Modest Mouse, Live at the Aragon 8/25/09

Omg, yo. You know what I think about when I think about Places Parallel? I think of Lucy Ricardo, working at the candy factory, unable to keep up with the assembly line, stuffing chocolates in her cheeks like a squirrel. There is *so much shit* we have to cover from this summer: the last of the last NIN shows (until Trent and Mariqueen and their eight kids tour America like the Von Trapp family), which I know is the only thing you're really interested in reading about, but Iris and I feel compelled to cover Lollapalooza (which is like 50 concerts all in one) and anything else we happen to see because we are Places Parallel, and that is the sort of thing we set out to do here.

The problem is that in addition to the 150,000 words I have to write, we have TONS of awesome photos and video footage, and ideally we'd have both available at the same time, but the fact of the matter is, Iris and I are both very busy people living in two different states, so the coordination of all this material is difficult. And sadly, I am NOT spending all this time sucking Trent Reznor's physical cock, as alleged. Though I wish I were! I mean, honestly, is that supposed to be some sort of insult? I hope our Anonymi curse me with a lottery win as well!

Anyway, an easy show for me to cover is the recent Modest Mouse concert that I attended with Ro and Mr. Maise and another friend (name withheld to protect the innocent). I wasn't sure of the camera policy, so I have no AV goodies for you, and it was a short, shitty performance anyway.

I think what may be difficult for the Anonymi to grasp is that I am not a professional concert reviewer. I am not forced to attend all shows in my area, good and bad. I generally buy tickets for acts that I enjoy, so probably about 90% of the time, I enjoy what I see. If I get cranky and dissatisfied, it's usually in regard to whatever opening acts imposed upon us, the audience. So it's somewhat of a novelty to me to give a negative review to a show.

Not that I would give Modest Mouse a negative review in general. I love their pessimistic outlook paired with infectious melodies. No one sings, warbles, and roars quite like Isaac Brock, and what I think I love about this band is that they are distinctly American. This band is not trying to be the 10,000th rip-off of Joy Division. Their sound originates in dark pine forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. The songs acknowledge the dangerous wild places of the world and of our minds with a resigned shrug. It's like those frenzied seconds in the middle of a car accident, when you realize what's going on, recognize that you're flying through the windshield, and then you think, "Well, this is exactly what I expected would happen."

There is something very cathartic about giving in to Isaac Brock's passions, thinking about someone who has fucked you over by being absent and withholding, and singing, "Are you dead or are you sleeping? Are you dead or are you sleeping? Are you dead or are you sleeping? God, I sure hope you are dead." The only problem with this show was, was Isaac Brock dead or sleeping himself?

Modest Mouse was preceded onstage by The Duchess and the Duke, but I can't tell you a word about them because this show started at 6:30, and us hard-working 30-somethings who are stuck working in the burbs have to commute in and grab a bite to eat. In fact, Modest Mouse themselves took the stage earlier than we had anticipated (between 7:45-8 p.m.), so we missed the first song getting our tickets scanned and receiving the usual strip-search from venue staff. Here's the setlist (via the Modest Mouse website):

King Rat
3rd Planet
Education
Black Cadillacs
Gravity Rides Everything
Shit Luck
Satellite Skin
Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes
Baby Blue Sedan
Dashboard
Dramamine
Life Like Weeds (Lyric Tease)
Guilty Cocker Spaniels
Blame It On The Tetons
Wild Packs Of Family Dogs
The View
Satin In A Coffin

Encore:

Paper Thin Walls
Ohio
Parting Of The Sensory

Well, it wasn't all bad. Highlights of the show for me included the following:
--"Shit Luck," a hard-hitting, bleak song that really wouldn't be out of place in Trent's catalogue;
--The radio-friendly (but not dumbed down) and energetic "Dashboard";



(credit must go to Rockerachick88 on YouTube for the video)

--"The View" which features this chorus, which will resonate with anyone who's lived through tough times, "As life gets longer, awful feels softer/Well it feels pretty soft to me/And if it takes shit to make bliss, then I feel pretty blissfully."



(credit must to go tkreuser on YouTube for the video)

--"Satin in a Coffin," the menacing chorus of which I quoted above



(credit must to go tkreuser on YouTube for the video)

--"Parting of the Sensory" with its unforgettable, hypnotic primal ending: "Well some day you will die somehow/And something's going to steal your carbon."

So looking at that list of highlights, it's going to be hard for me convey what exactly was wrong. I think the problem was not what was there, but what was missing. I've seen Modest Mouse twice before, and on those previous occasions, they had a lot more energy and verve. You know how at an awesome show, you totally lose yourself in the music and the joyful vibe of the crowd around you? Instead, my friends and I felt oddly disengaged. My friend, a true blue Modest Mouse fan *long* before I had ever heard of them, turned to me and asked me my opinion about tattoos during the proceedings. We just couldn't get in the zone.

Perhaps it had something to do with the inside temperature being somewhere around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Perhaps the heat led to the concert's end time of 9:15p.m. A band of their caliber and extensive catalogue could have done a lot more...at least throw us newbie fans a bone with "Float On" or something. Maybe if the show itself had been more intense, we wouldn't have felt let down. As it was, it felt like an hour of foreplay with nothing really happening. Should I blame it on the Tetons?

Lollapalooza--Day 3

Oh man, I'm back at the office, and I strongly feel that I need a vacation from my vacation, especially because yesterday was a veritable MARATHON of rock. I'm 30 with a soul-sucking day job...it's almost more than I can take! But over here at Places Parallel, we give our readers nothing but 100% committment, so we were in it for the long haul, from around 11:30 a.m. til 10:10 or so that night.

On Day 3 of Lollapalooza, the normally charming Grant Park was turned into a giant, muddy cesspool that smelled like the large mammal house in the zoo. Did people even bother using the port-o-lets? Any of those drunken barefoot floozies in sundresses were likely to catch dysentery or cholera in the rain-beer-vomit-soaked field in front of the Bud Light stage on the north end of the park. I mean, it was fucking nasty. I don't remember things being so unsavory in 2006, but then, it didn't rain at all that weekend. Fortunately, the strong lineup that day more than made up for the hazardous waste conditions at the park.

Iris and I arrived just in time to see Juliette and the Licks, the band fronted by charmingly psycho actress, Juliette Lewis. I was originally hesitant to catch their set, especially because it was scheduled so early on what was going to be a very long day. But I'm very glad I did. Juliette Lewis, wearing an inexplicable Indian feather and war paint under her eyes, gave the audience a lot more energy than many of the more critically acclaimed super-serious artists there. She and her band specialize in a classic bar rock style--black leather pants and high kicks and extended drum solos. Juliette's performing style is somewhere between Joan Jett and David Lee Roth. She howls and writhes on the stage, and it's just really fucking fun. She kicks sand in the face of detached hipster irony. Then she kind of shouts spoken word at it. And maybe takes off her shoes and screams. They were a really energizing way to start the day. Afterwards, Juliette and the Licks signed some albums, and our own Iris got to meet Juliette Lewis up close and personal, in all her freakish glory. I'll let Iris fill you in on how that encounter went.

Waiting to get Iris' album signed and extracting our husbands from the Playstation tent took up some time, so the next show we saw was Amy Winehouse, of whom I'm a huge fan. Back to Black is a solid, rich-sounding album--at times heartbreaking, at times mischievously witty, but infused with a grown-up sexiness. Her voice is reminiscent of '60s girl groups and Shirley Bassey, and she can make a morning commute feel pretty swank. Her "I don't give a fuck" attitude with regard to her notorious boozing and brawling makes for interesting gossip reading, but I'm thinking it's bound to be affecting her performance. On Sunday, she appeared to be half asleep. There were a couple of standout songs, such as "Me and Mr. Jones" and maybe "Tears Dry On Their Own." But she just kind of mumbled the rest of the set and displayed no passion whatsoever. She had a haunted look during "Rehab," and I just wonder if it's getting to the point where it's not fun for her any more. We pondered whether she was just overheated in the August sun, hungover or whether she hadn't eaten in three days, or a combination of all of the above. I really do admire her as an artist and would rather see her enjoying herself onstage than wasting away. Her songs are great, but it was a disappointing set.

After an air conditioning break in the AT&T Digital Oasis (still waiting for my product placement check), we went to see Iggy and the Stooges, which was absolutely the highlight of the weekend, in my opinion. Iggy was long-haired and shirtless and still feral after all of these years. Jumping around, climbing up on the amps, getting on all fours and humping the air (he could dislocate a hip at his age), Iggy and the Stooges played a blazing set that included favorites such as "1969," "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (shouldn't that be my theme song?) and "TV Eye." I was hoping to hear some "Nightclubbing" or "Lust for Life" or "The Passenger," but Iggy wasn't giving it up for Trainspotting fans. That's okay, though, because midway through his set, Iggy invited just about everyone in the near vicinity up on stage, and many many drunk fans took him up on the offer. Delightful chaos ensued. Security was overwhelmed, concert organizers had to be hyperventilating, and Iggy tried to coax people off the stage after the song saying, "Okay, everyone calm down...calm down...be cool, everyone, or things might get weird." They had to shut things down for a few minutes until they fired up again. The spirit of punk rock was alive that hour--not the safe, corporate-sponsored, family-friendly version of punk rock, but rather "Is the stage going to collapse and are people going to riot over there?" punk rock. A must-see set.

During dinner, we got to listen to a bit of the Wailers and witnessed a hilariously thick cloud of smoke rising above the crowd. Pot was EVERYWHERE this weekend, and I'm not a big fan of the smell. I'm not a pot-smoker myself and have never even tried it, but normally I'm very "live and let live" where that's concerned. If college kids and adults want to smoke up, fine. I've spent enough time in smoke-filled dorm rooms with my friends. But I hope I don't sound like a prude when I say that things were a teensy bit out of hand. My friends said they saw people smoking pot near the kids' stage, where three-year-olds were running around. I personally witnessed some kid who absolutely could not have been older than 11 smoking up...I mean, that's just ridiculous. That kid was holding the bag for the slightly older group he was with (no older than 16). All I know is, he's got the worst older sibling on the planet. As they said on South Park, "There's a time and place for everything, and it's called college." Or at least high school? Jesus Christ, I don't think that's asking too much. Anyway, I kind of wished there was just a bit more of a police presence to discourage that kind of thing. Not to sound like some kind of fascist, but people obviously can't keep it cool on their own. I mean, the kids' stage???

Prudery over. On to Modest Mouse! Unfortunately, due to the outdoor venue, we didn't get the shipwreck stage production, but I've never heard them sound better. They played quite a bit from Good News for People Who Love Bad News and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. "Float On," "Bury Me With It," "Bukowski," "Black Cadillacs," "Dashboard," "Fire It Up," "Missed the Boat" and "We Got Everything"--those were the ones I remember off the top of my head, and they all sounded great. Johnny Marr is obviously a great addition to the lineup. The only problem was that I was kind of distracted by the pot-smoking 10-year-old and his stupid drunk 15-year-old friends and some floozie in a yellow sundress who was barfing on the lawn. Ugh, I hate the youth.

I didn't get to see a lot of TV on the Radio because they were playing on the complete opposite side of the park, and they only played a 45-minute set, but I can see why Trent Reznor picked them as an opening band. I'm also not terribly familiar with them, so I can't give you song titles, but I really enjoyed their energy. I'll let Iris review them if she happened to see more of their set.

Finally...thank God, for I was so tired at this point, and now I'm tired out again just writing all this out...Pearl Jam! I really enjoyed this set a lot more than I thought I was going to. I wasn't a huge Pearl Jam fan back in the day because my feeling on Pearl Jam has always been this--I love their fast songs, but their slow songs are dirge-like and boring, and I hate them. Fortunately, this set was fast-paced and filled with everyone's greatest hits. My favorites from this set included "Worldwide Suicide," "Do the Evolution," "Alive," and "Evenflow." Eddie Vedder seemed to really enjoy himself on stage, praising other bands that played in the festival and remembering his days of riding the El in his Evanston childhood and listening to Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. There was a fun moment when he cited a group at Lollapalooza who were distributing information about BP Amoco's proposal to dispose of new waste in Lake Michigan. So Eddie wrote an amusing and catchy little ditty for us to remember not to frequent BP, entitled "Don't Go BP Amoco." Unfortunately, there was no "Jeremy" or "Black," which would be my favorite PJ songs. We were expecting those two as the final encore, but Eddie instead gave us a well-intentioned but excruciatingly boring and preachy antiwar folk song and a lively "Keep On Rocking in the Free World" to end the show. A small number of people were allowed up on stage, as a nod to Iggy Pop, but it wasn't nearly as much of a free-for-all. Oh, and bonus! We also got to watch a fireworks display! It looked like it was coming from Soldier Field, so I don't even think it was related to Lollapalooza. Anyway, it was a great way to end the fun, but exhausting, weekend.

I'm already looking forward to Lolla '08, and although it is an extremely well-run and organized festival, I do have some recommendations for the future.

1) Distribute the acts a little better. Sunday was jam-packed with excellent artists, whereas the only reason I even bothered showing up on Saturday was Interpol. There seems to be a *lot* of bland hipster filler; I could do without some of that, even if that means 90 bands performing instead of 130 or whatever.

2) I don't mean to hate on the kids, but I think more should be done to keep them from getting beer wristbands, and maybe if a kid who is obviously 12 years old does happen to get a beer wristband, maybe he/she shouldn't be served??? There's a reason why I don't want to be surrounded by drunk and high prepubescents...they are AMATEURS, and they wind up barfing on the lawn. Yuck.

3) Stock up on more nonalcoholic beverages. It's HOT and HUMID in Chicago in August, and we want to be hydrated. By the time Pearl Jam came on, the only type of beverage not sold out was beer, which sounds great, unless you're actually really thirsty and need *water*.

Any other suggestions, Ro and Iris???