music
Stayin’ Classy
You don’t think of Canada and
immediately envision hip-hop artists.
But any tour-savvy border-breaching
American hip-hop group, or any
modern hip-hop archivist, will tell
you that the Canucks have had it
going on up there for quite a while
now. Since roughly 1999, emcees
from the Great White North have
been permeating international
airwaves with styles and content
rivaling their American
counterparts. The first group to
achieve breakthrough was Swollen
Members, whose debut album
Balance, an incredibly well produced,
darkly medieval collection of songs,
redefined what conscious hip hop
could be — think Dungeons &
Dragons meets Souls of Mischief.
Swollen Members continues to drop
albums, and the group’s success in
the U.S. opened the door for other
artists such as Josh Martinez, Iraqi-
Canadian standout The Narcicyst
and, of course, Classified.
Classified is an emcee’s emcee.
His American equivalent is
something like Chicago’s Qwel (of
Typical Cats), or a young Planet
Asia. Classified isn’t afraid to tell
you what it’s like to be a touring
musician in the modern world of
carnivorous promoters and shady
door deals, and he refuses to be one
of those cats that forgets where he
came from. His music lets you know
how he grew up, who he looks up to,
what matters in his life and how it
relates to the world around him.
Some of Classified’s best punch lines
involve him musing on what it’s like
to be broke and married while on
the road, or how people in the U.S.
judge his success as an artist
by the type of cell phone
he carries.
Despite being well-
seasoned, Classified is
humble, an award-winning
emcee who’s been in
the game since ‘95
and is now in the
midst of his
golden years.
This
ambassador
from the North
is a hard-
working
rhyme-spitter
with a lifelong
dedication to
his craft —
about as real as
real can get,
and then some.
Classified
opens for
Slaughterhouse
at 9 pm Saturday,
April 14, at WOW
Hall; $18 adv., $20
door. — Dante
Zuñiga-West
24 APRIL 12, 2012 EUGENE WEEKLY
Two Hits and the Joint Turned Brown
Part of the contract people enter into when they decide to live in Oregon dictates that they will see mountains regularly —
whether that be off in the distance or from the summit of the one they’ve just climbed. While this pastoral outlook on
mountains is fine and dandy, it’s often easy to forget that the mountains over yonder have an explicit feeling to them — one
that can be summed up with scathing, scratchy vocal prowess, feet stomping against porchboards and the hefty plunk of a pick
hitting strings — and it’s this same romanticized view of musical mountain life that shines through the smooth-hitting jamgrass
music of Yonder Mountain String Band.
Defying the rather rustic archetype of jam-band culture perpetuated by groups like the Grateful Dead and Phish, Yonder
Mountain have more to offer than just stoned psychedelia. Of course, this is not to say that fans aren’t fiending for a chance to
sing along to tunes about marijuana, hangovers and buzz-kills, though it does provide an incredibly fun source of mature
provisions alongside the childish, high-school pipedream-fulfilling hippie-burnout material offered by bands from days past.
One thing people tend to forget about improvisation is that it takes talent. Whether improvisation takes a front seat in
Yonder Mountains’ live tunes is irrelevant. The fact remains: These dudes know how to play their instruments, and their show
this week is guaranteed to be a riotous display of musical expertise.
Yonder Mountain String Band and Brown Bird play at 8:30 pm Thursday, April 19, at McDonald Theatre; $20 adv., $25 door.
— Andy Valentine
Diamond in the Rough
So you get one more dude in flash sneakers and
a sideways ball cap waving his arms around a
switchboard and swerving with the lights and the
beats. He wants you to dance, wants your motion
to syncopate the rhythms that his gesticulations
beckon, to sweat, crystallize and break within
four bars. And he wants you to do it again, and
again and again. You may ask yourself why get
caught up in these Rorschach ripples of synth-
twitch revelry and bass under pressure, waiting
to be carved away, pared down to that
metamorphic ego? Simple: Paper Diamond is
the jeweler.
Colorado-based Paper Diamond welds festive
touring tools from his time as bassist for Pnuma
Trio’s organic electronica, to playing and producing
under his new moniker with Derek Vincent Smith’s Pretty
Lights label. Levitate, Paper Diamond’s debut album,
showcases that mountain sound with rumbling bass and
slip-slide dramatization that feels like origami skis escaping an
avalanche. But precise production seeps through tracks like
“Snowfall,” a soft come-upper with an ambient tow-lift. At other
end of the spectrum, “From Now Till…” features tendered samples
of expensive taste over whistle-pulsing pressure.
Paper Diamond is another talented switchboard
artist trying to help you dance — cut it out, fold it up,
get down.
Paper Diamond plays with Minnesota at 8 pm
Thursday, April 12, at McDonald Theatre; $15 adv;
$18 door. — Patrick Newson
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM