The Daytrotter Index
Tom Waits Live
Tom Waits: The Frazzled Musicmaker Takes The Form Of A Body
30 August 06
Words by Dan Maloney//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
Chicago Auditorium Theater
August 9th 2006
Patience is a virtue many don’t own. As a youngster, I waited two months once to get a Castle Grayskull only to break the door off a month or so later. All those Saturday hours mowing the lawn and doing yard work ended up not being worth missing Saved by the Bell and California Dreams. However, I have waited 25 years to see Tom Waits and I can say it’s worth a million Castle Grayskulls, albeit with doors.
Tom Waits doesn’t usually tour. Fans of his know this and when word gets out that he is coming remotely anywhere close, you suck up the 80 bucks or so and make damn well sure you’ll be there. I was one of thousands of other Waits fanatics in Chicago that somehow got tickets to see him within the five minutes the show was on sale at Ticketmaster. This remarkable feat made my year as you have to ask yourself, “How long a whiskey drinking/ chain-smoking legend lives for these days?” I’m crossing my fingers.
The Advantage
Spencer Seim of The Advantage and Hella Gets Lasso'd
29 August 06
Pay no attention to the flashing lights and the quests that defy plausibility and confuse human ability with fantasy. It’s the music that matters. When you’re saving a princess, listen for that swell of technological love current that has no...
A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Get Lonely": Day 3
28 August 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Be ready and willing to suspend any gleeful thoughts that you may having circulating through your person when you get into the creamy middle of “Get Lonely.” Now’s not the time for a hot fudge sundae or a fondness for anything, this is when we put on our serious faces, ones just right for the funeral parlor or the emergency room. Though nothing on the album is quite so grave, the asking price for even the faintest bit of optimism must have been more than head Goat John Darnielle was willing to shell out. But then again, it’s particularly moving when someone’s all in. It’s particularly warming when the agrieved are buried by it, when there’s no slushing or slurring of signals.
A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Get Lonely": Day 2
28 August 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
In several places on “Get Lonely,” Darnielle sounds as if he’s crippled by something phantasmic. Right here in this river city last week, a discovery was made of five crop circles in a soybean field. Of course, there was no explanation for the finding other than deeming it one of life’s great mysteries. These markings came from thin air and they’ll never really be claimed. They showed up. Darnielle’s “crop circles” come in the form of ghostly beings and phantom riders, blasts from the past who aren’t at all welcome, it seems. They appear in so many in this collection of songs that they must find him so often that they become less frightening.
Jennifer O'Connor
Jennifer O'Connor: The Never-Ending Story Involves Love And Sorrow And Both Win In The End – Figure That Out
27 August 06
Words by Sean Moeller //Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Photos by Jesse Codling
Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!)
Of the myriad concerns that have to be dealt with by all of us over the course of our lifetimes, it’s those of the garden variety that really give us the chills. The ones that make us shiver to our cores are the unanswerable questions that stalk us, usually from the first days of cognition to the times when we’re moving slowly and on our last legs, shaky and even more concerned because we never got a fucking answer to any of them. Just watch, it must happen, right before we kick off into a great sleep or whatever’s promised as the everlasting, we’ll have this pause—just seconds before the very end—where we all get a chance to float a big, hard mental curse word at the stark realization that we’re still clueless and all that brow-beating and nervous energy spent on the silly little loves, their aches and their contrivances was for naught. All we did was take in the contour of the big picture, failing to really appreciate the thirst for the solutions rather than actually getting anywhere. It’s these two very familiar and conflicting issues of love and death that seem to really force us into different stages of dementia, give us quivering extremities and lips when they back away or come too close. We’re worried about if we’ll find love, how much of it we’ll be allotted, how long it might last, is it the right kind and when will it all be taken away, reduced to a bittersweet lesson or a wisecrack depending on the circumstances upon its departure and who’s departing. We worry about the love we can’t control and the love we never controlled. And we worry about time that we don’t stand a lick of chance against.
A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Get Lonely": Day 1
26 August 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Oh, hold on now, where are we? Where did the lights go? Why has the air suddenly lost some degrees as if it went on a diet? What are those noises and are those real lumps in my throat? Nobody said anything about this shit getting all darkly serious and uncomfortable. At least when WE were introduced to John Darnielle’s step-father in last year’s “The Sunset Tree” we at least got some dance music with the bitter pill, we at least got a tuneful piss-off anthem of Scotch-drunk video game playing to suck on—“This Year” is one of the most splendid songs ever written I think it’s safe to say.
Adam Green
Adam Green: Jacket Full Of Danger (Danger Is Code For Every Drug In The World)
25 August 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Jorge Tapia
People go through phases. They get into golf for whole summers at a time, playing incessantly until the courses shut down for the season and then they don’t go back but more than two times the following year. They get on health food kicks where they trick themselves that salads are leafy glories and a plate of spaghetti is Satan. They start collecting souvenir spoons from every state in the U.S., and display them proudly in their den. Children collect baseball cards (or at least did until they became priced $3 for a pack of six cards) or they choose to wear a cowboy hat for weeks on end only to forget about their John Wayne days as soon as the new Shrek movie hits multiplexes. These phases and fads come and go like mosquitoes and cicadas – seasonal and flighty. It seems, however, that Adam Green’s drug phase is here to stay and I for one think he should be applauded for his resolve to hold onto what he cherishes in life. He likes drugs. He really likes drugs. My bubble cloud fantasy is of Green in a bear suit (something that was fairly common when he and Kimya Dawson were the effervescent Moldy Peaches a few years ago, falling into a touch of mainstream fervor with “Who’s Got The Crack?” a little ditty about cocaine that apparently isn’t so ironical) sitting down on his haunches, with his furry tub of a belly slung out before him and piles of brown honey jars skewed out around him, empty. Only there was never any honey in them, just acid or something like-minded.
Russian Circles
Russian Circles: Enter Forth The Apocalyptic Mood Rock
25 August 06
Words by Dan Maloney//Illustration by Abby Rodriguez
Whenever I come upon checking out a band that is instrumental, a few obvious questions come to my mind. One: Why don’t they have a vocalist? Two: Do they play boring jazz or electronic based music? And three: Is the music sufficient enough or am I wishing they held out for someone with some pipes? Chicago based Russian Circles surpass my instrumental screening criteria. Why? Because I think, quite possibly, vocals could ruin everything I like about their music. The band is modestly a three-piece, but manages to sonically expand to what—at times—sounds like an orchestra, that is if the said ensemble smoked a lot of pot and let their hair grow past their ears and worshipped the blessed time signatures of Yes. Lazy reviewers could easily lump these guys in with any heavy instrumental group that utilizes elements of math rock, jazz, and prog. I am going to attempt to do the boys one better by labeling them apocalyptic mood rock!
A Week With Christina Aguilera's "Back To Basics": Day 3
24 August 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abby Rodriguez
Christina Aguilera is kind of rad. Kind of. She has her dashes, her splashes of importance, when she exerts her dominance over the other female artists (and hell, even a lot of the good for nothing male artists) of her time. She can be a real dragon, a beast of slinky, hornball-ish proportions, contorting her voice to sound like lingerie (it really does sound like something lacey and designed specifically to barely cover the frequently blurred-out positions on the human body).
Tegan & Sara Lasso'd
Tegan Quin of Tegan & Sara Gets Lasso'd
22 August 06
Some bands have no heart and some bands have a lot of it. Some even make a pile of tiny velvet cutouts of the hard-working organ an integral part of their album’s artwork. They’ll go on to hang one of...
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