| 02/14/02 Los Angeles, CA, Troubadour |
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w/ Desaparecidos |
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[review] (from New York Press) Music It’s Valentine’s Day at L.A.’s Troubadour. On my right two fat people are making out with visible tongue. On my left a pretty, plain blonde girl has a brace on her broken wrist, from which I infer that she must have just broken up with somebody. When I called the Troubadour for the set times, the recording told me this would be a great show and I should bring my Valentine. Being recently separated from my wife, I hung up with a strained chuckle before searching for some kerosene with which to set my telephone on fire. I then remembered that there would at least be a lot of children sitting in puddles of beer and making out against the back wall. Not as many as I’d hoped, sadly, which makes sense in hindsight. It is Valentine’s Day and on the bill are champions of the lovelorn and relationship-prone, Desaparecidos and Rilo Kiley. Even with the scattered couplings one should not expect the energy in the room to be remotely sexual. This is an indie-pop crowd, after all, and sex just gets in the way of geeky brooding. The audience consists of tall, goony boys who scoured vintage shop after vintage shop before finding those just-right goofy glasses frames to go with their silly haircuts. These boys are here to pine away for Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley. Then there are the runty boys with the tousled hair and abbreviated torsos. They’re here to lust over Conor Oberst of Desaparecidos, though they might prefer the term "identify with" to "lust over." Give them time. The girls come in two flavors as well. The chunky chicks with the dyed black hair and the skirts made out of curtain fabric might be sampling dyke culture to see how it fits, or they might be the tall boys’ "girlfriends," which means their opinions were weighed heavily during the search for glasses frames. In either case, they would be happy to hear the voice of either Conor Oberst or Jenny Lewis on the stereo during one of their many intentionally failed suicide attempts. Especially Conor, who is taken to wailing lyrics like, "Two pills just weren’t enough/The alarm clock’s goin’ off/But you’re not wakin’ up/ THIS ISN’T HAPPENING HAPPENING HAPPENING HAPPENING HAPPENING." The other girls are the pretty, plain white girls who have come here for one reason, to undulate their bare shoulders to the sounds of Rilo Kiley. I am distracted by one of the chunky black-haired girls fixing her tall, goony boyfriend’s hair into pigtails, so I don’t notice Rilo Kiley take the stage. I had not heard Rilo Kiley before but I had heard enough about them to expect good things. Jenny Lewis launches into "Science Vs. Romance": "I used to think/If I could realize I’d die/Then I would be/A lot nicer." The guitar ambles to a big build behind her unaffected Patsy Cline meets Kim Deal voice, and I immediately join the ranks of tall goony boys pining away for her. Except I don’t wear glasses. Song after song about "where the fuck did we go wrong" and it’s clear that this is indeed the perfect place to be on Valentine’s Day. I needed to hear a voice crack over lyrics equating your average relationship to your more gruesome plane crash. Boys and girls alternately scream, "I love you," at the stage. Maybe it’s because I’m getting divorced or because I drink too much, but when she punches through the climax to "Pictures of Success" (These are times that can’t be weathered and/We have never been back there since then) I get a lump in my throat, which is quickly washed down with another beer. The only thing that can draw my attention away from Rilo Kiley is the discovery that there are now two girls with broken wrists in attendance. And they are both pretty, plain blonde girls, and they are friends who occasionally get a little huggy with each other. I double-check and, yes, they each have a wrist tightly bandaged and braced. I suddenly get a lovely vision of what softcore amputee porn might look like and I vow that by the night’s end I will find out how they broke their arms. A few more songs from Jenny, and one or two of covocalist Blake Sennett’s tunes, which sound like a slightly more pansyish Elliott Smith (but in a good way), and their set comes to a close. I run out to the merch table to buy their CD Take Offs and Landings (Barsuk) before Desaparecidos begin their shitty set. By the time Conor Oberst was 20 years old he had made a name for himself as an indie prodigy with his band Bright Eyes, releasing three LPs of folk-pop dense with open-up-your-wrists-and-howl misery that betrayed an experience far beyond his years. Now with all of 21 years under his belt, he’s fronting his side band Desaparecidos and has turned his attention to the subjects of suburban commercial overexpansion and the financial burdens of your average middle-aged father of four in the face of downsizing. Add to that the big 80s driving pop-rock and you’ve got an album that takes some getting used to. I did get used to the album Read Music, Speak Spanish (Saddle Creek), and have been digging it quite a bit. They were the band I came here to write about tonight and I just wish they would play their fucking songs. Instead, we’re treated to at least three minutes of witless banter between each song and the steady apologizing for sucking so bad that is requisite in any Conor Oberst show. After less than an hour of looking like little kids playing Rock Band, the guitarist Denver Dalley climbs atop the drum kit and falls down. And we are all embarrassed for him. Back to chicks with broken bones. "Did you two get into a fight?" I ask. They explain that they just by chance happened to break their wrists within a few weeks of each other. One by falling off a building (she didn’t elaborate), the other by rollerblading. The one who fell off the building adds: "We’re actually twin sisters." Happy holy motherfucking Valentine’s Day. The spirit of Tony Roberts calls me Max and whispers in my ear to imagine the mathematical possibilities. I begin the panicked, stammering, spittle-flying conversation of a man who for some reason believes that twin sisters love to fuck together. My folly comes to a merciful end when the twins are joined by a couple of guys who greet them with hugs and kisses. I scurry away. Sadly, their boyfriends are not twin brothers
[here's another review (not really a review) from the Phantom Planet fan mailing list] ~HEy Phans,
[and] Fun
Fact~ -OLIVE LA |