Loch Lomond – Tuesday, November 10th @ The Woods
They will have a new album coming out in Spring of 2010, but to whet our hungry appetites for more music, Portland’s finest chamber pop quintet have put together an incredible five-song EP, entitled Night Bats, that features some of their most anxious and intense material to date. Some of it – like opening track “Ghost Of An Earthworm” and a re-recorded version of “Spine” – is blustery and stormy; the rest, in keeping with the tenor of their previous album Paper The Walls floats along hazily and beautifully. Expect all that and more when they kick off their short West Coast tour and celebrate Night Bats’ release this coming Tuesday.
Midnight Callers – Saturday, November 7th @ Backspace
Power pop is something of tightrope walk for any band. You have to be nimble, fastidious and well-studied in your chosen genre. Lose the balance of any of those elements, and the whole thing is going to topple in front of you. Midnight Callers represents one of the seemingly endless stream of Portland acts that dance along that tightrope with aplomb. Their material sticks to the basics: songs about girls lost and found, sung to the sound of jangling guitars and urgent rhythms. This quartet only has one single to their credit at the moment, which showcases all the promise that you want to hear from a young band like this: full of raw energy and spunk that will likely be honed and perfected by the time the rest of the world wakes up and takes notice. Go see them now and brag that you knew them when.
Krautrock Tribute Night – Saturday, November 7th @
East End
This tribute night serves as the perfect companion piece to the recent BBC 4 documentary about the birth of the German psych rock movement commonly known as Krautrock. It, like this concert, covered all the greats – Neu!, Amon Duul, Can, Faust and beyond. Tonight, material by those groups will be taken on by the likes of Rollerball, Paint & Copter, Datura Blues, Centrum Silver, and others. If you are the downloading sort, I highly recommend watching the documentary first and then heading down to East End to experience what will likely be the best approximation of hearing these groups in their respective heydays.
