3 posts tagged “bottom of the hill”
I had to get the night off work to go to this one. Wayne drove, and we got there early enough to hit Farley's for some coffee. It seems that whenever I go to the Bottom of the Hill, I get there too early and have to walk up the hill for coffee. Maybe it's because the shows there always start late. Maybe it's because that way I get to drink more coffee.
This one started a few minutes after nine, with The Holy Kiss. They played songs that sounded like a mixture of punk and a rabid tent revival meeting. The singer was thin enough to disappear in bad light, and I couldn't tell whether he'd had extensive dental work or his teeth were covered in tin foil. The guitarist sent staccato shards of sound into the audience, her hands flying over the strings. Brittle and angry stuff, in an apocalyptic sort of way. They were definitely good local choice to open for Woven Hand.
As I was talking to a friend between sets, a roving photo guy from SF Station came up and asked to take our picture for the website. I'd seen pictures of this type before in the local free papers - people in bars smiling for the camera. Not really sure what the purpose of it all is. Perhaps so we can see that we're actually having fun. Perhaps so advertisers can make money. Yeah. That must be it. Look at the page though. There are some good pictures from the gig.
Next up were Silver Summit. They featured the standard rock instrumentation, enhanced by violin, and on some songs, a saz, which was a nice surprise. All three of the female members sang, which sometimes gave the vocals a beautiful choral feel. Musically, they reminded me of bands like The Iditarod and Fern Knight, with echoes of Greg Weeks. In other words, leaning towards the more delicate side of the psych rock genre, with a drifting, haunting feel to the songs. That said, they did occasionally kick into high gear. I only wish the violin had been a little louder.
Woven Hand followed after a bit of a wait. David Eugene Edwards is a rabid man, given to much twitching, eye rolling, and muttering. He played a variety of guitars, working the tremolo like a man possessed. Later on, a lute-like instrument made an appearance as well. He sang into two different mics, a standard one and an old-fashioned, music hall type mic which made his voice sound dry and sharp, like biting sarcasm at an unexpected moment. The bassist and drummer pounded away with unrelenting fury, and everything was turned up LOUD! I could hear a little voice echoing in my head, saying, "it goes to 11!" He was almost convincing enough to make me mend my godless ways. Almost. Definitely lots of fire and brimstone in his lyrics and vocal delivery. Again I was reminded of tent revivals where people fall writhing to the floor and speak in tongues as dust obscures their thrashing forms.
It makes for an interesting mental picture, at least. Wayne and I left with our ears ringing.
I'd only recently heard O'death for the first time, and before investigating Hillstomp and The Theater Fire on Myspace, I hadn't heard them at all. Still, what I had heard from O'death was intriguing enough to send me northwards. You've gotta love a band who crashes merrily along like some eighties european hardcore band, yet does it with acoustic guitar, banjo, and fiddle (not to mention ukelele).
What I heard on myspace painted Theater Fire as kind of bland, and Hillstomp as bluesy junkyard rock (sort of like Rube Waddell, really).
On stage, Theater Fire turned out to be pretty good. They definitely have a Calexico vibe, with trumpets, banjo, and washboard (worn like a suit of armor) complementing the more typical instrumentation. One of the band members even pulled a Moe!, running into the audience and playing an old keg and a chair for a few moments before hopping back on stage. A couple of songs had that haunting, southwesty kind of feel, which inspired the Calexico comparison above. The others were decent country/folk/indie fare.
Hillstomp, up next, consisted of just two guys - one on percussion (the drum set seemed to be composed mainly of plastic buckets) and one on guitar. They growled their way through a set full of blues covers and originals. Both sang, although the guitarist handled the bulk of the singing. Goddamn fine blues music. Made me blue.
O'death hit the stage running, with frenzied fiddle, electric bass, acoustic guitar, banjo, and a drummer who didn't stay in his seat much, and was periodically observed dropping bits of his drumset onto other bits of his drumset (okay, just the cymbals...). The songs often started out slow, with the guitarist and banjo player both singing, and then ripped into the aforementioned frenzy. The banjo went away midset, to be temporarily replaced by a ukelele, only to reappear later. Hillstomp came up on stage for a song or two to... stomp and play washboards.
For an encore they played a Pixies song. Don't ask me which one.
The O'death T-shirts at the merch table were really cool too, depicting a giant, frost-snorting Wendigo carrying off a hapless outdoorsman. Nifty.
I'll definitely be seeing O'death again the next time they come to town.
Tod A., who for all intents and purposes is Firewater, used to be in a band called Cop Shoot Cop, who apparently got hassled a lot by the police when they toured. Cop Shoot Cop sounded angry and weary, with harsh percussion backing Tod's city-hardened vocals. When Mr. A. moved on to form Firewater, the sound changed to a mesh of musical styles, with the band often sounding like an Eastern European gypsy outfit, with the Big Black-ish guitars of Cop Shoot Cop replaced by violin, accordian, and piano, amongst other things. Firewater contained a revolving cast of characters, and after awhile they seemed to vanish.
As it turns out, Tod left the country when The 2004 "elections" went horribly awry, and only now has he come back - now that the current administration isn't long for the world. He's come back with a new cd, The Golden Hour, and a new palette of sounds weaving their way through his songs. His voice is still the same - a world weary snarl, but where the band used to have an Eastern European sound, they now have a more middle-eastern/asian flavor. The liner notes state that it was recorded in India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Isreal, and it looks like many of the musicians were local to these areas. The cd is a fresh melting pot of ideas, boiling over with disgust and anger - a good portion of which seems to be aimed (as it well should be) at the Bush administration.
They opened their set at the Bottom of the Hill with one of those songs, Hey Clown, featuring the memorable chorus of "Everybody say, hey clown/We're gonna put you in the ground/We had it all and then you threw it all away/Everybody say, hey clown/You turned our happy upside down/We're gonna burn you flag/And piss on your parade, piss on your parade." A great way to start the evening. The band featured Tod on guitar, shakers, and vocals, a trombone/trumpet player (Avi Leibovitch, I think), a second guitarist, bassist, drummer, and a brilliant percussionist named Johnny Kalsi who nearly stole the show with his percussive genius - he had some sort of double-headed drum with a curved drumstick, and I'll confess my ignorance here as to exactly what kind of drum it was. Leibovitch's trombone and trumpet playing was also exquisite. By the end of the evening, they'd played nearly every song from The Golden Hour, and a couple from their first album, Get Off the Cross... We Need the Wood for the Fire (Some Strange Reaction and Bourbon and Division). This was just fine by me. The first and most recent cds are my favorite. The ones in the middle are good, and grow on the listener, but the two cds he chose to draw from for the evening hit the listener with the most immediacy.
It was a sold out show too, which is good. At one point, Mr. A. remarked that he hadn't been sure, due to Firewater's long absence, whether anybody would show up. I'm glad we did. After a lengthy encore, and saying goodbye to my brother (who remarked that Firewater had been added to his list of bands that he would want to keep playing no matter how tired he was), I ran up the hill (they don't call the venue Bottom of the Hill for nothing, you know). One thing you must realize about this is that by this time it was nearly 2 in the morning, and my day had started the previous morning before 6. I should have been absolutely exhausted. But I ran up the damn hill. That's how good Firewater was.
