EARS RINGING, TEETH CLICKING

Grandma, drill little holes into my eyelids...

On Friday night, Canadian electronic pop act Purity Ring played the late show at Vaudeville Mews. It was only the second tour date for the duo of 23-year-old singer Megan James and 20-year-old 21-year-old (that night was his birthday) beatmaker Corin Roddick, after a stop in Champaign, Ill., the night before, but they were already having a big day. That morning, Pitchfork (full disclosure: one of the publications I write for) ran an interview with the band under the website's buzz-generating "Rising" tag. It was the first time I'd been able to find key information on James and Roddick, such as their names, or the fact that they're originally from Edmonton but now live in Halifax and Montreal, respectively. Along with the article, Pitchfork also shared "Belispeak," which is only the third publicly available song from the group. But those first two songs, "Ungirthed" and "Lofticries"-- the two sides of a 7" that has long since sold out-- were already almost ridiculously impressive, combining the woozy, bass-heavy wobble of Southern hip-hop with the eerie lyrics and pitch-warped vocals of futuristic Swedish duo the Knife to create a new kind of head-nodding, captivating dream-pop. And Purity Ring will be joining another band that evolved from nebulous blogger praise into a pair of legitimately satisfying (and, in the case of 2009's Psychic Chasms, somewhat zeitgeist-capturing) albums, Alan Palomo's Neon Indian, on tour this fall. So getting an early glimpse of them at a small venue here in Des Moines, away from any annoying blogger's crappy phone camera but my own, was a real treat.

Purity Ring didn't disappoint. Sure, there were the expected hiccups, such as the fact that the volume was way too low, so that during quiet moments you could sometimes hear outdoor DJ Alex Brown's reggae wafting in through the door. And I definitely can't tell you the lyrics or much else of interest about any of the new songs we heard; they all sound pretty much like the three we've already heard, and for now, that's wonderful-- we could definitely use a whole album like this. But what I can tell you is that Purity Ring's live show, in keeping with its releases so far, feels like the product of far more forethought than we'd typically expect from such a young band. It turned out that my crappy phone camera was almost useless, because the band performed mostly in the dark, with intermittent stuttering flashes of onstage lights. They played in front of their own big, multi-colored backdrop-- which I don't remember much about, sorry-- with James on one side, roaming the stage and threatening to bang on a giant gong, while Roddick was on the other side of the stage hunched over a variety of electronics. The turnout was light, but passionate, all assembled up in front, even bartender Clint Curtis, who usually hates everything but that night was front row center waving his hand in the air. Purity Ring played the three songs we know, James' sweet lilt transmogrifying into a goblin groan over Roddick's shuddering rhythms. They played a few songs we didn't know. And when it was over, we cried out for an encore. As with Tennis when that band played here well in advance of its own album, James was forced to admit the group just didn't have any more songs. Basemint Design was on hand selling a Purity Ring poster, and the band itself had brought tank tops, but no records yet (a split 7" with Braids is due next month on Fat Possum). I bought a poster, and a tank top, and then the nice folks from Basemint Design were kind enough to call me back over so I could exchange my tank top for Purity Ring's one remaining T-shirt. #wearitwithpride

The headliner of the early show, metal band Nachtmystium, unfortunately canceled.

Purity Ring, slightly more visible here.

Eagle-eyed reader and Des Moines' own king of the mustache Shane O'Brien reminds me of another glaring omission from my recent list of upcoming shows: Rap trio Das Racist plays the Blue Moose in Iowa City on October 21. I still need to get tickets, but I definitely plan to be there, and maybe even head up to Chicago the next day for a Northwestern football game if I'm lucky.

Christopher the Conquered

I also had the great pleasure and privilege of getting to play records a couple of nights in the past week. The first was outdoors at Vaudeville Mews' PBR Bar on Saturday night-- huge thanks to Ladd Askland for booking me and to T.J. Wood, who (good for him, terrible for us) will be moving to New Orleans shortly, for putting up with me and for keeping me supplied with Sazerac. (Another upcoming date: T.J.'s Last Stand takes place Saturday, September 10, at the Vaud, with the Powerplant, Wolves in the Attic, Dustin Smith & the Sunday Silos, Gadema, and DJ Richie Daggers.) And then, on Tuesday night, the Poison Control Center's Patrick Tape Fleming held his birthday party at the Vaudeville Mews, with really fun sets from out-of-town indie-poppers Fishboy and their Sam Cooke-quoting, accordion-toting member Googleplexia, plus locals Christopher the Conquered, Wolves in the Attic, Derek Lambert and the Prairie Fires, and, in a rare appearance, January Rabbit. Between sets, I got to go upstairs and spin records. Thanks so much to Patrick for asking me to participate, to Logan Christian on sound for all his help, and to Brody for working the bar downstairs.

After the jump, full track lists of my sets, with links to streams:

RALLY AROUND THE FLAG, GLORY, GLORY, HALLELUJAH

Let's have bizarre celebrations.

So the fourth annual 80/35 Music Festival looks to have been a resounding success. You can read Joe Lawler's reports on Saturday and Sunday's activities over at the Des Moines Register. Looks like the fest handily passed its break-even point, helped this year by gorgeous weather on Saturday, and organizer Amedeo Rossi is already planning a sequel next July. My friends Andy and Ryan over at We Hate Music also have photos from days one and two, and I imagine Josh or Jessie will probably post something over at Nothing Gets Crossed Out.

A little-known highlight was probably the after-shows at the back bar outside the Vaudeville Mews; if you didn't go this year, definitely try to check them out in 2012. Set up against weathered-brick downtown buildings, the space looked great, and it sounded surprisingly good, too, giving the music some more room to breathe than in the Mews itself. Plus, on Saturday, the place was basically packed. Wolves in the Attic, who'd had equipment problems earlier in the day, got their chance at anthemic noise-rock redemption, while Mantis Pincers were able to whip up some of their cosmic cooking for an audience that somehow still had energy to keep on dancing. On Sunday night, festival headliners Of Montreal's own Kevin Barnes was out there DJing.

Happy Independence Day! I don't have much else to write at the moment, but some of my trademark fan's-view blurry phone pics are below. As Titus Andronicus's Patrick Stickles remarked from the main stage, "It's hard to be humble when you're on the Jumbotron." As Des Noise pal Travis said to a bearded guy who wasn't Patrick Stickles at the after-show (because Titus totally had to drive 20 hours to New Jersey immediately after playing), "Nice set!"

IF MILLER HIGH LIFE IS THE CHAMPAGNE OF BEERS...

Shane thinks Love Songs for Lonely Monsters are sweet.

Jonathan Richman was punctual. We arrived at the Orpheum Stage Door in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few minutes after the show's 8 p.m. start time, and the former Modern Lovers frontman-- the guy lots of people seem most likely to recognize if I say, "He was the singing guitar player in There's Something About Mary"-- and his longtime drummer Tommy Larkins were already well into a song about a painter, or the joy of music, or how the very ways we seek to criticize art/music/life and put it into words and lists and numbers tend to miss what makes art/music/life most wonderful in the first place.

WE ARE MANY AND THEY ARE FEW

So you hope that one person can solve everything.

A pair of highly complementary singer-songwriters came to Vaudeville Mews on Saturday night. Damien Jurado, from Seattle, has this high, lonesome voice that perfectly suits his mournful, meditative folk songs. San Francisco-based John Vanderslice has a more conversational type of voice, keeping the focus on his vivid, finely wrought storytelling, as you might expect from a guy who has worked with word-smart veterans like the Mountain Goats and Death Cab for Cutie. Both Jurado, the opener, and Vanderslice, the headliner, put on riveting performances in front of a mostly rapt and hushed crowd that paid $15 a ticket, in comparison with the $5 to $10 most of the shows I go to cost.

I'M STANDING ALIVE AND I WAS SINGIN'

They're just photos, after all. 

Earlier this month Nick Southall, who wrote for sadly defunct webzine Stylus, unveiled The Music Diary Project. The project's worthy goal is "to document, over the course of one week, how we listen to music: when we listen, where we listen, who we’re with when we listen, and how we choose what we listen to." This week a whole bunch of smart people I follow on Tumblr have been participating, dutifully posting listening logs and sharing their experiences. It's a great idea, and while I'm far too neurotic to take part, it's been a lot of fun seeing not only what people are listening to, but how they listen.

On Day Two of the project, Australian writer Jonathan Bradley posted some observations I found myself copying and pasting into my own media-consumption diary of sorts-- this weird little blog. Most of Bradley's music listening is solitary, he says. He writes that "I just don't give a fuck if I can't share music with other people, because usually I don't. I listen to a ton of stuff, and most of it I know of no other person who shares my liking for the music, just because I have my taste and other people have theirs and the two don’t need to meet for us to be friends... The music I listen to is for me, and it doesn’t worry me if I’m not sharing it."

These comments started me thinking. How much of my listening is solitary in the same way? How much is driven by this mad urge to share, share, share?

SOMETHING LIKE A NEO-RAP ZACK ATTACK

A hustler is a female version of a hustler.

Last night at a sold-out Yacht Club in Iowa City, Das Racist hype man Ashok Kondabolu, aka Dap, surfed the crowd with his face just inches beneath a sweaty ceiling you could reach with your hand. When the audience coordinated an "encore!" chant, San Francisco native Victor Vazquez, aka Kool A.D., hopped back up on stage. Did Queens-born Himanshu Suri, aka Heems, join him to do "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," the hilariously on-point Yum Brands farce that first had mp3-downloaders chuckling their pescado breath, shaking their pizza butts ("No, that's where I'm at-- where you at?")? Heck no. Somebody put on M.I.A.'s New Year's Eve mixtape, Vicki Leekx, and one last dance party broke out, with Vazquez in the middle. There was a huge cheer. I went to a place called Pizza on Dubuque and bought more slices than I could eat.

YOUR FEST PRESS PASS IS AMMO THAT YOU AIM AT BANDS TO END THEIR LIFE

Could you deliver a message to my mom and dad?

There's something weirdly revealing about seeing a band play an under-attended weeknight show in Des Moines. The great ones, like Sweden's Love Is All, thrive on the energy what little audience is in attendance throws their way, making for an intimate, unforgettable experience. Others, like L.A.'s Dum Dum Girls, strut around like they're too big to be here, as Christopher Owens from tourmates Girls-- who really did think his band was too big to be here and decided to skip that stop on the tour, but showed up in the audience anyway-- wanders around in a hunched pose with a weasel-ish expression. There's probably a famous quote out there I'm not remembering about how when bands play New York, they know they're playing for an audience that sees a ton of bands come through, so they have to put on their best show; seeing bands in Des Moines gives you an idea how they might play when they think hardly anyone is looking.

I wasn't really sure what to expect from Fergus & Geronimo, a Denton, Texas-based duo who have since resettled in Brooklyn. When I interviewed them for eMusic, at first I was afraid our conversation was going to look pretty boring in Q&A form-- that is, until I played back the tape and realized they were actually sort of hilarious, just mostly at my expense (I'm the guy who, as they touted how much they supposedly love sports and claimed they moved to New York City because the New York Jets had won the Super Bowl-- think about that for a second-- said something like, "Oh man, there's not enough indie-rock bands or whatever you want to call them that are into sports-- I mean, I love sports!"). But their debut album, Unlearn, on Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art, is a smart, sardonic update on plenty of classic 1960s garage rock and pop, the kind of record that might throw you off at first with its heavy irony and primitive feel but really grows on you as you find yourself noticing more and more details. So I was curious how they'd respond to a Monday evening crowd in Des Moines.

The crowd last night was even thinner than I might have expected, with not a lot of guys and only one woman in the audience. Ames-based openers Nuclear Rodeo put on another solid set of sort of Weezer-ish power-pop, maybe a little louder and more raucous this time, and joined by a keyboard player, but-- well, Mondays are Mondays, and I guess most people's friends were like my wife, or Chet Boom's girlfriend, or Ben and Travis and Moffitt, who had to work early in the next morning or were out of town or whatever. But I was happy to find that Fergus & Geronimo still put on a really fun set for the modest sausage party that was there. Jason Kelly, aka Geronimo, has big glasses and slightly mussed brown hair, looking a bit like the indie-film director Andrew Bujalski, and splits his time between guitar and keyboard. Andy Savage, aka Fergus, has more of a blonde Kurt Cobain mop, and spends the evening behind the drum kit. They each trade off lead vocals, and are joined live by a bass player and another guitarist.

Jason admitted to being slightly stoned, and Ladd bought the band a round of shots, so it might not have been Fergus & Geronimo's tightest performance ever or anything. But I was impressed by a lot of things, including: Jason's voice in-real-life sounding all raw and soulful and gritty like Otis Redding or Jagger or something on standout "Powerful Lovin'"; the new song they had just written in the van that day (something about "strange wool"?) they played before segueing into "Powerful Lovin'" and then cutting things off when the shots came onstage and then going back into it again because they saw that's what the people wanted; the other new song they had written in that van today (this time something about Roman numerals); "Baby Don't You Cry"; the way Jason really sticks his tongue out exaggeratedly when doing "la-la-las"; "World Never Stops"; the high praise Jason gave the Iowa sunset; Andy or somebody else saying how they were all sleep-deprived and wanted to get laid and me just thinking man they're in the wrong place tonight because the only girl here has a boyfriend; and how I wished after the last song they had still played "Wanna Know What I Would Do?" because that one hits sort of close to home. I hope someone offered them a place to stay-- another danger of playing Des Moines. I bought a 7".

So all right, I've seen a bunch of other shows since I last posted about one, including the Poison Control Center (below) playing a bunch of new stuff at Des Moines' new Club 504 venue, and there's a bunch more great stuff coming up (I already bought a ticket for Das Racist in Iowa City). I owe you a spring concert preview. I owe you a lot of things. Unfortunately, I also owe my editors, and they're the ones who pay the bills. Every day I'm hustling like Lykke Li. Until soon.

So I've been writing this ballet...