Tag Archives: carissa’s wierd

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Why Timber! Outdoor Music Fest is Worth the Trip

Lemolo will rock Timber! Fest this weekend. (Photo: Tony Kay)

Sure, there are more outdoor music festivals surfacing around this neck of the woods than you can shake a tube of sunscreen at. But Timber! Outdoor Music Festival, coming this Friday and Saturday, looks to be one of the indisputable highlights of the summer concert season. It’s programmed by the same folks who’ve made Doe Bay Fest into a mini-phenom, and shares that festival’s penchant for gorgeous scenery (Timber! will be using Tolt-McDonald National Park in Carnation as a backdrop) and ace musical acts. Plus, unlike its cousin in the San Juans, Timber’s not (quite) sold out.

Even factoring in travel and campsite costs, two days at Timber look like a pretty spiffy deal.  A full-fest ticket will only set you back $45 per person, and most camping spaces run around $20 to $30. It’s kid-friendly, packed with fun activities, and you can even camp in a designated quiet area if you’re not up to partying ’til the wee hours.

Then there’s the musical lineup, which, well, could hardly be better.  There’s not a bum act in the batch, but enclosed, please find 10 good musical reasons to yell Timber! this weekend.

The Helio Sequence: With all due respect to this Portland duo’s dense and wonderful studio recordings, The Helio Sequence’s live shows remain the definitive way to experience them. Brandon Summers pulls out a dizzying array of effects from his six-string, and Benjamin Weikel’s insanely animated and musical drumming is a show unto itself.

Pablo Trucker: Not every band that combines greasy rock and roll with Americana and roots touches sounds like it’s aping Neil Young or Wilco. Singer/guitarist Brian Wagner writes mostly mid-tempo rock songs that nonetheless possess a drive and sense of haunted menace amplified by his sometimes spectral, sometimes gutsy voice.

Hobosexual: Between The Helio Sequence, Lemolo, and these hirsute rock giants, every possibility that exists in a two-person rock group can be explored. Ain’t nothing better than watching (and hearing) Ben Harwood attack his guitar with a combination of virtuosity and total abandon while Jeff Silva piledrives Hobosexual’s epic boogie rock home on a live stage.

Lemolo: Lemolo recently put out A Beautiful Night: Live at the Columbia City Theater, a document of their sold-out CD release shows last year. It’s a lush testament to the fact that the telepathic connection between singer/guitarist Megan Grandall and drummer/keyboardist Kendra Cox is a spell most potently cast live.

Kithkin display their customary restraint live. (Photo: Tony Kay)

Kithkin: With galloping walls of percussion and enough youthful energy to power a small city onstage, this collective puts on a show so relentless (and fun), it’s mathematically impossible not to move.

Quasi: Exhibit #4 for the two-man band defense, your honor: the idiosyncratic and winning husband-wife team of singer/guitarist/keyboardist Sam Coomes and drummer Janet Weiss, whose bent pop songs pulse with hooks and Weiss’s muscular backbeat.

Baltic Cousins: Not a lot of bands combine the spit of punk rock with the burnished traditionalism of Springsteen-style Americana, and even fewer do it well. Put Seattle quartet Baltic Cousins right at the head of this particular class with the mighty Hounds of the Wild Hunt.

Ivan and Alyosha: One of the upsides to River Giant’s abrupt last-minute exodus from Timber is the addition of Seattle’s most Beatles-esque roots band. Great harmonies + chiming Rickenbacker (or at least they sound like Rickenbacker) guitars + just enough Americana touches to add character = unmissable.

S: Jenn Ghetto, the voice behind much-missed local indie band Carissa’s Wierd, is back, and still sounding as strange and wonderful as ever. Fingers crossed, she’ll bust out her singular takes on hair-metal band Warrant’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the National Anthem (yes, that national anthem) this weekend.

The Passenger String Quartet: This string ensemble, spearheaded by violinist/arranger Andrew Joslyn, plays a set of their own as well as backing S and Avians Alight, making them Timber’s informal house band for the weekend. There’s a reason everyone from David Bazan to Macklemore’s enlisted Passenger’s services, and you’ll likely hear why, many times over, at Timber.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Sera Cahoone’s Big, Two-Hearted Deer Creek Canyon

(Photo: MvB)

Ever since her release party at the Neptune for Deer Creek Canyon (Sub Pop), I’ve been walking the gray, fall streets of Seattle, kicking leaves and listening to Sera Cahoone as if I’m an age-old fan–though I don’t recall ever catching her live before. It seems to me that I would recall hearing the combination of Cahoone’s voice and Jeff Fielder’s picking on banjo and dobro.

Speaking of picking, let’s address the Americana issue head-on: My suspicion is that it’s a term used mainly by people who make what used to be called country music but who don’t want to be lumped in with Taylor Swift or Rascal Flatts or people for whom the Civil War is primarily a question of federal overreach.

My tastes in this area run toward the outlaw-country of Viva Terlingua, and I feel like Jerry Jeff Walker himself would have hollered a few times there at the Neptune. Cahoone’s band, fresh off a European tour for the album, kept up a Deliverance-style, folksy ease, while just killing it: Jason Kardong, pedal steel; Sarah Standard, violin; Jonas Haskins, bass; and Jason Merculief, drums; with Tomo Nakayama sitting in on piano and organ.

And soaring on top of it all, Cahoone’s voice, slightly husky and toughened (as on the title track), but capable of taking off, upward, surprisingly strongly, like a grouse’s feathery rocketing out of a bush (“Naked”).

Frequently, in her Deer Creek Canyon songs, Cahoone finds herself heading the opposite way she once meant to go: “Please understand, this wasn’t what I planned,” she asks in “Nervous Wreck,” a skittery up-tempo number where, nonetheless, something has not gone quite right. In “Rumpshaker,” it’s “I know at the time you meant a lot to me / but now I don’t care if I stay or I leave.”

She told No Depression:

Deer Creek Canyon has always been a very special place to me. It’s a beautiful canyon in Littleton Colorado.  My mother lives up on the top of one of the mountains there. My father also lives in Littleton but in more of the suburbs. So I would go back and forth.

It’s not the kind of ambivalence where someone is frozen between two choices. Cahoone is on the move, a seasonal nomad. “Forget you in summer / by fall, I always want you back,” she sings of where she grew up.

Whether it’s home in the world or home in the heart, Cahoone locates herself in that pull between here and there. When she sings, in “Any Way You Like,” that “I’m already in your life / so take me anyway you like / I’m right in front of you / before I change my mind,” you know that, as her declaration rises toward a drum-driven anthem, to pay attention to that last reversal.

For all that, the ballad “And Still We Move,” might be the song that takes your feet from beneath you. It’s at Patsy Cline on the heart-breaker: “I’m tryin’ hard,” Cahoone sings, stretching the “hard” into a physical act, “not to erase–all of you.” My only regret is that the song doesn’t go on longer.