It's annoying how weeks can go by with no shows or anything like that that I really wanna go to, and then suddenly there'll be too many things overlapping in a single weekend to do them all. This past weekend was one of those, and I had to miss out because of my band's show and other personal commitments. Lewis Black performed at the Towson Center on my school's campus, and since I work for Towson's events department, I had to set up the stage and seating for the event, but wasn't able to actual go see him that night. I saw him once before at the Baltimore Improv a year or two back, but it would've been really great to see him froth at the mouth less than a week before the election, his material practically writes itself these days.

On Saturday there was a good bill at the Ottobar that I had to miss out on. Two bands that I'm up for seeing anytime (Skeleton Key and Mike Watt), plus another (Rasputina) that a friend from work was hyped to see and I wanted to go and hang out with. I'm not too broken up about it, though, just because they both tour constantly anyway. And now that Watt's new album, The Secondman's Middle Stand is finally out, after years of talking about it (I interviewed him 4 years ago and we discussed it in detail) and touring the material, it's kinda underwhelming. And I say that as someone who *loves* Contemplating The Engine Room, so I have no problem with Watt's grumbly spiels or his 'punk rock opera' concepts. But where Engine Room had some of Nels Cline's best work ever and heartfelt tributes to Watt's father and fallen bandmate D. Boon, Middle Stand has a B3 organ (which sounded great on the last couple tours when they covered "Little Johnny Jewel" but not so much on the originals) and parallels between Dante's Inferno and Watt's near-fatal illness that are so faithful to the experience that inspired it that it's pretty unpleasant to listen to at times. "The Angel's Gate" is pretty intense, though.

Skeleton Key, on the other hand, had one awesome under the radar major label album, Fantastic Spikes Through Balloons back in 1997, then broke up, and then about 3 years ago one of the founding members, Erik Sanko, bought out the other guys for the use of the name and re-formed the band with a completely different lineup. I've seen the new incarnation of Skeleton Key a couple times and they're alright, but it's kind of a bittersweet consolation for not having caught the original lineup. Recently, the official SK website had a bunch of mp3's up of a bunch of cool remixes of Fantastic-era songs by people like Christian Marclay, Foetus, Sparklehorse and the Automator, and one of my main motivations for writing this post was to link that, but just now when I looked the MP3's are gone. Dammit. Hopefully that collection of remixes will pop up in some form, legit or otherwise, sometime soon.

Labels: comedy, concerts, Mike Watt, music

This entry was posted on Monday, November 01, 2004 at 8:26 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.