The main thing I noticed about Beach House is that they are a quiet band. They are indisputably the quietest band I have recorded live. An unfortunate side effect of this is that people take this as an green light to strike up conversations while the band plays in the background. A sizable number of audience members made a furious bid to get up to the front of the stage when the band started, only to end up blabbing throughout the entire set, pausing only to politely applause between songs. This adversely affected my recording, as I have audio evidence of people conspiring to sneak marijuana into the show. I also learned about several awesome parties that I missed out on. I guess my invite got lost in the mail.

From this show is “Used to Be” and “Silver Soul”.

Prospect Park 07-27-10

Setlist
Better Times
Used to Be
Walk in the Park
Silver Soul
Norway
Master of None
Gila
Zebra
Heart of Chambers
10 Mile Stereo

Download: Beach House – Used to Be (Live)

Download: Beach House – Silver Soul (Live)

I wasn’t properly introduced to Memphis’ His Hero Is Gone until they put out their split 12″ with Union Of Uranus back in ’98. Their style of crust/metal never appealed to me as much as the Uranus side, but HHIG live was a whole other story as this video attests. As an aside, I’m really digging Todd’s Copout shirt in this video.

Download: His Hero Is Gone – Chain Of Command (Live Video)

We had a request a couple months back to post this show for someone who had the great fortune of actually being in attendance. I saw Jonathan Fire*Eater a couple of times on this same tour, once in Seattle at a bizarre club with the widest yet narrowest stage I have ever seen and also at the 400 Club in Minneapolis. Enjoy this set from what was nearing the end of their reign as one of the most influential bands of the ’90s.

Setlist:
1. No Love Like That
2. These Little Monkeys
3. Search For Cherry Red
4. The Shape of Things That Never Come
5. When Prince Was A Kid
6. Give Me Daughters
7. I’ve Changed Hotels
8. A Night In The Nursery
9. Station Coffee
10. The Public Hanging of a Movie Star
11. When The Curtain Calls For You

Sample:

Download: Jonathan Fire*Eater – Cincinnati – 7/24/97 – 260 MB

This is a Lush performance on a UK show called “Hotel Babylon”. I wasn’t able to find any info about the show, the only info that came up for “Hotel Babylon” was a BBC drama from 2004-2009. That would have been awesome if they wrote Lush into an episode. Maybe it wouldn’t have gotten the can had they done that.

Download: Lush – Ladykillers (Live Video)

This was my first experience at Brooklyn Bowl, one of the two bowling alley / concert venues that I am aware of (Asbury Lanes in NJ being the other). I knew the place was a pretty happening location and always had a steady stream of national acts coming through. Unlike Asbury Lanes, where the bands play on a stage set up over the lanes, Brooklyn Bowl has a stage and floor set up in the back of the venue. This helped to keep most unwanted interlopers from invading my precious concert space. Unfortunately, a group of Ed Hardy / bowling enthusiasts who were at the venue this night set up their base of operations near where I was standing. They conversed very loudly during the show, presumably about various strategies to get laid. But never mind them, I was here to see a show.

Midnight Juggernauts took the stage, fittingly, a little after midnight. While the band is only a trio, they had enough instruments with them to satisfy a small orchestra. The two non-drumming members took turns switching between keyboards, guitars, basses, vocals, and even drums. While James Brown may have been the hardest working man in show business,  Midnight Juggernauts may be the busiest on stage. The extremely poor acoustics of Brooklyn Bowl did little justice to the bands’ mix of indie and electro rock, and I doubt the band won any new converts that night, but I can confidently declare they are a band I will be checking out live many more times. And you should too. Hopefully at a legitimate full-time concert venue.

Included here is “Vital Signs” from the Crystal Axis and “Tombstone” from their debut album Dystopia.

Brooklyn Bowl 07-24-10

Setlist
Winds of Fortune
Shadows
Too Many Frequencies
Vital Signs
Tombstone
Cannibal Freeway
This New Technology
Road to Recovery
Into the Galaxy

Ending of an Era

Download: Midnight Juggernauts – Vital Signs (Live)

Download: Midnight Juggernauts – Tombstone (Live)

Download: Vic Godard – Blackpool

With most of the titans of the metal genre (the successful ones anyway) becoming bloated and progressively uncool (Motley Crue, Metallica, GNR, etc) it was nice to see Faster Pussycat have the appropriate ‘look’ along with drug-induced sunken faces to lead me to believe these dudes are the real thing. Who cares if the vocalist Taime Downe is the only original member? The team who were up there nicely fit the bill of what a heroin-chic glam-metal band should look like. Furthermore their sound was as filthy as their look and a much improvement over the 80s recorded output (as I recall it anyway). Good show.

Download: Faster Pussycat – Bathroom Wall (Live)

Tokyo’s The Moools opened on Wolf Parade’s recent North American tour.  They are well-known to aficionados of the Pacific Northwest music scene, having been strongly associated with K Records and opening for Modest Mouse and Quasi at various times.  The title of this song, the closer from their set in suburban Cincinnati, is “I Do Not Need That” (at least, according to Google Translate).  It starts off more quietly than the other songs they played that evening, but ends up in the chaotic sprawl that seems characteristic of their style.

Front man Yasuaki Sakai won over the crowd halfway through the set when he explained, slowly and in halting English, that they had come from a very long way away, and that their luggage was very heavy, and they had carried it all the way from Japan, so…”please, buy our stuff.”  He repeated this last line several times.

Download: The Moools – I Do Not Need That (Live)

Long before iPhones, and Androids, and Twitter, there was my simple idea for a daily mp3 blog that would feature rare music that I had collected over the years. Along the way, I started featuring videos, then added a writer, then started featuring entire concerts, then added a few more writers, and here we are nearly 5 years later. And although I personally think that TSOI should be one of the most read sites out there, the people that do stumble across our little corner of the net are extremely appreciative, often even sending in contributions of their own. All I can say is I owe an extreme debt of gratitude to the 4 people who have joined me in posting over the past couple of years. Frankly, if it wasn’t for them taking on such a huge part of the load and contributing such great content, this site would have never seen it’s 1,000th post. I also wanted to thank the readers who have consistently come back, commented and provided me with some amazing music that I would have never gotten otherwise (I’m looking at you James and Steve).

Here’s to the next 1,000.

Faith No More
Williamsburg Waterfront
Brooklyn, NY
7/5/10

Faith No More was a band I was obsessed with for the majority of my formative years, since they released 1992′s “Angel Dust” (the greatest hard rock album of all time, at least in this writer’s humble opinion). I used to drop copious amounts of money on every import, single, and bootleg that my local CD shop owner could order, amassing quite an impressive collection in the end. Unfortunately, due to my parents’ restrictive anti-school night concertgoing policies and FNM’s policy of only playing the Northeast on weekdays, I was only able to catch them live on their final tour in 1997, when they finally played NYC and Philly on a weekend. It was awesome. Making it extra awesome was getting to watch openers Limp Bizkit get booed off stage halfway through their set at the Philly show. Faith No More broke up shortly afterwords, and we started seeing other people, moved on with our lives and expected to never see each other again.

Fast forward to early 2009. From out of nowhere (pun intended), Faith No More put out a press release stating that they were back together and preparing to tour the world. I was ecstatic. Then I waited…and waited…and waited for North American dates. Finally after a year of seeing the band post shows for every corner of the globe except for North America and Antarctica, I got not one, but TWO dates in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I kind of expected them to announce a full North American tour, but it turned out in the end that Coachella, 3 nights in San Fran, 2 Brooklyn dates and 1 night in Philly were all that their homeland was getting. I thought it was kind of a dick move, but what do I care, Faith No More was playing 2 shows in Brooklyn!

I was rewarded handsomely for my dedication. The two Brooklyn shows featured two radically different setlists. Faith No More is one of the only bands (in the non-dirty hippy jam band category) that is actually capable to not using a setlist and just playing whatever they feel like. The sets focused on a couple songs from each era, with a healthy dose of the wacky cover songs the band is known for (see Michael Jackson’s “Ben”, the Bee Gees’ “I Started a Joke”). Vocalist Mike Patton was his usual spastic, over the top self, and his stage banter is 2nd only to the Jesus Lizards’ David Yow in high-larity. I especially appreciated him referring to the audience as a bunch of “fucking hipsters”.

Unfortunately, I was only able to obtain audio evidence for the July 5th show, and even then I missed the encore due to dead batteries in my recorder (which seems to be a bit of a pattern around here lately). So now I present to you, in it’s entirety…sort of, Faith No More July 5th Williamsburg Waterfront:

July 2nd Setlist
Reunited
From Out of Nowhere
Land of Sunshine
Caffeine
Evidence
Surprise! You’re Dead!
Last Cup of Sorrow
Cuckoo for Caca
Easy
Midlife Crisis
Gentle Art of Making Enemies
Ashes to Ashes
I Started a Joke
King for a Day
Epic
Just a Man

Stripsearch
Be Aggressive

We Care a Lot

July 5th Setlist
Midnight Cowboy
The Real Thing
Be Aggressive
Land of Sunshine
The Crab Song
Gentle Art of Making Enemies
Last Cup of Sorrow
Chinese Arithmetic
Easy
Midlife Crisis
Digging the Grave
Ashes to Ashes
Ben
King for a Day
Epic
Just a Man

I Started a Joke
As the Worm Turns
We Care a Lot

Stripsearch

Sample:

Sample:

Download: Faith No More – Brooklyn – 7/5/10 – 499 MB