Tallest Man on Earth

The Tallest Man on Earth
The Independent
San Francisco, CA
May 9, 2010



What a charmer: The Tallest Man on Earth, in his skinny jeans & square jaw w/his wee elfish boots & his raspish voice. On record, The Tallest has been fairly compared to a young Robert-o Zimmerman, for obvious similarities of timbre, phrasing, inflection, verbosity.

On stage in person, the analogy does not hold. The Tallest hops into the room & then proceeds to take efficient ownership of it. He roams hither & yon, upstage & down, he eyeballs the audience, now grave now flirting now comic now tragic. He cracks little non-sequiturs & we laugh as if we're in on some joke we maybe don't quite get but Oh how we wish to. The Tallest is a seducer, you see. Within ninety seconds, substantial contingents of the audience are swooning.

It was really quite a magical thing. The Tallest performs alone & unadorned. There's no band, the stage is clean, it's just him & his 3 guitars. He plays through a little practice amp that's miked right into the PA. He's got a cushy chair to collapse into from time to time as the need arrives. Which it doesn't much, The Tallest is a firecracker he doesn't much pause he doesn't much rest.

The Tallest goes & goes. His music generally gets called Folk. It's a fair descriptor, but a wholly inadequate one. I mean, ok, it's a guy & his guitar & his songs are all poignance & poetry, all of that is true. Still. I am not aware of any Folk paradigm that would encompass the ragged, naked charisma of the Tallest. Or more significantly, the raw & (hello?) sexy charge that he elicits onstage. It's luxurious & it's often quiet, right, but what The Tallest brings is rock & roll I just don't know how else to say it. You can find familiar things in unfamiliar places, sometimes. What a delight is that.

The Tallest has a couple of albums out, now. They don't (can't, really) do justice to the allure of this guy working the room. The songs are truly great ones however, & you really ought to check them out. The Wild Hunt is the apt title of the current LP.

TMOE-Burden of Tomorrow mp3

Good Morning.

The Morning Benders

The Independent

San Francisco, CA

March 30, 2010

If so inclined, one could find reasons to quibble. i.e., the set was barely an hour long, consisting essentially of the Big Echo album, w/song order shuffled. No encore either, it was pretty much wham-bam thx & goodnight.

Honestly though: it was a great show, & it was a good hour later before I even thought to get critical like that. The Morning Benders have quickly matured into a very sharp & very satisfying live band. Still centered around the original & efficient trio, they’re currently touring as a 5-piece. The new songs, so richly & lushly produced on the album, were fleshed out beautifully onstage. All of the playing was fresh, exuberant, totally fun.

Of course, this was something of a triumphant return: the album is a big hit (in indie terms), the tour has been selling out left & right, NY, LA, & SXSW all went well, Hey life is looking good for the Morning Benders. This hometown show was all sold out, & the mood appropriately festive.

As per my usual preference, I stood right up in front of the stage. That put me amidst all the girls, sighing & fawning all gaga for Chris Chu. What a heart-throb, what a dreamboat. Which ought not to suggest that Chris is just a pretty face, no way that. He is waifish & mignon, yes, but he’s also a man all in charge of his destiny. The sweetness is there but it’s plenty balanced; there were portions of actual ferocity. It’s a rock & roll band, after all.

& I have commented before about Julian Harmon’s drumming, of which I am an unreserved fan. But I’m not certain I’ve ever been fully appreciative of Tim Or’s bass playing. Like every truly great bassist, Tim’s grapple against those unwieldy blocks of sound is undertaken w/grace, w/fluidity. He constantly does difficult things & he makes them all look inevitable.

The closing number was “Excuses,” accompanied by a string trio & members of both opening bands. I think I counted thirteen people on the Indy’s little stage. Nicely done, that.

Big Echo

When I first got myself all excited about the new Morning Benders album, I had heard only one song, “Promises.” I just immediately loved the start/stop rhythm, the interstitial beer bottle percussion, the breathy verse vocals, the sudden belting of the chorus. I loved the dense layering of sounds. All of that. I loved.

To be perfectly candid, I was not so automatically sold on the rest of the album when I first heard it. I’ve come around now, but initially this record didn’t always make sense to me. The songs here are very Pop; they’re plainly solid & satisfying, yes, but the production choices are not obvious ones. & so at first I was confused. See, there’s real subtlety and complexity to Big Echo; this album wants repeated listens. & it dispenses its rewards patiently.

First, the Morning Benders are having like a crush on 1960's Phil Spector. You’ll get right away that this is a wall-of-sound-type of production: the instrumentation is piled on baroquely, there’s enormous reverb throughout (hence the name, right?). Not to suggest that this is a historical re-enactment project (see, e.g., Gigi). No, this is a new thing all its own.

Significantly, the hierarchy of sounds in the mix here is dynamic, not static. Meaning: usually when you listen to a song, you’re basically instructed by the mix what to hear as foreground & what’s supposed to be background. There are “lead” instrument(s) placed in relief, & then other, “supporting” elements more or less behind & underneath. Probably too often, those production choices are driven by convention. i.e., You typically expect to hear the vocal out front & the bass behind &, by golly, that’s what you usually get fed.

Not so, here. On Big Echo, that hierarchy is a fluid thing. You don’t always get to settle in lazily & hear these songs the way you think you oughtta. bc the M. Benders feel strongly that what needs to be at the forefront of your attention right now might be, e.g., the rattling, reverbed tambourine jinglers (“Pleasure Sighs” @ ~1:07), or the swizzling ride cymbal (“Mason Jar” @ ~2:10), or even just a handful or two of disembodied distortion fuzz (like, all over). Meanwhile, the expected “lead” instruments (e.g., the guitar, the voice) wander in & out of the foreground, following an aesthetic logic that is sure-handed but unapologetic to (y)our expectations.

For any number of bands, this approach to the recording & production would be all de rigeur, right? I mean, if a band telegraphs itself as capital-E Experimental, then we know in advance to expect the unexpected. Our minds are open before we even press Play. But where, as here, the song-writing is so Poppy-peppy, we might anticipate easing into something more conventional. Well, I did anyway. & so I found myself a bit at sea, at first. Yet it was the ineffable charm of the songs themselves that kept me coming back for more listens. & now that I’ve spent some time with it, I am genuinely a fan of the Morning Benders, and of this fascinating album.

Big Echo comes out officially on March 9, & I think buying it is a very good idea. For the next few days though, you can stream the whole album right here:

The Morning Benders are a local band, if you didn't know. They are touring nationally even as we speak, & will stop in to play the Independent on March 30. Meanwhile, you can always check them out here.

Burning Bright

The Ghost of a Saber Toothed Tiger

If By Yes

Consortium Musicum

SF Noise Pop Festival

The Independent

San Francisco, CA

February 24, 2010

Sean Lennon is full of surprises, & this is a very good thing. I’m quite sure Sean can have a huge, commercial career in the music industry if he ever decides to want that. On the available evidence though, he’s much more interested & engaged in just playing with his friends in fluid, interchangeable band lineups. He played with each of the three nominal bands onstage at the Independent on Wednesday night. I couldn’t discern if any of them are actual, ongoing projects, or if this was a Just For Now kind of thing.

It didn’t really matter. Because, somewhat surprisingly, Sean Lennon actually fucking rocks. Best part of the night from my perspective at the edge of stage-left was the 20-minute Noise Improv Jam between Sean on (mostly) guitar & Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier on drums. Which just killed me.

After that was If By Yes, fronted by vocalist Petra Haden. Later still, Sean fronted the Ghost of the Saber Toothed Tiger. Both bands included all 3 members of Cornelius, & also Yuka Honda (all of whom had backed Yoko Ono the previous night).

Between songs, Sean is fey & deadpan & devastating with his foppish hair & his admiral overcoat. He’s Oscar Wilde w/electric guitar. He is hilarious & charming.

Sean’s playing is all butch, however. Make no mistake about that. He is confident, he’s aggressive. He plays raunchy, even when the song is sweet. Somehow he seems to make those disparate components fit into a single puzzle. I wasn’t the only one getting a thrill out of that.