Ninjas! Move It!
by The Scene on July 31st, 2008
The last time we saw Of Montreal it was abundantly clear that they had recently gotten obsessed with Prince. They played not one, not two, but three covers from Purple Rain that brought down the house. “Id Engager”, the first single from their upcoming album Skeletal Lamping, is a sexy jam that would have The Purple One himself gyrating in his leather pants. The song has an interesting overloaded quality, with oddly incongruous sounds thrown all over the mix, taking what would be an relatively straight-ahead groove and turning it into something that’s both a lot more awkward and a lot more sinister.
We like.
It’s Ironic Becuase It’s True
by The Scene on July 31st, 2008
Our other shirt is actually an American Apparel Deep V-Neck Sweater with a Cut Copy patch sewn onto the left sleeve. Buy it and you’ll instantly double your pageviews. [Hipster Runoff]
Good for you, guys.
by The Scene on July 31st, 2008
Hypebot does this great thing and we think it’s funny.
(Damn, dirty next-door kids keep him up at night with incessant “Nintendo-gaming”)
by The Scene on July 31st, 2008
Ted Stevens, the 84-year-old GOP senator from Alaska, is being charged with corruption on the basis that he’s taking bribes from oil company VECO. Previous successes for the senator have included millions upon millions of dollars invested in a bridge to nowhere, a bill banning centaurs from his front porch, and being older than a pile of dirt.
Which begs the question, do you think the Justice Dept notified him of their charges via a series of tubes? 
Show O’ The Day - Liz & The Lifted @ Kimo’s
by The Scene on July 24th, 2008
Amy Winehouse’s crash into the public consciousness last year proved a number of things. Number one, she proved that in fact there is a ground floor for public self-destruction to which most up-and-coming starlets can only hope to aspire. Number two, it reminded the general public that smartly done, tastefully arranged blue-eyed soul is something that they don’t just like, but eat up with a spoon. SF’s very own Liz & the Lifted take Ms. Winehouse’s formula and substitute Mark Ronson and the Dap Kings’ lush big band orchestration for minimalist three-piece groove machine that understands that when you’re making funky soul music the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do. Singer Liz Culley has an engaging, idiosyncratic purr and likewise knows when to belt it out and when to show restraint. “Eye Contact,” a track currently on their MySpace, is a definite stand-out. www.myspace.com/lizandthelifted Liz & the Lifted , 7/24, Kimos, 1351 Polk St, SF.
Best. Review. Ever.
by The Scene on July 22nd, 2008
We’ve been reading P4k pretty much daily for a long time. Ever since we were wee high school lads and the venerable indie hive-mind correctly informed us how urgent it was (very) that we listen to Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West immediatly.
They’re been around for nearly a century (internet time), and only today have they finally crafted an absolutely perfect record review.
Dubious Ranger - “Paganini”
by The Scene on July 22nd, 2008
The fruits of the Dubious Ranger’s loins have come to bear again (sorry). This can only mean one thing: the first song off of the new record, Uneasy Truce At The Watering Hole, is ripe and ready to go. The band describes the song, “Paganini” thusly:
This is “Paganini”. It’s the first track off Dubious Ranger’s upcoming album Uneasy Truce At The Watering Hole.
The song is ostensibly about Niccolo Paganini, the greatest violinist of all time, and how virtuosity, artistic accomplishment and happiness seldom go hand in hand. However, the song is really about us taking our love of There’s A Riot Goin’ On-era Sly & the Family Stone, Beck and all those super-funky strung-out Miles Davis records like Bitches Brew and Live-Evil and creating a bizarro hybrid that’s as much as an inward looking sonic meditation as it is a shout-along anthem.
So yeah, we like it. A lot
This is high praise from the people who wrote and recorded the song and are now half-assedly trying to get you to buy the album when it comes out this Winter.
Pardon?
by The Scene on July 22nd, 2008
After nearly a decade of listing to and playing music as loudly as humanly possible (we steadfastly believe that, when the situation arises, it is acceptable to go to eleven), we may have slightly damaged our hearing. By “slightly” we mean, “What? Can you repeat that? Elephants? Sorry, we still didn’t- You’re not saying elephants are you? No? What? Yeah, we’re just going to leave.” This often makes going to bars/Urban Outfitters/pan-Asian fusion restaurants/trendy children’s hair salons/anywhere that plays really loud music a difficult place to carry on all really the important conversations we have on a daily basis. (Even though the only things we ever talk about are the plotlines from 90’s kids TV shows that no one else remembers).
Anyway, researchers in France did a study demonstrating that people consume more alcohol when “loud environmental music” is playing. We’re don’t know what the “loud environmental music” is they’re referring to is but, if we had to guess, we’d probably go with “Journey”. Our most sincere hope is that the proprietors of the bars we frequent don’t read Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, the journal where the study was published, and crank up their volumes accordingly although we get the feeling that this might become CW pretty quick.
We’d like to have quick conversation with all the bar owners/employees reading this. If you work at a bar/cafe/the Gap and have infulence over the volume, join me below the picture of two adorable children plugging their ears.
So here’s the deal: this is how you determine the correct volume for your establishment. You ask yourself this question: is the music the most important thing for your customers to hear? Is the answer no? Well turn it the fuck down.
Thanks.
WE’RE BACK
by The Scene on July 16th, 2008
So you may have noticed that Scenes From The Scene has been a little dormant lately. Actually, its been a lot dormant - we haven’t technically posted anything since the beginning of June. So yeah, sorry about that.
In what must come as a shock to exactly no one, SFTS is largely operated by members of the band Dubious Ranger. Dubious has spent most of the last month at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio recording a new album. Every moment we haven’t spent neck deep in 2″ audio tape and vintage echoplexes, we’ve been spending in a drug-induced stupor trying to come up with innovative new ways to take all the nice pop songs we have written and ruin them with disorienting snippets of horrible noise. It’s going to win 12 Grammy awards, trust us. Or at least one of the songs is going to be appear on an episode of Gossip Girl. In 2008 those carry about equal prestige.
Anyway, so the moral of the story is that we’re back and ready to once again deliver all the useless crap you’ve been grudgingly putting up with for however long we’ve been doing this.