Corridor Buzz - The Premier Source of Arts & Entertainment News and Information for the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor

Mission Creek Festival: four shows not to miss

By Loren Keller, John Kenyon and Brian Thompson

The fourth annual Mission Creek Musical Festival kicks off Tuesday night with a lineup of more than 60 bands and several literary events over the course of five days at various venues in downtown Iowa City.

Limited edition, all-access passes to the festival — taking place at the Englert Theatre, The Mill, The Picador, The Yacht Club, Public Space One, the Java House and the Iowa Memorial Union — are available for $50. Check the Mission Creek web site for details on how to get one.

A festival pre-party, with free pizza provided by the University of Iowa’s student-run radio station KRUI and four bands performing, begins at 9 p.m. Tuesday at The Mill. The festival wraps up Saturday night with a free performance by hip-hop group The Cool Kids at the Iowa Memorial Union.

A complete schedule of shows and readings is available here.

As with most festivals featuring bands playing simultaneously at different places, sometimes difficult choices need to be made. Festival organizers have singled out Fruit Bats, El Paso Hot Button and The Tallest Man on Earth as festival acts with the potential to go on to bigger things this year (more about them here) and solid local acts playing this year include Pieta Brown, David Zollo, Matthew Grimm and Caleb Engstrom, among many others.

KRUI is also hosting several in-studio performances by Mission Creek festival bands this week inclucing Cartright, These United States, Rommate, The Parlour Suite, Polite Sleeper and Golden Birds; click here for the schedule.

Here are CorridorBUZZ.com’s own picks for shows not to be missed.

Wednesday: GZA/Genius, 8 p.m., Englert Theatre

When it comes to performing a masterpiece, there’s little need to mess with perfection — let alone write a new set list.

Van Morrison recently performed his seminal 1968 record Astral Weeks in its entirety at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Sonic Youth played their iconic 1988 album Daydream Nation from beginning to end on a summer tour two years ago.

On Wednesday, Wu-Tang Clan founding member GZA, also known as The Genius, will give the same treatment to his 1995 sophomore solo effort Liquid Swords.

Produced entirely by Clan-mate RZA and selected as one of The Source magazine's 100 Best Rap Albums of all time, Liquid Swords is widely considered to be the best solo effort to come out of the Wu-Tang Clan’s nine-member camp.

GZA proves himself a master wordsmith throughout the record’s 13 tracks, creating a dark, cinematic atmosphere layered with references to kung fu movies, chess and crime over menacing beats provided by RZA.

GZA’s performance with the garage rock group Black Lips at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin last week drew less than enthusiastic reviews (“the chemistry was not quite gelling,” reported the Houston Press) but he’s certain to sound much better on his own.

Yea Big and Kid Static open the show; admission to GZA also includes access to the afterparty at the Yacht Club featuring a tour de force of underground MCs in Yak Ballz, Derill Pounds, Roebus One and Kosha Dillz.

—Loren Keller

Thursday: Beach House, 12:10 a.m., The Picador

Baltimore, Md., indie rock duo Beach House, formed in 2005, is composed of singer and organist Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally on guitar and keyboards.

While their name may conjure up images of sunny afternoons in the summer time, their music is more of a quiet, late night affair. There is also a hypnotic allure to their music that has been compared to the likes of Nico and Mazzy Star. But unlike Nico’s harrowing and atonal vocals, Legrand’s vocals are both beautiful and haunting at the same time; she almost sounds like a Siren singing off in the distance.

Much of the music is layered, including the vocals as well as organs and keyboards. The sound of the organ seems to ebb and flow, with touches of slide guitar added here and there and a simple drum machine quietly accompanying the proceedings. All of it is drenched in reverb and makes for a very dreamy sound.

Beach House has released two full length albums. Their self titled debut appeared in 2006 and their latest, Devotion, was released last year. Both are on Carpark Records.

Opening for Beach House will be the folk-pop band Fruit Bats, indie rock act Headlights, and Roomate. The music starts at 9:15 p.m.

—Brian Thompson

Friday: Mountain Goats/John Vanderslice, 9:30 p.m., The Mill

A neophyte coming to the latest music made by John Darnielle’s band the Mountain Goats is likely to think of it as spare and stripped down. Anyone who has spent time with the band’s prodigious output, however, would know Darnielle’s recent albums are positively orchestral in comparison with his earliest work.

Darnielle was one of the earliest artists in the lo-fi movement that found untrained musicians recording songs and albums on whatever equipment they could find. For Darnielle, that meant a boombox. But long after he could afford — both from a financial and credibility standpoint — to move to a studio, he eschewed high fidelity in favor of the rawness of his earliest recordings. That presentation fit his subject matter well, his keening singing and manically strummed acoustic guitar nearly maxing out the boombox’s microphone at times.

Around the start of the decade, Darnielle seemed to desire taking his music to a larger audience, more fully exploring the sonic possibilities of his songs along the way. He signed with the 4AD record label and began issuing a series of well-recorded, adventurous albums. Including 2002’s transitional Tallahassee, he has issued five records on 4AD that, while still focused on his voice and guitar, augment the sound with other instruments and textures to create more satisfying beds for his literate lyrics. The most recent is 2008’s Heretic Pride.

John Vanderslice, to a certain extent, is at the other end of the sonic spectrum. To those not familiar with his music he is best known as the proprietor of Tiny Telephone, a San Francisco recording studio that gave birth to many successful indie rock albums.

It’s no surprise, then, that Vanderslice’s music is a rich tapestry of sound, the work of someone that uses the recording studio as an instrument. He broke through with his 2004 album Cellar Door, the first where the execution and ambition aligned. There, his elliptical lyrics were married to intricate harmonies floating atop a bed of guitar rock augmented by electronic wizardry. The follow-up, Pixel Revolt, showed little fall off in quality, while 2007’s Emerald City took a slight stylistic left turn by stripping away some of the studio experimentation to focus on the core of the songs.

Simon Joyner opens the show at 8:30 p.m.

—John Kenyon

Saturday: No Age, 9:10 p.m., The Picador

Avant-garde noise posters No Age is a Los Angeles guitar and drums duo whose 2008 album Nouns (released on Sub Pop Records) ended up in many year-end, top 10 album lists, including Pitchfork.com's. And while there have been several guitar and drum outfits in recent years, The White Stripes and The Black Keys to name a few, No Age doesn’t sound anything like those artists. The band’s music is a mixture of pure pop melodies with experimental tape loops, static and feedback that comes across as something akin to a two-piece Sonic Youth at times.

The group consists of Dean Spunt (drums and vocals) and Randy Randall (guitars). The two became regulars at The Smell, a downtown Los Angeles live music and performance art venue that is known for its punk rock, noise and experimental music. It is not only a place they played at often, but one where they have been heavily involved in its operation by booking shows and running the soundboard among other tasks.

Opening for No Age will be Netherfriends, Birth Rites and The Western Front. It is an all-ages show and doors open at 6 p.m.

—Brian Thompson