Featuring Birds is fairly mellow with lovely melodies backed by some buzzy guitar and sometimes wild keyboards. My top tracks are “I Never Want to See You Again,” the rocking and dissonant “Ape Self Prevails In Me Still,” the 60’s organ-forward garage rocker “I Give Up,” and the only Weiss-lead vocal’d “Tomorrow You’ll Hide.” A lot of the record is a little too indie-twee for my tastes (the ukulele-styled guitar ditty “Please Do” for instance, and “You Fucked Yourself” which, despite the title, is a jazzy piano little number). April isn’t that long ago but I feel like they played a much more dynamic show than Featuring Birds would indicate for their style.

The post Quasi “Featuring Birds” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

We arrived pretty early to the show on Friday so I was able to get a good shot of Bob’s rig before the shitty Colectivo lights went on, as well as an ancient Fender Bassman amp from his and Spencer’s Pussy Galore days.

As is my style, I got a spot right at the stage for Spencer’s performance and took a few decent photos (after heavily editing the bad lighting, of course), plus scored Coomes’ copy of the setlist at the end of the night.

The HITmakers played several tracks from Spencer Gets It Lit including some of my top picks: the opener “Junk Man,” “Bruise” (I need to somehow work this into a yoga playlist as one of the main refrains is “inhale/exhale”), “Death Ray,” “Get It Right Now” and the super-sexy “Worm Town” (the name of the song=not so sexy). They also played a couple of songs from Spencer’s last release, Spencer Sings the Hits! like “Beetle Boots,” “Overlord,” “Cape” and “Do the Trash Can” (as one of the encores) plus the super-early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song “Shirt Jac” (1992).

The post Jon Spencer & the HITmakers “Spencer Gets It Lit” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.