Crash-Course, No. 5: Gaytheism & PDX Pop Now! 2019

Fine. Mid-40s probably.

[Ed. - Full disclosure: I don't own any Gaytheist albums, so this kind of violates protocol, but I wanted to look into them, they just played PDX Pop Now! and I wanted to learn about them...I regret nothing.]

It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more or less purely local bands. Whether it’s a question of what they play or…let’s call it personal aesthetic, some bands will never grow much beyond its immediate market. When you’re a three-piece playing under the name “Gaytheist” and you’re (guessing here) pushing 50, your shot at the big time probably passed a while back.

I assume Gaytheist is pushing 50 based on the names its front-man, Jason Rivera, dropped as the bands he saw growing up in the Pacific Northwest – e.g., ““Nirvana, Mudhoney, Yankee Wuss, Hazel, Tad, The Accused, Whermacht, Hitting Birth, Sissyface, The Need, Sicko.” (Fun story: I’ve knew the latter from their time in Pullman, WA; and I’ve fucked up their guest list at least once by being over-polite.) That said, I suspect it’s what and how they play more than their age that will always keep them at the local level. To borrow the phrasing that lingered on the tip of my tongue as I listened to them last week:

“It's not quite metal, but it is heavy.”

While they have “metal” passages across multiple songs – e.g., “Let’s Get Astrophysical” is solid sludge metal, also see the boiling riffs in the middle of “The Glory of Love, Part 2” – but, regardless of what they do on the guitar sound, their rhythm components sound more punk than metal to my ear. Once you add Rivera’s fairly eclectic, and specific lyrical choices – i.e., what drew me to them in the first place on “Post-Apocalyptic Lawsuit” and “Into the Trap” – you have a band built for a certain audience, and it ain’t a huge one.

Tim Hoff (bass) and Nick Parks (drums) round out Gaytheist, and they’ve had the same lineup since they started. Of all the things I learned about this week, none of them gave a sense of who they are quite like Rivera flat-out stating in a 2013 interview with Performer Mag that he writes with Parks in mind. And, as I’ve found across multiple (scarce) interviews/reviews, Gaytheist is a band built on co-writing (this is Rivera):

Crash-Course, No. 4: Celebrating PDX Pop Now!

Eh, they do pretty well sometimes.

With PDX Pop Now! 2019 happening over the weekend, I threw together this wee tribute to Portland, Oregon’s DIY, highly-affordable (it’s free) outdoor music festival. It’s been going on since 2004, it’s always been all-ages, and some of the bigger local names have given songs to the compilations that fund the festival each year.

I have far from a perfect record of attendance – think I’ve been to just three of ‘em, most recently in 2016 – but it’s usually fun. The current location isn’t the best - the organizers center it under the Hawthorne Bridge, with North and South stages on each side – and, unless they’ve got tarps this year, it’s largely uncovered. The crowds have been sparse during the day every time I’ve gone, which hurts the atmospherics a bit (it has looked downright desolate here and there), but the crowd fills in nicely when the sun goes down; it feels like a solid, regular music festival starting right after dinner.

The first year I went – this would have been 2006(?) – they held it at least partially at an indoor venue (think it was Loveland the year I went) and, if I could have one wish, they’d go back to that, but I get it at the same time.

Anyway, the coolest thing about PDX Pop Now! is the range of artists you can hear. An entire day spent there almost guarantees exposing yourself to something you normally wouldn’t listen to and that’s the festival’s strength. You get that on the compilations too – something that comes through in the 50 songs selected down below (and included on the Spotify playlist I’m posting with this). Last, but definitely not least, here’s information on where to find and, crucially, where to buy the compilations – and that gets you access to all of them. That helps with the funding for what is a goddamn cool event, however you take it in.

Some of your bigger local artists have contributed songs to past compilations and some of them (but not many) show up on the playlist I compiled. One thing I noticed as I was getting them onto the Spotify, a lot of the songs submitted for the compilations aren't the best-known works by many of these artists. In many cases, that happened because I'm pulling from older compilations (as old as 2005), and they've put out more, sometimes better work since that time. Best case, people can use the list and links below as a first step for exploring the local music scene. That's the goal here, and god knows I'll be doing that going forward. Just this post gives you/me about 47-48 bands/artists to work with, so have it.

Crash-Course, No. 3, ft. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: A Thing for B-Sides

Aw. L'il scamps. (Like circa 2000.)

“Karen is great because I just believe her when she sings, which is very, very important.”
- Brian (“Danger Mouse”) Burton

Given how much just about anyone to whom I’ve mentioned Yeah Yeah Yeahs refracts the band through the person of Karen O (aka, Karen Lee Orzolek), I’m equal parts surprised and happy that they never wound up as Karen O & Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The marketing arm can’t win ‘em all.

While I had the same personal entry into Yeah Yeah Yeahs as everyone else – e.g., “Maps” (purposely excluded from the playlist) – how many of those same people would have missed that song entirely unless they bought Rock Band 2 (spending all that time in the 2000s being a dad meant not getting out much)? When it comes to band like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that apparently meant missing one hell of a live set. An interview that came out around the time Karen O was touring to support Crush Songs (2014) – something she referred to as a collection of demos – contrasted that person with the Karen O most fans know:

“…not what I was expecting after three years of watching her screech across stages in wrecked Chuck Taylors and tattered mini-skirts, pumping sweat and posturing with a devilish grin of smeared lipstick, her glittery eye shadow smudged and on the move across her face.”

A later Q&A with The Guardian makes that sound like what happened after she slowed down (fwiw, that’s the best source/history I found for Karen O or Yeah Yeah Yeahs).

Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“YYY”) have as many members as words in their name, and the other two are Nick Zinner (guitar/keys, and an impressive history with collaboration) and Brian Chase (drums, but also (possibly) the biggest musical chops of the bunch). The band formed in New York in 2000, by way of Oberlin and Bard Colleges. Zinner and Karen O found Chase after their original drummer backed out, and after they “decided to ‘shake things up a bit’ by forming a ‘trashy, punky, grimy’ band modeled after the art student, avant-punk bands Karen O was exposed to at Oberlin.”

Crash Course, No. 2: ft. Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band (+ 5 Others!)

This one....

After several weeks of concocting plans and schedules (and scrapping them the next hour), a new five-year plan and this playlist came together. It’s built mostly around songs from the 2000s-era music-philic teen drama, The O.C. and a couple bands I found through Matador Records compilation that came out in ’97. I doubt that’s the first place I heard this week’s featured artist, but it’s possible.

Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band
“In the context of Yo La Tengo, ‘just right’ means the noise ended up being soothing instead of grating, beautiful instead of ugly.”

The author of SPIN’s review of Yo La Tengo’s 2018 release, There’s a Riot Going On, executed a tidy two-fer with that sentence, summing up both the band and the album. He (assuming “Andy” is a he) fleshes that out a little more poetically in the next sentence: “Yo La Tengo have found tenderness and soul in the sound of humming speakers and overloaded amps.”

Hoboken, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo has out-lasted scores of their contemporaries while never achieving anything approaching mainstream success; their “peak” came when their aptly-named 2009 album, Popular Songs, clawed its way to No. 58 on Billboard’s charts. And yet the band’s two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Georgia Hubley, persevered through 14 bassists (a detail that always comes up) before bassist James McNew backed into the band and, by general agreement, completed them as an act. McNew’s arrival coincided with the band signing with its long-time label, Matador Records, and creates a very clean B.C./A.D.-style split in its career/catalog. If you’re gazing over Yo La Tengo’s catalog, Painful (1993) is the first album of the band’s long “A.D.” era. Even with Kaplan and Hubley being married almost as long as Yo La Tengo has been around (1984 versus 1987), the band is an entirely collaborative effort. They’ve given “Yo La Tengo” writing credit since 1995’s Electro-Pura and, based on McNew’s description of how they compose, that’s fitting:

“But I had never been in a band where it was like, ‘The next section of the song begins when we decide, when we’re ready.’ It was always, ‘Count to 16 and then change.’ That’s just who Ira and Georgia were, and it’s who I became. It’s a huge part of the way we play music: a real open approach.”