Live Show Log: Evelyn Evelyn

Evelyn Evelyn was in Minneapolis on Tuesday at the Cedar Cultural Center (a pretty great venue). I spent the night in a migraine fog, so it's probably for the best that I didn't try to get tickets.

Here's the customary pre-show Ninjaview:

Album Absorption 010: An Unwelcome Guest

I really hope y'all aren't sick of Guante yet. I am definitely a record needle stuck in a groove and I just need to work it out.

An Unwelcome Guest is a concept album. It's about one man traveling across the United States from East to West after an unnamed apocalypse. I choose to assume zombie apocalypse, from the line "We are waking up in our caskets" in track 4, The Stockholm Syndrome (featuring Prolyphic and Big Quarters). Sure, I am probably meant to interpret it metaphorically, and it's a very powerful line taken that way. I just also choose to interpret it literally. Because I can. This is my LitCrit Bill of Rights.

I like, in my mind, to line up this album and Stars Lost Your Name, which is a transcontinental journey in the other direction. Different genres, different stories, different compass needles, but a thread between them. It's good.

A particular favorite is track 3, The National Anthem (featuring Haley Bonar). I need to look into more of her stuff. Intriguing.

Okay, analysis now. Big Cats brings nice beats, and layers them with the nostalgic, tragedies of futures-past retro crackles and bent sounds, as though from time-warped cassette tapes or thermonuclear-slagged records. Guante's voice, now smooth now ragged and raw, delivers very tight images of what we will have lost. What we are in danger of losing right now. What we are losing right now. In a sense he's cataloging our apocalypse-in-progress.

It's all streaming here.

I | MPLS

So I talk some smack about the Current. I love that I have the luxury of smack-talkin my local alternative radio station. It is one of my favorite problems to have.

This weekend my jaw almost fell off when I heard this song on the radio:
The 757s - Mary Lucia (2009)


Mary Lucia rocks. No matter what I ever say about the Current, that will stand.

Song-a-Day 022: Cecil Otter

I apologize for missing yesterday's Song Set, but I had the screaming vomits for most of yesterday and today. So let's do a double up on Cecil Otter.

Cecil Otter and Paper Tiger - Forensics (2008) - I was expecting, I dunno, vocals from this track, since it's a Doomtree project, but I really liked how lowkey it is.


I think I may have only ever heard Cecil Otter live. The internet does not yield up tracks of his very easily.

Cecil Otter - Rebel Yellow (2009); recorded at South by Southwest.


Both Dessa and Cecil came up through the Twin Cities' slam scene, and you can hear the echoes in their lyrics. The strength of our spoken word scene is underappreciated.

Doomtree was on the current just before Christmas (3 December 2009): Dessa and Sims - The Wren, Cecil Otter - Demon Girl, and Sims - Like You Mean It.

Spoken Word: Come and Get Some

Ed Bok Lee - How to Survive in America (2009); Lee was in town last April for the first Urban Griots awards. (Via El Guante's blog.)


Guante performing The Last Words of a Roach, Underfoot (2009); (from Minnesota Microphone's youtube channel, where you can find a crapton of MSP poets.)


Lauren Zuniga - To the Oklahoma Lawmakers (2010); I am very much hoping she makes the OKC team and that I get to see her this summer at the National Poetry Slam. (Hat tip to Pharyngula of all places.)

Song-a-Day 017: Gayngs

So, Gayngs has kind of been on my radar a little while. Somewhere below Courtney McClean and the Dirty Curls (that is until yesterday when she mugged for my camera during the May Day parade (hooray puppets!) and went up quite a few notches) and, say, M.anifest (i.e. local artists who I should probably pay more attention to).

Holy Shit, I should have paid attention sooner. There are approximately nine jillion members, many of whom I already know and love, including the Eau Claire contingent: Joe Westerlund, Phil and Brad Cook, Nate and Justin Vernon (every one of them stellar musicians and much missed by me) and Maggie Wander, aka Dessa.

Also, incidentally, I read the Vernons are organizing a concert and music resource space in Eau Claire at the old women's college, which I had heard NOTHING about. That would be so awesome! That town needs it; it has one of the best university jazz programs in the country and so much musical talent just sort of bubbling away below the surface in so many of the sketchy, sketchy venues I went to in my squandered youth there. Good for them.

Music now.
Gayngs - The Gaudy Side of Town (2010) forthcoming on Relayted in May.

Live Show Log 002: PROOF

Didn't believe me?

P.S. You're gonna get rickrolled.

Dang that was a fun show.