This is a Warning...I'll Spell it Out For You...

I woke up this morning at about 9 am in horrible, horrible pain. So blinding and disorienting was the discomfort in and around my head, it took a few minutes simply to discern what body part actually hurt. I'm pretty sure I've never had a headache severe enough to classify as a migraine, but this is what I'd imagine one would feel like. The kind of sharp, clenched pain that makes it impossible to think. All you can do is focus on how much you hurt, no matter how hard you try.

It turns out, yet again, we were dealing with tooth pain. This is the goddamndest thing. For years (years!), I never went to the dentist and for years my teeth felt absolutely 100% fine. No complaints. Then, my father starts working in tandem with a Los Angeles dental office, so I have no more excuse for not taking care of my teeth. Suddenly, after going for regular cleanings and getting some cavities filled, I'm having all kinds of crazy tooth problems. It's as if they're making sure to bust up some other part of my mouth every time they go in there to fix something, guaranteeing return business. Oh, man, Koreatown dental office...I am so on to you...

This is the second time one of my wisdom teeth has developed a severe cavity unbeknownst to me. In my experience, when most teeth develop severe cavities, they start to issue forth a piercing, unpleasant sensation. A toothache. It's annoying. You'd want to get to a dentist soon to get it taken care of. But it's a background kind of pain, the sort of thing that will prove bothersome but not life-interruptive. But when a wisdom tooth develops a deep cavity, it feels like they're botching the Big Dig right there is your jaw. I couldn't even move my head.

It felt as if I was using that metal ball from Phantasm as an Everlasting Gobstopper. As if that weren't enough, there were two more problems. (1) The dental office I regularly visit in Koreatown is closed on Wednesdays. (2) I had a ticket to see Hot Chip play at the Troubadour this very night.

For a while, I thought that perhaps I could take some pain medication, grin and bear it for today and then go see the dentist tomorrow morning before work. Sure, it might ruin the vibe of the concert, but the only alternative was to drive down to my father's dental office in Orange County to have him look at my teeth. After a few hours of wincing in pain and trying unsuccessfully to distract myself by watching "Amazing Stories" on DVD, I gave in and took the trip to Costa Mesa.

A brief side note: My dad is a dentist but he has never been my dentist. I'm not quite sure why. He certainly seems competent. To my knowledge, no one has ever sued him for malpractice or anything like that. He certainly seems to share the professional fetish for shiny metal hooks. My parents just thought there would be something weird about the man who raised me also cramming his fingers into my mouth and prodding around in there. But I guess when you think about it in those terms, it's odd anyone has that job.

So this was to be the first time my father would actually perform dentistry on me (or anyone in my immediate family, to the best of my knowledge). The pressure must have been intense. After all, you mess up and accidentally overdose some random patient on nitrous, you can just dump the body somewhere and hope that no one knew they had an appointment with you that day. But this is family.

It took a little work, but he managed to get the wisdom tooth out of there alright. The bedside manner could maybe use a little work. At one point, before injecting the roof of my mouth with novocaine, he told me "you're not going to like this." It did kind of hurt, but I've never had a dentist just come out and tell me he was going to harshly jab me with a needle in such direct terms. Also, he kept pointing out to me that the tooth in question was in the way way back of my mouth, and thus was hard to see.

"Can't hardly get back there," he'd note as I'm gaping wide-eyed at him from the dental chair. "Hope I can see alright! Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the right tooth. After this, I'll go ahead and sew you up!"

Other than that, it went fine and didn't even take all that long. So I was able to get back to LA in plenty of time to see UK's electronic pop combo Hot Chip tonight. Turned out to be a fairly terrific show.



Hot Chip's latest disc, Mercury Prize nominee The Warning, will almost certainly place among my favorite releases this year. In fact, let me try to list a year-thus-far Top Ten List for your convenience right now, in no particular order:

TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
Hot Chip, The Warning
Tapes n' Tapes, The Loon
Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther
Neil Young, Living With War
Destroyer, Rubies
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
Starlight Mints, Drowaton
Thom Yorke, The Eraser
Sunset Rubdown, Shut Up I Am Dreaming

This is shaping up to be a pretty great year for new music. It was really easy to come up with 10 great albums so far, and I had to leave off some other stuff I've enjoyed (like Band of Horses, Silversun Pickups, Jolie Holland, Morrissey and the Raconteurs). Oh, and while we're on the subject, the two biggest disappointments so far this year are the new albums from Built to Spill and the Flaming Lips. Two once-great artists now spinning their respective wheels.

But back to Hot Chip...


I most frequently hear them compared to their DFA labelmates LCD Soundsystem, whose drummer Pat Mahoney played with The Chip tonight, but to me they sound more like Beck or AIR than the post-punk-dance-funk-whatever of LCD or, say, The Rapture. Yes, it's hooky British pop songwriting teamed with sampled beats, but Hot Chip's sound is more about the vocals than the production.



The band sounded great live, which is kind of an uncertainty for a band working so intimately with a DJ. Sometimes, what sounds great mixed on an album comes off as perfunctory or uninspired in a live setting. Not Hot Chip, which really comes alive as a band in its own right on stage. The songs get kind of shuffled around and reinterpreted in the live venue. Sometimes, repeated samples used in the album versions aren't in the live versions, and some of these relatively small switches can totally alter the song.

The addition of drums in the live setting as well added a sharp, propulsive element to the performance. You don't realize how much energetic, adroit drumming adds to a band's live show until you see some guys play without a drummer. I saw Sebadoh a short while back at the Troubadour, and in lieu of a drummer, Lou Barlow would just start a tape of himself playing pre-recorded drum accompaniment. It was kind of adorable in a semi-pathetic, throwback 90's slacker kind of way...but I can't help but think those songs would kick way more ass with a real, in-person drum section.

Likewise, opening "act" (and I use the term loosely) Bobby Birdman went up on stage all by his lonesome and rapped-sung over entire pre-recorded songs. Seriously. He just stood up there, played recorded songs and then did a weird spoken-word thing over them. It was highly comical to me for about two minutes, then it started to get really annoying. Really really annoying.

Then I started thinking about the arrogance of putting on this kind of performance. I mean, he had an okay voice, I guess, from what I could tell on the rare occasions when he'd actually bother to sing a line instead of pseudo-rap it. But what makes you think, "Hey, people will want to watch me jam over a pre-recorded song on a stage! So much so, that they should have to pay me to do it!"

Don't get me wrong...If Russell Simmons ever puts together a "Not Particularly Def White Guy Poetry" pilot for HBO, he should definitely look up Mr. Birdman. (No, not that Mr. Birdman). I just can't see the guy ever selling out arenas. Or showcases in Branson. Or the Troubadour.



The choices of songs played off of The Warning struck me as kind of odd. First single "Over and Over" was saved for the encore, of course, but the equally popular title track from the album wasn't played at all. My favorite song from the album, "Boy from School," thankfully was played (and sounded great, with the harmonizing of Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard reminding me of The Beatles) as well as the hypnotic album closer "No Fit State."

It was a brief show, lasting a bit under an hour with a one-song encore, but that's just as well. The Troub was packed tonight (packed!) and it was a such a fast-moving, lively, bouncy kind of show, I'd have found too much more musical goodness exhausting. After a while, I get kind of claustrophobic at these type of shows, tonight even more so because these two girls were dancing together right in front of me and one kept inadvertedly slamming her purse into my gut and side.

These two girls were clearly in love with one another. They could not take their eyes off one another for a second. I'm not sure they ever even glanced in the direction of the band playing for their amusement not 20 feet away. They just danced together and stared longingly into one another's eyes.

Yet I clearly heard one of them speak more than once about her boyfriend. It made me wonder about the further details of their story. Is the other girl a lesbian who is trying to seduce this heterosexual girl? Are they theoretically "platonic" friends who don't realize what is clear to everyone else? I swear, I wasn't trying to invade on their private lives during the show. I went to go see Hot Chip. I just kept getting distracted by having a purse slammed into me.

And they were more interesting than the losers smushed up against my other side. They were this odd hipster chick who kept doing strange, Madonna/Kaballah hand signals through the whole show, and this bald older guy who desperately wanted to have sex with her. She was pushing through the crowd, trying to find a spot with enough room to do her Kaballah dance while making sure that everyone could see what she was doing. He kept doggedly following her around, nearly knocking me over at one point so he could at least be within 3 people of where she was dancing. Clearly, they had come in together, and she would occasionally look over and acknolwedge his presence, but it was in more of a "isn't this band neat?" way than a "take me home right now for a little ground n' pound" kind of way. If you catch my meaning...