Stephen Stills July 6 The Showbox Better Than: Listening to Neil Young's Living With War
Stephen Stills is toeing a very fine line.
On one hand, he's a great songwriter. Among the best I've heard who survived the '60s. He proved it Friday night as he ran through catalog favorites like "Change Partners" and "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." But he's also something of a nostalgia act, or as much as any other act three decades past its prime that draws a collective groan at a whiff of "new material." That's not what the boomers dusted off their tie-dyes for. They came to sip tall Pabst and whisper along to the tunes that made high school bearable.
Less important than the fact that Stills' Red-smoked throat doesn't conjure the same harmony-inducing ecstasy as it did with Buffalo Springfield or CSN was that he was sending grins to those living for the weekend.
Click the photo for a Deftones slide show. All photos by Marcella D. Volpintesta.
By T.J. Tranchell
Deftones, Dir En Grey, the Fall of Troy WaMu Theater July 8 Better than: Listening to Korn's unplugged album while watching anime on Nickelodeon.
You won't get a much more diverse show that last night's Deftones gig at the WaMu. Opener the Fall of Troy (from Seattle, as they reminded the crowd four or five times) played hard, loud, and fast. Vocalist-guitarist Thomas Erak alternates between a Bruce Dickinson über-tenor and a more natural voice. Both sound great. The band had a rough moment when Erak's cords came unplugged, but bassist Tim Ward and drummer Andrew Forsman figured out that they could still play and soloed for a bit. The group looked like they had a blast.
Japanese metal act Dir En Grey came up next, and none too soon for the sea of teen girls there to see them. The performance, while energetic, didn't seem to catch on with the Deftones fans waiting their turn. The vocalist did some raver moves that would get his ass kicked in a real metal pit, but he did the high-pitched wail just fine. If we're talking one-to-10 here, Dir En Grey are a six, and only because they are loud.
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