SOUNDTRACK:THEM CROOKED VULTURES-Live on Austin City Limits, Feb 13, 2010 (2010).
This set from Them Crooked Vultures is outstanding. I really like the album, but in a live setting these three (technically 4) guys are on fire. They extend the songs a bit but are always tight as a drum. Josh Homme is a great front man, even if he’s not that animated. He shares guitar duties with Alain Johannes who is not on the album, but who gets some great sounds out of his guitar.
Dave Grohl is in his drum-pounding glory back there. Man, he hits the drums hard. And he seems to be really enjoying himself .
And the biggest surprise (sort of, but not really) is John Paul Jones. He fits in perfectly with the two younguns, and he really shows them how it’s done. His bass work is phenomenal: fast, furious and accurate to a fault. He also plays keyboards, an LED pulsing 12-(at least) string bass and a fascinating purple electric slide guitar contraption on “Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I”. Matt Rosoff from cnet explains this guitar here:
It looked like some sort of slide guitar with an electronic screen. I’d never seen anything like it before, so I did a little digging and found out from a March interview in Bass Player that it’s a custom-made axe created by Hugh Manson, who has been Jones’
tech for some time and who owns a renowned guitar shop in England. It’s essentially laid out like a lap slide guitar, modified so Jones can sling it over his shoulder and carry it around on stage, and with two extra bass strings at the bottom.
So what about that rectangular screen? According to a forum post on the EMG pickups site, it’s a MIDI controller that Jones can use to trigger stage lights. I imagine it could also be used to trigger various effects, similar to the modified Korg Kaoss controller that Manson built into a guitar for Muse’s Matt Bellamy.
If you’re already a fan of the band, you really need to check out this live show; they are amazing. And if you’re not a fan, you will be after this show. This is how I first heard them and I was blown away.
You can watch the show online on PBS.
[READ: July 27, 2011] Five Dials Number 20
I didn’t expect to get caught up to Five Dials issues so quickly (has it really been 20 weeks already?). This is the most recently releases issue! They aren’t getting published as often as I expected. Which is fine. But the funny thing with this issue is that there were several printing errors in the initial run of this issue. I don’t know if this has happened before, but it seemed so noticeable to me, that I had to wonder how it slipped by everyone. The most obvious was that the front page had many ƒƒƒƒ characters (these were also evident in the Word Cloud later on). There’s a word missing from the fiction “the thin cold stillness you got [ ] this part of the country” and there’s a crazy typo in the Fiction story later on. The errors have now been fixed. But, the letter to the editor (and this has not been fixed) promises us a picture which isn’t there. “Here’s a photo of Doni at the reading – he did a brilliant job.” I’ll assume they were partying too hard at the Port Eliot Festival to make sure the issue was launch-ready
CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On Cable Street and General Interests
There were some serious race riots on Cable Street back in 1936. Indeed,the head of the British Union of Fascists, Mosley, and his aggressive supporters were turned back by a noisy crowd (Irish women throwing fishy potatoes at them). The rest of the magazine he says is general Interest, an anachronistic term from the 20th century before all magazines had to specialize in something. I mentioned in my introduction that there was a photo error here. Doni Gewirtzman performed a reading at the launch of Five Dials 19. They couldn’t out the picture there, so they added it here. Perhaps in Issue 21? (more…)
I Just Read About That... 