deerhoof / xiu xiu / father murphy
30-09-2010
mavericks, ottawa
i was supposed to go to montreal to see liars with my friends....
....but i promised my sister that i'd stay in ottawa and see deerhoof with her. she was so excited....
...and then she didn't show up because she didn't like the venue. flaky bitch....
the truth is that i didn't actually want to go to montreal, anyways, and certainly not to see liars, who i think are terribly lame. i would not have stayed in ottawa solely on my sister's request. but, it was a convenient way out of wasting money on going to montreal a day ahead of the swans show to see a band i don't actually like, regardless of the bail. the reality is that i stayed in ottawa to see this show because it's the show i had more interest in.
i didn't catch much of the father murphy set. i gave them a chance, but i quickly determined it was boring, pretentious trash and left after a few minutes to smoke a joint in the back and consequently missed the middle part of the set. so, i caught the first few tracks and the last one and don't think i missed anything of value.
actually, maybe i should say something about "catholic guilt". i was raised a catholic, wasn't i? didn't i go to a catholic school? and, didn't i reject the religion? so, why isn't this more appealing to me?
no. you've got me all wrong...
i actually wasn't raised religious at all; i wasn't baptized until i was four, and the reasons i was baptized have to do with the intricacies of the school system in ontario. at the time, the ontario public school system (and our catholic schools are publicly funded....) had the strange tweak of only offering kindergarten in it's catholic stream. so, you couldn't go to kindergarten in the public school system unless you were baptized; if you were unbaptized, as i was, you had to wait until grade one to go to school.
so, my mother had me baptized at the age of four in order to send me to school.
and, was this because she insisted i get the good values instilled in me through the teachings of christ? well, no. there were two substantive reasons. the first is that i actually attended pre-school for a period when i was younger and had fallen into a kind of purgatory where i was too old for pre-school and too young for grade one. had i not been baptized, i would have had to have taken two years off. the second is that my mother does not deal with stress well and preferred to dump me at school (which is why i was at pre-school in the first place).
so, you could imagine that her sudden embrace of catholicism did not come with any real attachment and that, despite attending classes at the catholic school, i did not have any real religious upbringing. i did not attend church regularly - or, in fact, at all. i did not participate in the sacrament of the eucharist in the second grade, and i was not confirmed in the sixth grade.
rather, the fact that my mother did not feel constrained in getting me baptized in order to send me to school should itself speak volumes about how i was raised. i don't remember the process, but she couldn't have thought of it as anything more daunting than a weirdo in a funny hat saying some hocus pocus while sprinkling some water over my head. she in fact thought that the ritual was so blatantly meaningless that it was of no concern to her to put me through it.
so, this is my actual upbringing: i was raised as an atheist in a catholic environment. so, i don't have this mystical "catholic guilt" that people speak of. rather, what i have is a distant sort of skeptical rationalism. i never rejected the religion because i was never brainwashed by it; instead, what my distance from it did was instill a sense of critical thinking skills. my upbringing did not create some kind of nihilist reaction to empty ritual, but a russellian kind of secular skepticism. and, to this day, i identify as a secular humanist, rather than as a nihilist.
so, i don't get what a catholic would get out of this - it just strikes me as a lot of pretentious nonsense from what is, frankly, a foreign culture.
the following sets are both from the cleveland show a week later, as is the deerhoof set at the bottom:
this was my second xiu xiu show and while i can enjoy aspects of the music, i really just can't stand the singer. he's just way too gay for me to really get into. yeah, i'm liberal and gay-friendly and everything (i'm a male-to-female transsexual!), but the stereotypical "gay personality" sort of gets on my nerves in large doses...
....meaning i spent the whole time hoping he'd shut up, which is ironic because the focus is supposed to be the lyrics.
the decreased focus on a percussive presentation and greater focus on a post-punk aesthetic was not a step forwards in terms of the band's appeal. if i found their first set pretentious, but reaching, this one was stripped of anything resembling ambition and reduced to a set of generic dance-punk songs. the band actually sounded lost, as though it needed an extended break to refocus but was instead pushing through with watered down "material" for the sake of doing so. while the problem may have been most exaggerated at this point in their career, this is really a deeper criticism of xiu xiu: they released too much material too fast. they should have slowed down and released a new record every two or three years, instead of every couple of months - and in the process should have discarded the vast bulk of what they released on their records as outtakes. the crux of the problem is likely that the band is so vocally driven, as this shortens the release cycle by nature of what it is; a vocally driven artist wants to move on to the next song as soon as possible, whereas a musically driven artist wants to slow down and make sure the sound is perfect. xiu xiu are not the first band i've run into that have this problem of releasing torrents of half-finished and subpar material, but they are one of the worst offenders.
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deerhoof is an act that i never got the chance to see when they were more relevant, but would have liked to see sometime around 2003-2004 or so. i'm not a fan of their later recordings at all because i find them to be a little bit unadventurous (i'm actually not a fan of their earliest material, either - they really had a very short window of relevance around two or three records, 2002-2004), and while i was certainly expecting them to play a lot of newer material, i was hoping that they'd play a lot more older material than they did. so, i was disappointed by the set list, but i really have no excuse to be. the lesson learned is that deerhoof is not an act to be seen until they split up, reform and start playing their "classic" material again, which will probably take 10-15 years. this is presuming that they don't pull a sonic youth and renaissance...
these are known acts so i'm not breaking any stories here, but do be careful with deerhoof in concert for the foreseeable future, unless you really like the new material (of course).