Last night a friend invited me to see a screener of a new movie by John Turturro and Joel Cohen, “Rosebuds & Cigarettes.” [actually it’s “Romance & Cigarettes,” my mistake]. I thought it was a funny coincidence after having seen The Rosebuds play with Portastatic at Spaceland the night before. Both North Carolina bands have new albums that they are touring to support.
The Rosebuds were good, certainly better than I remember them from 500 feet away at Coachella last year. I think the new album is way better than their first, too. They have a great old-time rock & roll feel, and the husband/wife duo of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp are quite fun to watch because they both really get into the music in different ways. My only qualm with the show was that I thought the drummer used about 73.8% too much cymbal. They have such an intimate sound… but it started to get drowned out by the percussion. I was also a bit let down that they didn’t play “Blue Bird,” my favorite track from “Birds Make Good Neighbors,” but they very much made up for it by closing the show with a great audience clap-a-thon version of “Shake Our Tree.”
They were followed by Portastic, a side project of Mac McCaughan of Superchunk fame (founders of Merge Records). Though I haven’t payed a great deal of attention to them of late (they sound much more like Mac’s dayjob than the quirky synthesizer-heavy project I remember from 1994-1995. It was also funny to think that I first saw Mac as Superchunk 11 or so years ago, which, though this might date me, I believe was my first concert.
By the way, “Romance & Cigarettes” was really great. Very tough to put your finger on, but in the vein of “O Brother, Where Art Thou” and “The Big Lebowski,” but set in New York.
: The Rosebuds - Blue Bird :
: The Rosebuds - Shake Our Tree (stream) :
: Portastatic - Truckstop Cassettes (stream) :
[…] Chapel Hill is a small city to produce so many good bands. I know it’s a college town, but seriously. I mean it’s 1/10th as big as Austin. Sure, there’s Carrboro next door which makes it a bit bigger, but what does that make it, like 2/19ths? Who even talks in 19ths? And from when I worked down there, Raleigh certainly wasn’t adding in much of anything near as cool. I can’t say I ever stopped paying attention to Chapel Hill, before I found Little Brother and then went crazy for The Rosebuds, it didn’t seem like there was that much new going on besides for one of the best record labels in the country (if not the world). Then this year I was introduced to Annauls (maybe they are from Raleigh, okay), and now Can Joann. For a town of that size, it seems like 1 in 10 or so must be in a band worthy of national recognition. Come on, now. […]