March 04, 2002
Concert Report: Guided By Voices, Preston School of Industry, Dealership, Visqueen (noisepop!)
Ahhh, the final show of Noise Pop 2002. At Bimbo's again. Our waitress remembered us, or at least our drinks, but tonight was a special night so I switched to the mixed drinks. And then it was time for the show!
First up was Visqueen, most notable for being the band that Kim Warnick left the Fastbacks for. Well, I don't really know that is why she left or anything, but she is no longer in the Fastbacks and is still in Visqueen. Anyways, they were a good guitar/bass/drums punk-pop band, with both females doing vocals. It was really entertaining, and they knew how to talk to the crowd, and it was definitely a good start to the evening. They played on the corner stage, which was a little weird, but nice because of the reduced setup time. I think they'd be worth a CD purchase, but they didn't have any out at the merchandise tables. And, for the record, "visqueen" appears to be a type of plastic.
Next up was Dealership, which was definitely a mellower sound than Visqueen, but still enjoyable. They had a few songs I really enjoyed, although they played a few too many slower ones for my tastes, especially after that opening act. Both vocalists were good, but I don't think the music quite pulled far enough away from the indie rock genericness that I have gotten to know over this festival - of course, I am pretty worn out at this point. Maybe if they had gotten the crowd going a little more, things would have seemed more exciting. I decided to check out some of their recorded stuff before deciding on an album or not - they definitely have potential and at least a few good live songs. And, I also need to note, they have one of the best band websites I have ever seen. And the drummer has a weblog, as does the singer/guitar/keyboard player, although that one doesn't look updated recently. Of course, now I see that my blog is linked here, so I am going to be worried about sounding like a musically illiterate (is there a better phrase for that?) jackass. I'll agree to the musically illiterate part, anyways.
Anyways, then it was time for Preston School of Industry, known for containing a former member of Pavement. Wow, how this made me wish I could have seen Pavement play, since PSOI was incredible. They rocked, had the guts to try to get the audience to chant along (from where I was it didn't seem like it worked well, but I appreciate the effort), and kept the energy level up their whole set. At the Modest Mouse show, someone had told me they thought PSOI's vocals were too screechy, but I don't see how they'd think that. This was straight-up hard indie rock, with appropriate amounts of yelling vocals. No shame in that if you can get it to sound like this. I would have bought the CD then, except they had sold out already. I guess I wasn't the only one impressed.
Finally, it was time for Guided By Voices. I had heard one GBV album before this, and thought some of it was interesting, but overall wasn't impressed. If you play that many songs, some are bound to be crap, right? So my expectations weren't very high going in, and they had a tough act to follow, especially after 3 bands I had enjoyed. Things started off all right - Bob seemed to have an appropriate rock-n-roll swagger, never too far from his beer, doing shticky moves with the mic and some kung-fu kicks and everything. The songs were OK, too. But then things kept going, and the shtick kept repeating, and it became harder and harder for me to tell which song was which. Was I too tired - was getting up for the 8:30 soccer game a mistake? It just started to blur together for me, and I decided it would probably be better to get home a little earlier rather than stay for more of essentially the same stuff. There were definitely some interesting songs in there, but besides me thinking about how Bob seemed like a drunken ass, I had essentially the same reaction I had had to the CD - cut this down in length by a significant factor, and it could be pretty entertaining. As it is, though, it starts to seem a little too much like some kind of music production algorithm without enough variables.
Overall, though, tonight's show was pretty awesome. Unusual when the headliner is the least enjoyable part of the show for me, but even they were entertaining for a while.
And so ended Noisepop 2002 for me. Hopefully I will post what I learned from Noisepop later, but I think I may need some time to get back into a normal schedule. Oh boy is work going to be fun tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this thing happen, especially the bands that played, even the ones I said mean things about. I'm still jealous!
Update (7/1/2002): I got an email pointing me to the Visqueen website. An album should be out later this year. Whoo.
Posted by babar at March 4, 2002 02:16 AM