Thursday 10.29.09: BUILT TO SPILL / DISCO DOOM @ echoplex

Posted by damara - filed in 18+, echoplex, events

builttospill

When Built To Spill wanted to find out what their music sounded like they locked themselves in Doug Martsch’s garage. Without a tentative conclusion or even a hypothesis the four members began to experiment. Their collaborative efforts lasted seasons and yielded dozens of hours of ADAT tape. The album You In Reverse documents the newest branch of Built To Spill’s chaotic, yet elegant evolution. Rather than Doug’s former reliance on extensive overdubs, the group tried to capture loose and live moments, letting each individual musician’s talents be more accurately represented. Instead of a broad, atmospheric sweep, this record sounds natural. It resonates with relationships, the way the band as a whole responds to music and to each other.

with:
Disco Doom || Listen

@ Echoplex
enter at 1154 Glendale Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026

8pm / $22 advance, $24 day of show / 18+

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Thursday 10.29.09: ALELA DIANE / MARISSA NADLER @ echo

Posted by damara - filed in 18+, echo, events

aleladiane

Alela Diane || Listen || Watch

Diane demonstrated her broad range and flexibility, interpreting songs by artists as disparate as Vashti Bunyan, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Daniel Johnston on 2008′s The Silence of Love, which she recorded with some musician friends as Headless Heroes. To Be Still will never fire up any parties, but its emotional range is as wide as that covers project’s– from “Age Old Blue”, a wistful duet with craggy-voiced troubadour Michael Hurley about Diane’s sharecropping Scottish ancestors, to the flushed-cheek, string-surging “My Brambles”. Lead track “Dry Grass and Shadows” sets a playful tone, the sigh of steel pedal underlining her languid, country-twangy come-on: “I like to look at your teeth lined up in perfect rows… Where the flatlands stretch inside your mouth/ And when you laugh all the star thistles tumble out.” A little hippie-dippy, but also utterly enchanting.

The album’s first single, “White as Diamonds”, best showcases her expanded musical ambitions and the record’s pristine sound (coproduced with her bluegrass musician father in his studio). Two years ago, accompanied by acoustic guitar, Diane previewed the newly hatched song for Daytrotter (second station of the cross for up-and-comers after Blogotheque) and claimed “Diamonds” is about silence and uh, snow. Disingenuous-sounding, for sure, but it’s not like she’s the first artist who’d prefer not to parse lyrics. She’s also absolutely right: Simplicity is key to the song’s stark power, and its uncluttered vocabulary of fiddle, cello, guitar and drawn-out, warbled “wooooahs” are as head-clearing as a cold February morning. Fill its white spaces with what you will. – Pitchfork

with:
Marissa Nadler

8:30pm / $10 / 18+

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