The Long Winters

Oakley Hall

What Made Milwaukee Famous

Spaceland - October 12, 2006

Live Review by Kate Guillemette

I have grown gradually more and more fond of Austin brethren What Made Milwaukee Famous over the past couple of years, and it’s really nice to see the hip kids finally rewarding all their hard work by taking some notice and showing up early.  The band has an endearing positive energy and a gleefully scattershot approach to genre and tone that separates them from many a calculatedly cool pop act.  Their enthusiasm was contagious and heartwarming, especially considering that they’d driven straight from Colorado to make their appearance on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic that morning.

Oakley Hall, about whom I knew nothing, and who only joined the tour for this one night, are a 6-piece Americana outfit from Brooklyn occupying a demolition derby between stoner pop and alt-country.  They ostensibly have a bearded guitar-playing frontman, but the show was stolen completely away from him any time the guitar-playing frontwoman next to him opened her mouth to sing.  I would be interested to hear more from her.

Then The Long Winters took the stage and set up their undeniably catchy pop behind John Roderick’s gruff bitchiness.  The bittersweet combination was compelling, and the man can drop an acidic lyric like nobody’s business, sketching heartache in the kind of broad, stagey terms that invite all listeners to find analogues in their own love lives gone wrong.

The set was a balanced crowd-pleaser, unafraid of the “hits”—and “Cinnamon” is even now still ringing through my head.  But it was also somehow kind of alienating, like a guy trying to convince you that he’s both super-macho and deeply sensitive—on the same date.

I am told that Roderick wore a Raising Arizona-reminiscent leather vest many nights of this tour (which wound to an end the following evening in San Francisco), but alas, it did not make an appearance at Spaceland.  But I did get to see the Long Winters superfan with the kazoo, so I suppose it evens out.