Los Tikkilyches y Los Schwamigos
Fox and Goose, Sacramento Aug. 7th and Marcos Cafe, Columa CA, Aug. 9th.
Los Tikkilyches are a five piece from Sayulita, Mexico that describe themselves as “latin-surf-funk-rockin’soul-reggae fusion” who played recently with a Sacramento funky trio, The Scwamigos for two beautiful nights of eclectic musical maestrosity.
Los Tikkilyches play in all the restaurants and bars in and around Puerto Vallarta and they’re bringing their significant musical chops to the Western States for a couple months of rampant touring and tearing it up.
Both bands played their lights out in two venues the weekend of Aug. 7-9 and demonstrated true musical transcendence. Schwa Monley, bassist for Schwamigos, is nearly as much fun to watch as he is to hear, with the funk happening on a grand scale. Alejandro on drums and Hunter as frontman scoop up the funky vibe and groove to unheard of heights.
In the Tikkilyches, we got Alyssa Adams on keys and vocals with the beautiful grace and style. She harmonizes with Julia Blumenthal on guitar while Jonas Brewer holds down the lows and the beautiful flute solos and works his hair and his chilled out beatific personality pretty good as well. There’s a new guy on drums, Chad Sylva who’s worked out his amazing chops in Nashville for the last ten or twenty years. His fills are so clean they bring a tear to the eye. And then forget
Los Tikkilyces
about the guitar player, Jess Edmondson, if you’re worried about crying because his tasty guitar leads and solos fill the air with enough creamy goodness to fill the tear coffers of the most industrious tear merchant. Lightning fast and graceful is an understatement and it’s enough to turn everyone’s body into “one giant ear” according to the musician himself. Plus, the beard alone is worth the price of admission.
They got the whole glorious crowd gyrating exponentially and feverishly and nobody wanted it to stop. It was so frenetic my nice digital camera flew apart into a million pieces spontaneously and luckily nobody got hurt. Russ flew himself to the floor once, but made a graceful recovery, moved to his left and kept eveyone’s groove alive. We all felt gloriously alive and swam down the rapids of love and nostalgia until the next show. 
Catch their tour right here: wooooo!
May 2009
Check out these shows…
May 7th:
The Illness, Cloakwheel, Headshear – Kimo’s
Spectrum, The Entrance Band – Great American Music Hall
April 2009
Handpicked shows in San Francisco, constantly updated, come back often…
Parlor Mob, Sassy!!!, Satin Peaches Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $10, Thursday April 23rd.
Headshear, Fractal, David Knight – Hotel Utah, Saturday 04/18/09
Floater, Dolorata, Sticks And Stones- Bottom of the Hill, Saturday 04/18/09
Black Keys, Thee Makeout Party Fox Theater. 8pm, $30, Saturday 04/18/09
Mastodon, Kylesa, Intronaut Great American Music Hall. 7:30pm, sold out, Sunday 04/19/09
Fleet Foxes, Blitzen Trapper Fox Theater. 8pm, $22.50, Tuesday 04/21/09
Hotel Utah Sat. 04/17/09
Headshear, Fractal, David Knight – Hotel Utah
Jackscrew Player
Jackscrew is GT, Lørth Samuelsson ünd Joe Boojjer. They are a neo-arena rock band for San Francisco, California.
From s/t by Jackscrew.
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From Five Live Demos:
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From Bone Conduction, by jackscrew
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Jackscrew on the roof
T-Model Ford and Gravel Road, Ferocious Few, Ramshackle Romeos – Thee Parkside, 03/29/09
My girlfriend dumped me today so it was a good time to listen to the Blues.
Real, authentic, deep South, Delta Blues coming to you from the luminary label Fat Possum. This was T-Model Ford. Eighty Eight years old and a reported 23 little Ford’s to his name. That’s got to be a classic.
Francisco Fernandez, from the opener Ferocious Few called out his name and pointed to the diminutive man sitting on the side with his cane waiting patiently to go on.
“I’m a legend!” he announced. Classic.
T-Model Ford
Getting dumped is a bummer. But it’s a bummer tinged with realism and that’s what the blues are about. It’s a bunch of sad chords, set with a bunch of sad and lonely and resigned lyrics, but there’s an optimism and energy to the structure and to the rhythm. We’re all fucked, it says, but we’re all in it together so we may as well dance, drink, fuck and have a good time.
So I was listening, loosening up, drinking Thee Parkside’s famous Blue Collar Special (shot of Jameson and a PBR) two fisted of course and the feeling was coming back. From an incredible sadness I went into a kind of reverie and then I hit on this girl that turned out to be my friend’s new girlfriend. Oops! Worse things have happened and now we were all good friends.
I even started flirting, by text, with my ex. Maybe we weren’t done after all. As long as there’s the blues, there’s a glimmer of hope.
T-Model has a creaky broken guitar sound that he fingerpicks and drones and he plays exclusively in the key of E. That’s apparently all he knows. He only picked up a guitar at the age of 58. And now he sounds like the back side of Heaven. “I’m a chicken head man,” or “She asked me, so I told her.” Classic.
Between every song he announced, “It’s Jack Daniels time!” and he took a slug.
Nothing sad about this man. He was having the time of his life and you could tell he had that same time of his life every night. This was not the embittered, embattled picture of the stereotyped black bluesman from the South.
He watched my friend’s girl twirling her hips to the beat right in front of the stage and licked his chops. He wasn’t afraid.
Twenty four was right around the corner.
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This week!
Don’t miss this! Saturday, Mar. 28th at the Elbo Room.
Monotonix(from Israel)
Triclops
Lumerians
Tricops! has been tearing it up. Their last show, at the El Rio with Schlong, was an event. Johnny had his shoe lights conking into my head all night and Christian’s axe was wielding in full force even though his Orange head was as dead as blond Cylon. Monotonix, from Tel Aviv, are “untarnished” according to their Myspace page. I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to find out this Saturday.
The next night, Sunday Mar. 29th at Thee Parkside, brings the Ferocious Few opening up for T-Model Ford of Fat Possum Records. FPR is one of those white guy outfits that mines the Mississippi Delta for legit Blues legends and T-Model is one of those with tunes like, “She asked me, so I told her”, sung over and over.
The Ferocious Few are a young, two piece band to watch. I got word that they had a great experience at SXSW this year, having played 15 shows, including their trademarked ‘find a loose electrical outlet dangling from a tree, plug in and play for five hours and sell 100 CDs at 7-10 bucks apiece.’ While other bands are struggling to break even these two hucksters have gone back to basics and are teaching us a thing or two about grass roots capitalism. The music doesn’t suck either. They play together (Francisco Fernandez and Daniel Aguilar) so much that they’re like a Swiss watch of tempo synchronicity. After the show Francisco goes back to sleep in the back of his ’71 Cadillac Hearse (white) or stays up all night and schmoozes with the locals. The buzz is starting. You heard it here first.
Moped at Amnesia, Mar. 7th
I discovered Moped the day before the show.
As any of my readers know, I’m a diehard guitar based, power trio, rock ‘n roll mayhem kind of noise connoisseur, but I’ve been branching out lately into, of all things, the Chill station on satellite’s Sirius XM. It’s a matter of simple pragmatics. I can’t get any work done while I’m listening to anything with too many lyrics or a melody. It’s just too distracting. And you can forget about the usually tantalizing guitar solo – way too captivating. So seamless, nauseating Downtempo it is for most of my day.
So that’s what I’ve become (during the mean spirited work-aday period between 9 and 5) and I’ve quickly found rationalizations for this seemingly mindless, vapidly over-aged genre. “It’s the future of music,” I’ll find myself saying. “Yes, I know it’s a warmed over, passionless turd, but at least it’s trying to use modern instruments (sometimes) in a format that’s not always confined to the dance floor. It actually mixes nice new synthesizer technology with traditional analogue instruments and even strays into truly International and World sounds. Zoics! There’s no rules. If it grooves or glides or fits into a perfectly synched midi environment, and if it’s capable of infinite repeat without getting too annoying then pile it on.”
So, in this new inclusive, shiny and indoctrinated state of mind I came across the Myspace page for local the local duo, Moped and welcomed them with an open heart. I listened to their five songs at least five times as I was working on my new website and the friendly, unassuming sounds wafted over me like melted cheese. I got to the end and I pushed play again. The tunes are perfectly organized, with no sharp edges, a bit of humour thrown in from time to time. I heard the word “nipple” a couple of times but wasn’t challenged enough to endeavor a context. The songs pulsated and repeated and the cool sax leads positively nurtured my beleaguered soul.
They were playing the next night at Amnesia and I had to see how two guys could pull it off. I played the nipple song for my girl. She thought it was funny. I wondered what the hell I was thinking. Could all my years of ear splitting rock ‘n roll fetishism be proved wrong? Could a couple of knob twisters and multi instrumentalists create a program as vital as say, The Entrance Band or Wolfmother.
The answer is a resounding No.
The dudes are certainly talented. Moped is by far the best loop and laptop band I’ve ever seen, but when I saw that anodized aluminum clam-shell opened up for the first time my heart sank. My girl told me to get over it. She was more privy to the club scene and to all the attempts at “live” electronic music. She was experienced enough not to get her hopes up. She just wanted to hear the nipple song and move on with our lives.
The sounds came on as crisp as a pile of chopped up iceberg lettuce. The bass loops intensified. The video footage of a mother falcon weening her young in the nook above an austere human cemetery provided ample ironic edge and campiness. The live drumming was particularly inspired. The sax playing gorgeous enough for a Steely Dan song or even Van Morrison. The sounds of the 80′s resounded and the Cure’s “Lullaby” was the obvious and most inspired cover of the night.
We all held our collective breath for the nipple song. Elevator, from their new CD, listened to a total of 17 times on their Myspace page; at least 10 of which were by me and my girlfriend.
What have I come to expect?
Singer and multi instrumentalist, ____, grabbed the mic, pushed a play button on his powerbook and came to the front of the stage. The crowd, ample, moved closer to the front and started bobbing to the infectious rhythm. There came the climactic moment in the song, about a nerdy guy trying to hit on a strange woman in an elevator and didn’t know quite what to say. “I decided to keep it simple. I touched my nipple.”
The crowd went wild.
There’s really not much to say. If that’s what tends to make a crowd go wild these days, we’re in dire times indeed.
There’s really nothing wrong with loungey chill or warmed over cheese for that matter, it’s just not terribly compelling as a live endeavor. Many will continue to try. The likes of Thievery Corporation have turned turntableism into a valid cash cow, but where’s the intensity? Where’s the passion? It’s a calculated, laptop aesthetic that’s best left to your iPod earbuds.
Thanks for trying, Moped. I’ll still listen to you when I’m trying get something done at work.
Hey, baby. Ow!
Ferocious Few/T-Model Ford
test, ow!
Moped at Amnesia, 03/07/09
Saturday 7th
Live electronica, odd 80′s & Djs
9 p.m., $5
Moped sounds like perfect lounge. Something you’d hear on the XM Chill station. Check it out.
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