Just tune in to Beyond Beyond is Beyond on Thursday at noon eastern to find out how to enter!
Here’s the Time Out show preview
Tim Bluhm of The Mother Hips is gonna be on Beyond Beyond is Beyond for the second time this Thursday! ‘Member his visit from exactly one year ago on 5/14/09? Here’s a reminder…
Tim Bluhm: Time-Sick Son – Live at EVR
*photo by Mike Newman live at EVR 5/14/09
The Hips will be rockin’ the Bowery Ballroom on Friday, May 14th…and they are at their absolute best onstage. And if you haven’t checked out their most recent Pacific Dust album, you should. I even chose it as one of the best of 2009.
So tune in to Beyond Beyond is Beyond on East Village Radio at noon eastern on Thursday and we’ll chat with Tim Bluhm and he’ll rock a tune or two for us. And as usual, there will be tons of other jams without boundaries throughout the show!
And get your tix for the Bowery Hips show here.
What a great show last night at the Ballroom, where the sound is always perfect! We got there towards the end of the opener, Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, and were pleasantly surprised to hear a top-notch folk-psych outfit who could be Steeleye Span folky one minute and the next, launch into some scorching jams led by electric guitar maestro, Phil Wandscher. Jesse’s voice is beautiful and hauntingly mesmerizing, and completely set apart from the vocal style that a lot of ‘alternative’-ish female singers are latching onto these days. Dig their songs on MySpace!
And then it was on to the main event, Black Mountain, who started strong and never let up. Here’s the setlist…
…and that’s about the best picture I got, since the band likes to keep the stage nice and dark. They are named Black Mountain, after all! These guys pound you with heavy riff-filled sound that you can’t help but bang your head to…kinda like Black Sabbath, but more trippily-psychedelic, and with killer proggy keyboards. They have a female singer with a ‘bleating vibrato’ (a la Roger Chapman…anyone?) and the guitarist also sings. And the band is at their best when the two are singing together, like in the third song of the night, “Wucan”, a song that puts me in a willing trance every time I hear it. Check out their video for the song…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8upxRhff7cE&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]
…is that not amazing? And it was 11 times the badassedness live at Bowery Ballroom last night. There was nary a dull moment. Other highlights for me besides “Wucan” were “Druganaut” and “Stormy High”. Check this band out if they come to your town!
I love that there are now bands like this out there playing to indie-rock audiences and reminding them how good a guitar solo can sound. It seems like the guitar had become just an instrument to make cutesy little jangly sounds on for so many indie-rock bands, as it somehow became unhip to have songs with guitar solos. Why is this? Did all the sensitive guys think of a guitar solo as an extension of their penis, which of course they would never want to admit to having? Or maybe their lyrics were so deep that a guitar solo would only water down their dire message to the world. Well, I’m happy to say that I’d rather wallow in the guitar-centric new pool of talented psych-rock bands such as Black Mountain, Dungen, Howlin Rain, Wooden Shjips, Earthless, and Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter.
Check out Black Mountain music on MySpace and, if you dig ‘em, pick up In The Future, an album that I nominated for one of the best albums of 2008 at mid-year.
