Results tagged “Pilot Light” from Live Like This

Despite the downpours, a sizeable crowd turned out to Pilot Light on Saturday night for L.A.'s Best Coast and Brooklyn's Cults. (It was also Pilot Light owner Jason Boardman's birthday). Starting at around 9:30 p.m., a noticeably younger audience that included several out-of-towners (I met a couple from Michigan and a group from Kentucky) filed down Jackson Avenue and
quickly filled the club to capacity an hour before the show even got started. In an
effort to deal with the crowd, Cults took the stage at an uncharacteristically early 10:30 p.m. (for Pilot Light) and overshadow the "permanently chill" Best Coast; Cults lead singer Madeline Follin
energetically danced around the stage as she performed the group's happy-go-lucky pop.
--Carey Hodges

Knoxville's Ampient Music, a free-floating collaboration of drone, sound art, and other noises that ask for a lot of patience, is moving into Pilot Light tonight for an early show. The group generally includes Todd Steed, John T. Baker, George Middlebrooks, Carl Snow, Toby Applegate, and a few others. Find out more here, and there's discussion at KnoxBlab too. (There's a free download of the Knoxville Is Ampient compilation at the bottom of the page.) Tonight's show starts at 8 p.m., cover is $3. 

Best Coast, the hazy beach-pop L.A. duo that's getting all kinds of attention from Pitchfork etc. and is scheduled, according to Pollstar, to play at Pilot Light on Sept. 11, has made its upcoming debut album Crazy for You, available for streaming at the Urban Outfitters website. The disc is due on July 27. It sounds pretty good so far. 

Last week the Rossini Festival street fair and productions by both Knoxville Opera and UT Opera Theatre made for a busy weekend. There's just as much to do this weekend.

• Walking With the Dinosaurs at Thompson-Boling Arena on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday--as close as your going to get to seeing real-life dinosaurs anytime soon

• Indie-folk singer Josephine Foster (above) at Pilot Light tonight at 10 p.m. On her most recent album, Graphic as a Star, Foster has set several Emily Dickinson poems to music.

• UT's annual spring concert, Volapalooza, moves from Fraternity Row to World's Fair Park this year with electro-pop group Passion Pit, Celtic rockers Flogging Molly, and novelty rapper Asher Roth. The concert starts at 7 p.m. tonight. Tickets are free for UT students, $15 for everybody else.

• Mitch Easter, the guy who produced the first two R.E.M. albums with Don Dixon and fronted the classic North Carolina college rock band Let's Active for most of the 1980s, is playing at Barley's Taproom on Saturday night. The Tim Lee 3 and Angela Faye Martin, whose new album Pictures From Home was one of the last projects Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous worked on before committing suicide in March, are opening.

• Self-deprecating TV comedian Kathy Griffin is performing two shows at the Tennessee Theatre on Saturday. The first show, at 7 p.m., is already sold out, but tickets are still available for the 9 p.m. set. The performances are being recorded for an upcoming special on Bravo. 

Way back in 1998, I saw Modest Mouse and Stinking Lizaveta at some long-gone club in Atlanta. At the time it was a brilliant match--MM was touring in support of The Lonesome Crowded West, still their best album, and its rigid grooves and jagged guitar riffs fit well up against SL's tornado of heavy, jazzed-up post-punk.

Since then, Modest Mouse has become a gigantic pop crossover band--"Float On" is a great single, but it doesn't compare favorably to The Lonesome Crowded West--and now a veteran early-'00s legacy act. Stinking Lizaveta are still bruising around the country, playing small clubs to small audiences. Their most recent album, Sacrifice and Bliss, is a minor masterwork of what's been called "doom jazz." Both are coming to town in the next few months: Modest Mouse at the Valarium on July 18 (tickets are $35) and Stinking Lizaveta at Pilot Light (their 15th show there!) on May 11 (admission is $6). 

It's been a rough year for San Francisco art black-metal band Ludicra, who are scheduled to play with Argentinum Astrum at Pilot Light on Friday, April 23. First, the band's spring tour with Mayhem was canceled just weeks before it was set to start, leaving Ludicra and tour mates Krallice and Tombs scrambling to fill in alternate dates. (That's how Ludicra got booked in Knoxville.)

Then, last weekend, guitarist John Corbett (also of Hammers of Misfortune and the totally great, unheralded Slough Feg) suffered a burst appendix on the second date of the De-Cancellation Tour in Olympia, Wash. He's still there, but the band's continuing as a quartet until Corbett can rejoin them, so it looks like the Knoxville date is still on, at least for now.

You can find information on how to donate to Corbett's medical bills here.

Ludicra's fourth album, The Tenant, has just been released on Profound Lore. 

The rain actually seems appropriate this morning, even if it is coming down way harder than it needs to to set a somber, elegiac mood. Yesterday just kept ratcheting up to the buzzsaw blur of Liturgy and Gang Gang Dance's slinky, ritualistic dance party, and today feels like it should be spent with some quieter music.

I took a short break after Dirty Projectors, then headed back to the Old City for Konk Pack. The improv trio--a Frankenstein monster keyboard, drums, and a weird inside-out elctric guitar, laid out on a tabletop like a lap steel--started slow, and the group's free playing takes some orientation, but a third of the way in it started to click. By the end it was a beautiful swirl of noise, playful, just this side of chaotic, and a thrilling example of what Big Ears still offers besides marquee indie rock.

At this point I'd decided that the Big Ears Annex had been fruitful enough that I was just going to stay in the Old City. I skipped some potentially rewarding, even lifetime-enriching-type shows--Terry Riley's pipe organ concert, William Basinski and Ben Frost, Bang on a Can and Riley at the Tennessee, throw in Joanna Newsom if you want to--for Pilot Light's metal lineup. Warband's retro thrash sounded tighter than it did the last time I saw them (and it's fun to pick out the band's obvious influences--I spotted riffs straight from Metallica's "Whiplash," "Seek and Destroy," and "For Whom the Bell Tolls," as well as a double-time coda copped from Iron Maiden's "Hallowed Be Thy Name"). Argentinum Astrum has added substantial black metal influence to their doom/sludge, presumably since the arrival of new bassist Emily Robinson, formerly of Tenderhooks. An interesting departure, but I think I preferred the old Burning Witch style more. Something to watch.

Warband and A.A. brought in lots of people for Liturgy's second show of the day. The band just kills--great songs, tight as a drum, and the sight of cherubic-looking singer/guitarist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix shrieking his lungs out is something else. I really do appreciate that Big Ears recognizes the genuine artistic merit of metal.

 

Akron/Family are asking fans to contribute home-recorded version's of their new song "Woody Guthrie's America," which has reportedly become the set-ending song on the band's current tour, which stops at Pilot Light on Feb. 28.

They've posted a handful of fan-submitted video and audio clips of the song here.

More Big Ears additions just announced: the international guitar/synth/percussion improv trio Konk Pack, made up of Henry Cow's Tim Hodgkinson, Thomas Lehn, and Roger Turner, and New York art-black metal band Liturgy.

Both have recently played in Knoxville. Konk Pack was at Pilot Light in 2007, and Liturgy played a blistering, exhilarating set at the Birdhouse last fall.

Bear in Heaven are coming to Pilot Light with Cymbals Eat Guitars (named Best New Brooklyn Band of 2009 by the Village Voice) on March 10. They have a couple of new songs from their new album, Beast Rest Forth Mouth, available online.

mp3: Bear in Heaven, "Lovesick Teenagers" from Beast Rest Forth Mouth (Hometapes, 2009)
mp3: Bear in Heaven, "Wholehearted Mess" from Beast Rest Forth Mouth (Hometapes, 2009)

UPDATE: Actually, Pujol's show seems to have been canceled. It's a good bet, however, that he'll be back soon.




Nashville singer/songwriter Daniel Pujol, who the Nashville Scene included in its feature "10 Artists to Watch in 2010" last week, is playing at Pilot Light on Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Scene writer D. Patrick Rodgers says of Pujol, who plays Knoxville frequently:

When talking to Daniel Pujol, it becomes swiftly apparent that he's one of those musicians for whom creating art is less a sweet way of passing the time and more an active expression in what it means to be, like, human and stuff. Could it be that this artist in the populous stable of local D.I.Y. punkers known as Infinity Cat is a part of that all-too-rare breed? You know, the breed of musicians who are politically informed and culturally conscientious?

Synth-pop bands Cold Cave and Nite Jewel got stuck in the snow in Washington, D.C., on Saturday and couldn't make it into Knoxville for their scheduled show at Pilot Light. Never mind, though--local duo Damaged Patients more than filled in the headlining spot with their public debut.





Damaged Patients--the enigmatic Jennifer Toland on vocals, Ben Tramer on drums, and a preset synth--performed a short 20-minute set of nearly a dozen very brief songs that channeled both Joy Division and classic 4AD bands like the Cocteau Twins. Toland sang in a flattened but not quite emotionless voice over melancholy synth lines while Tramer banged a steady, heavy martial beat with mallets on a tom/snare/cymbal set-up and two separate video screens showed a close-up of Toland's mouth as she sang and a wide-open human eyeball.

A sizable crowd had come to the show, presumably to see Cold Cave and Nite Jewel--one group had, in fact, driven up from Florida to see them--but got way more than their money's worth from Damaged Patients. (Never mind that there was no cover.)

Cold Cave, the noisy Philadelphia electro-pop band that's gone totally '80s on their new album Love Comes Close, have just released a new video for the song "Life Magazine." The band, featuring members and ex-members of Xiu Xiu, Prurient, and American Nightmare, is playing at Pilot Light on Saturday, Feb. 6, with Nite Jewel and locals Damaged Patients. 

Cold Cave "Life Magazine" from Focus Creeps on Vimeo.

Will Fist's Three Man Band has been added to the bill for Thursday's concert by the Whigs at the Bijou Theatre. Royal Bangs are opening. It's almost certainly the first time a Whisk-Hutzel band will play the Bijou. The collective of lo-fi projects led by Fist typically plays Pilot Light.

Andrew Clayman wrote about the Whigs the last time they came through town.

mp3: Royal Bangs, "B&E" from Let It Beep (2009)

Up-and-coming indie dance-pop stars Cold Cave and Nite Jewel are coming to Pilot Light next weekend. They're playing with the similarly minded local duo Damaged Patients on Saturday, Feb. 6.

Cold Cave's full-length debut, Love Comes Close, was released last year, then reissued by Matador. The three-piece band from Philadelphia is led by Wesley Eisold and includes Caralee McElroy, formerly of Xiu Xiu, and Dominick Fernow of Prurient.





photo by Jayme Thornton

Mp3: Cold Cave, "Laurels of Erotomania" from Love Comes Close (Matador, 2009)

The chaotic local pop collective formerly known as I Need Sleep is now going by the name Bald Eagle Refugees. They're making their debut at Pilot Light on Thursday, Jan. 28, with the Royal Bangs side project Cool Runnings. It's also a benefit for a friend of the band from Austin, Texas, who's been in a coma since she was hit by a car while riding her bike on New Year's Eve; all the proceeds from the show will be donated to her family for medical expenses.

Buzzed-about New York band Cymbals Eat Guitars, whose debut album Why There Are Mountains got some notice back in the spring, has announced a show at Pilot Light on March 10 with Bear in Heaven. The group's ramshackle, raggedy, and catchy indie rock recalls '90s artists like Pavement and Archers of Loaf. (It's not terribly surprising that they started out as a Weezer cover band.) And the Village Voice named them the Best New Brooklyn Band of 2009. 

Hot Horse, a new record/music equipment/etc. store in the Old City, is officially open for business. There's a substantial selection of new and used vinyl from Lost and Found Records and ex-Raven Records owner Jay Nations. Most of it's standard old vinyl so far, with just a few collectible or exotic items on the shelves, but more is on the way.





There are also music instruments and gear--a few guitars and amps, strings, some accessories and oddball vintage keyboards--and some vintage clothing and home stuff fromthe recently closed Legacy.

The store's a joint venture among Nations, Lost and Found, Legacy, and Music Room Guitars, and Jason Boardman of Pilot Light, which just happens to be right next door. (So if you break a drumstick on stage you know where to get a replacement.)

Hours seem to be noon to 10 p.m.

Teenage Love (officially Teenage Love13 these days) will be celebrating 25 years together on Jan. 9 at Pilot Light. That's a quarter century of Rus Harper pulling his pants down to a soundtrack of scary punk. 

It's a big weekend in Knoxville:

• The James Agee Film Festival starts tonight at the East Tennessee History Center and continues tomorrow at the Square Room and Sunday at the Bijou Theatre. Lots and lots of details courtesy MP editor Coury Turczyn here.

• Jonathan Sexton has a release show for his new CD New Day at the Square Room tonight with his band the Big Love Choir.

• The first Knoxville Horror Film Fest is tonight at Pilot Light.

• KSO at the Tennessee Theatre tonight.

• Comedian D.L. Hughley at Sidespltters Comedy Club.

• Angel Zuniga Martinez, formerly of Angel and the Love Mongers and long overdue for some MP coverage, is playing at Preservation Pub tonight with Kevin Hyfantis and Matt Urmy.

• Get an intro to Knoxville Rock Girls Camp at the Birdhouse on Saturday afternoon.

• Brewers' Jam at World's Fair Park on Saturday.

• Local deathcore kings Whitechapel at the Valarium.