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sourmaker

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About sourmaker

  • Birthday 09/20/1986

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  1. I'm glad this tour seems to have improved. I definitely get where he was trying to go with the alter-ego thing (he's clearly very into Bowie right now), but that Baltimore show was really undercooked.
  2. Wow. It sounds a lot better. I listened to that Low Times Podcast he did, and it sheds a bit of light on what he's trying to do with this tour. It's supposed to be a Bowie-esque performance art thing. It's a relatively coherent listen relative to the storm of gibberish we got at Metro Gallery, but even with a greater understanding of his goals for the performance, I haven't changed my mind about it.
  3. Oh yeah, the Gretsch vs LP comment is germane, because the volume pots are opposite the LP, so he kept turning the guitar off when he was trying to turn it up. The amp was new too, so he spent a lot of time messing around with that. If he had played more than 5 songs over 50 minutes, this would have been funny, but he didn't, so it wasn't.
  4. I was there last night, and I strongly encourage you to save your time and money. I still don't really know what to make of it, because if anything, the press copy BillyA posted is more coherent than the events of the "show." Here's how it went down: The second opener finished their set around 10:45, and Blake started setting up. He set up his laptop, a keyboard, and his guitar (a Gretsch, not the LP), but he also had a stack of DVDs, a crate of records, and a music stand with books on it. Once he was done, or appeared to be done, he and the merch girl, who turned out to be his girlfriend, left the venue. I figured they were having a smoke before the set, so whatever, but during the set, he made it clear that they had gone to a club around the street for a little while to dance. He finally got back on stage sometime after 11:30 and started playing a sample of Sade's "Soldier of Love" and skronking on his guitar over it. Over the course of what was at least 5 minutes (but felt much longer), he commanded the crowd to dance, said something about the guitar noise getting him off, and then abruptly stopped. He then introduced himself as "Christopher Lager Alexander Blake Schwarzenbach," rambled mostly incoherently for a little while and mentions that he made the forgetters record in Baltimore, and said "I'm doing a storytellers thing. I'm going to play songs and tell stories. What do you want to hear?" Of course, at this point there's a lot of clamoring for Jawbreaker/Jets songs, and he says "whoa, whoa, whoa, let's start with some of the record I made here in Baltimore." He got a request for "Vampire Lessons," so after mocking Vampire Weekend for a while, he started in on that. Now, it was abundantly clear that he had not practiced this song at all. He read it off of a sheet of paper (fine), but he also had to stop several times and made it clear that he hadn't thought about how to play the song solo. After that (and more rambling and flirting with his roughly 25-year-old girlfriend who at this point was sitting on the side of the stage), he played a cover of "Foreign Policy" by Fear, "Turn Away," and "O Deadly Death." All of those were very start/stop, as he clearly had not considered how to play them live. At one point during the set, he said something like, "I could do this all night; I still have all of Jawbreaker to get through," so despite the obvious lack of preparation, I was still hopeful. So when he abruptly stood up after skronking on Sade a bit more, said "I'm going to do one more song, by that band I used to be in," I was elated. Then he said "the best part is, I didn't write it." And then he did a David Bowie song. After that he said, "I'm going to spin some tunes, hang out, and drink some beers," fired up his laptop and that was it. Now, I'm all for a loose show, but the whole time, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being shaken down by someone whose music meant a lot to me. I had told myself before the show that if he played even one Jawbreaker or Jets song, I would be kicking myself forever for not going. I knew it was a long shot, but that line "expect some catalog" gave me some sense of possibility. Now I really feel like Blake knowingly took advantage of the fact that there are still fans like me out there. He delivered on that press copy. There was some catalog, there was some DJing, and there was incoherence in abundance. But I still feel ripped off.
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