Fog
w/Steve Fisk, Dosh
Thurs June 19, Sunset, 9 pm, $7.
The effects of time, not to mention an incalculable number of late-night boozing sessions, seem to have reduced my memory to paltry Commodore VIC-20 levels. I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday, and no matter how hard I squint my brain, the first 10 years or so of my life are basically a blur.
Yet there are a handful of memories that do pop into my head in fairly vivid detail. One of them is of my elementary-school music class back in 1978: The room overflowed with instruments of all kinds, and every day before class started, we'd commandeer the recorders, xylophones, triangles, maracas, melody harps, bongos, even the wobbly, poorly tuned piano in the corner, and begin composing an ungodly symphony of third-grade cacophony until the teacher ran in and screamed at us to stop.
From the sound of the excellent new Fog album, Ether Teeth, I suspect main man Andrew Broder had a similar experience in his youth. The 24-year-old Minneapolis native may have since graduated to turntables, keyboards, samplers, guitars, and a decent home-recording setup, but his music still retains that vibe of a child let loose with some basic tools and a whole lot of imagination, not beholden to anyone else's rules or expectations.
Sure, Broder might not scratch like some DMC-championship acrobat, or employ fancy chords that turn hands into pretzels, but his beautifully warped vision brings the worlds of lo-fi indie pop and blippie-bleepie electronic ambience together in truly unique and charming ways. Take "The Girl from the Gum Commercial," for example--the beat is derived from what sounds like the steady chomping of Bubblicious by an eight-year-old, while gentle piano, rudimentary acoustic slide guitar, swishing turntables, and Broder's raspy-sweet voice join the fray. Or "Under a Anvil Tree," a pastoral ditty in which Broder pits resigned Thom Yorke-like pining against the cutesy lyrical hope that "one day a dump truck will dump two tons of kittens on me."
Look for Broder and his touring band to unleash even more strange, wonderful quirks live. You'll feel like a kid all over again.
