To paraphrase what I wrote in my 2009 Best of.. List a few days ago, “here’s a list of Portland artists that I spent the most time with in 2009. This is not meant to be a ranked list..” Portland never ceases to delight, with fresh new music popping up every month or so. Here’s just a handful that meant something to me this year.

The Builders And The Butchers

I saw The Builders And The Butchers at the Sasquatch Festival this year and was amazed to see the audience spontaneously begin to sing along with the band. It turned out to be one of the best performances of the weekend. Buy Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well

When It Rains by The Builders & The Butchers

Alela Diane

Early this year Alela Diane delivered, To Be Still, a wonderfully elegiac follow up to her album, The Rifle. I reviewed it at the time. Although she moves to and fro between Portland and Northern California, we should claim her as our hometown girl, as there is no doubt she is moving steadily toward greater renown.
Buy To Be Still

White As Diamonds by Alela Diane

Ramona Falls

Brent Knopf steps out of his Menomena world to bring us a startlingly fresh solo album, Intuit, under the moniker Ramona Falls. The release was accompanied by an amazing video.
Buy Intuit

Russia By Ramona Falls

Lackthereof

For ten years or more, Danny Seim, also of Menomena, has been releasing his own work as Lackthereof. In 2009 Barsuk released a retrospective of his decade’s work. This is a must have collection that will help you catch up with the work of one of Portland’s more creative and experimental musicians.

Buy A Retrospective 1998-2008

Last November By Lackthereof

Nurses

I’ll let this music fan, who left a review of the Nurses album Apple’s Acre on Amazon, have her say:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best albums of 2009, August 10, 2009
By J. Marler “Trendkill” (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

“This is a truly one of a kind album. I’ve never heard music like this before, not even from their first album. It’s an absolutely beautiful album, my personal favorite tracks are Mile After Mile, Technicolor, Man At Arms, Lita, Apple’s Acre… I guess I should just list the whole album every song is 5 stars. I can’t help but dance and sing with every track. My favorite album so far this year.”

Buy Apple’s Acre

Caterpillar Playground By Nurses

Panther

This is Portland’s loss. A word from Kill Rock Stars:

We are very sad to announce that Kill Rock Stars artists’ Panther are calling it quits. They have scheduled their last show for Dec 20 at Rontom’s in their hometown of Portland, OR. It will be a free show to thank their fans and friends for all their support.

Panther started out at the end of the 20th century as a solo project for Charlie Salas-Humara, then of the noisy prog band The Planet The. His shows were legendary - his signature falsetto over blown out beats making a bizarre form of damaged r&b along with his insane Merge Cunningham inspired dance moves and crowd heckling made for chaos that (mostly) won even the most uptight crowds over. He released a few records in this vein on local Fryk Beat records and made an AMAZING video before adding drummer Joe Kelly to the band and signing to KRS.

Buy Entropy

Love Is Sold [Lips and Ribs Remix] By Panther

Bobby Birdman

I love this video from Bobby Birdman and Audio Dregs and Fryk Beat Records. Click the image to play.

Buy New Moods

Thao And The Get Down Stay Down

Thao and her band had a busy year. There was the new album Know Better Learn Faster as well as her participation with the Portland Cello Project. I’ve a feeling that she will go far.

Buy Know Better Learn Faster

When We Swam By Thao And The Get Down Stay Down

Tallymarks By The Portland Cello Project feat. Thao

Bladen County Records

Bladen County Records continued to support and promote great music.

Pickathon and MusicFestNW

And it was another good year for two of our best music festivals. Pickathon and MusicFestNW.

Dr Dog at Pickathon

Crowd at Pickathon

Tu Fawning at MusicFestNW

OPB and WOXY iPhone Apps

And where would I be without my OPB Music and WOXY.com radio iPhone Apps?

The Decemberists recently released their latest album, The Hazards of Love, and to get things kicked off they performed at this year’s SXSW Music Festival. Here’s a live cut from that set.

The Decemberists - Margaret In Captivity [Live from SXSW]

Sunday night Luminous Things will be playing at Rontom’s here in Portland. Luminous Things is the newest project from Durango Park founders John Kwon and Katie Griesar and journeyman drummer Ned Folkerth. If you like NW indy rock with a strong Velvet Underground influence, you will like these guys. Don’t take our word for it, download the tracks.

Luminous Things - A Stranger

Trivia Note: Drummer Ned Folkerth was in Dave Allen’s first Portland based band Squall.

Alela Diane has always struck me as a child of Civil War-era America who figuratively wanders across a modern world that is deaf to her ministrations. The Woman Who Fell To Earth. She sings not of what is but everything “that has been”; she’s a messenger channeling the past.

“There are things that I have seen in my head…” are the first words sung on her wonderful new album ‘To Be Still.’ These things she sees are all around us but Alela sees them through an ancient lens. On ‘White As Diamonds’ when she sings of how “our lives are buried in snow” it is a lament that is not necessarily auto-biographical yet still feels like a cry for help. Another line “a glimpse of what has been…” is a metaphor that runs throughout all of her work - she has always sung of rivers, streams, mountains, trees, strong hands, the skeletons of leaves; charades, torn and stained lace, waters of all forms that clean love’s loss, of siren’s tombs - all sung with such longing and a crystal clarity.

Where her previous album, ‘The Pirate’s Gospel,’ had a rich and dark gothic feel to it, ‘To Be Still’ has careful country overtones that remind me of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest.’ And Diane’s voice as always is a miracle - pure, lilting cadences that deliver clear lines of yearning never leaving the listener feeling low; as with gospel music all doubts are aimed upward to a higher being and the results are uplifting and spiritual.

Home is a rock on the title track ‘To Be Still.’ The end of the trail where wanderings cease for a time, where perhaps love waits - “oh it’s here at home where I’ll wait for your wanders to be still” - but Diane also suggests that home can be a prison - “there’s a wolf inside the cave, and another in the clouds, I’ve seen them chew at night on the shadows in your eyes.” To this man who wanders and may have sinned, she offers up forgiveness before forgiveness is required with a take on don’t ask, don’t tell when she sings “and I won’t trail my feet in whatever dirt you track in,” and goes on to suggest that love is a gift, the “crock of gold that is not far from the snow” which returns us neatly to her theme of “our lives are buried in snow.”

The hope of rebirth and regeneration is scattered everywhere throughout the album, none more so than on ‘Take Us Back’ - “meet me where the snowmelt flows, it is there my dear where we will meet again.” Ironically ‘To Be Still’ is full of voices like that, voices that are never still - the callings are many. In religious terms these lyrical callings sit alongside the doomsday scenario known as End Times but Diane escapes the shackles of religious puritanism always flying free even as her songs suggest that the modern world denies nature. Nature always takes its course in Diane’s world.

Still, religion may have its place. When she sings, “the strength of water can sink a man,” does she mean the raging currents of snowmelt or the lifelong scars of baptism? She who has wandered for an eternity could answer that question and it would be up to us all to listen.

Diane works magic as she channels these lyrics especially with recurring water themes. Water is everywhere, it is tidal, it drowns, it rushes, it cleanses and purifies. It brings to mind Dylan, not Bob but Dylan Thomas and Dylan Ail Don of ancient celtic myth wherein “Dylan comes in contact with his baptismal waters, he plunges into the sea and takes on characteristics of a sea creature, moving through the seawater as perfectly as any fish, thus earning his epithet, Eil Ton ‘the son of the wave’.”

Alela Diane’s ‘To Be Still’ is a lyrical masterpiece, a body of work that is as restless as the sea.

‘To Be Still’ is released on Rough Trade on Feb 17 2009.

Alela Diane - White As Diamonds

An Interview with Ben of the band Arizona - part 1 from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

You may have noticed a dearth of new posts from me recently but I have a good excuse - Pop Asheville. Pop Asheville is an annual music festival and conference that takes place in Asheville, North Carolina and I believe this was their third year. This small but vibrant town in the NW of the state has a music festival that reminds me of the early days of SXSW and also of a smaller Portland-like music scene. Anyway I was invited to give the keynote speech this year. I spent an hour reminding the musicians in attendance that they are no longer in the music business, they are in the T-shirt business and they all seemed to agree. The music industry is not hurting, it’s the cd business that is in decline.

I’ll be writing later about the festival after I have gathered my thoughts. What I do want to say today is that I discovered a wonderful band while I was there. Arizona. There were many great bands performing over the weekend but Arizona stood head and shoulders above the crowded field. Perhaps it was just my own sense of the decline of standards in rock music that always leaves me pessimistic but I was shocked at how good these guys were playing live. The next day I had the honor of interviewing their lead singer Benjamin. It turned out to be a lengthy video so I will offer it up in parts. Part 2 will follow real soon.

Benjamin Morris Wigler, the self-described ‘Keith Richard Dreyfuss’ of rock, has much to say. And he says it very well and wittily too. Worth a watch. Listen as Ben talks about his four year old tub of urine that he collected from his stoned friends to load into super soakers to be used to hose down a local child molester. Listen to him sing a beautiful song a cappella and then talk about Dream Theater, Tool and Radiohead.

Arizona - Heath from the album Glowing Bird. Buy it here.