by Stranger Things To Do Staff
The leaves are changing, the temperatures are lowering, and the doomsday possibility that Trump may become president is impending. Leave your apartment and enjoy the live music this town has to offer before our planet spontaneously explodes in November. We've got everything for your discerning sonic palette, from the jazz legacy of black greatness, to Bob Dylan's archnemesis, to as close as you can get to being inside of an episode of Stranger Things. Check out our music calendar for more options.
OCTOBER 10
Black Breath, Hissing, Of Corpse
For the past 11 years, Black Breath have been on a ferocious tear. When I first caught on to them back in 2007, they were punishing local eardrums in Bellingham bars. They quickly rose to the top of the Northwest metal scene and shortly thereafter gained traction on a global basis. After releasing three crushing albums on the heavy-hitting Southern Lord label to critical acclaim, touring extensively throughout the world, and decimating audiences with their signature crunch, care of the almighty Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal Pedal, Black Breath have proven themselves to be the kings of Northwest metal. KEVIN DIERS
Earshot Jazz: Freddy Cole Trio
Sway to the great Freddy's Cole's swingy piano and oaky baritone (yes, he's from that family of Coles), as Randy Napoleon and Elias Bailey back him up on guitar and bass.
OCTOBER 11
Ex-Cult, Power, Night Boss
Memphis quintet Ex-Cult have plundered a rich vein of post-punk bleakness and wrenched it for powerful results over the last four years. Their music has the peculiar effect of making you feel exhilarated even as it radiates a gnawing hopelessness. Anger is an energy, as Sir John Lydon observed in PiL’s “Rise,” and Ex-Cult have embraced that paradigm and forged a poised, coiled attack over three albums. Their songs rock with a grim imperative, yet they remain as exciting as a military coup. That merits respect and admiration. DAVE SEGAL
Glass Animals
Seemingly overnight, Glass Animals became a massive pop juggernaut, with scores of fans screaming their buzzy hit-list lyrics. Their multilayered indie rock appeals to many, as they attempt to pull in more than just their own sonic history on their latest album, How to Be A Human Being.
Gojira with Tesseract
French metal troupe Gojira have a lot on their mind. Alternately eco-conscious and wellness-seeking lyrics punctuate their songs, as do guitarist and singer Joe Duplantier’s private fascinations with whales, Japanese mythology, and, on their new album Magma, Yellowstone Park. Gojira’s songs, by contrast, don’t skimp on down-tuned bludgeoning. Duplantier’s signature pick squeals and dive bombs offer enough flavor to make their music stand out from an overall same-y genre. The approach has served them well, as Gojira opened for Metallica not long ago. And while their last album, L’Enfant Sauvage, dragged on a little too much, Magma is stacked front-to-back with singles. JOSEPH SCHAFER
OCTOBER 12
!!! with Drug Apts
Sure, !!! are an entertaining live entity whether in a club or on an outdoor festival stage or in your buddy’s basement. Yes, their sinewy, sleek funk and disco jams and freaky frontman Nic Offer’s wry exhortations have been getting folks moving since the late ’90s. True, they have an album called As If that keeps the party vibes efficiently flowing, with some of their nastiest bass lines yet. DAVE SEGAL
Brujeria, Cattle Decapitation, Piñata Protest, A God or Another, Xoth
From Cannibal Corpse’s cartoonish gore to Amon Amarth’s Tolkien worship, fantasy looms large in the world of heavy metal. In the most effective cases, fact and fiction blur together. For years, people weren’t sure if the elusive grindcore band Brujeria were legit Mexican drug traffickers. But once the band finally brought their songs celebrating Pablo Escobar and Adolfo Constanzo to the stage, Brujeria’s membership affiliations with acts like Fear Factory, Napalm Death, and Faith No More dispelled the myth. Knowing the truth might be part of the reason their new album Pocho Aztlan doesn’t quite match the raw unbridled intensity of early offerings like Matando Güeros or the ¡Machetazos! EP, but like so many great metal bands, basking in the fantasy lends some added weight to the punishing riffs. BRIAN COOK
James Blake with Moses Sumney
Talk about a show with bass. The last time I saw Londoner James Blake in concert, I felt like I should tip the masseuse. But Blake’s low-end technique hits more like a ton of feathers than a ton of hot stones. His production, which often builds off of his tender piano playing, swells with vocal layering and subtle dub rhythms, softening studio fuzz as he bends challenging loops into pieces of melody, before you even notice the tremendous bass throb forming below. Blake’s studio mastery and handsome voice (like a less cheesy Sam Smith) has invited collaborations with everyone from Beyoncé and RZA and Vince Staples to Frank Ocean and Bon Iver. The Blakester’s latest, this year’s The Colour in Anything, finds him stretching from his usual melancholy moods toward the colorful world beyond. TODD HAMM
Kikagaku Moyo, Kingdom of the Holy Sun, Julia Dream, Weeed
After collaborations with Kinski and Moon Duo, plus four critically acclaimed albums, Tokyo’s Kikagaku Moyo (“Geometric Patterns”) aren’t likely to play a local venue as intimate as the Sunset Tavern again, so this is a rare opportunity. On their latest long-player, House in the Tall Grass, the quintet constructs a mesmerizing acid-folk edifice with delicacy and restraint. The gentle vocals of cofounders Go Kurosawa (drums) and Tomo Katsurada (guitar) fade in and out as sitar and theremin swirl around them. Then, when they’ve got you where they want you, relaxed and open, they set their guitars to stun—the better to give your pleasure center a generous zap. Since Can and Black Sabbath never formed a super group: Kikagaku Moyo are the next best thing. KATHY FENNESSY
S U R V I V E with Majuere
Need a career boost, musicians? Just do the soundtrack for a scorching-hot TV show. Voilà, deep media penetration—even if you’re a synth-oriented ambient group, like Austin quartet S U R V I V E. They’ve rocketed to notoriety and Rolling Stone coverage with their retro-futurist drones and tingling motifs for Stranger Things. S U R V I V E are also supporting a new album for Relapse titled RR7349. It’s a solid collection of well-manicured synthesizer compositions that breaks no new ground nor adds new colors to the air. An understated melodrama courses through its nine tracks, but S U R V I V E are no Tangerine Dream. Do get to the Croc early for Seattle’s prolific analog synthesist Panabrite (Norm Chambers), who offers a more varied tonal palette and conjures deeper atmospheres in his ambient music. DAVE SEGAL
The Garden, So Pitted, Heyrocco
Shape-shifting Orange County punk duo The Garden is a vehicle in which twin brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears continuously attempt to defy categorization, despite their own self-established 'Vada Vada' genre. The mercurial Shears boys will be joined by local dungeon-scuzzers So Pitted, and Heyrocco.
Ying Yang Twins, Bezzel, Lil Rip, DJ Indica Jones
Atlanta’s Ying Yang Twins are best known for their platinum early-’00s work with two huge ATL tastemakers: iconic crunk choirmaster Lil Jon and the man who brought the world Soulja Boy, Mr. Collipark (aka DJ Smurf). While “Get Low” and “Salt Shaker” are C-word classics, it’s the snap/“intimate club” landmark “The Whisper Song” that’s endured far better (it even got bitten by David Banner’s “Play” within months of release). LARRY MIZELL JR
OCTOBER 13
Andy Meyers (The Scenics), Critte & The Borzoi
How lucky are we to get treated to a rare solo performance from Andy Meyers, guitarist of the mid-’70s Toronto group the Scenics? It should be interesting to hear Meyers’s solo translations of the Scenics’ jams; they were a punk group, but, while having the period’s rawness, they locked into a more artful punk sound. Their sizzle has the shimmer of Television’s melodic clang and the Velvet Underground’s expansiveness. While tonight’s show is a solo event, it will, I suspect, be a continuation of support for In the Summer, a collection of late-’70s recordings that Light in the Attic released earlier this year. Rounding out the evening is the shoegazey electro-pop of locals Critté and the Borzoi. MIKE NIPPER
Audion, Ramiro of Uniting Souls, Nark
Matthew Dear’s hard-techno alias Audion has always been the source of my favorite material by him. For over a decade, the former Ann Arbor, Michigan, producer/DJ/vocalist has created a canon—including the great 2016 LP Alpha on !K7—overflowing with psychedelic bangers that are stripped down, hypnotic, and lubricious as fuck. (Pro tip: This is superior sex music, but you’d best have stamina to keep up with its hectic pace.) Dear hoards his most outrageous and odd sounds for the Audion project, and his production technique spikes way off the scales of club-music status quo, even when heard on MP3. Now imagine how his studly techno will sound on a big sound system. Take some birth control to Neumos tonight. DAVE SEGAL
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
The big event of this year’s Earshot Jazz Festival is certainly the brilliant and famous trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. He will perform with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. We can expect nothing but greatness from this event. And not just greatness but black greatness. And not just black greatness, but a history of that greatness. What do I mean by this?
Remember, Wynton Marsalis once criticized black Americans for not aggressively supporting America’s classical (black based) music, and continuing the tradition of greatness that’s exemplified by recordings like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Charles Mingus’ Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and Duke Ellington’s Black Brown and Beige. His massive and gorgeous Blood On the Fields—which was released in 1997 and won a Pulitzer Prize—represented his Herculean effort to continue this black-neglected tradition of black greatness. But as a jazz critic at Amazon.com, Andrew Barlett, put it: “Marsalis won the Pulitzer Prize for Blood in 1997, decades after Ellington should've won for any of two or three suite-length works.” In short, the project was not about continuity or even the revival of a tradition. It was instead condemned to be an archeology or history of black greatness.
Wynton Marsalis is great, and so is the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, but the age of black greatness is, sadly, in the past. Nevertheless, you must not miss this show.
CHARLES MUDEDE
Kero Kero Bonito
J-pop meets Britpop meets 8-bit meets dancehall! How does such a swirl go about swirling, you might well ask. Well, Sarah Midori Perry sings and raps in both Japanese and English, and while I can’t vouch for her Japanese accent, she sounds cute and sometimes slightly standoffish in both languages. Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled—with the beats and melodies—like the Casio, throw in plenty of noises from nonexistent video games, love Windows 98 (I sure hope that’s a joke), and remind us that it’s okay to be yourself and not what society wants you to be. Damn. Looks like we still need as much of that as we can get. ANDREW HAMLIN
McCoy Tyner
At 77, McCoy Tyner’s been to all of the mountains a jazz musician’s supposed to survey, although admittedly he got a tremendous boost when John Coltrane picked him in 1960 for the classic Coltrane quartet. Alas, Coltrane, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones left the earth before Tyner, leaving him the only one to testify, musically, about those times. Not that Tyner is at all stuck in the past. A recent video clip shows him leaning over the keyboard, summoning a storm, not at all quiet, thick clouds of sustained runs running and roiling through the air, dissipating just a few touches to let his sidemen in. Then back he comes, sweeping them up in what he’s made. ANDREW HAMLIN (Through October 16)
OCTOBER 14
Califone, Slow Moses, Ghosts I've Met
Born out of the ashes of Red Red Meat—who made a hearty meal out of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet and consequently excreted some crucial, distorted country blues of their own—Califone have ascended to the summit of American roots music by twisting said style until it’s contorted into fascinating shapes. Their 18-year career’s marked by a steady stream of rickety, rural blues rock that accrues pathos through surprising musique concrète elements, dustily noble melodies, and Tim Rutili’s world-weary, forlorn drawl, which I’ve described as sounding “like a septuagenarian emphysema sufferer.” Most US roots bands fail to move me, but Califone possess the bent compositional nous and textural adventurousness to make familiar tropes sound fresh again. DAVE SEGAL
Cold War Kids, The Strumbellas
California's Cold War Kids attempt to stay modern in the face of the world of contemplative indie rock, sounding like "a mellowed, second-generation Wolf Parade," emerging from the blinding sun of Los Angeles.
Ghost, Marissa Nadler
Take one glance at the skeleton face paint and pope regalia adorning lead vocalist Papa Emeritus and the spooky mouthless demon masks of the five nameless ghouls beside him onstage, and one might assume Ghost play brutal, deafening death metal. In reality, they have more in common musically with a band like Blue Öyster Cult than, say, Morbid Angel. Their melodic yet Satanic anthems have earned the mysterious Swedish band quite the following, as they’ve transcended their underground cult status, transitioning into their spot as the coolest damn thing on commercial rock radio. KEVIN DIERS
Grouplove, MUNA, Dilly Dally
California indie poppers Grouplove utilize that Angeleno charm in creating highly palatable chart-toppers for the high-energy festival masses. They're joined by MUNA and Dilly Dally.
Tokyoidaho, Voyager One, The Knast, Fotoform
Tonight’s the final show for Seattle psych-rockers Tokyoidaho. For the last half decade, they tapped into a cool, sleek vein of Anglophile rock that peaked in the early ’90s with groups like Ride and the Verve. Tokyoidaho’s songs have instantly amiable hooks, but they can also trance out on an epic scale, as “Deep Cushions” proves. They bow out supporting their new album, The Void (on local label Neon Sigh), a slightly more electronic take on their interstellar rock, with a surprisingly solid dub tangent. I’ll miss these guys. Tonight also marks the one-off reunion of Voyager One (featuring Tokyoidaho’s Peter Marchese), one of this city’s exemplars of spacey, oneiric rock from the ’00s. DAVE SEGAL
Yo-Yo Ma Plays Haydn
Classical music icon and the world's most famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma joins the Seattle Symphony for an intimate evening that is sure to be powerfully affecting, considering Ma's long and storied career. Enjoy a set that pulls from his ninety-plus albums and over fifty years of international performances.
OCTOBER 15
Donovan
Adored English folkie Donovan will be in town this weekend for two nights of his Sunshine Superman 50th anniversary tour. After a remarkably prolific and successful run of American Top 40 singles between 1964 and 1969, Donovan became one of the period’s best-loved folk/pop icons. And those songs, while well-written, well-arranged, and chart-friendly, were often drizzled with flashes of periodic lysergic imagery and occasional fuzz guitar; I can only imagine the aplomb on AM radio when a track like “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” perhaps, would follow anything by, say, Rosemary Clooney. God damn. As for his current live show, the set lists I’ve seen cover all his hits and some of his close misses, like “Barabajagal.” MIKE NIPPER (Through October 16)
Geist & The Sacred Ensemble, Alto!, Arrington de Dionyso, Katsura Yamauchi
Portland trio Alto! deal in mantric repetition within a (kraut)rock context. Through motorik rhythms, heavily FX’d guitars, and noisy, Allen Ravenstine–like keyboard ornamentation, Alto! ramrod you into submission in a most ecstatic manner. However, on their latest full-length, LP3, they swerve into a warped, quasi-gamelan soundworld and concoct more intricate, interlocking rhythms while also deviating into stoner metal. It’s a strange, exotic record that should appeal to fans of the Sublime Frequencies and Abduction labels. Saxophonist/vocalist Arrington de Dionyso constructs utterly compelling outré rock and drones informed by Indonesian music and throat-singing techniques that make it seem like his voice is emanating from the earth’s core. He’s an upsetting force of nature. Geist & the Sacred Ensemble take Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds to a remote forest and scare the crap out of ’em with their stark, merciless psychedelic folk. DAVE SEGAL
Poster Children with Kinski
Smart, jangular indie rockers Poster Children may have fallen into obscurity with the late-’90s alt-rock apocalypse, but their peaks—1993’s Tool of the Man and 1995’s Junior Citizen—combine some of the best parts of ’90s indie rock: Silkworm-esque collegiate nerd anthems, Shudder to Think–ish depraved-yet-bookish experimentation, Versus-y, sepia-toned Guess ad moodiness. Poster Children—who formed in 1987—possessed a similar aesthetic to Hum, fellow space-gazed, introspective Champaign, Illinois, residents (whose bassist, Jeff Dimpsey, played guitar on Poster Children’s Daisychain Reaction). On more recent records, things get less spacey and more brash; 2004’s No More Songs is brighter and more assertive, over-caffeinated punk pop that’s largely hit-or-miss. However, this tour is in support of the new reissue of 1991’s swirling breakthrough record Daisychain Reaction, which means tonight should please nostalgia-seekers and late-passers alike with big guitars and soft-grungy, daisy-studded riffs. BRITTNIE FULLER
Saint Vitus, The Skull, Witch Mountain, Ancient Warlocks
American doom-metal group Saint Vitus never got the recognition they deserved when they were active in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when they missed the boat on three major commercial rock trends (hair metal, thrash metal, grunge) that shared their hard-on for Black Sabbath. These days, though, Saint Vitus have been championed as songwriters and masters of atmosphere. Traces of their DNA can be heard in bands like Pallbearer, Seattle’s own Bell Witch, and Witch Mountain, who are opening their tour. This time around, Saint Vitus are touring with their original lead singer, Scott Reagers (the band is most well-known for working with Scott “Wino” Weinrich). Come early to see the Skull, featuring original members of fellow Doom progenitors Trouble. JOSEPH SCHAFER
OCTOBER 16
Earshot Jazz: Music and Art / CMD
At The Stranger, we don't throw around words like "genius" lightly, but Kris Bowers is a friggin' genius. Just listen to his shimmery playing on Heroes and Misfits, which draws on everyone from Oscar Peterson to Ligeti and then adds birdsong. He has composed documentary film scores and played on a Jay-Z/Kanye West album, so he's not shy about delving into different genres and media. NONVisuals joins him for a synesthetic jam. Ivan Arteaga opens this Earshot evening with the CMD (Computer, Music, Dance) project.