Silverplatter has 3 contests for some great upcoming shows!
Japandroids is coming to town April 19th at the Trunk Space.
We have a pair of tickets to give away, as well as a copy of the CD and LP.
If you can answer the following question, send the answer to contests@silverplatter.info
Q: What two band names did “Japandroids” come from? Please list JAPANDROIDS in the subject of the message and list your first and last name along with phone number.
Silversun Pickups and Muse are playing US Airways Center on April 9th!
Our nice friends at Dangerbird Records want to hook you up with a pair of tickets to see Silversun Pickups. How awesome!
Send an email to contests@silverplatter.info, list SILVERSUN PICKUPS as the subject and tell us why you dig the Pickups so much! Don’t forget to list your full name and phone number.
Pierced Arrows are playing March 23rd @ Sail Inn.We’ve got an autographed LP to give away along with a pair of tickets from our rad friends at Vice.
Send an email to contests@silverplatter.info and tell us what band members of Pierced Arrows used to be in. Keep in mind this show is 21+
Please list PIERCED ARROWS in the subject of the email and don’t forget to list your full name and phone number.
Good luck everybody!
Civic Space Park launches Lunch Unplugged Jan. 28
Who: Civic Space Park, Radio Phoenix, Downtown Phoenix Partnership, City of phoenix, ASU’s College of Public Programs
Where: Downtown civic Space Park, 424 N Central Avenue Phoenix
When: Thursdays, January 28 – April 29, 2010 11:00 am- 1:00 pm
What: Free lunchtime music series
PHOENIX – “Lunch Unplugged” is a weekly music showcase in the Civic Space Park featuring a variety of local Metro Phoenix musicians playing acoustic or rhythmic sets. The series begins on Thursday, Jan. 28 and continues though April 29, 424 N Central Avenue Phoenix, AZ 85004.
This series is presented through collaboration with Radio Phoenix, the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department, Arizona State University’s College of Public Programs, Downtown Phoenix Partnership, and The Fair Trade Store.
This showcase aims to provide a lunchtime destination for Phoenix community members and ASU students as well as support the growing music community in Phoenix. The event is a part of the continued efforts by community members, businesses and institutions to bring quality arts and culture to Downtown Phoenix.
Featured artists include Vanessa Atalanta, Clinton Switzer of Amen Cowboy, Tobie Milford of the Whisper Lights. Ree Barto, Noel Baodo, Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl, and Andrew Hiller of Wizards of Time.
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For more information, please contact Laci Lester at 602-496-1268 laci@azfairtrade.com or Clinton Switzer at clintonswitzer@radiophoenix.org.
Dean Spunt has an annoying cough. Not annoying in the sense of it being bothersome to anyone else, but annoying in that he can’t seem to shake it. It’s not the kind of cough that sounds life-threatening, it won’t wrack his chest or make him double over in pain or anything, but what it will do is hang out all day and linger in the back of his throat. It will needle at him, it will mock and it will scratch. It will tickle and feel like a lump of some kind, some bolus of indeterminate origin that just refuses to be swallowed or washed away, no matter how much water he drinks. Dean will claim later in the afternoon that perhaps it was the dust that they had to travel through to get here, kicked up by strong monsoon winds and carried across the desert floor, dust that leaves a fine and gritty coating on all that it lands on, including lungs and throats, particularly when there is no rain to follow it, where there is no moisture to temper the smoke. Dean’s cough is dry and it is wheezy and you can really feel the force behind it when it comes out, an expulsion of dry, static, raspy breath that seems to speak to the weather here this week, more than anything else, here in this dusty and parched megalopolis, the scarred and scorched sprawl of this unofficial capital of the American Southwest. Today, Phoenix is currently enjoying its fifteenth straight day of hot, heavy winds and 110 degree plus temperatures with nary a storm cloud on the horizon. Even if Dean took the very best care of himself, which he admittedly sort of seems to, being a vegan and all, and had time to properly rest and recuperate from his physically exerting duties as one-half of the LA based noise duo No Age, his throat and his voice might have been no match for the unforgiving heat and midday sun of Phoenix’s legendary asphalt island anyway. This is not a knock on Dean Spunt, not by any means, just a normal, everyday fact of life here. It’s not just that it’s hot in Phoenix; it’s that it traps in the heat as well, with its concrete and its pollution, creating the effect of being inside a closed, untended oven for the majority of the summer months, slowly being roasted alive. Having a show in the middle of the hottest day of the year so far (116), inside a small record store off a busy intersection (when it comes to cars anyway), in the middle of a record breaking heat wave, is something that would be almost unheard of outside of the circles that No Age travels in. Conventional wisdom might suggest that an in-store held under these conditions for nearly almost any other band still small enough to do it would draw maybe a dozen people at best. A lesser band might have called off the thing entirely. But then this is No Age, Dean on the drums and the vocals and Randy Randall on guitar, and if they’re known for one thing already, it’s for their visceral live shows, for churning out blistering and whipcrack smart sets on a pretty much regular basis, especially at unconventional venues such as this one, and for leaving audiences completely satisfied in their wake. You don’t go see a No Age performance as much as you go to experience one and no one knows this better than Dean and Randy themselves. Not only are they going to play today, coughs and swelter be damned, but they’re going to kick ass doing it as well.
And so here they are, a bit late but ready to make up for it, setting up their equipment at Stinkweeds Record Exchange in Phoenix at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of July. About eighty people have packed the tiny store and a small fan has been set up on top of one of the CD shelves to help circulate the air and to combat the waves of heat that have wafted in each time the door opens and have been perpetuated by the intimate crush of this many people standing this close to one another. Most have stood inside the store for the last hour or so, enjoying the air conditioned respite, however minimal, while browsing at the merchandise. Still others lounged on the store’s small outdoor patio, sweating and smoking and enjoying the strange communal vibe of enjoying something this early in the day that has nothing to do with submerging one’s body in water. The median age here appears to be about twenty three with a significant majority of the audience obviously under twenty one. This is important to remember because No Age is actually playing two shows in Phoenix today, one here at Stinkweeds and then one later at a bar near the Arizona State University campus not normally known for hosting a band like No Age, this as part of a showcase put on by the local alternative weekly featuring four local “indie” acts with No Age serving as the headliner. Ticket prices for this later show were only five dollars, despite the odd choice of venue, and this was actually a pretty sweet deal, all things considered, especially if it meant that you had more money to spend at the bar. Unless of course, you were not yet of legal American drinking age, which gave the free all-ages show here at Stinkweeds some extra meaning, in more ways than one. See, No Age just also happen to be supporters of the All-ages Movement Project, better known as AMP, which is, according to the organization’s literature, “a member-based network of community based organizations that connect young people through independent music and art.” In other words, an advocacy group for the promotion of all-ages cultural events, much like this one is. In others words, let the damn kids in. It’s an admirable thing to be involved with, AMP is, and No Age’s belief and participation in it is a stirring reminder of the DIY ethos and progressive political stance that earlier bands like Fugazi had towards these same types of issues. No Age, in case you don’t know the whole story, was and is a big part of the success story of downtown LA’s all-ages art and performance venue, The Smell, which never charges more than five bucks for a show. Kimber Lanning, who owns this record store that No Age is playing in today, also operates one of Phoenix’s finest performance spaces, the all-ages Modified Arts, where No Age played a blistering 45 minute set five months back. Do you perhaps begin to see a pattern here? This is a band that actually cares very much about what their fans think and knows who they are and cares about their well-being and caters to them just as much as possible, to include advocating on their behalf, and then networking and conducting business with like-minded individuals and organizations as well. It’s always a nice thing to know that the band that you care about, that you are investing your time and energy in, also cares about you and this alone is a refreshing thing to see. This fact alone, this demonstrated level of commitment to their audience, makes No Age worthy of your attention, makes them and their politics an interesting thing to talk about. But it is by no means the only interesting thing about No Age or even the most important.
That of course would have to be the music.
No Age is one of the most consistently amazing live acts on the planet right now. It would be one thing if they were just a principled touring band with a good, strong work ethic who just happened to have some pretty okay songs to boot, but it’s another thing entirely that this band just happens to slay live and by slay, I mean destroy. They are one of the few bands working today who really are even better live than they are recorded, one of the few who actually live up to that hoary statement. Audio, video, cell phone, none seem to do justice to the intimate fury and controlled squall of a No Age set. The people gathered in this tiny room today are all hoping that today’s show, despite its space and time limitations, will not be the one to be the exception to this rule. And you know what? It’s not. Despite being set-up on a small end aisle designed to showcase the store’s new release wall, an aisle not well suited to the band’s impressive physical tendency to jump and climb and bounce around, No Age nevertheless show up, plug in, and besides thanking the audience for braving the heat, they waste neither beat nor breath in launching headlong into the storm. They come, they see, they conquer. This is what No Age does and so they begin a shortened set, but not one that is stripped down sonically in any way. The guitar is loud as hell and sounds beautiful and hits all the right notes in just the right places and the drums and vocals are clear and crisp and mic’d just right. People sometimes refer to No Age as a punk band and this is just a bit of a misnomer here. They possess the attitude and the viewpoints of the body politic of punk rock, the punk aesthetic as it were, and the songs themselves certainly are noisy, but what No Age truly excel at, what they are really playing on stage at any given moment is actually surf music, the sound of crashed and crashing waves, souped and speeded up into a glorious fever pitch. It’s almost the opposite of what people once loved about the White Stripes. While Jack and Meg became venerated by press and fans alike for creating so much bombast despite there being just the two of them, with No Age you wonder instead how Dean and Randy are able to hold any of it back, how they haven’t just merely settled for bombast and taken the easy way out, such are the heights that No Age are able to achieve with their beautiful noise. The sound soars, it is anthemic and it is crucial and it is jangling to the ears and it is proud of it. It is resonant as opposed to dissonant and seems to just shimmer and vibrate slightly higher than what you might expect from just a guitar and a set of drums. If Jack White writes songs under the assumption that there’s a whole history of American songwriting technique that is being neglected by the average music fan, a musical tradition that needs to be updated so that it might be revered by a new generation, never mind what’s modern, then Dean Spunt and Randy Randall obliterate the conceit entirely. This is not music for any other time but now, it is for now and for what lies on the road ahead. Their short bursts of songs reach out for you, seizing you in their immediacy, fully formed, almost shockingly complete in their conciseness, elevating the listener, transporting you, pushing you higher, faster, and ever forward. No Age deals not in mountains of music, or in the bloated history of what makes a “rock song”, but rather in the cool, rare, bracing air that shapes and surrounds and informs and feeds the creation of such art in the first place. It’s a mainline to the source, for the lack of a better term, tapped in and insistent in its prodding, and is therefore instantly more relevant and satisfying than a dozen lesser bands could ever hope to be. A two or three minute song just happens to be their stock in trade, their raison d’être, but they could easily be longer without diminishing their joy and devastating power, but then what would be the point of that? How would that be any more fun than the fun we’re having right now? As it is, the art that is created by No Age is proudly ephemeral, in the sense that it takes pride in its ability to draw from the moment at will, to plug in almost effortlessly to a direct and dedicated line straight to the light of creative improvisation itself, and to stretch out this exercise for even a moment longer than what is absolutely necessary might very well dilute the intended result. This is why every time a No Age song ends, you’re almost always left wishing for more. But again, why risk it? Why bother? What would be the point? Perhaps it’s that you don’t have to engage in filler of any kind when you know that you’ve already taken the Great Leap, to commit consciously and carefully to the production of topical, relevant art. This is a challenge across every creative medium, to be sure, what to say and how best to say it, how to do it in the fewest and most meaningful strokes. This is a review of a No Age show, for instance. This is not a review of a No Age show. This is a short essay about the commoditization of youth culture and the increasing disappearance of unmediated experience from our daily lives. This is not an essay about those things.
And yet today, like every day, No Age is here to play music and not to fuck around. They have what was a limp and wilting crowd in the palm of their hands almost immediately. There’s something incredibly cathartic about watching these two perform. From the opening chord, from the first clatter and rush of drums, No Age makes you want to move your body. For despite the punk rock tag that is sometimes thrown at them, mostly because of their DIY ethic and proud political stances (see Craig Ferguson for details), again what No Age really engage in the most is surf music. Tightly wound and almost impossibly precise surf music, played very fast and very loudly. This is nature music for what might be the last generation of what we’ve traditionally thought of as nature, these are short sharp anthems for an age with no name, for an age with no real history to draw upon for the work that it must do if it wants to survive. No Age doesn’t sound like “now” as much as it sounds like exactly five minutes from now, to peddle in a cliché that just happens to be potent and decidedly true for once. Hearing the band live makes you want to snap something inside of yourself, but in a really good way. It makes you want to move your feet and swivel your hips and run and skate and surf and dance ferociously. Some of the words that come to mind when trying to think of adjectives that would accurately describe the No Age concert experience include kinetic, calisthenic, crest, crescendo, pivot, ratchet, undertow, swell. It is doubtful that a recording of any kind could accurately depict the live experience that is No Age at this point in its history as so much of it is based on the energy of the audience as well, maniacally head nodding and foot shuffling and butt shaking in rapid yet neatly syncopated time. Today they will play a shortened set in a tiny room, but will they strip down or back away from it in any way at all? No. No they will not. These boys are consummate professionals at their craft, even at such a tender age. Randy plugs in and tunes loudly for a brief moment amid a mad skittering of cymbals by Dean and then it’s off to the races. Dean is positively aerobic on the drums, flailing wildly, his arms jutted out at the elbows, playing fluidly, with strength, using more the wrists than he does the hands and singing in time. Randy is loose and confident on the guitar, standing legs slightly apart in a sort of planted stance, his fingers flying up and down the frets and strumming the strings like it’s a surgical strike. This is an F5 blowing, a whirling wail, an absolute dervish of sound coming clean and right at you from small mobile speakers that you’re surprised can contain it, and if any of this sounds like hyperbole to the reader, it is only because it is not. It is only because these moments in art and in music do in fact happen, though sadly it is increasingly rare, and those in attendance today are quite lucky indeed to have a front row seat to what any critic or music fan worth their salt would clearly recognize as greatness. Today they do not have the room to bounce and to jump around and neither does the crowd for that matter, which makes the performance all the much stronger and memorable for some reason, the feeling that the coiled energy that is being generated in this room by performer and audience alike would be enough to power a small city somewhere were there a way to actually capture it. But again, this is for the moment and for this moment only. What you decide to do with it when you walk back out those doors is entirely up to you now. They give the crowd what it wants here, they play “Teen Creeps” and they do “Sleeper Hold”, they do an absolutely airtight and hypnotic version of “Neck Escaper” and then they ask the audience if there are any requests. One girl standing near the front calls out for their version of Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” to which Dean amusingly can’t remember the words for exactly, but they decide to go for it anyway. They debut two new songs, both very loud and very good, one of which has the killer working title of “Fuck Prop 8 in the Face”, of which Dean amends to Prop 202 in deference to the local version of the same hate-filled legislation. This is a band to love here. This is a band that really could be your life and already are, to some degree or another. They close with a snap crackling version of “Brain Burner” but before they do, Dean asks the crowd about the “bar and grill” that they will be playing at tonight. He is confused by it, by its name. Is it a college bar? Amid groans and titters and assertions of yes from the audience (as well as what sounds like the gentle, jaunty strumming of the opening of “Hey There Delilah” from Randy), Dean says well, that’s okay. Dean says that the next time they swing through though, they’ll be sure to play the Modified again or else The Trunk Space, another downtown all-ages venue, and he professes his love and his admiration for both places. He even leads the crowd in a sort of instant polling, exhorting one side of the room to cheer for Modified and then the other for The Trunk Space, back and forth between the two of them, before deciding to stop because he doesn’t want to “divide the town”. Yeah Dean. Exactly. Thank you. He means this comment on two levels and he knows you know it. Then he pauses for a moment and takes a sip out of his water bottle and rubs at the sweat and the frog in his throat and then says, well, and pauses again. He looks into his mic and smiles shyly and says well, I’m glad we got to play here for you then. Thanks again you guys. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you next time.
Yeah. Like I told you. This is a band to love.
Here’s a video from the instore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOVB0cNL8DQ
