For someone who doesn’t watch much TV–and it’s mostly sports or Spongebob when I do-I’ve sure managed to get introduced to a lot of great musicians from watching it. Case in point – Nashville native singer/songwriter Landon Pigg whose sweet, understated “Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop” was featured in a DeBeers commercial. Diamonds don’t interest me much but the song made a big impression on me, introducing me to Pigg’s music. TV’s been good to Landon Pigg–as a child he sang commercial jingles with his siblings and his first appearance in the national spotlight came after one of his songs was featured on “Grey’s Anatomy”. Another of his songs was featured on an episode of “One Tree Hill”. Since then, Pigg has focused on developing his fan base the good, old-fashioned way by releasing albums and touring, although he did take a break from the road to appear as Ellen Page’s love interest in Whip It.

Landon Pigg is back on the road now and will be bringing his poetic pop to Neumos on Monday, November 9, where he will be appearing with Among the Oak and Ash who have brilliantly reworked traditional Appalachian folk songs for a modern audience, and Seattle-born, LA-raised singer-songwriter Alison Sudol who blends alt-folk with creative pop as A Fine Frenzy.

Doors are at 7, all ages with ID. Tickets are $18 in advance via TicketsWest

Photographer Michael Lavine’s got a new book called Grunge, featuring an essay by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and a whole bunch of excellent photographs of the Seattle music scene from the 80s and 90s, many of which are fresh even to those of us who were around at the time and all of which are stunning documentation of a significant art and cultural movement that continues to reverberate even today.

Lavine will be signing copies of his book on Friday, November 13, down at Olympia’s Orca Books (509 East 4th Ave), and also on Saturday, November 14 at Easy Street in West Seattle (4559 California Ave SW).

Additionally, the book is being celebrated at book release party Friday, November 13 at Neumo’s with musical accompaniment by Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, a band featuring members of Tad and Unnatural Helpers and the legendary Mudhoney. Doors are at 8pm; tickets are a mere $12 in advance and since this show’s likely to be full early, you’re definitely going to want to get them in advance.

Unless, of course, you’re the lucky winner of the pair of tickets Seattle Metblogs has to give away. If you and a guest would like to attend this show–and, believe me, you want to–send us an e-mail with your name and contact info at seattle.metblogs@gmail.com no later than Wednesday, November 11 at noon. Sorry minors, you must be 21 or older to attend this show.

You can check out images from the book on Lavine’s website. After you’re done looking at the Grunge images, I highly recommend checking out his “Real People” portfolio.

Sin Fang Bous, photo by Sindri Mar

Sindri Mar Sigfussion is the founding member of Icelandic pop-folk group Seabear. Feeling a desire to diversify his musical output a bit, he shortened his name to Sin Fang Bous and released an album of experimental pop that draws from a broad range of influences that’s earned a number of critical raves. He’s playing tonight at the Showbox along with fellow Icelanders Mum, touring to support their own well-regarded album. Show time is 8:00 pm.

For a preview of tonight’s show, click here

U2 is going on tour in the summer of 2010, news that excites many a U2 fan around the globe. If you happen to be a U2 fan who lives in Seattle, you’ll be glad to know that they plan to come here, playing a show at Qwest Field on June 20, 2010.

the most serene republic, photo by josh (me)

The Most Serene Republic, who played a heck of a show opening for Grand Archives last week (a bunch of my photos are on backbeatseattle), had a pretty bad time after their performance in Vancouver.

Following a show at the Biltmore, they had an ample amount of gear stolen. It’s always sad when good people have their stuff taken from them, but if you had seen the way that lead singer / lead trombonist gleefully danced around the stage with that horn of his, you’d know that the sting of theft was all the more bitter. If you happen to see a bunch of gear (acoustic & electric guitars, Jiggs Whigham 2102L King Trombone, pedals, and flight cases) showing up at near the border pawn shops, please get in touch with Arts & Crafts to bring the lawbreakers to justice and the equipment back to the band’s loving embrace. (full list of stolen gear and contact info after the jump)

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Eddie Vedder during Pearl Jam’s sold out Key Arena show last night

Wow what a show. Not only does Pearl Jam still have what it takes to kill it at a huge venue like Key Arena, but they can do it for over 2 hours. Above all it was just a good old rock show. No fancy screens or effects, just some nice stage lighting and Pearl Jam doing what they do best. The songs were a nice mix of old and new, along with a couple from their newest album, “Backspacer”. (Speaking of “Backspacer”, if you have Rock Band you can download the entire album to play in the game as of today.) As of this morning there were still some tickets left for tonight’s show. If you are still thinking about going though you should act fast!

Here is the full set list from last night. Sounds like people are split 50/50 about what the set is going to look like tonight. I’m guessing they change it up and play a lot of older/obscure stuff along with the songs from the new album.

Set List: Long Road, Corduroy, Gonna See My Friend, Got Some, Hail Hail, Amongst The Waves, Daughter, Even Flow, Johnny Guitar, Unthought Known, World Wide Suicide, Small Town, Off He Goes, Down, Save You, The Fixer, Life Wasted

1st encore: Just Breathe w/the Octava String Quartet, The End w/ the Octava String Quartet, Inside Job, Rearviewmirror

2nd encore: Given To Fly, Do The Evolution, Better Man, The Real Me (Townshend) w/ the Syncopated Taint Horn Quartet, Indifference, Alive

For many many more pictures I took at this show, keep reading after the jump… (more…)

girl talk at the showbox; photo by me; more in the photoset [flickr]

Girl Talk is one of those acts that reminds you how fortunate it is to be in a place with a floor built on a bed of springs. Mere minutes after Greg Gillis ran onto the stage, made a round of front-row high-fives, scaled his table, and settled into his spot behind a card table decked out with plastic-wrapped laptops (”2 laptops and a pair of giant studio monitors are the new 2 turntables and a microphone.” [@asa]), the sold out crowd was putting the structure to the test. A track or two in, and the empty stage began to be filled by a not entirely unreasonable cross section of Seattleites — a low key programmer type for every two neon spectacled party kids — and a duo of jerseyed leaf blower operators who sent toilet paper, confetti, and the occasional inflatable into the house.
Really, though, the onstage spectacle of dancers, a sweaty disrobing (not a) DJ hardly stopping his bouncing while hammering away at the mix, and retro projected graphics, hardly mattered. The stacks of samples, cutting across decades of popular and obscure culture, colliding into each other, being mixed into new mental connections, and made fresh in an on-the-fly live experience made nonstop dancing entirely more compelling than people-watching. I’m sure that someone with a better ear and mind for cataloging will come up with a brainbending setlist; my favorite moments of recognitions were for classic Nirvana, Kelly Clarkson, Journey, the usual set-ending Elton John, and some new (disc of the summer) Phoenix making it into the mix. After something like an hour and a half, the show ended promptly. In the moment, stopping before midnight seemed too soon, until you realized that maybe if it went on forever people would die of dehydrated exhaustion, making the leaving while wanting more just about perfect.

get up kids playing the roseland for musicfest nw. photo by me; more in the photoset [flickr]

Last weekend Portland (a.k.a., the new Ballard) turned over some of its finest clubs to host Musicfest Northwest, a sort of (I imagine) South by Southwesty citywide parade of excellent shows. Over the four days, it seemed like just about every important touring band converged on the town to torment fans with difficult decisions about how to best make use of their wristbands and to balance strategic decisions about lining up early versus seeking out taco stands and worlds of books. To an infrequent visitor, this collection of packed nighttime performances and small daytime performances in basements or former funeral homes only enhanced the perception that Portland is a sprawly city with a bit of magic in the air. Schoolbuses with confused drivers shuttled between clubs, a costumed wrestling match took place on our hotel’s covered courtyard, the per capita concentration of plaid and heavyframed glasses were so far above the national average it’s hardly even worth trying to quantify, entire villages of food carts have come to occupy stray parking lots, and sometimes people say “the evil swoosh” out loud.

Of course, the shows were great, too. Explosions in the Sky make melancholy sound heroic like nobody’s business; Frightened Rabbit make continual heartbreak seem like not such a poor life choice; Arctic Monkeys kept the dance floor rolling while seeming incredibly tired of being young and famous; Mount Eerie are wrapping sprightly nature poems in harsh metals; the Local Natives provided an excellent reason to get out of bed before ten; Pink Mountaintops were pleasantly less psychadelic than advertised; and the Get Up Kids had me screaming with Napster-era nostalgia during certain parts of their set. Also notable was a KEXP–Caffe Vita co-production at the Woods, a venue carved out of a former funeral home. The Lonely Forest, Langhorne Slim, Fences, John Vanderslice, Bobby Bare Jr., Black Whales, and others played tiny sets in the parlor as the perfect soundtrack taking it easy on a Saturday afternoon. Keep an eye on their blog [caffevita] for performance footage. All in all, the festival was a wonderful reason to visit our neighbor to the south to be reminded that there are cities even more relaxed than Seattle.

Image via Nate Watters

I’m sure you’ve noticed that Monotonix did not burn down Neumos. Thankfully. There was no fire at all which, given how tightly the crowd clustered around whatever member of the band was closest, was definitely for the best.

The last time I saw Black Eyes and Neckties was kind of a high water mark for me in terms of impressive ridiculousness, what with the wheelchair and skull. I enjoyed them no less this time around. It was a little sad when they came onstage, knowing that this was their last Seattle show. They are sinister and seething when they play and charmingly goofy in between songs. If you can, you should probably head up to Bellingham on Halloween and catch their final show.

Second opener Unnatural Helpers have a singing drummer, which is a thing that always amazes me because it seems like it would take an extra helping of coordination.

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the depreciation guild (above) & the pains of being pure at heart (below) played neumo’s on tuesday. more pictures in the photoset [flickr]

On Tuesday night, early-arriving fans at Neumo’s were no doubt disappointed to find that a burrito in Idaho had spoiled their efforts to see Cymbals Eat Guitars. Food poisoning had derailed the band’s plans to claim a much-anticipated opening set, leaving its members unfortunately ill and Seattle with a bit more time on its hands to get a drink. Sadness about missing them aside, I think that anyone who has suffered from severe digestive illness knows which party got the better end of this arrangement.
That left the Depreciation Guild, basically the shoegaz[ier] A/V club (or rather subcommittee) of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, in the role of warming the crowd. Combined with the last-gasp of summer outside, the poor ventilation inside, and videogame bleeps blipped over guitar washes and energized by a live wall of shifting color blocks, they stepped-up to the task admirably, holding and gathering a crowd.
Although the all-ages balcony had plenty of breathing room, the main floor soon attracted a perspiration-heavy gathering for the headliners, who ran through most of their recorded material — including geographically-appropriate “Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan” (which, they admit, cribs more from the Vaselines than Nirvana), and venue-appropriate “103″, and closing with an encore of their rock out freakout “Gentle Sons”. Along the way, they played some material from their forthcoming Higher Than the Stars EP along with old favorites about library sex, taboo love, and dedicated a get well song to their ailing tourmates. Predictably, the vocals were sometimes swallowed by the giant wall of fuzzed out guitars, but it was OK. We heard about how they loved Seattle and that season of the Real World with the fish throwers, the slap heard ’round the world, and the teddy bear sacrificed to the Sound. The front rows pogoed madly and more than a few guys with giant hair air drummed aerobically.
By the end, during the “banter part”, some people implored them to ditch Brooklyn for Capitol Hill. And while I’d concur that we’d love to have them in town all the time, I’d not encourage anyone to live in the basement at Neumo’s. Until then, though, we’ll have the records and the hope that they’ll bring their big tour van back someday soon.