Even if you’re not going to check out Timbrrr! Winter Music Festival‘s awesome lineup in Leavenworth, there’s still great live music to be heard in Seattle this weekend. It’s a strong showing for reunited sludge duos, reunited hiphop icons, and a melancholic country-ish/grunge-ish singer-songwriter. Here are the highlights, but, as always, here’s the complete music listings for the weekend and beyond, for your perusal.
FRIDAY
1. godheadSilo, Corey J. Brewer
Armed with a wall of amps and disproportionately large drums, the bass-and-drums duo godheadSilo fuzzed and howled through the 1990s, then disappeared at the close of the decade.
BRIAN COOK
2. Godspeed! You Black Emperor
The substantial, enduring popularity of Godspeed You! Black Emperor proves that music fans have greater attention spans than pundits usually give credit them for. GY!BE’s raison d’être is to create orchestral epics in loose song form. Lacing their sweeping drone-rock suites with anti-imperialist spoken-word messages and pointed, elliptical film dialogue, GY!BE shift from tense tranquility to grave turbulence with a masterly sense of drama. DAVE SEGAL
3. Jessica Lea Mayfield
There is a beautiful moody fog in the Ohio singer-songwriter’s sometimes country, sometimes grunge-y rock music. Her originals, which she’ll play solo on this tour, are wistfully romantic in their sparse, tasteful instrumentation, full of pretty longing and tinged with vague, tender sadness emoted through Mayfield’s dreamily enthralling voice and poetic lyrics that she’s been perfecting since her first recording as a 15-year-old Foo Fighters fan. ROBIN EDWARDS
4. Reflection Eternal
With the Rawkus Records-led wave of late-’90s East Coast conscious rap spilling into the 2000s, Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek released the moment-defining Train of Thought under the group name Reflection Eternal. Tek’s warm, waxy soul takes coupled with Kweli’s word-dense storytelling produced a near-perfect mix of social commentary and engrossing rhythm. TODD HAMM
5. Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s third album, Multi-Love, is the kind of cultural artifact that’s so out of step with the times that it’s timeless (only the references to smart phones give the game away). The muted trumpet on “Necessary Evil” and slick saxophone on “Extreme Wealth and Casual Cruelty” evoke 1980s fern bars filled with wine cooler-sipping Patrick Nagel collectors in designer polo shirts. KATHY FENNESSY
SATURDAY
6. Don McGreevy’s Temporal Nature of Stability
Branching out from his avant-rock duties as drummer for Master Musicians of Bukkake and bassist for Earth and Mississippi blues interpretations of Yada Yada Blues Band, Don McGreevy has composed a symphonic piece that, in his words, “is intended to impress upon listeners an awareness of our synthetic biologic imprint for succeeding generations.” DAVE SEGAL
7. Mommy Long Legs, Wimps, Boyfriends
The fiercely funny, brightly-colored-wig-wearing feminists in Mommy Long Legs call out cat callers and yuppie moms and that garbage human/offensive guy we all know trying to be funny with snarling, distorted guitars and gleeful, howling gang vocals. … This lineup is all killer, no filler. ROBIN EDWARDS
SUNDAY
8. Turntable Sundae
Rapper Deadmics sounds as though he spent his formative years devouring every Sage Francis bootleg he could get his hands on, with the sort of open-mic/spoken-word delivery so prevalent among backpack rappers at the turn of the millennium. KYLE FLECK
9. Sō Percussion
Highbrow musicians who can generate fun are a rarity. One example are Sō Percussion, a phenomenally inventive avant-garde quartet of percussionists who combine intricate rhythmic interplay with whimsical abandon and a predilection for quirky tonalities. DAVE SEGAL
