THE DECEMBERISTS played Chicago Tuesday and Wednesday; Ken King and I saw them last night. As when I saw them at the Intonation festival, for a band that often gets compared to Robyn Hitchcock and the Smiths for its literary quirkiness, the sextet knows how to “make show.” Live, the band packed a bigger wallop than on the albums, especially a galloping version of “The Infanta” from Picaresque, though “This Sporting Life” and even “Sixteen Military Wives” were punchier. Although the set favored Picaresque, the band did dip into the back catalog for crowd favorites like “Leslie Anne Levine” and “Red Right Ankle,” a request frontman Colin Meloy dedicated to his “sweetheart,” who we learned created the band's avian backdrop. I also want to highlight the contribution of violinist and vocalist Petra Haden, who is the newest Decemberist and seems to be having a great deal of fun with it. Indeed, the band “making show” works beyond mere theatricality because all of the members seem to be having fun making music. The encore was energetic as well, with Meloy leading the band through a hyper-kinetic cover of ELO's “Mr. Blue Sky” (sadly the bootleg video link I had is dead now) and their own “I Was Made For The Stage.” The show was sponsored by KEXP, which has a streaming studio appearance from March online. I believe the show was recorded, so perhaps you too will soon be able to enjoy a part of a highly entertaining evening.
SON VOLT is doing a concert webcast from the 9:30 Club in DC for NPR this Friday at 10 Eastern/9 Central. You can also stream past shows from the link, including My Morning Jacket with Kathleen Edwards.
JOHNNY CASH: Pitchfork has the skinny on the first-ever single-disc career retrospective.
MY MORNING JACKET: Seen their video for “Off the Record?”
APOLLO SUNSHINE is written up at YANP. He's killing music a little, but scrupulous readers can stream a few from the band's MySpace page.
THE CONSTANTINES are interviewed at PopMatters, which ironically is the low score for the band's new album at Metacritic, which gives a composite score of 81.
WEEZER frontman Rivers Cuomo is going back to Harvard. I thought he wanted to be in Beverly Hills.
THE POSIES get a web-exclusive profile at Paste. Better still, Auer and Stringfellow play Jukebox Jury with Seattle Weekly. Stringfellow says that being in a band “is like being drafted with friends and sent to Guadalcanal; it's either going to be the world's greatest bonding experience or something ugly is going to come out of it—some tale you only tell your grandchildren when you're really drunk.”
FIERY FURNACES cover “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” for the Rubber Soul tribute disc. Stereogum kills the music.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: Kevin Drew gives what I suspect is half-serious advice to people listening to the band's new self-titled album: “If you listen to this record song by song I think you'll love it. If you put it on all at once it's very difficult to find something to get into. It's not an instant coffee… But if you want a crazy psychedelic indie-rock disco party, then hey, do we have an album for you!”
CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH have a chat with the Austinist.
THE MICHAEL STIPE LUNCHBOX that Bono and Coldplay's Chris Martin bid tens of thousands of pounds to get can be seen at R.E.M.H.Q.
PETE DOHERTY-KATE MOSS UPDATE: Moss's mother has flown to America after a call for help with a week of “family therapy sessions.”
BONO lunched with President Bush to follow up on their July talk at the G-8 summit and to discuss President Bush's cover version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” The self-proclaimed “Imelda Marcos of sunglasses,” also met with Congressional Democrats to talk about debt relief for developing countries and the global AIDS crisis.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON is proud of her “leading ladies.” Which may explain why she seems set on getting plastic surgery later in life.
MICK JAGGER is mocked by ex-wife Jerry Hall.
MADONNA is mocked by Jon Bon Jovi.
JESSICA SIMPSON and Nick Lachey continue to lead separate lives, according to Page Six and Us Weekly.
THE FRENCH HOTEL, in what may be a first, denies having sex with someone. Just when you thought Tom Sizemore had already hit rock bottom.
VAUGHNISTON: Just Jared has a boatload of photos of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn caught canoodling on a Chicago hotel balcony.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: The latest tabloid rumors have Cruise and Holmes getting hitched next month on a Mexican beach. A source told London's Daily Mirror, “Tom's old fashioned. He wants his child to be born in wedlock.” That's sorta old-fashioned, I guess…
DAVID COPPERFIELD is hoping to impregnate a female participant on stage without touching her. Since so many sites have already mined the Tom Cruise jokes, I'll ask, “How does being married to Claudia Schiffer put you off women?”
DEAD MAN'S CHEST: Some Russian movie site has leaked pics of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.
WILLEM DAFOE says his toughest sex scenes yet were in a new film co-starring and directed by his wife.
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF has hired former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger and longtime Al Gore senior aide Ron Klain as advisers to the TV show, joining former White House social secretary Capricia Marshall and former Clinton communications aide Steve Cohen, who is a writer for the show.
EVANGELINE LILLY seems to be engaged to the Hobbit she works with on Lost (third item).
MEL GIBSON donates a million bucks to hurricane relief for Mexico?
CHURCH AND STATE? A San Antonio middle school is under fire for trying to change the curriculum to include grammar books, dictionaries and teaching manuals based on the beliefs of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
CULT OF THE iPod: The gadget is catching on as an educational tool at the elementary school level.
NANOTECH: When it comes to assessing the occupational health hazards of exposure to nanoparticles, what can we learn from other small particles and fibers such as asbestos?
HORSE-SEX DEATH CASE: A man who authorities say helped run a farm where people had sex with animals — and where a Seattle man died doing so with a horse — was charged with misdemeanor criminal-trespassing Tuesday. Washington state is one of more than a dozen states that does not outlaw bestiality. “There is no evidence of injury to the animal to support animal-cruelty charges,” said the county prosecutor's chief of staff. “This is the only crime we can charge.”
PARENTS ARE SHOCKED at their kids' casual attitudes about oral sex. Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, says, “What we're learning here is that adolescents are redefining what is intimate.” Or maybe just redefining “is.” Somehow, the story avoids the term “Lewinsky.”
HEALTH OF THE TROOPS: USA Today reports that more than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment, according to the Pentagon's unprecedented detailed screening of troops before and after rotation to a war zone. This statistic includes things like toothaches and marital stress. The percentage of troops back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with health issues is close to the portion of former servicemembers coming to the VA for mental health or medical care. So it appears that health issues are not being ignored.
IRAQ: Bill Roggio looks at an unconventional approach to securing the border with Syria. Some analysts inside and outside the Bush administration are questioning the authenticity of the letter purportedly sent from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi. A Spanish judge issued an arrest warrant for three U.S. soldiers whose tank fired on the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad, killing a Spanish journalist and a Ukrainian cameraman. Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald was there and says it “was an accident by well-intentioned men who had been under fire, some of it intense, since dawn the day before.” Rory Carroll, who was writing articles for London's Guardian last month suggesting that US forces were a bigger threat to journalists than the insurgents, has been kidnapped by the inurgents.
THE UNITED NATIONS has developed procedures to curb sexual abuse by its peacekeepers but the measures are not being put into force because of a deep-seated culture of tolerating sexual exploitation, according to an independent review.
BOA CONSTRICTOR: Captured after popping up in the toilets of a posh block of flats in Manchester.
N.M. DOG attacks his owner, the author of a new state law that allows felony charges against owners of dangerous dogs.
COWS go wireless with Bluetooth technology.
ROADKILL: Why am I not surprised that the Stuffed Squirrel and Chipmunk Museum is located behind the Cheddar Curtain?
GATOR UPDATE: Here's one I missed that turned up in a backyard in New Jersey.