Comments on: Quick Impressions: The Rocktober Concerts Edition

By: T-Sides » Blog Archive » Double dipping: Morrissey @ Webster Hall, The Grates & Micachu and the Shapes @ Pianos, Wednesday, Mar. 25th

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:21:41 +0000

[...] warmed the crowd up, as has become standard, with a series of old video clips before his set. When the curtain dropped and the pompadoured [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:34:32 +0000

Well, I mean, my good taste is limited by the fact that I do regularly listen to both the Doobie Brothers and Chuck Mangione. I’m probably not the most reliable taste-meter(that’s not a word but I could care less).

It’s strange how weirdly bad Ditherer (their new album) is because on both 10th Avenue and Hummer there were songs that were incredibly rocktastic (one of which has a random section that sounds almost exactly like LA Blues by the Stooges, one of my favorite noise-rock esque bits of music ever. It almost puts Lightning Bolt to shame) and weren’t so…bad. I think that’s the adjective that I want to use. I’ve listened to Ditherer about 4 times now and I still can’t find anything remotely interesting about it.

Fog’s lyrics do tend to be completely nonsensical. They’re usually just sort of loosely strung together phrases that are vaguely connected to a theme. One of his songs (my favorite actually) called Wallpaper Sink or Swim is 11 minutes long and has a three minute segment where he just repeats “Goats will eat tin can”. It makes sense in the scope of the song (it’s a really beautiful drawn out piece that, like most of Ether Teeth, relies on pianos and sampling techniques that create an aura of foreboding, despair, and eerieness).

I could go on for ages about how much I enjoy that era of Fog and it’s really disappointing to me that I’ll never get to experience live his older music in its intended manner.

By: Taylor

Taylor — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:58:17 +0000

I’m glad to hear that – I remembered you saying you liked them, but they were just… not good at that show at all, and I was nervous, thinking “…but Jeff normally has such good taste!” I’ll definitely have to check out Ether Teeth.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:51:24 +0000

Fog is a really interesting band. It used to be just the lead singer (Andrew Broder) and it was more of an electronica/turntablism/acousta-tronic kind of band. They put out this album Ether Teeth which is probably my favorite album of all time. Just moody and beautiful. But after third album (10th Avenue Freakout) they turned into sort of a Jesu-lite by actually adding permanent members and becoming more rock oriented. It’s really disappointing to me because half of their original charm is the fact that the older stuff was so quiet and personal and beautiful.

So pretty much, check out Ether Teeth and Hummer and 10th Avenue Freakout, but the new cd is weird and not anything like anything they’ve done.

Also Broder is someone who is really weird. I saw them open up for Subtle (a hip hop act off Ninja Tune/Lex (Broder used to be a hip hop DJ before he became Fog)) and he opened the show by putting a band-aid under his left eye a la Nelly.