Live Report: North By Northwest
Portland’s North by Northwest music festival — the smaller, more
parochial younger cousin of Austin’s famed South by Southwest —
celebrated its fourth year in existence at a time when an array of
regional acts (Everclear, the Dandy Warhols, Cherry Poppin’
Daddies, Elliott Smith and the Spinanes, to name a few) are fast
gaining Portland a reputation as a viable music community. With 350
bands at 30 venues, Portland overshadowed Seattle for the three
nights of the festival.
On day one, the Mission Theater’s down-at-the-heels gothic cinema
played host to an evening of acoustic diversity, with Portland acts
Kaitlyn Ni Donavan, Cheralee Dillon and McKinley creating very
different takes on folk’s crystalline quiet. Ni Donavan and her
band played a magisterial brand of dirge-like country blues, while
Dillon’s improvisational musings proved a sonic dead ringer for Cat
Power’s Chan Marshall, as she and her drummer whisked through a
compelling set of raw and powerful confessionals. McKinley, for her
part, ended the evening with her sophisticated, icy avant-garde
jazz.
“We really try these days to only play the gigs we like, with the
right crowd, the right energy,” said Dillon after her set. “If we
don’t have that, we don’t play.” Her eccentric tales of heartbreak,
emotional abuse, disappearing pet cats and masturbation technique
seemed to resonate with the audience.
On Friday, the Mission was again the venue of choice, where
Portland locals Bingo were the paragon of a band playing in its
element. Led by multi-instrumentalist Kevin Ritchey, Bingo’s
country-tinged jangle-folk ably shifts gears — a hybrid country
blues at one instant to an almost Zep-like Eastern thrum at the
other.
Later, headliner Richard Buckner focused on material from his new
album, Since, offering tales of life’s beautiful losers
with a more electric bent than found on record. “I played
[Since] for my friends and then I didn’t hear back from
them for months,” Buckner said. “I was sure that I’d made a really
f—ed-up record.” Actually, only the set’s unusual cover of
Pavement’s “Here,” recast as a dust-bowl sing-along, approached the
abnormal.
On the final day, fabled underground haunt Satyricon provided the
mise-en-scene for a party thrown by Seattle indie music magazine
The Rocket. There, the kick-ass muscle-rock of 44 Long
moved the afternoon along at a breakneck pace. Major-label bait
Sunset Valley wrapped up the smoky affair as heads nodded along
with their tart brand of pop, setting up what were arguably the
weekend’s most anticipated sets — San Francisco’s Creeper Lagoon
and Sunset Valley (yes, again) in front of a packed house at La
Luna.
Just when rock seems to have run out of possibilities for the
classic guitar/bass/drums/vocal lineup, a band like Creeper Lagoon
comes along to remind us that the genre’s best feature is its
capacity for reinvention. Balancing clever songwriting with
economic musicianship, the band played a set focused on material
from I Become Small and Go.
Then Creeper passed the baton to local heroes Sunset Valley, a band
driven by an unholy alliance between the perfect popcraft of the
Posies and the sleek dexterity of the Cars. Like Creeper, Sunset
appear ready to upgrade their ramshackle vans for plush Greyhound
buses. Judging from all the label-types in the audience, their
crunchy space-pop is eagerly awaited by the indie masses.
Of course, when indie meets the masses, NXNW meets the drawing
book — conjuring up next year’s models.