Tag Archives: Peter Fedofsky

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Your Live Music Bets for the Weekend of August 23 through August 25

After this weekend, you won’t have Absolute Monarchs to kick around anymore. (photo: Tony Kay)

The Dog Days of Summer are officially in place, so get ‘em while they’re hot. And if you’re of the opinion (like me) that the best moments of the soundtrack of your life should be set to live music, this weekend will not disappoint.

Tonight (Friday, August 23):

Pixies Cover Night (feat. members of Midday Veil, Ononos, Kithkin, Tea Cozies, and more) @ Chop Suey. 21+. $10 at the door. Show at 9 p.m.

The Pixies’ brand of mutant pop sports so many jagged edges, it’s easy to forget how many durable, honest-to-God songs they crafted. Tonight at Chop Suey, you should get plenty of reminders. Best of all, none of the bands whose members comprise the evening’s entertainment sound at all like The Pixies, meaning the possibility of hearing some radical reinterpretations of classics like “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and “Where is My Mind?” runs pretty high.

Luke Winslow-King, James Apollo, Annie Ford Band @ Columbia City Theater. 21+. $12 at the door. Show at 8 p.m.

It’s gonna probably be hot and a little humid tonight, and Michigan transplant-turned-New Orleans club vet Luke Winslow-King‘s variety of ambling, bare-bones blues should fit that kind of climate to a T. Winslow-King’s one of those roots musicians who sounds like he stepped from a 1930s Mississippi bar, straight into a time machine that spit him out in 2013 (the warm retro environs of Columbia City Theater should feel exceptionally apropos). That he never seems to be trying too hard to sound like he does adds immeasurably to his easygoing charm.

Men Without Hats, The Scarves, Color, Crooked Veils @ El Corazon. 21+. $18 at the door. Show at 8 p.m.

Synth band Men Without Hats will forever and ever be known as the architects of one obscenely-massive hit, “The Safety Dance,” but they actually cut a couple of pretty good pop albums back in the big ’80’s (Rhythm of Youth and Pop Goes the World) bric-a-brac with ploinky synths and propulsively catchy artificial rhythms. Their most recent record, Love in the Age of War, takes a solid step into the New Wave Wayback Machine, but you’ll be forgiven for biding your time until you’re able to do that scissor-armed spastic dance like Ivan Doroschuk and his dwarf buddy in the video.

Saturday, August 24:

Linda’s Fest, featuring Absolute Monarchs, Constant Lovers, Katie Kate, Tilson XOXO, Big Eyes, and Iska  Dhaaf @ Linda’s Tavern. 21+. Free. Show at 9 p.m.

It’s the fourth year that Linda’s Tavern will be rustling up some choice local talent for a totally free show. This year, the Fest takes place in the parking lot behind Pine Food Market. The buzz set of the night belongs to post-punk/metal titans Absolute Monarchs, playing their (say it ain’t so) last show. But you’ve also got the similary-corrosive and awesome Constant Lovers, dance-music priestess Katie Kate, the soul-hip-hop-and-more polyglot of Tilson XOXO, short-and-sweet sugar buzz punk from Big Eyes, and jumpily-gorgeous echo-chamber pop music from two-man band Iska Dhaaf.

International Pop Overthrow Seattle Day 3, featuring Peter Fedofsky of Curtains for You, Irene and They Go Pop!, Smile Brigade, Lights from Space, and more  @ The Mix. 21+. $10 advance/day of show. Show at 9 p.m.

International Pop Overthrow, a festival dedicated to celebrating pure pop music from all over the globe, landed its Seattle iteration at Georgetown’s The Mix yesterday, and it’ll be parked there tonight and tomorrow as well. Quality acts were/are scattered throughout the three-day fest, but the final night of the Fest includes sets from some of this town’s most choice pure-pop acts. Lights from Space play awesome, toothy power pop that sounds like Fountains of Wayne’s tougher kid brothers, while Smile Brigade‘s 60s-style sunny singalong ditties include a pinch of enchanting psychedelic weirdness. Best of all, Peter Fedofsky, keyboardist/songwriter/singer with Curtains for You, opens up IPO Day 3 at 7:30 with a set of sparkling pocket symphonies that roll Ben Folds, Harry Nilsson, and Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys into one lovely package. Get there early, and stay late.

Sunday, August 25:

Black Nite Crash, Dead Teeth, Yonder @ The Comet Tavern. $7 at the door. Show at 8 p.m.

The fact that Black Nite Crash named themselves after a song by Ride will come as no surprise once you hear ‘em. The Seattle band play their spattering and swirling mix of shoegazer rock and Brian Jonestown Massacre-style psychedelia so sublimely, you’d swear they were a bunch of pasty-faced Brits (that’s a massive compliment). Equal parts danceable and dizzyingly heady, their sound’s infused with just enough urgency to render the familiar ingredients wonderfully fresh.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle’s Best Pop Band Gets Its Moment in the Neumo’s Spotlight

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Curtains for You play, harmonize, and jump around like crazy men tonight at Neumo's. (photo by Tony Kay)

Curtains for You, The Pica Beats, and Tomten play Neumo’s tonight. Doors at 8pm, show at 9. Tickets, $8 advance, $10 at the door.

Headlining at Neumo’s has always been a Holy Grail for Seattle bands, so the fact that Curtains for You are anchoring a slot there tonight is kind of a big deal. The Capitol Hill venue’s been an inestimable buzz club for years, solidly drawing hot national acts while always keeping a prescient finger on the local scene’s pulse. When a local combo headlines Neumo’s, so the local parlance goes, they’ve arrived.

The gig’s a great validation for one of this ‘burg’s hardest-working (and best) bands. For the rest of us, it’s a thrilling opportunity to catch Curtains for You once more holding their own. At risk of thumping a tub I’ve pounded a lot in the last two years, you won’t see pure pop delivered in a live setting with a more perfect synthesis of peerless harmonizing, swoon-worthy melodies, and kick-in-the-pants energy.

They’ll likely be trying out some new material this evening, and if this all-around awesome number penned by keyboardist Peter Fedofsky is any indicator, the creative streak that began with 2009’s What a Lovely Surprise to See You Here and continued with last year’s After Nights Without Sleep continues unabated.

The bill’s bolstered by two other great local bands, so (repeat after me…) get there early. Tomten richly ply many of the same influences as the headliners (Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys, Beatles, Zombies), with a stirring of Morrissey-esque baritone bittersweetness. And Pica Beats sound like Interpol’s Paul Banks reconciling vintage pop sounds with here-and-now indie sensibilities. In non-music-geek-speak, that means it’s all good.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Curtains for You Bring Pure Pop to Now People

After Nights Without Sleep, the newest release by Seattle band Curtains for You, dropped yesterday, courtesy indie label Spark and Shine Records. If your record collection includes any Beach Boys, Beatles, vintage Harry Nilsson, and/or Posies–and if that jumpy mass occasionally occupying space on the surface of your sleeve is your heart–get thee to your local record store or online music provider, post-haste. Simply put, you won’t hear a better pure-pop record all year.

Vocalist/guitarist Matt Gervais and keyboardist/vocalist Peter Fedofsky (the band’s principal songwriters) share a love for classic songcraft, and best of all, the sensibilities to distill their influences into something far greater than the sum of their parts. Curtains been kicking around the local music firmament for about six years, but the last two years have seen them roaming a creative purple patch.

Their compositional styles–Gervais rooted in slightly more guitar-based rock, Fedofsky lending more ornate (and, obviously, piano-based) touches–compliment each other in stunning fashion. 2009’s awesome What a Lovely Surprise to See You Here provided eleven bittersweet, unabashedly melodic bursts of magic, from Kinks-style ragtime shuffles like ‘Small Change’ to Fab Four-infused rays of sunshine like the luminous “Licorice Skies.” The sonic template remains the same on After Nights Without Sleep, only it’s done even better this time out.

The new record superficially follows the pattern laid down by Curtains on What a Lovely Surprise–five songs by Gervais, five songs by Fedofsky, and one track by a third band member (bassist Nicholas Holman, this time out). It pretty much bolts from the starting gate with a hit: “Daisy,” the album’s opening track, soars on a wave of pulsing drums and dual harmonies; lyrics rife with metaphors uniting square-peg misfits in awkward passion (“Just two daisies trying to fit in/In this rose garden”).

And the jewels keep coming, from the rollicking Beatles gallop of “What Good Am I to You Now?” to the catchy country shuffle of Holman’s “Bronx Zoo Hobo” to the Queen-gone-power-pop “Open Your Eyes.” The closest thing to an Achilles’ heel amongst the proceedings–the record’s sometimes too-polite production–gets ably sidestepped by the intelligent lyrics, and by refreshing bursts of swagger like “Eggs Over Toast,” the best slice-of-life rocker Elvis Costello never recorded.

There’s an enthralling undercurrent of darkness to After Nights Without Sleep that lends a gravity that only surfaced sporadically on What a Lovely Surprise. Make no mistake: this is still a hook-laden pop album. But Gervais’ lovely falsetto pulls a palpable ache from the circus-music bridge of “In the Last of the Light,” and a sense of wistful melancholy colors the Pet Sounds lope of “Photographic Memory.”

After Nights Without Sleep’s centerpiece, “The Wasteland,” stands as the album’s masterstroke, a lushly orchestrated, exquisite mash-up of “Eleanor Rigby” with Nilsson-style twilight romanticism. And when the band bursts into sumptuous wordless harmonies at the end, Curtains for You accomplishes one of pop music’s most cherished hat tricks–namely, making deep-set sadness abidingly beautiful–and irresistibly catchy.