Life is a complicated thing and it’s made for a quiet few weeks here at Taking Tiger Mountain as a result. My buddy Mark Theriault, CG artist extraordinaire behind Partially Frozen is helping me out by sharing with us the evening he discovered Daniel Buxton on a Vancouver street corner.
Look for more TTM updates coming soon…
Last night, I had a moment that made me remember why music and live performances can’t be contained by a stage or venue. Daniel Buxton is something of a rarity that proves my point. As I was leaving an eatery on Granville, I heard a voice coming from across the street and I thought to myself “Wow, is this guy really singing?” My friend and I ran to see this lone man standing in the light of an Aldo shoe store. With a thin frame and hair that for sure makes women more than a little jealous, stood Daniel Buxton.
He was playing a square guitar and using a wooden foot plank attached to tambourines, belting out a song that I can’t remember the name of, but the title of which was truly irrelevant. This man could sing and play better than most people I’ve ever seen live. Buxton embraced the emotion with his tightly closed eyes and booming voice. The street was empty but for an audience of two and he played like it was two hundred. After a few covers, he took a short break to which I used the opportunity to ask if he had any original stuff. Instantly, he lit up and said “Yeah man, for sure. Here, I’ll play two songs.” I was nervous. I have heard a lot of acts that can cover a song flawlessly but can’t bring to the table stuff of there own making.
To this, Buxton started to play…and play he did. His original work was way better to hear then the covers. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know the covers are a valid addition to a street performers repertoire, but if I had it my way this man would play all original work. Granville St. in Vancouver isn’t the most music appreciative place on earth…the neighborhood mainly consists of Kim Kardashian-esq women and what I would consider ‘roided douche bags. When he was playing large groups of people would walk by and 9 out of 10 wouldn’t hear a lick of what he was playing. The singular guy that knew and appreciated talent that would turn his head, stop and join the audience. This happened at least 3 or4 times while I was watching. He would approach the two audience members, just my friend and I at the beginning, and say “Holy shit, this guy is so good” while frantically searching for a dollar or more to throw into the guitar case. What can be said about Daniel Buxton and his performance in the doorway of that Aldo is that he has the ability to truly pull out the best in people who appreciate music and soul.
Check out the Candice Weapon remix of Daniel Buxton’s ‘Sex With My Ex’:
I’m not entirely sure why I like Tokyo Police Club the way I do. The core building blocks of the band are pretty straight forward: metronomic indie rock drumming, jagged, occasionally reverbed guitar and a thin but emotive lead singer. All the elements separately wouldn’t stand a chance , but together they coalesce and creates something that exceeds expectations.
When the tempo is pushed forward, the songs are at their best; propulsive head-nodding pseudo-anthems that catch you in their wake and pull you along. Tracks like ‘Your English Is Good’ stomp along with all the fervor of punkrock’s grandchild, but with an added attention to shifting detail. The song is littered with touches; the keyboard line glues together the clicking of the drums and the steady, fuzzy bass. It’s not repetitive; the riffs concise and incredibly efficient.
I’m not the type of listener who reacts to the lyrics. I tend to process the minutia of the sound production rather than respond to the worlds described by the singer. Dave Monks is an exception as very early in my discovery of the band I found myself looking up the lyrics and additionally, the meaning behind the words to ‘In A Cave’.
The phrasing isn’t always perfect, but his choices create something that is earnest and visual. The narratives twist throughout the song, fragments of images appear and guide you along. I think the almost awkward positioning of some of his word choices are the things that draw me in. The times my ears get confused cause me to only listen closely and examine the narrative better. Like with The Ghost’s Brian Moss, the things that I initially found offputting about some of his lyric choices evolved into the things that I found most endearing about the band.
The Interface has a few fantastic in-studio acoustic performances up as video and for MP3 download. Plus, Monks has a Maps and Atlases shirt on…you know how I love those guys. Always nice to see people you like have good taste as well.
You can download the full set for download as an single MP3 from The Interface, but I took the liberty of chopping it up into individual tracks. Far more useful that way:
Tokyo Police Club - Live at The Interface (Acoustic)
01. Tokyo Police Club - Tessalate: MP3 - VIDEO
02. Tokyo Police Club - The Harrowing Adventures: MP3 - VIDEO
03. Tokyo Police Club - The Nature of the Experiment - MP3 - VIDEO
04. Tokyo Police Club - Centennial: MP3 - VIDEO
Elephant Shell is a great example of quality from a young band that will only grow as time moves on. The songs they’ve presented us are smartly produced, contemporary indie rock that is driving without being lofty or overly anthemic. The live, acoustic cuts strip away the layers and show something of exceptional craft at the core. What they do next will no doubt be well worth the listen.
I’d like to recommend The Gaslamp Killer at The Crown Room. He’s one of the resident DJ’s at LA’s Low End Theory which I mentioned earlier this week. He always spins a good set.
While I had intended for this to just be a blip on the old TTM Twitter, as I made my way through the entire rendition…I realized that this needed to be on the site.
He loves it enough to take a 17 year old SNES game and program it to perform one of Radiohead’s best and most complex songs. Here it is in all its glory:
Germans have an interesting concept of pop music, especially when electronics play in to the mix. I’ll credit them with always having a strangely coherent grasp of melding the organic and the inorganic into something that felt more natural than when other nationalities took a stab at the same thing.
Schneider TM, the recording name of Dirk Dresselhaus, is a guy who has a masterful grasp of a solid songcraft, threading “Slide” with a warm comforting melody that intermingles violin, vocoder, and dissonant guitar ambiance with a thin semblance of looped percussion. As much as the song has a somber overtone, there’s something genuinely uplifting about the song as a whole.
2006’s album Skoda Mluvit is a much more realized album when put in context with his earlier work. While his earlier stuff is certainly good…(you can’t really go wrong with 2000’s “Reality Check” there’s something more evolved about the production this time around. It’s cleaner and much more confident, and the whole album is far more cohesive as a result.
As a bonus, here’s the charmingly nonsensical video from the lead single off Skoda Mluvit, “Pac Man/Shopping Cart”:
DB Buxton Revue - Sex With My Ex (Cadence Weapon’s No Sex Mix)
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