Larry and His Flask « Frequency blog: Music news and reviews from Bend and Central Oregon, by Ben Salmon

Posts Tagged ‘Larry and His Flask’

talking about local music on Clear 101.7 FM today, Thursday and Friday

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

I totally forgot to mention this Monday and Tuesday (I blame the peppermint bark haze I was living in at the time) but Dori Donoho — host of the excellent Homegrown music show on Clear 101.7 FM and all-around awesome supporter of local music — was nice enough to have me as a guest for her daily Homegrown Hits segment this week to talk about the year in music in Central Oregon.

On Monday and Tuesday, we played songs by Laura Curtis and Mike Potter, respectively, and chatted a bit about each of those artists. Today, we’ll feature Cadence. Tomorrow it’s Tuck and Roll, and Friday is Larry and His Flask. All of these artists and songs are available for free and legal download on The Bulletin’s Near/Far compilation of 2011′s best tunes.

Anyway, the segment airs around 10:30 a.m. (that’s soon for you Cadence fans!) but you should go ahead and tune in earlier and listen to Dori’s whole show, because it’s cool and she’s cool and you’re cool, too … right?

Tags: Cadence, Clear 101.7 FM, Dori Donoho, Larry and His Flask, Laura Curtis, Mike Potter, radio, Tuck And Roll
Posted in administrative, self-promotion | No Comments »

The 11 best concerts of 2011 in Central Oregon

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Four things:

1) I saw a lot of live music in 2011, and below you’ll find reviews, videos and photos of my 11 favorite concerts of the year, plus links to more on each.

2) You’ll note, perhaps, that these happened at 11 different venues in Central Oregon. I thought that was cool.

3) Why 11? Because I couldn’t bear to cut any of them to get it down to 10!

4) As long as you’re here, be sure to click over to our Near/Far page and check out the rest of our coverage of 2011′s best music, including free, legal downloads of the year’s best songs!

CHAMPAGNE CHAMPAGNE
JAN. 9, OLD MILL MUSIC LOUNGE
FULL REVIEW

Champagne Champagne. Photo by Ben.

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Tags: Best of 2011, Champagne Champagne, Cheyenne Marie Mize, Danny Barnes, Gregory Alan Isakov, Joe Pug, Larry and His Flask, Marty Stuart, Subliminal, The Confederats, The Decemberists, The Felice Brothers, The Shins, Tuck And Roll, Vandaveer
Posted in lists, live review | 6 Comments »

Music this week in Central Oregon

Friday, December 9th, 2011

When you fill the first 13 page of GO! Magazine with a review of the year in music in Central Oregon, as we did today, you don’t leave much room to talk about all the music that’s happening in the area this week.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about! Here’s a roundup of what’s happening … think of it as you regular music section in GO!, except you can’t start a fire with it after you’re done reading every word.

Floater, chillin' on a bench, pioneering a new genre: "bus-stop rock"

Floater returns for two nights

Oregon’s indestructible rock trio, Floater, has been through Bend so many times, there’s nothing else to say. I mean really. I have nothing to say.

Go read my April 2010 interview with frontman Rob Wynia here. Then click here and sample the band’s sound, a throwback blend of prog, grunge, metal and funk that’ll make you wonder where the past 15 years of your life went.

Floater (electric), with Jones Road; 8 tonight, doors open 7 p.m.; $15 advance, $18 at the door, ticket outlets here; Domino Room, 51 N.W. Greenwood Ave., Bend; www.randompresents.com.

Floater (acoustic); 9 p.m. Saturday, doors open 8 p.m.; $13 advance, $16 at the door, ticket outlets here; Domino Room, 51 N.W. Greenwood Ave., Bend; www.randompresents.com.

Briertone, Rural Demons at The Horned Hand

The solid, left-of-center roots music just keeps flowing through The Horned Hand in Bend. Saturday, the newish art space and music venue will host Briertone, a California band with DIY spirit and a gritty twang to their ominous “outlaw rock.”

Opening will be a likeminded Bend band, Rural Demons, whose Western gothic doom-country sound is making serious noise on the local music scene. You can hear the Demons’ excellent “Ghost Lights” album here.

Briertone, with Rural Demons; 9 p.m. Saturday; $5; The Horned Hand, 507 N.W. Colorado Ave., Bend; www.facebook.com/thehornedhand.

Larry and His Flask, Necktie Killer play benefit show

Uh … Larry and His Flask and Necktie Killer at Players Bar? Yes, please. It’s gonna feel like 2007 in there.

Bonus: The show is a benefit for Johanna Olson, a friend of the bands who has undergone four surgeries on a brain tumor. Go, party, rock out. The cover is $5, but give more for Johanna.

Larry and his Flask, Necktie Killer: 8 p.m. Saturday; $5; Players Bar & Grill, 25 S.W. Century Drive, Bend; 541-389-2558.

Empty Space Orchestra residency continues

Local post-rock prodigies Empty Space Orchestra are making this a December to remember that doesn’t involve a Lexus in the driveway with a giant bow on top. The band is playing four of five Saturday nights at Silver Moon Brewing & Taproom this month, with a different set and a different opening act each time.

This weekend’s opener is Water & Bodies, a fine Portland-based band that includes Beau Kuther, who grew up in Bend. In March, I described the quartet’s “Light Year” album as a “tight, glossy collection of songs that blend the hooks of 1980s New Wave with the heft of 1990s emo/alternative, plus a healthy portion of spectacle that flies in the face of so many shoegazing indie rockers.”

Empty Space Orchestra, with Water & Bodies: 9 p.m. Saturday; $5 plus fees advance here, $7 at the door; Silver Moon Brewing & Taproom, 24 N.W. Greenwood Ave., Bend; www.silvermoonbrewing.com.

Chicks With Picks benefits Saving Grace

I’m swiping this from the paper:

“These gals are playing for a good cause: Saving Grace, a Bend provider of services to survivors of domestic violence. Saturday’s “Chicks with Picks” show at the Astro Lounge will feature four female-fronted bands showcasing the skills of local musicians such as Stacie Johnson and Lilli Worona of Broken Down Guitars, Jamie Houghton of The Dream Symphony, Stephanie Slade of Death of a Hitman and Hannah Costa of Tentareign.”

Chicks With Picks: 7-11 p.m. Saturday; $5; The Astro Lounge, 939 N.W. Bond St., Bend; 541-388-0116.

Josh Gracin at Maverick’s

Swiping this too. Swipe-fest ’11!

“Josh Gracin finished fourth on the second season of “American Idol” and now he sings country music. On Thursday, he’ll play at Maverick’s Country Bar and Grill in Bend as he tours behind his new album ‘Redemption.’”

Josh Gracin: 9 p.m. Thursday; $25; Maverick’s Country Bar and Grill, 20565 Brinson Blvd., Bend; www.maverickscountrybar.com.

Portland Cello Project at McMenamins

All hail the Portland Cello Project, a collective of adventurous cellists who play not only beautiful classical music, but also super-fun, YouTube-friendly covers of indie rock and pop hits by folks like ABBA, Bon Jovi, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.

Helmed by Douglas Jenkins, PCP will return to Bend Wednesday to play a free show at McMenamins. Last time I saw the band there, the place was packed, so consider getting down there early and getting a seat. Maybe have some tater tots. You know … live a little.

Portland Cello Project: 7 p.m. Wednesday; free; McMenamins Old St. Francis School, 700 N.W. Bond St., Bend; www.mcmenamins.com.

Other highlights this week include Voodoo Highway at Silver Moon and Shade 13 at The Horned Hand tonight, the Holiday Brewgrass Jamboree Saturday in Sisters, reggae night with MC Mystic at The Astro Lounge on Wednesday, and Cadence at The Summit on Thursday. Find all the details and lots more in our online nightlife calendar.

Tags: Briertone, Chicks With Picks, Empty Space Orchestra, Floater, Josh Gracin, Larry and His Flask, Necktie Killer, Portland Cello Project, Water & Bodies
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[Photo / Video] Larry and His Flask, Tuck and Roll, The Confederats at The Horned Hand

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

I was hoping to find room for this in tomorrow’s GO! Magazine, but we ran out of space. So to the blog it goes!

Helluva show Saturday night at The Horned Hand in Bend, featuring one of the best local punk bills I can remember in my five years here. Tuck and Roll kicked things off with some top-notch pop-punk, followed by a furious set from local old-school shredders The Confederats. Both bands have been scarce around town in recent years, so it was great to see them rip it up.

The Flask was awesome, as always, nailing all their originals and covering Thin Lizzy, Marvin Gaye and someone else I can’t remember (I think?). You can tell that playing scores of sets in all sorts of circumstances this summer on the Warped Tour really honed the band’s skills and tightened up their show. It’s still a wild time, but not quite the unnerving chaos it was, say, 18 months ago. It’s more of a controlled chaos these days.

Of course, on Saturday, a little bit of that control may have been because of the distance between the band and most of the crowd. Apparently — and this is based on one side of the story, but seems to be basically accurate — The Horned Hand received notice before the show that their legal capacity would be dropped from 200 to 49 thanks to some sort of structural issue cited by the city of Bend’s fire marshal. (More on that soon, I hope.) As a result, Hand owner Wesley Ladd, fearful of a fine for being over capacity, allowed 49 people inside the building and kept the other 100+ outside, where they crowded around an open bay door to watch the show. (The Flask played inside, in front of the stage, but walked out into the throng several times, which made me wonder if that meant others could come in under the one-in, one-out policy.)

It was a little awkward — the Hand can clearly hold a lot more than 49 people — but I thought overall it was a decent solution, and the best Ladd could do in a tough spot. But then, I was inside. I don’t know how the people outside felt; I did see mostly smiles and friendly interactions with the big dudes whose job it was to keep them out all night.

Photos and moving pictures! (Thanks to Adam Sears for the videos.)

LARRY AND HIS FLASK

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Tags: Larry and His Flask, The Confederats, The Horned Hand, Tuck And Roll
Posted in live review, photo, video | No Comments »

Tonight’s Larry and His Flask show moves earlier, outdoors

Saturday, September 17th, 2011

Citing “capacity issues” ~~(which, frankly, have existed since the second this show was booked; it’s not like venue got smaller in recent weeks)~~ (OK, I’m retracting that statement because I was reminded that while venues generally don’t physically shrink, their legal capacity certainly can. More on this as soon as I can get it.), local punkgrass powerhouse Larry and His Flask announced last night via Facebook that their show tonight has been moved outdoors into the parking lot of The Horned Hand (507 N.W. Colorado Ave., Bend), and earlier in the evening. Here’s the message from LAHF:

Hey everybody, Slight change in the schedule for (the) 9/17/11 show at the Horned Hand in Bend, Oregon. Due to capacity issues the show is being moved to the parking lot where capacity will not be an problem. Doors will be at 6 p.m. Music starts at 6:30 p.m. Larry And His Flask will be going on at 9 p.m. sharp. $6, 21+ There will be skate ramps so bring your deck! See ya’ll there!

Also on the bill: local punk legends The Confederats and one of my favorite bands in town, Tuck and Roll. So I’d encourage you to get there on time. It’s gonna be wild.

Tags: Larry and His Flask, The Confederats, Tuck And Roll
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[Poster x 2] Larry and His Flask at The Horned Hand

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Saturday night’s show at The Horned Hand is a local punk fan’s dream: three quality bands of good dudes who play three very different styles. Tuck & Roll will bring the bouncy pop-punk, The Confederats come straight outta the old school and Larry and His Flask will close the night with their increasingly famous brand of acoustic chaos.

I suspect it’s going to be a pretty crazy scene, folks.

So big, perhaps, that the show needs not one but two awesome posters!

First up is one from Randi Hobbs, who did the cover art for the Flask’s “All That We Know” album:

Then we have one from local artist and skull-o-phile Dana MacKenzie. This one is cool, too, but in a very different way!

If you’ve scrolled this far, you might as well check out Frequency’s gallery of local posters and flyers!

Tags: Dana MacKenzie, Larry and His Flask, Randi Hobbs
Posted in flyer | No Comments »

This week in GO! Magazine’s music section

Friday, September 16th, 2011

September is a big month on the local music scene, with the Sisters Folk Festival last weekend and the Bend Roots Revival next.

But the week in between isn’t exactly an opportunity to take a breather. We’ve got a CD-release show from a longtime local, a bunch of great roots-rock shows, some jazz and more.

Bend-based singer-songwriter Laurel Brauns will release her new album tonight at PoetHouse Art. I spoke with her about “House of Snow” (it’s great) and the list of guest artists who play on it (it’s eye-popping).

At 12 tracks and 42 minutes long, (“House of Snow” is) a compact slice of her life, merging Brauns’ Central Oregon experiences with her love of indie-folk-pop and the independent artistic sensibilities of her soon-to-be home, Portland.

The latter comes in the form of several Portland-based guest musicians, including cellists Skip vonKuske and Anna Fritz of Portland Cello Project, organist Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Cooper of Horse Feathers.

Additionally, Nathan Clark lends his sturdy baritone to the proceedings, Franchot Tone plays guitar on a couple of songs, and a chorus of locals take the second track, “Doldrums,” to an ethereal place. A twisted Okkervil River cover and Bend artist Kaycee Anseth’s album art round out the impressive package.

She also revealed that she’s moving to Portland near the end of September.

“I need to be there to make it happen,” she said. “You’ve got to meet the people, shake their hands, see ‘em face to face. They’ve got to hear you play. I think we all delude ourselves (into thinking) the Internet’s this hugely powerful thing that can make all this stuff happen for us, but there’s nothing like actually talking to somebody.”

You should read the whole article by clicking here, and then go see her tonight at PoetHouse.

For Feedback this week, I bounced around the Sisters Folk Festival on Sunday afternoon. Chicago folk singer Joe Pug was the highlight of my day.

On stage, Pug is a soft-spoken but compelling performer who spills his guts into each verse and stares down his microphone as if it just insulted his mother. His eyes remain closed much of the time, but when he opens them, it’s like peering through a window at the downcast desperation that pervades his songs.

That feeling was particularly evident on “Disguised As Someone Else,” a request for forgiveness with a luscious arrangement for two acoustic guitars. And in set-closer “Hymn 101,” when Pug practically spit out the line “I’ve come to say exactly what I mean / and I mean so many things,” you got the sense that his poetry comes from somewhere deeper than most songwriters.

It was a terrific way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and I hope you’ll go read the rest right here.

Elsewhere in this week’s music section: Larry and His Flask play a homecoming show, Bobby Bare Jr. headlines McMenamins’ Halfway to St. Patty Day party, Murder By Death comes to The Horned Hand and Jazz at Joe’s hosts Seattle’s Jay Thomas Quartet. Plus, tonight at the Century Center, you can see Mosley Wotta, Marv Ellis, Tony Smiley and Cadence, and your admission fee ($5 if you wear a mask, $10 if you don’t) benefits the Red Cross. What a good deal and a good deed!

Tags: Bobby Bare Jr., Jay Thomas, Jazz at Joe's, Joe Pug, Larry and His Flask, Laurel Brauns, Mosley Wotta, Murder By Death, Sisters Folk Festival
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Larry and His Flask: new video, album preorder

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

A couple of notes on local thrashgrass blur Larry and His Flask:

1) The guys’ new album, “All That We Know,” is now available for preorder right here. There’s an array of colored-vinyl options for collector nerds, plus one package that comes with a hip flask engraved with the LAHF logo. Awesome!

2) The band filmed its first official video at the Rise Up Warehouse in May, and today, it showed up on Altpress. Behold:

I’m starting to wonder if the Flask might return home from the Warped Tour an even bigger deal than I thought they would. Scroll through their Facebook, Google their name … you’ll find a lot of folks out there falling in love with this band.

Tags: Larry and His Flask
Posted in buzz, releases, video | No Comments »

“Their van is so ghetto it had a padlock on the outside.”

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Here’s a super fun video. “Straight Trippin’” is, it appears, a web series that’ll follow a couple of buddies as they hitchhike from Portland to Los Angeles to New York. In the pilot, below, one of their first rides comes from Central Oregon’s own road warriors, Larry and His Flask. This was shot more than two years ago, when the Flask lived on tour even more than they do now.

The whole thing is worth your time, but if you want to see the Flask part, you’ll want to watch from 4:30 to 6:50, which includes a short interview with guitarist Dallin Bulkley, a classic Jesse Marshall laugh (at 5:45), and one of the band’s trademark sidewalk jams. Fun times!

As long as we’re here, how about a couple of Flask news bits? First, their new album is done and due out in June on the Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club record label, according to Marshall, just before the band heads out one of the biggest, most successful summer festivals, the Warped Tour. (Warped’s annual compilation will feature the Flask song “Blood Drunk,” among huge names like Paramore and Against Me!)

Before Warped, the band will play a local show June 11 at Century Center, which will double as an EP-release show for The Autonomics. And word on the street is that when they return from Warped, Larry and His Flask will headline a certain Bend-based rootsy festival that they’ve never played before, but should be a perfect fit for their revival-style thrash-grass. If that comes to pass, I predict it’ll be a wild scene.

Here’s that video:

Tags: Larry and His Flask
Posted in cool stuff, video | No Comments »

Larry and His Flask playing 2011 Warped Tour

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Photo courtesy Joseph Eastburn Photography

Short but sweet: Central Oregon’s fast-rising favorite sons, the acoustic juggernaut known as Larry and His Flask, will play every date of this summer’s Vans Warped Tour.

The Flask fellas will spend most of their summer as part of the biggest, longest running and most popular pop/punk/emo traveling festival in America, which will kick off June 24 in Dallas, Texas and will wrap up Aug. 14 in Hillsboro. Other artists on the tour include Unwritten Law, Yelawolf, The Ready Set, Reliant K, Lucero, Hellogoodbye, and probably other bands that are huge, but I don’t recognize because I am old.

This is huge exposure for these hard-working local dudes. Congrats, guys.

Tags: Larry and His Flask
Posted in buzz, news | No Comments »