Final Allman Brothers Band setlist (Beacon Theater, 10.28.14)

Allman Brothers Band
New York, NY
Beacon Theater
10.28.14

Set 1:

Little Martha
Mountain Jam
Don't Want You No More*
It's Not My Cross to Bear
One Way Out^
Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl
Midnight Rider
The High Cost of Low Living
Hot 'Lanta
Blue Sky
You Don't Love Me




 Set 2:
Statesboro Blues
Ain't Wastin' Time No More
Black Hearted Woman > Other One Jam
The Sky Is Crying$
Dreams
Don't Keep Me Wonderin'
In Memory of Elizabeth Reed
JaBuMaOt > In Memory of Elizabeth Reed

Set 3:
Melissa
Revival
Southbound
Mountain Jam reprise
Will the Circle Be Unbroken! > Mountain Jam reprise

Encore:
Whipping Post

Encore 2:
Trouble No More%
%Muddy Waters cover

* The Spencer Davis Group cover
^ Elmore James cover
# Sonny Boy Williamson/ Grateful Dead cover
+ Willie Cobbs cover with Soul Serenade tease
@ Blind Willie McTell cover
$ Elmore James cover
% Muddy Waters cover
! The Carter Family Cover

Phish - Chula Vista 10.25.14 download (Sleep Train Ampitheatre)

Poster Art by LandLand

Phish
Sleep Train Ampitheatre
Chula Vista, CA
10.25.14
(download) 

Set 1: Devotion, AC/DC Bag, My Sweet One , MOMA, Halleys, Funky Bitch,Wolfmans, Destiny Unbound, Timber, Tela, Wingsuit

Set 2: Free, Golden Age > Jibboo, Carini > Piper > Caspian > Tweezer > Rock & Roll > YEM

E: Suzy, Tweezer Reprise

Phish - Santa Barbara 10.22.14 download (Santa Barbara Bowl night 2)

Phish 
Santa Barbara, CA
Santa Barbara Bowl (night 2)
10.22.14
(download)

Set 1: Soul Shakedown Party, The Wedge, Undermind, Horn, Ya Mar, Jesus Left Chicago, A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing, Winterqueen, My Friend, My Friend, Split Open and Melt, Walls of the Cave

Set 2: Drowned > Theme from the Bottom > Steam > Waves > Twenty Years Later > Scent of a Mule > 2001 > Mike's Song > Runaway Jim > Weekapaug Groove

E: The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Run Like an Antelope

Phish - Santa Barbara 10.21.14 download (Santa Barbara Bowl)

Poster Art by Ken Taylor

Phish 

Santa Barbara Bowl

Santa Barbara, CA 

10.21.14

(download)

Set 1: Stash, Possum, Ocelot, NICU, Back on the Train, Limb By Limb, Waiting All Night, Yarmouth Road, When the Circus Comes to Town, Heavy Things, Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan

Set 2: Chalkdust > Ghost > Birds of a Feather, Wombat, Tweezer > Julius > Piper > Velvet Sea, Suzy Greenberg

E: Boogie On Reggae Woman > Tweezer Reprise

Chalkdust Torture > Ghost (27:55)

  

Phish - Seattle 10.18.14 download (Key Arena)

Phish 
Key Arena 
Seattle, WA 
10.18.14
(download)

Set 1:  Cavern, Wilson, Rift, Moma Dance, The Line, Sugar Shack, Lawn Boy, Kill Devil Falls, Wolfman's Brother, Sparkle, Bathtub Gin

Set 2:  Down with Disease > Golden Age > Fuego > Light > Cities > 46 Days > Sand > Backwards Down the Number Line, Bold as Love

E:  Meatstick, Character Zero

photo @ seattlemusicinsider.com

Phish - Eugene 10.17.14 download (Matthew Knight Arena)

Poster Art by Rich Kelly

Phish
Matthew Knight Arena
Eugene, Oregon OR
(download)

Set 1: Waiting All Night, Free, Poor Heart, Sample in a Jar, Strange Design, 555, Bouncin', Reba, Roggae, Simple, Maze, The Squirming Coil

Set 2:  Carini > Plasma, Farmhouse, Halfway to the Moon, Twist > Crosseyed & Painless, Harry Hood, Rocky Top

E: Wingsuit, Sleeping Monkey, Mighty Quinn

photo @ treehugger.com

ScHoolboy Q - Man Of The Year

Flying Lotus Toronto setlist (10.21.14)

Flying Lotus - Danforth Music Hall, Oct. 21, 2014

Flying Lotus 
Danforth Music Hall
partial setlist (out of order)

Theme
Camel (Los Angeles)
Sultan's Request (Until The Quiet Comes)
Getting There (Until The Quiet Comes)
MmmHmmm  (Cosmogramma)
Do The Astral Plane (Cosmogramma)
Coronus, the Terminator (Your Dead!)
Dead Man's Tetris (Your Dead!)   
Man Of The Year*
El Topo#
Mighty Morphin' Foreskin#
The Killing Joke# 
The Protest

* ScHoolboy Q
# Captain Murphy 

Flying Lotus Toronto Review (10.21.14)

Flying Lotus ended his Your Dead! album promotional tour stop with a stark appraisal of the Toronto crowd: "You're poor!".   Invoking the built-in rivalry between Montreal and Toronto Lotus couldn't help himself but to comment on the superiority of the Montreal audience the night before.  And it's true the crowd was weak, Toronto crowds are notorious chin waggers and even at events where you would presume dancing would be involved (like an EDM concert) - there is not.  Toronto is the Screwface Capital- it's true.  But Brainfeeder label honcho Steven Ellison should have known to come correct.

Whatever weak label DJ's he threw on before his set basically trotted out all the club staples from trap to electro to breakbeat with no particular identity.  The second DJ, JPX or JFX (don't look it up), had no well, soul.  His song selections lacked any sort of coherent linkage (or even non-linkage).  If he was making noise it was just noise.  At one point he played the opening of some Metalheadz Goldie shit, which got you half hyped for a second, but then it turned out to be some soft boy remix.  He threw in some reggae and dancehall at the end of the set for the 11 persons of colour in the audience as well as one - clearly overjoyed - Trustafarian.

The audience was as noteworthy as the musicians for their lack of diversity.  Many would not look out of place in a United Colours of Benetton advertisement if that reference had any cultural cache anymore.  It seems highly likely that at least three couples had some form of charcuterie before they arrived.  But they deserved better and did not get it.  Or at least not until mid-way through the Flying Lotus' set at the end of the evening.

There was a lot of anticipation for Thundercat, who sounds great on record as recorded by Ellison.  Unfortunately live his set (plagued by sound and sonority problems) comes off like one long godawful fretless bass solo that is circling the bowl of some cruise ship calibre type shit.  His drummer has no feel, no touch and only the most rudimentary understanding of his instrument.  If he was a barber he would only know how to do four haircuts.  The keyboardist Edgar Winters IV (not actual name) made the best of his winnowing locks and tightly tailored jacket (he also played a number of keyboards) and fortunately was not stricken with the albinism of his forebears.  When they finally stopped playing most could not comprehend what they had just experienced. Literally.

The hype around Ellison is largely legitimate.  His background alone, as the nephew of John and Alice Coltrane's makes him a genuine source of curiousity (with all his recent outings Cosmogramma (2010) and Until The Quiet Comes(2012) steeped in Alice's brand of mysticism.  His sound is often a pastiche of glittering sound, chimes, saxophone squawks and bass freakouts- affecting a sort of electronic confetti.  Bohemian EDM might be a good way to describe it.  As with any musician these days the endorsement of  Pitchfork is pivotal and they grabbed on by both ponytails.  Pitchfork and Flying Lotus are embroiled in a love embrace that is both repellant and perfectly fitting since the latter's job is to name the zeitgeist and the former is - well the zeitgeist. At least for this moment.  

So where was I?  Basically Ellison presses play on a pre-recorded mix within a convex dodecahedron that functioned as the performance pod/ visual backdrop for the whole proceeding.  He also made large silhouetted and pantomimed gestures some of which included actually adjusting levels- mids, mid-highs, highs, as well as quite a lot of lows. For the first part of the set he had lit up sunglasses, at one point he asked for some water rather brusquely.  The visuals admittedly were unbelievable and saved the show.    Drawing at times on some of the Brainfeeder motifs (brains, lobotomies, skulls) they were largely a constantly evolving barrage of deeply hallucinatory visuals.  If you didn't have Nintendo Epilepsy before this concert you do now.

He also played some music including Camel (from 2008's Los Angeles) Sultan's Request and Getting There (from Until The Quiet Comes); MmmHmmm and Do The Astral Plane (from Cosmogramma) and very little actually from Your Dead! (Coronus, the Terminator and Dead Man's Tetris).  He did a great left-field drop of ScHoolboy Q's Man Of The Year.  When he finally came out from behind the curtain he got into some of his MC material as Captain Murphy from 2012's Duality (El Topo and Mighty Morphin' Foreskin) which seemed to legitimately hype up the crowd- right up until he started shitting on them.

Then Thundercat came out in some godawful fucking fox headdress and jammed out with his lord and master from behind the Oz thing.  That part was really awful.  As one parting dig despite the fact that the audience didn't show him enough love or not the kind of love he wanted he sharply exited the stage saying: "But I'm still going to go back there and press play" (because I already have your money).  Then he put up some trippy album cover promo and basically said peace I'm out.  And we were like 'yeah we're out too'.  Yikes.

BADBADNOTGOOD - CS60

BADBADNOTGOOD Biography

(l to r - Matthew Tavares, Alexander Sowinski, Chester Hanson)

It seems natural that aspiring jazz musicians (at Toronto's) prestigious Humber Jazz Program would be informed by the music they're listening to, only their instructors probably presume that their listening to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Vijay Iyer or really getting out there with Steve Coleman. MF Doom and Odd Future notsomuch.

Collaborating first on an arrangement of Gucci Mane's Lemonade it was their performance project based on a piece of Tyler The Creator's music that tanked with their instructors but went viral online when they later released it as the Odd Future Sessions Part 1 (they later released part 2 as well).  This caught The Creator's attention from deep in a suburban basement lair with egg carton and foam stapled over ever possible surface, dimpling the walls in strange undulating patterns that absorbed him endlessly.

This led to direct collaborations with Tyler The Creator (such as Fish) as well as work with Frank Ocean who can't play an instrument to save his life.  Most exciting have been the collaborations between BADBADNOTGOOD or BBNG with Ghostface Killah and on occasion Danny Brown such as the greasy Six Degrees.

Now comes word that Six Degrees will appear on an entire Frank Dukes produced album to be entitled Sour Soul (due out on Feb. 17 on Lex).  Pretty Tony himself will rap on every single cut and the second single released to high anticipation is Gunshowers. 

Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois - An Ending Ascent

The music we know as Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks- likely the gold standard for so-called ambient music- began as music for a single film Apollo later retitled For All Mankind.  The music was intended as a soundtrack for a movie composed of 35 mm footage of the Apollo moon missions.  But the 'art film' never materialized satisfactorily.  The music has since been used in countless contexts including the films 28 Days, Trainspotting and Traffic.

Much of what makes the album so distinct is the creative collaboration between Brian Eno and Canada's Daniel Lanois for the second time in Lanois and his brothers studio in Hamilton (at Grant Avenue Studio in a converted Edwardian house).  The studio itself was a venture between the Lanois brothers and Bob Doidge.   It was as Lanois puts it a great place for 'creators' and Eno took both to Lanois and the space.  With the compliment of some specific equipment Eno requested, like a Yamaha Omnichord, and the serendipity of Lanois' unschooled and beautiful playing on the lap steel- the two made sweet music together here and for years to come.

Eno, who was an Art school ponce, enjoyed Lanois' lack of formal education as it were.  I'm sure there were some ventures in creative chemistry that contributed to their overall fondness for one another and the sounds they produced as well.  Eno is known for employing elaborate concepts to deploy in his music (such as on Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, a stylized take on a Peking opera based on a set of postcards).  In the case of Apollo he was drawn to the notion of wanting to avoid the melodramoatic and uptempo way he felt the landing had been presented in the media.

In the liner notes, Eno relates that when he watched the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 he felt that the strangeness of that event was compromised by the low quality of the television transmission and an excess of journalistic discussion, and that he wished to avoid the melodramatic and uptempo way it was presented. That philosophy dominated when For All Mankind ("Apollo") was originally released as a non-narrative collection of NASA stock footage from the Apollo program.

Dean Ween's Guitar Moves

In this episode of Guitar Moves Deaner (Michey Melchiondo) starts off with an instrumental he jokingly called Dicky Betts.  He goes onto explain how every solo he's ever done is a variation on either the Allman Bros. Blue Sky or Eddie Hazel's (of Parliament Funkadelic) Maggot Brain.  He then gives some lessons on 'tasters' and teaches the kids how to play fancy songs like Mr. Would You Please Help My Pony (from Chocolate and Cheese). 

Baseball Wisdom - Bunting with Coach Kent Murphy

Sports isn't really our bag here at Northern Heads (unless its the epic Huey Lewis album of the same title).  But in this case we made an exception because Buck 65 has introduced us to one of the best online coaches of the fundamentals of baseball and that man is: Coach Kent Murphy

Buck 65 & Jorun Bombay - Laundromat Boogie

Buck 65 - She Fades

Buck 65 - Paper Airplane w. Jenn Grant

Buck 65 - Heart of Stone (live) w. Fransceca Anderson

Buck 65 - Only War w. Tiger Rosa

Buck 65 debuts Neverlove and Laundromat Boogie (CBC Youtube taping)

Buck 65's kept busy of late.  With a renewed vigor, softened by the blow of a by all accounts hard divorce, the man born Rich Terfry has softened like naugahyde leather.    In the lead up to the release of Neverlove he's been doing a flurry of promotional activity including fulfilling a childhood dream: throwing out the opening pitch at the Chicago Cubs game.  Twenty odd years ago Buck used to do an amazing version of the seminal baseball poem Casey At The Bat interlaced with the drama of his provincial baseball finals.  Rich of course, as many know, was so good at baseball - pitching in particular- that he was signed to the New York Yankees only to blow out his knee spoiling his prospects of an international career at least in that field.

Buck 65 came to international acclaim in part through the endorsement of Thom Yorke who was originally introduced to his obscure Language Arts series (including Weirdo Magnet, Vertex, Man Overboard, and Synesthesia) when Kid Koala gave him a copy of Man Overboard (the original run of which couldn't have been over 500).  All of these legendary underground Hip Hop albums were re-released 'as part of the contract that eventually spurned his “breakthrough” (i.e. “charting”) album Talkin Honky Blues'.

While Buck 65 has stayed fairly constantly in the public eye with a slew of releases and a stint as a CBC Radio 2 host (well suited to his Tom Waits style persona which is something like an ossified version of one of the characters from the Language Arts series named Uncle Climax), somewhere along the line the bloom came off the rose a bit and Buck may have lost some of his evolving fanbase.  Neverlove seems like a bid for new attention or 'fresh laundry' as he puts it in So Fresh (from Laundromat Boogie).  If Neverlove is Buck 65's bid to be taken seriously, to sing and to process his life's transition, Laundromat Boogie the Jorun Bombay produced album that came out the day before (Sept. 29) is running straight in the opposite direction.

The set itself opened with a Bike For Three! (a side project with Greetings From Tuskan) song from this year's So Much Forever but the set was drawn largely in reverse chronological order from: Neverlove, Laundromat Boogie and 20 Odd Years (2011).  Buck opened with his usual spritzing with the audience, possessed with innate comedic timing and the storytelling abilities of a Garrison Keilor his sets are a joy to behold.  Beat for beat he was actually funnier than Dave Chappelle's pop-up show he did in Toronto a couple years back on a sheer cheeks hurt level.  Buck opened with some schtick which seemed to be largely based on reality about something bad that he ate but quickly got over his dyspepsia.  He quickly got up to cruising altitude peppering his set with obscure references to his greatest love: Baseball and the 'fundamentals' as taught by Coach Kent Murphy.

On many songs Buck was joined by a stunning vocalist Maya who he needed to lean on at times for difficult songs both in terms of delivery and lyrically.  Since Maya was such a force to be reckoned with, his set veered towards torch songs including Paper Airplane originally written and performed with Jenn Grant.  Maya had her finest moment on Only War which would have given Alicia Keys a run for her money.  Buck's real chokers were his ode to his hometown of Mount Uniacke, NS - Heather Girl - and Superhero In My Heart.

Buck 65
CBC Youtube taping setlist

Legendary
Gee Whiz
Laundromat Boogie
She Fades
Paper Airplane
Heather Girl
Only War
So Fresh
Love Will Fuck You Up 
Superhero In My Heart
Heart Of Stone
Wicked and Weird
Super Pretty Naughty (with pantomimed 'cock lasers')

The Barr Brothers - Love Ain't Enough (KEXP live at Pickathon)

Listen to The Barr Brothers perform Love Ain't Enough in a literal field recording with beautiful audio at Pickathon in Happy Valley, Oregon.

Al Tuck & Gordie Roach - Merle Haggard's Swingin' Doors

Listen to perennial Canadian songbird Al Tuck pluck out a tune for his roommate, cohort and even one of his musical heroes Gordie Roach.

Hey Ya! -Live Loop (French Horn cover)

Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo is known for turning out geeks of interminable persuasions (usually engineers and tech guys to service the surrounding 'tech sector' ie. Blackberry).   As everyone knows the French Horn was the ultimate of geek instruments, surpassed only by the obo, in terms of difficulty to play and sheer nerdiness.  Here Patrick Godfrey adds a beard and a choice instrumental cover of a Hip Hop classic to the mix.  That is not the definition of irony.  It has something to do with irony but to be honest we're not sure what.

An Introduction to The Golden Dogs

Taylor Knox played a phenomenal show with his three piece band this weekend at Lee's Palace (Sept. 27) opening for The Golden Dogs and Zeus.  Taylor's a close broheme of both groups having been a member of The Golden Dogs after Carlin and Nicholson's overlapping tenures as well as having been in a group Major Grange (with Neil and Dave Dalrymple).   They're calling th is tour the Ill Eagle Revue or the Family Affair Tour.  It's highly fitting as Dave Azzolini wife Jess Grassia and Taylor were involved with the original Zeus recordings that became the Sounds Like Zeus EP.

 Ill Eagle Revue

Fri Oct 03 @ House of Targ – Ottawa, ON – w/ Taylor Knox

Sat Oct 04 @ The Spill – Peterborough, ON w/ Taylor Knox and Wax Atlantic – $10 door

Tues Oct 07 @ The Starlight – Waterloo, ON – w/ ZEUS and Taylor Knox

Wed Oct 08 @ Ebar – Guelph, ON – w/ ZEUS and Taylor Knox

Thurs Oct 09 @ The Casbah – Hamilton, ON – w/ ZEUS and Taylor Knox

Fri Oct 10 @ Detour Music Hall – St.Catherines, ON – w/ ZEUS and Taylor Knox

Sat Oct 11 @ Call The Office – London, ON – w/ ZEUS and Taylor Knox