Doors wide open and a starless sky above, the Chambers Hotel Ice Bar grand opening was a crowded soiree of black pea coats and rosy cheeks. Heaters were scattered about the front half of the patio, sandwiched between the two bars, DJ and private lounge tents, causing the bulk of the crowd to rub elbows and backsides with other heavily clothed strangers. A large fire pit of rocks and flames offered not only heat but a nice glow on the little bit of skin left exposed.
Overall, the Ice Bar itself wasn't near as impressive as I had hoped. Columns dripping slightly on my toes, the bar's shelving was even wetting the computers. Ice booths and tables surrounded the bar, but few sat still while trying to keep limbs warm.
While a plethora of stylish coats and mittens were in attendance, the sea of bulk black attire meant no one in particular stood out for excellent style. Mostly experienced Minnesotans in the crowd seemed appropriately dressed for the chilled air. I, on the other hand, came ill prepared, wearing a pair of peep toe heels. I quickly discovered the absence of feet heaters and therefore was left with no choice but to prop my feet up on the fire pit's ledge. While I only received a few strange glances from people opposite the blaze, my frozen toes were an excuse for conversation with the otherwise silent men standing nearby. Ten minutes later, I saw another woman put her boots up to the fire and I no longer felt like such a rookie.
Greygoose Vodka sponsored the event and the staff of female-only bartenders were definitely pushing their $11 specialty martinis named things like, "Jinx's Juicy Conditions", "Bibi Dahl's For Your Eyes Only" and "Cosmo Chill." Being that it was a friend's birthday, the sexy Eskimo behind the bar offered us each a Jello-shot "on her" (as in, gratis, get your mind out of the gutter). Not only do the ladies making drinks wear boots with fur and short white skirts, this particular dame's
name is Kissy-- hello fantasy for the three straight men in
attendance. We ordered a "Kissy Suzuki's You Only Live Twice", a special recipe by the woman herself, mixed with vodka, crème de menthe, crème de cocoa and Bailey's Irish Cream.
Delicious and smooth, I only wish my budget would've allowed three more.
Maudlin CD Release with So It Goes and The Hopefuls
Nov. 26, 2008 @ The Triple Rock.
While a good percentage of the city was either rocking out to Ike Reilly or getting blind drunk in preparation for a long, dysfunctional Thanksgiving Day (or possibly both), the Triple Rock Social Club became local power-pop heaven for a few hours Wednesday night. You can say what you will about this type of music, but as much as it's nice to be completely caught off guard by a band it's also nice sometimes to have a general idea of what you're getting yourself into--and then still be surprised a few times during the course of the evening. Local up-and-comers Maudlin were hosting the release of their self-released sophomore CD, "Maudlin and the Second Law of Thermodynamics" and could hardly have picked more perfect bands to help them out than So It Goes and The Hopefuls.
If you like your martinis with a side of babushka and mini-skirt, you
might be interested in tonight's opening of the Ice bar at the
Chambers Hotel. Frigid, clean, and embracing minimalist design, the
inside of Chambers is surprisingly similar to it's cool outdoor
counterpart. Greygoose Vodka is sponsoring the event and to celebrate
the opening, there will be free Greygoose martinis from 7-9 p.m
Minneapolis house legend, Jack Trash, and other local DJs from the
Sound in Motion crew will be providing dance music for the evening.
Expect it to be packed and come in style (does this mean with Gucci mittens?). The Ice Bar is one of those novelty places you go to once a year and tonight is probably it. After, you'll probably find a shivering wasteland of frozen chi-chi girls and rigid,
robot-like business men. Take advantage of the free booze and warmth
of others while you can and celebrate the good things about winter
while you still enjoy it.
-- Justin Flower
Sluggish from all the turkey you wolfed down yesterday? Don't lie, we know you went back for thirds. If you're feeling a little thicker after giving so much thanks, you could work off the extra junk in your trunk with a night of vigorous dancing. Lucky for you, New York techno favorite Derek Plaslaiko will be in town to help you along. Michigan-bred Plaslaiko was a Detroit staple for years before his relocation to NY brought him even more success, and after numerous stops here in Minneapolis, Twin Cities dance fans have gotten a taste of what makes him so popular. He works turntable magic, constructing DJ sets that revel in exquisite tension before the inevitable release, leaving heaving masses of satisfied party people in his wake.
Plaslaiko's return marks the last of the weekly Shelter events, Friday night parties focused around one headliner playing for four full hours, which have given clubbers a closer look at the record collections of some of their favorite DJs for the past five months. With Derek at the controls of Shelter's impressive wall of speakers for those four hours, Barfly's Loft is sure to be packed with plenty of fans that have forsaken a post-holiday gym visit in favor of the serious dancefloor workout they'll receive tonight. Besides, what sounds better: flipping channels trying to find a station that isn't already playing Christmas movies, or attending a raucous send-off bash with one of New York's finest party starters?
In this dystopian present, where many popular forms of music seem to approach the drain in ever tightening orbits, the intrepid among us, who populate our basements and work sheds, strive tirelessly to bring music to ever more unfathomable outer reaches.
Distended from orgiastic turkey feasts, lobotomized by tryptophan, the streets of our fair cities will be aswarm with zombified masses, lurching about in search of loud noise and cold beer. Clip your mittens to your sleeves-- this weekend's a big one, and it's almost ready to come out of the oven.
I know, I know. It's already a loud weekend. But when there's two feet of snow on the ground and the world is muted by head gauze, you'll wish you'd stockpiled all your loud sounds when you had the chance.
As you might've gathered from my A-list blurb for their show at the Triple Rock tonight, Boris are a pretty multifaceted and unpredictable band -- not to mention a loud one. Loud, loud, loud. Of course, they perpetrate different varieties of loud: there's the hellacious squalls of feedback, the deep, subwoofer-destroying doom rumble of super-slow-motion sludge-metal, and in some cases, the kind of loud that would be quiet in any other context aside from their forays into ultra-minimalist ambient experimentation. And if that's all a bit much for you, there's always their straightforward rock jams, the ones that run off the theory that Motörhead was a good start.
The latest experimental rock act to become deservedly aggrandized by Trent Reznor's visionary tour plans, the Tokyo-based protean three piece Boris is hot off the Target Center stage, where they wowed a capacity crowd on Tuesday night in an opening slot for Nine Inch Nails.
In retrospect, a shower and a shave might have been in order.
"What you here for?" said the doorman when I arrived. "Keith Sweat," I said. He laughed mirthlessly. "You gonna be underdressed, that's for sure," he said.
After idling for a couple minutes at will-call while the clerk composed a lengthy and annoyed text-message, I tapped on the glass. She looked at me with contempt. "What are you here for?" she said. "Keith Sweat," I said. "I see," she said. "You just elected not to get dressed up?"
The owner of the club breezed by and spied me. "What are you here for?" he said. "Keith Sweat," I said. "I can't let you in," he said, "until you take off your hoodie. Is your t-shirt clean?"
The ticket taker stopped me from proceeding. "What are you here for?" he said. "Keith Sweat," I said. "You're going to have to check that backpack," he said. "Can't have you walking around like a bum."
Maybe we lost something when we took a headlong dive into the idea of the music video as pseudo-narrative miniature movie. I've seen a pretty good number of pre-MTV broadcast television music clips from back in the day, typically involving the artist(s) standing around lip-syncing on a soundstage, maybe dancing a bit, and sometimes that near-primitive simplicity is just a bit short of astounding. When you grow up watching Duran Duran cavort around in the jungle on some fake-Spielberg business, your garden-variety ca.-1970 pantomime performance is pretty damn novel.
Image courtesy of Dylan Reichstadt's Facebook page
A Webbified Cottage Grove teen has been recording his life -- almost all of it -- on Justin.tv for the past year. His broacasts have attracted a small following. He even got a company he interned for this summer to send us a press release about it.
Park High School junior Dylan Reichstadt broadcasts every hour of his life -- except those hours when he is in class -- according to Katie McNabb, of 50 Entertainment. Reichstadt broadcasts his life on Justin.tv. -- the social media Web site made famous when a user's suicide was broadcast online.
"Hang on a second!" The Delta Spirits' Jon Jameson yells into the receiver followed by a series of muffled, gurgling noises.
"There, sorry." He's back after a frantic pause. The San Diego bassist explains that he's driving to Long Beach and a cop rolled up, "I had to put my headset on."
Think hard-- when was the last time you heard Franz Ferdinand in a bar,
it must be at least two or three year's ago right? Just when you
thought "This Fire" was out of your head for good, it's back and it's
better than ever because you've had about six Premiums and everyone
around you is dancing just as crazy as you are.
At Clubhouse Jager, DJ Jake Rudh hosts Transmission, where he plays the
best and worst -- and some of the songs you completely forgot about --
from the 80's till today. Tonight's Thanksgiving edition is one of
their biggest of the year, and what keeps people coming out to
Transmission week after week is it's young, fun attitude, where you
can dance and not seem out of place, where girls wont get grinded on,
lest they initiate the grindage, and where black is always in style.
It's an odd mix of awkward goths and hip college kids, Foucault-reading Grad students and slightly smelly artists, as well as fashionable Uptowners and Nordester's on their
weekly pilgrimage to the other side of the river. There are even
people from St. Paul and nobody knows what they do or how they got to
Minneapolis.
This mix of fairly like-minded people from all over the
Twin Cities gives Transmission a laid-back, but slightly pretentious
vibe, a dichotomy that works because when you are huddled around the
fire pit on the patio every-one will find something to talk about, at
the very least its easy to mutter some profanities about the cold.
With the holiday shopping season kicking off this Friday, people have been asking me lately, "Patrick, what should I get for my wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend/baby daddy/baby mama/boo/OPP this year?"
In an article Monday headlined "American band releases album venomously attacking China," the Global Times said unidentified Chinese Internet users had described the album as part of a plot by some in the West to "grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn."
The album "turns its spear point on China," the article said.
Satirizing a statement like this would only gild a gorgeous lily, but it can only be assumed that the Chinese media proxies responsible for the release haven't subjected themselves to the album's content. In this respect, if in no other, the informational health of the heavily censored nation can be strongly envied.
Tuesday night's show at the Target Center was a run-on sentence of the most elegant composition, full of multiple clauses and digressions, ornamented by all the pretty verbs that can hang a crowd of thousands agape and breathless for three long hours. Boris, noise metal prodigies of the lowest RPM, opened the show, beset by enormous LED monitors that backlit their droning take on industrial metal. As musically oppressive as a funeral dirge, their pensive shoe-gazing and statuesque performance, which was as overwhelming in the Target Center PA as a tsunami at its highest crest, seemed mildly out of place in such an opulent venue, and one would certainly be wise to see them this Friday at the Triple Rock, where the finery of their music won't be lost in the cavernous echo chamber of a basketball arena. Still, they were received well, and kept the floor crowded, a hard feat for an opening act at such a marquee show.
On the HowWasTheShow.com blog today, David de Young provided a nice roundup of the shows happening tonight. As David says, it's usually one of the busiest nights of the year for local shows -- everyone knows that Thanksgiving food tastes better when you are hungover and suffering mild ear drum damage, right? If I know David, he's going to be hitting up at least half, if not all, of his recommended shows.
Here's a few of our favorite shows happening tonight:
The Ultramagnetic MC's were pioneers of hip hop in the late '80s: producer/MC Ced Gee, who'd spent a bit of his spare time creating beats for Boogie Down Productions' classic 1987 debut Criminal Minded, was one of the genre's early abstractionists, while Kool Keith -- later notoriously known as Dr. Octagon and currently pushing the bitterly funny Dr. Dooom 2 -- was revolutionary in his weirdness, coining an unpredictable and literally off-beat, stream-of-consciousness style that backpackers are still biting two decades later. If you haven't heard of them, it could be because they released their canonical debut album, Critical Beatdown, in a crowded 1988 -- which hip hop fans will acknowledge as possibly the most ridiculously great year for rap albums ever.
With Minneapolis maestro Chuck Love, you can forget about a typical DJ set -- fold that notion up and cram it deep in the pocket of that coat you won't need at his set tonight. Live instrumentation is a hallmark of Chuck's performances, and it's a thrill to see him pick up a trumpet, flute, or guitar and add improvisational touches to his impeccable selection of records. In many cases, those records were created by Love himself, as he's a prolific studio wizard in addition to his considerable skill as a live performer. If you remember your physics, you know that heat rises, so it's entirely fitting that Love will play in the Loft above Barfly, which has become a regular stop for dance music fans in the Cities. However, tonight, the Loft will host an array of guests and music fans of every stripe, all hoping to warm their spirits with a dose of Love. So, leave the frigid weather and holiday preparations for Thursday, and be sure to wear something you can peel off. Tonight, we sweat.
Perhaps the commander in chief sees some of himself in Forte-- like Bush's presidency itself, Forte's innocence is nigh indefensible. Notwithstanding, the case sent the best and brightest stars of the music world to his aid. Carly Simon, for example. Despite the inestimable heft of Simon's celebrity, her efforts to have Forte's case reopened proved futile.
But when it comes to lost causes, Bush is something of a patron saint, championing any cause in vain, no matter how Avant-garde. With Forte soon to be a free man, the only thing left to do is await his first post-prison single. Will it back Bush in a hip-hop first? It seems the only neighborly thing to do.
According to VH1, Kurt Cobain's suicide was the second most shocking moment in rock and roll history. But VH1 also gives Christopher Knight and Flavor Flav a weekly paycheck, so their acumen is questionable at best. Nonetheless, one pull of a trigger on an April evening in 1994 sent the momentarily enfranchised right back to being the perpetually disenfranchised, and suddenly all those red flannels and hemp necklaces felt like a cruel joke foisted on the national youth.
His legacy is beyond reproach-- with only his wit and his can-do attitude, he single-handedly inspired such luminaries as Monster Magnet, Silverchair and Seven Mary Three. But what has he done for us lately? The Cobain camp has been suspiciously mum for well over a decade now. Not one peep from the Man Without a Face. So now, in our endless quest to plunder every sacred crypt from Cape Cod to the Congo, armed only with a plastic plechette and a taste for the demonstrable, Gimme Noise proudly presents Kurt Cobain: The Ouija Interview.
Just a reminder that dreamy French DJ/producer David Guetta is in Minneapolis for the first time tonight for what will no doubt be an insane crowd for a Tuesday (prepare to phone in some sick time).
Guetta is famous (relatively) for his house production that features smoov R&B vocalists and radio-friendly beats and for his "F*ck Me I'm Famous" parties in Ibiza and beyond.
Also, did we mention he's French? In dance music, that goes a long way (thanks to two certain "robots").
As mentioned in previous posts about tonight, Guetta is pretty fabulous when it comes to track selection (think Cassius meets DJ Falcon meets an aging pop radio jock). Some of the croony vocal stylings can get a bit old and make his set sound like one long song, but when he sticks to good beats and varies up his tracks it's something to remember.
Our favorite Guetta track (listen to more tracks here.):
Here's a very charming holiday message from Ian Rans, host of cable access show Drinking With Ian. Those unfamiliar with the show should head down to First Avenue on Friday night for a live taping -- the info is in the video:
Welcome to the first installation of what is going to be a more-or-less daily exercise in giving you, the City Pages reader, a brief yet powerful audio-visual dose of high-quality music across all spectrums of fame, genre, region and era. For the most part, I'll be focusing on stuff you might not know about -- or, failing that, stuff you know in a new, different or otherwise strange context -- along with a few heads-up bulletins on some of my personal choices for artists and bands to go check out when they come into town.
On Mondays, everything seems to cost double. The morning coffee is twice as dear, the headache it treats is twice as urgent and unjust, the 8 hour day you send in your carpeted cubicle is twice as bottomless and enveloping. But it's all creative math at Memory Lanes tonight, and every Monday night for that matter-- a flat zero cover charge, a full card of bands worth many times that much (nevermind the mathematical implications-- it's a compliment), cheap beer and all the bowling you can eat, tonight's show at Memory Lanes is a perfect oasis of vice and vagary on this chilly November Monday.
Audiences at The O'Shaugnessy theater in St. Paul this weekend were treated to a full menu of visual poetry, as TU Dance filled the stage with its buoyant, beautiful choreography.
Artistic
directors Uri Sands and Toni Pierce-Sands formed TU Dance four years
ago after dancing together with Alvin Ailey Dance Company in New York.
Thanks to Jim Walsh over at MinnPost, my Monday morning got a whole lot sweeter when I clicked on the link for this heart-wrenching video of Romantica's Ben Kyle singing "Danny Boy" with his current tour mate Carrie Rodriguez. I've always been a huge Romantica fan, but Kyle seems to shine especially bright when his performances are stripped down to just his voice and guitar. This performance is no exception -- with only a soft guitar strum to guide him, Kyle's voice cracks with a vulnerability and tenderness that makes even this oft-covered tune mesmerizing.
I didn't know much about M83 going into Saturday night's show at the Triple Rock, save for a few tracks I'd heard on the Current and a music video that a friend sent me on YouTube. (Their videos, by the way, are quite interesting and seem to feature the same handful of young actors and actresses; I've included my favorite one at the bottom of the post.)
The Absent Arch's Will Markwardt. Photo by Alexa Jones.
In my column this week, I wrote about the first time I saw The Absent Arch and how impressed I was by their balance and performance despite the fact that they were crammed in the corner of their trumpet player's living room. Impressively, the band was able to transfer the loose-yet-polished feel of their house party performance to the stage of the Triple Rock on Friday night, defrosting the bundled-up audience with their organic charm.
Post a Comment
Image courtesy of TU Dance Web site
