Story courtesy of Los Angeles Times.
To think, I felt a surge of guilt in eighth grade when, while sitting bored through a mandatory Mass, I started doodling the cover of Depeche Mode's Violator on the back of a pew with my fingernail only to realize that the wood was so soft that I created a permanent mark.

Maybe not ever, but in a very long time.

"My sunglasses match the cocaine tray."
-- Mynx "I'm So LA"

You can listen to the whole thing here.

There are things about Los Angeles that I will never understand despite the fact that I was born and raised within the city limits. For example, why are people so unwilling to take flyers or promotional cds after shows? To the folks who turn their heads at street promoters or, worse, throw stuff on the ground, you're missing out on some serious goodies. Take, for example, the one-song CD that someone handed to me as I waited in line to leave the Troubadour after the Go! Team show last week.
Colored Shadows didn't list the name of the single track on the disc, but I checked on the My Space page and it's called "Moscow." I hate to use words like dreamy, so let's just say that it's like a cross between Ride and Air with lyrics about a sad girl with crazy roommates looping through beautifully stoned guitars with keyboards trickling in the background. I just listened to it four times in a row.
Colored Shadows is set to release a new EP, entitled Tiger Mask, with a subsequent single, "Life After Love." They are also playing at the Derby on Tuesday. I'll post more on that in the comments section when available.

I was reviewing a cd yesterday and, by the album's second track, I thought, Holy shit! This totally reminds me of Daisy Chainsaw!
I couldn't even put the comparison in the review because, well, who the hell remembers Daisy Chainsaw? That's like comparing a band to Vyvyan or Shampoo or any other band that I only heard on Rodney on the Roq. It's a completely meaningless comparison to anyone but a handful of adults who listened to the show through the 1990s.
My copy of Daisy Chainsaw's first (and, I believe, only) full-length, Eleventeen, was a gift from my first boyfriend, who was pretty much a jerk but had good taste in music. I considered trading it in after his trainwreck of subsequent girlfriends began prank calling me, but it was one of the few albums that could put me in an appropriately manic state to actually do things like clean my bedroom. Eleventeen was not an album full of rage, but rather an album closer to being institutionalized than anything Suicidal Tendencies did. Most of this was due to Katie Jane Garside's high-pitched, nearly-out-of-breath yelp. As she screeched out lines like, "You [gasp] be [gasp] my [gasp] frieeeeend," in the video for the song of the same name, I half-expected her to start chanting "hey nonny nonny" and drown. The long, matted hair and tattered slips (later favored by fans of Tori Amos and Switchblade Symphony) only added to the Ophelia connection (need proof: check out this and this). Back then, I was sixteen and reading Hamlet in class, so the album appealed to me in that respect. More than ten years later, though, I still have a penchant for music on the brink of madness, making Eleventeen a personal classic. Maybe I'll dig it up and listen to it again. Perhaps, it will prompt me to give my room a good cleaning.

I don't know what's worse, the fact that Dinosaur Jr. even bothered to reunite or the fact that people are actually excited about this.
Maybe it's Pixies-syndrome, that feeling of excitement one gets when a band that one was either too young or too far from a city to see the first time around reunites. I suffered from Pixies-syndrome and I wish that someone had told me how sloppy they play live before I stood out in 110 degree Palm Springs heat crying out of sheer disappointment. And so I write this today, as your friend, in hopes that you too will not have to suffer from the taste of tear-salt in your overpriced beer someday.
I had only a passing appreciation for Dinosaur Jr. back in 1992 based on a video or two that were regularly aired on Request Video. Then I saw them live.
It wasn't even like I went to the show to see Dinosaur Jr. The trio was booked at the Rose Bowl in a slot opening for the Cure. We arrived early enough to catch the Cranes, who astounded our little clique of gothlings with Alison's fragile voice. We were high on music (and maybe a clove cigarette or two) when Dinosaur Jr. took the stage and played about forty-five minutes of the most grating rock music I had ever heard. It was the musical equivalent of slinging cafeteria slop onto a plate and calling it food. They closed the set with a rendition of "Just Like Heaven" worse than anything I ever heard at a high school battle of the bands. It was our good fortune that Robert and the boys played brilliantly, otherwise I might have erased this concert from memory.
Oh, I've been to shitty concerts since then, like the time Emily's Sassy Lime and Noise Addict played like they hadn't even bothered to rehearse over at Jabberjaw and I spent the bulk of the night listening to my ride babble as to how Brian Krakow of My So Called Life was checking out her goods. Dinosaur Jr. was worse than that.
A few years later, one of the KXLU elders asked me why I loathed Dinosaur Jr. and I mentioned that show.
"Oh, well, they always suck live," he answered.
To this day, I cannot understand why people would listen to a rock band knowing how abysmal the songs will sound live.

My least favorite question is, "So what does the band sound like?" It seems like nonsense to me because what sounds like an orgy of stray cats to me may sound like the imagined greeting upon entering the pearly gates to you. Music is never objective. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
So, then, what do The Go! Team sound like? Three days after seeing the British six-piece live, I still barely have an answer.
The closest I can get to describing The Go! Team is, as I said to Carlos a day after the show, "like The Avalanches if they started a punk band."
Remember the Avalanches? It was (and, I believe, still is) this DJ crew from Australia (or was it New Zealand? I can't remember and this stupid library computer won't load the webpage) who recorded an album entirely from samples entitled Since I Left You. The album was full of soulful dancefloor dreams and seemed poised to break in the U.S. as it did elsewhere, but then electroclash happened and the Strokes happened and the Avalanches fell off of hipster radar in favor of a bunch of decidedly less creative New Yorkers. (Sorry, dear friends in NYC.)
Imagine that style of cut'n'paste funk performed live by three boys and three girls onstage at the sold-out Troubadour in West Hollywood in the midst of a heatwave so intense that, if we're lucky, the temperature might drop to 80 degrees at night.
It was a night of trying to dance while pushed back against sweat-soaked walls, of moving to excuse passers-by in a rhythm similar to the double drums. Singer Ninja is the energetic force of the band. Dressed in cut-off jeans, an orange tank top and green knee socks, she moved about as if the oppressive weather had not affected her in the least. She looks like she might have been a gymnast as some point, short and very muscular with moves like a snapped rubber band. By the end of the set, she had the entire crowd waving towards the ceiling to expose sweat-stained armpits.
With so many days passing between the show and this update, I honestly cannot remember which songs were played, although I'm inclined to think that most of the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike made it into the performance, including a twee secret track sung by drummer Chi Fukami Taylor.