Ida Maria. She rocked Spaceland. She’s an artist from Norway. I’d never heard of her until reading about her in the LA Weekly. The LA Weekly describes her as “packed with bare-bones garage-punk jams longer on attitude than ornamentation . . . larger-than-life
reputation for onstage antics.” She’s definitely a woman filled with attitude. At the end of her set, she’d destroyed the stage, but she still had vocals to finish up so she grabbed two microphone stands and rushed towards one end of the stage with finality on her mind. Her onstage antics included a self-only wet t-shirt contest which resulted in everyone noticing she wasn’t wearing a bra. She does have the onstage antics down, but I can’t say they’re larger-than-life. Maybe people who love Ida Maria haven’t seen Shayne from Spider Problem – now that’s a person with onstage antics. I loved the set – and the pink high top shoes she wore. Perhaps my thirty minutes of enjoyment had something to do with the fact that just before the set began a friend of mine began jumping around chanting, “Ida Maria. Ida Maria. Ida Maria.” It sort of got me going and I will say that from her very first song, I had a smile on my face.Rocco Deluca. He’s doing the residency at Spaceland this month of January. This guy can rock it. The first half of his set was a thrill of rock and roll. He uses a resonator guitar, which in my mind gave the music a southern rock feel. He had folks bouncing with the music. He slowed it down during the second half of his set. There were a couple cool duets with a female
singer. There were also a couple other guest musicians. My nitpicking, I got really into the first half and wished he’d continued in that vein, but I can’t complain too much because as mentioned I did enjoy the two duet songs. I read online that Kiefer Sutherland of “24” fame has taken an interest in Rocco Deluca’s music and that a Rocco Deluca music video is on the “24 – Redemption” DVD. I couldn’t help but think that his music would be great for that Louisiana-based TV show “True Blood.” (Anna Paquin just won the Golden Globe for “Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series – Drama.)HoneyHoney. This band is the main reason I headed out to Spaceland Monday night. For some reason, reading the LA Weekly, the band name just caught my attention and I figured I had to give this band a
listen. I wasn’t disappointed. As the LA Weekly puts it, HoneyHoney is “an appealing uptempo brand of melodic folk-rock.” Hey, when Suzanne Santo is jamming on the violin, you can’t deny that this is uptempo music. She also plays that banjo, but she had problems tuning it so she didn’t really use it during the night. HoneyHoney is a two piece band (I think) with Ben Jaffe on guitar. He helps out on vocals, as well, but Suzanne is the main vocalist for the band. They also had two other musicians playing guitar and drums. What was endearing (at least to me) was the fact that midway through their set (which started a bit after midnight) Suzanne said something like, “I’m going to sleep in tomorrow morning. I’m so used to going to bed early that by 9:30 p.m. I was wondering how I was going to make it through the night.” It is nice to know that not all musicians get an extra boast of energy starting around 1 a.m. It was unfortunate that Spaceland partially cleared out soon after Rocco Deluca, because people missed a great set. (I suspect that Suzanne isn’t the only one who needs her sleep. Tuesday is a workday and I think even in Silver Lake people need to head to bed for the next day’s grind.)Other than music, something to remember the night by: there was a guy who was trying to hit on every woman in his near vicinity. Most of the women shifted just out of conversation distance soon after initial contact.
Over-heard comment from Suzanne regarding the audience, “Hey, everyone, why don’t you . . . oh thanks, I thought you were all going to stand away from the stage during our set.”
Notes from Vivace
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