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• Mom, do we have to?

Meat Puppets, Retribution Gospel Choir

Cat's Cradle, Carrboro

The Meat Puppets and Retribution Gospel Choir don’t seem to have much more than a touring van in common, at least at first glance.

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• Da Bears.

Grizzly Bear

Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Grizzly Bear didn’t need to convince anyone of its charms at a sold-out Cat’s Cradle last night: Many onlookers wore broad grins when the lights dropped, and the crowd at large welcomed the band to the stage warmly. The quartet gauged the vibe. Singer Ed Droste lauded his first taste of local Locopops. And off they went…

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• The lights come up on Steely Dan in Durham Tuesday, June 9. (Photo by Jedidiah Gant)

Steely Dan

Durham Performing Arts Center

You don't go to a Steely Dan concert in search of happy accidents and unscripted moments. No note is out of place, and no spotlight is late to a soloist. The tightly choreographed proceedings unfold with a precision that must inspire envy among Swiss watchmakers. In other words, it's the multi-sensory equivalent of the Steely Dan album's Aja and Guacho, two painstakingly crafted monuments to the quest for musical perfection, the recording studio used as laboratory.

Such was the case with last night’s appropriately Aja- and Gaucho-heavy program last night in Durham. The flawless execution was especially impressive considering that the Durham Performing Arts Center was the first stop on the band’s latest tour and that there were 13 people on stage, not counting the roadie zooming around on a wheeled office chair. A four-piece horn section, three female support singers, a bassist, a guitarist, a keyboardist, a drummer, longtime cohorts Donald Fagen and Walter Becker: Indeed, this was Steely Dan as a big band.

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• Coming to America. Or, here.

PJ Harvey and John Parish

Warner Theatre, Washington, D.C.

“Can I tell you something?"

P.J Harvey, the indie-blues songstress from Dorset, England, crouched onstage at the stately Warner Theatre in D.C. Her long, black dress, hanging loose from her shoulders, gathered in folds behind a row of distortion pedals.

“Can I tell you a story?” she continued. “It’s about me and Billy.”

“Billy" is one of Harvey’s many fictional lovers, the "steaming and sweating and sticking against the wheel” sort from the 1996 song “Taut,” a whispery, slow-groove confessional about guilt, religion and backseat sex. After delivering the first few lines (“I remember it all started when he bought that car/ It was the first thing he ever owned, apart from me.”), Harvey rushed to the edge of the stage. She delivered to the crowd her direct, hurried monologue: “And the color was red/ And the color was red and he drove me/ He drove me out of my mind/ I  am over it now.”

Without warning, Harvey’s arresting falsetto—“Jesus, save me!”—shattered the song’s tension. She pounded the prayer-chorus into the ground with her fist. A woman in front of me dipped her head back, staring into the giant, pill-shaped concave that hovers over the back few rows of the 1920s D.C. theater like an upside-down swimming pool. After a few more appeals to God, Harvey ended the song abruptly. Fog-machine mist rose. She took a drink of water and launched into the rest of her otherwise mediocre set list.

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• Morning's memo: Spend less on live graphics, more on album graphics.

Brad Paisley

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Toward the end of his long set at the Time Warner Cable Pavilion at Walnut Creek Saturday night, country megastar Brad Paisley took a break to thank the audience for shelling out its good money to see him, despite the tough economic times. The nearly sold-out crowd responded with a deafening if half-drunk roar. After all, Paisley and the night had provided what good country music is about these days: a pretty night with a full moon, a packed crowd, songs about love, family and hell-raising, plenty of light domestic beer, and—come to think of it—plenty of songs about light domestic beer, too.

Let the indie rockers whine. Let the hard rappers threaten. Let the pop tarts sell their, uhh, souls: Country music is a different animal. Its critics (and there are plenty of them) complain that it’s a simplistic, dumbed-down, obnoxious form of commerce that has built its success on jingoistic claptrap like Billy Ray Cyrus’ “All Gave Some, Some Gave All.” And maybe it is. But while the rest of the world despairs, modern pop-country singers live happily in a universe of family and the good, rejoicing in simple pleasures of bass fishing, barbecue and youthful indiscretion.