I'm So Morning Teleportated.

I spend a lot of time being wide-eyed and starry while roaming around the Portland music scene. Much of this has to do with the oh-so luscious opportunity that I've been provided since this summer, which is to do Booking and Publicity for Holocene, a club full of delightful people with their ears very much to the ground. I hope to keep you all abreast of some exceptional musical experiences that I've had in that lovely space...like, for example, this one:

We recently hosted the housewarming show for recent Portland-via-Austin transplants and ultra-hyped rockers Morning Teleportation. My first instinct, being thoroughly assimilated into the Northwest aesthetic, was to resist. Resist, commence apathy, be thoroughly unimpressed. After all, these boys look like they came out of a cereal box - they look, in the context of our comfortably careless city, TOO good. Quite literally too good - hairdos perfected in their shagginess, jeans tighter than tight on legs longer than long, undeniably attractive in the most seamless of ways - and they're standing in front of some seriously slick gear. Perhaps weighing heaviest on my mind is that they've received the Isaac Brock seal of approval, which means I have to hope that the resonance of their sound outweighs the grandness of their connections.

Yet gloriously, I had a serious paradigm shift when those boys started up their very particular, fantastic breed of ruckus. Morning Teleportation create sprawling, complex rock'n'roll which has enough of a hint of Moon-and-Antartica-era Modest Mouse to explain Brock's drooling, but definitely nowhere near enough of it to write them off as derivative. In actuality, their music is almost impossible to pin down - there's nostalgic, ambient psych in songs like "Crystalline," yet there's also chicken-fried garage-fuck meanderings like "Banjo Disco". Best of all, in a town like Portland that spends a whole lot of time not having a whole lot of fun, this band is funky. And I mean funky. All right, so I love jumping at a chance to use a word like effluvium, but it's honestly a perfect choice here - this band was emitting a musical effluvium. They had their mojo working, as Manfred Mann would say. And their mojo sure did work on me. Their look, coupled with the well-earned youthful vigor that probably comes with the realization that you and your friends are on the verge of stardom and are having a great fucking time doing it, was somehow turning Holocene into an arena. It definitely wasn't hard to imagine a slew of teenage girls clawing each other's eyes out at the Crystal Ballroom to get to a used towel from one of these dudes. That thought alone is refreshing in the Portland scene - we have rockers now?! We can fill that secret Strokes-shaped hole in our heart?! Yet what is most refreshing of all is how very UN-shallow the musical product actually is. People are, and will continue to be, going nuts for this band. And beyond the finesse of the facade, they'll do it because Morning Teleportation create some of the most intriguing and masterful rock I've heard in a while.