired?) DC Comics Publisher Jeanette Kahn’s “Direct Currents” column about a potential film adaptation of Watchmen back in the late 80s.

I was excited when I read in the long-defunct Fantagraphics-published fanzine Amazing Heroes that Sam Haam had written a screenplay that actually improved upon the one (arguable) flaw of Moore and Gibbons’ 12-issue maxi-series: it’s 1950’s The Day the Earth Stood Still-style denouement. (I hear that an alteration to the ending has survived all the subsequent drafts and years of development hell, though only the Writers’ Guild knows whether the finished film’s ending was Haam’s.)

I was excited when Terry Gilliam was going to direct it, even though his own revision of the screenplay purportedly sucked worse than the film version of Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If anybody could get this thing onscreen intact, I figured, the guy who made Brazil could do it.

I was excited again, ten-plus years later, when Paul Greengrass was going to do it. (Though Cloverfield is probably a fair indication of what a Greengrass-shot Watchmen would have looked like.)

I was skeptical when I heard Zack Snyder, he of the-shot-by-shot adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, had won the gig. I haven’t seen 300, but I gather it was mostly about a bunch of CGI-hardbodies wrestling in Matrix-like slow-motion. But when I read about the faithfulness and commitment with which Snyder was translating Moore and Gibbons’ sprawling masterpiece for the movies — keeping it set in alternate 1985, casting non-stars, allowing for a near-three-hour theatrical-cut run time (three-plus for DVD) and, crucially, an R-rating — I began to get excited again.

In about seven hours, I’ll be watching the movie. Sometime after that, though possibly not right away, I’ll know whether Snyder and screenwriter David Hayter succeeded. I’ve tried to avoid reading the mainstream critics’ notices, though I did weaken and read David Edelstein’s review in New York, which articulated nicely my reservations about Snyder.

I believe this much, though: Snyder tried — really tried — to make something great. Or at least to be faithful to something great.

Orson Welles, who made three brilliant films and many more failures, said it takes as much hard work to make a bad movie as it does to make a good one. But William Goldman, who’s had more commercial success than Welles but never improved upon The Princess Bride, said that most movies aren’t even meant to be any good.

Watchmen, I have faith, was meant to be good. And now, we’ll see.

Live Last Night: Lucinda Williams

Any cover of an AC/DC tune is inevitably going to struggle not to taste like nonalcoholic beer or fat-free ice cream, but Lucinda came as close as anyone could to pulling it off. Reviewed for Post Rock.

Lucinda Williams and Buick 6 at the 9:30 Club, Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The Setlist

01 People Talkin’
02 Ventura
03 Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
04 Circles and X’s
05 Pineola
06 Drunken Angel
07 Side of the Road
08 Everything Has Changed
09 Something About What Happens When We Talk
10 Overtime
11 Tears of Joy
12 Are You Down
13 Real Love
14 Essence
15 Come On
16 Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings
17 Honey Bee
18 Joy
19 Righteously

ENCORE:

20 Angel (Jimi Hendrix; performed by Lucinda alone)
21 Little Rock Star
22 It’s a Long Way to the Top (AC/DC)

The Band

Chet Lister – guitar, lap steel, keys, vocals
Butch Norton – drums
Eric Skimmerhorn – guitar
David Sutton – bass, vocals
Lucinda Williams – lead vocals, guitar

Because I Just Can’t Help Myself, Random Musings RE: U2’s No Line on the Horizon

So here we are, a dozen years to the day since the release of U2’s first perceived failure, POP. Their second album, October, didn’t set the world on fire in 1981, but U2 weren’t huge then, expected to do big numbers every time out of the gate.

Today also marks the U.S. release date of No Line on the Horizon, U2’s 12th and longest-in-development studio album, though of course it leaked weeks ago and has been streaming on U2’s Myspace page for a week already. U2-biquity week here in the U.S. began last night, with the airing of the first of the band’s every-night-this-week live performances on The Late Show with David Letterman. A raft of radio show appearances and a Good Morning America slot are also booked for the next few days, and secret gigs are rumored at Boston’s Paradise Theatre (recording site of the two of the best bootlegs from U2’s early period) and on the Fordham University campus.

There is also a Comcast commercial in heavy rotation on late-night promoting a new deal that will give subscribers on-demand access to previously-released U2 videos and concerts presented in high-definition for the first time. (I just cancelled my Comcast service a couple of months ago. Thanks, Boys!) U2 made the rounds of the U.K. outlets last week, performing a four-song set on the room of the BBC’s Broadcast House last Friday, and generally appearing on so many Beeb shows that some people accused the government-funded entity of making itself U2’s publicity arm.

Great times, if you’re a U2 fan, of which there are many. And if you’re one of the many who despise U2, perhaps for the very shock-and-awe saturation of the media campaigns that accompany each new album release, well, it’ll all be over in a week or two. Maybe.

Anyway, the fact that No Line on the Horizon is being issued officially on the same day as POP feels significant, because POP was the final album of the band’s Adventures in Irony Phase that began with the paradigm-shifting Achtung Baby in 1991. And after two relatively safe returns-to-form, U2 are once again back in more experimental country with No Line. There’s a symmetry there that I haven’t seen anyone mention. (More symmetry: U2 will also be playing U.S. stadiums this year for the first time since 1997. And Bono’s cut his hair again. Meaningful connections abound!)

No Line‘s looooooong gestation period, and the aborted Rick Rubin sessions, were both danger signs, I thought. Time was, the fact that Achtung took an entire year to make was taken as a sign of how arduous that particular U2 album was. But with the exception of 1993’s tossed-off-in-three-months-and-all-the-better-for-it Zooropa (the most underrated U2 record), every U2 album since then has taken longer than that. And not, presumably, because Bono is away campaigning on behalf of AIDS-stricken Africans most of the time. (He wasn’t in 1996, for example, when U2 were making POP — the album they said they had to release before its time because the PopMart Tour was already booked!)

I’m just relieved that the new record — for all my fears to the contrary — is good. I was nervous even before they pushed its release from November (the month of Achtung and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb) to March (the month of The Joshua Tree and again, POP). The choice of “Get on Your Boots” as the lead single did nothing to reassure me. I don’t dislike the song, but it sounds too much like “Vertigo,” and it isn’t in any way representative of the tenor of the album. Worse, it has the same, lame sloganeering-as-lyric that afflicted the prior two U2 full-lengths.

But fear not: Complexity is back. Depth is back. The need to listen more than a couple of times to get it is back — I haven’t felt that about a U2 album since POP. And Zooropa was the last time the pendulum of my reaction to a U2 record swung from hate to affection like this. The day No Line leaked, I was mocking it via I.M. to several parties as I listened, all of whom seem to have come ’round to liking the album. I degraded my own virgin listening experience. Another reason why listening to music the way I do, mostly — sitting at a computer — is no way to do it, no matter how high the bit-rate of your files, or how good your speakers are.

Sure, it might have been better without the bet-hedging, foursquare U2 safe cuts: “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy” tonight feels like more of the Classic U2 Pastiche that felt reassuring on All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000 and troubling on Atomic Bomb in 2004. But “Magnificient” and “Breathe” sound like classic U2, too, and they’re marvelous. (Bono’s opening rap on “Breathe” reminds me of Mick Jagger’s delivery on the Some Girls country parody number “Faraway Eyes.”) “Moment of Surrender” and “Fez – Being Born” and “Cedars of Lebanon,” meanwhile, push the boys out of their comfort zone, with thrilling results — they’re as good as Eno’s collaborations with David Byrne on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today last year. Though you get the feeling it took Eno a quarter of the time to get there swapping files via broadband with Byrne as it did physically in the studio with U2.

I’ve read probably close to two dozen reviews at this point, beginning with the major Irish and U.K. papers, all of which issued glowing notices that I first suspected were inflated. But, no — the U.S. critics tend to like the record, too. Nobody thinks it sucks except Pitchfork, and their pan of it is — as my pal J. Freedom du Lac said to me today — as unsurprising as Rolling Stone‘s five-star rave.

The more interesting domestic write-ups I’ve seen have come from The Los Angeles Times’ Ann Powers, my pal J. Freedom’s in the Paper of Record, and from the Chicago Sun-Times’s Jim DeRogatis — usually the U2-hating half of the the Sound Opinions duo. (I’ve even left a voice message this week on the Sound Opinions listener-feeback line expressing my surprise and delight at DeRogatis’s favorable verdict on the album.)

Most critics seem to agree there are only six or seven essential tracks among the eleven on this album; tellingly, nobody quite agrees on which those are. There are pockets of consensus: Everyone loves “Moment of Surrender,” while nobody is much impressed by “Get on Your Boots.”

Welcome back, guys.

Live Last Night: Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit at the 9:30 Club

He’s good. Really good. Too good to stay in the Drive-By Truckers and sing four songs per night.
Reviewed for Post Rock.

The Setlist

01 Brand New Kind of Actress
02 Decoration Day
03 Seven-Mile Island
04 Chicago Promenade
05 The Last Song I Will Write
06 Never Gonna Change
07 Goddamn Lonely Love
08 Soldiers Get Strange
09 Dress Blues
10 Psycho Killer (Talking Heads)
11 Danko / Manuel
12 Try

ENCORE
13 Outfit
14 Hurricanes and Hand Grenades
15 The Assassin (Patterson Hood)
16 Coda

The Band

Derry deBorja — keyboards

Brownan Lollar — guitar, vocals

Jimbo Hart — bass, vocals

Chad Gamble — drums

Jason Isbell — vocals, guitar