Archive for April, 2011

Foo Fighters @ Ed Sullivan Theater 4/12/2011 Bridge Burning / Rope / Dear Rosemary / White Limo / Arlandria / These Days / Back and Forth / A Matter of Time / Miss the Misery / I Should Have Known / Walk / All My Life / Times Like These / My Hero / Learn to Fly / Cold Day in the Sun / Big Me / Stacked Actors / Monkey Wrench / Everlong / The Best of You / This Is a Call

Foo Fighters "Back and Forth"

In the time since The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters became a band that could be relied upon to produce a few quality modern rock singles with each new record, but not a lot more. And this was fine: Dave Grohl is his generation's equivalent to Tom Petty, and being Tom Petty is no bad thing. Wasting Light, the band's seventh studio album, breaks this cycle. It's a solid rock album, one of the best straight-ahead mainstream rock records of the past few years. Almost every song on the thing sounds like it should be a big hit. This resurgence will probably be lost on a lot of people though, because mainstream modern rock is pretty much the least cool genre going right now. I totally get why people have blinders to this stuff -- a huge amount of it is total garbage, and even a lot of the decent stuff basically sounds like going to the mall. But Grohl is a master of this genre, and his band delivers simple thrills with remarkable clarity, precision and power. As a critic it is kinda hard to put a thoughtful spin on this music -- there's no clever concept, no novelty factor, and Grohl's lyrics are so vague that pretty much any song could either be about the death of Kurt Cobain or a conflict with anyone ranging from the love of his life to someone who cut him off in traffic. It's not easy to frame this music, but framing it is beside the point: It's catchy and it rocks and sometimes that is all you need. Buy it from Amazon. Here's the full concert from last night, by the way:

Panda Bear "Last Night at the Jetty"

What is Panda Bear singing about here? Let me paraphrase: Did we have a good time? I think I had a good time but maybe we didn't? Didn't we want to enjoy ourselves? Maybe we did? How can we deny that maybe we had a good time? Etc, etc. If you look at a transcription of the lyrics, it seems like a very bad translation from another language. That said, I like how this slippery, confused emotion is expressed in this sweet, earnest, boyish melody within this icy, pretty arrangement. I love the way this track is just shy of feeling entirely graceful, as if there's some slightly mechanical glitch keeping this from perfection. Buy it from Amazon.

Sebadoh @ Bowery Ballroom 4/9/2011 Too Pure / On Fire / Skull / Ocean / S. Soup / Mind Reader / Got It / Drag Down / Dreams / Magnet's Coil / Rebound / License to Confuse / Sister / Drama Mine / Nothing Like You / Crystal Gypsy / Love to Fight / Bird in the Hand / Careful / Together Or Alone / Not A Friend / Beauty of the Ride / Forced Love / Sixteen / Give Up / Junk Bonds / New Worship / Brand New Love // Not Too Amused / Willing to Wait It's probably for the best that Sebadoh released their best work before phrases like "TMI," "emo" and "overshare" became commonplace. Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein are indie rock's all-time beta male shame spiral champs, a duo of songwriters rivaled only by Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham in their skill for articulating neurotic relationship drama from a straight male perspective in song. Their current tour is focused on the band's mid-90s peak, back when they were basically the rocked-out male equivalent to Liz Phair's music from the same time. Okay, but here's the thing: Whereas I think a person can gain a lot of strength and wisdom from listening to Liz Phair, it's better not to relate to Loewenstein and Barlow's songs. Their music is a catharsis for unflattering feelings -- pettiness, jealousy, neediness, foolishness and passive aggression. These are valid feelings, but...ugh, you know? I hear these songs and remember a lot of awful things. Worst of all, I hear similar situations repeating over and over.

Sebadoh "Give Up"

"Give Up" overflows with self-loathing. Each line comes off as self-condemnation: He's a burn out man, typically bitter, locked into a vicious cycle, a helpless slob in a dead-end day job, a codependent self-styled nightmare. Not long ago, I shifted my perspective on the words and starting hearing it as a sketch of someone else rather than something to be directed inward. Either way it's totally brutal. Buy it from Amazon.

Sebadoh "Nothing Like You"

I love the way the descending, plodding bass line in this song sounds like the body language of a morose, brooding guy pacing around with slumped shoulders. "Nothing Like You" is about trying to make sense of a complicated, painful relationship that is already over. It's broken, you barely get along, but you want to salvage it somehow, if only to justify the time and emotion you've poured into it. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion is perfectly articulated in the double meaning of the chorus: "There's a lot of girls in the world that are nothing like you." Buy it from Amazon.

Hauschka "Cube"

Hauschka's latest album Salon Des Amateurs finds the German experimental pianist playing with rhythms and structural ideas inspired by dance music. I can hear it in some of the tracks for sure, but as usual, the main appeal of Hauschka's work is not a formalist appropriation of ideas from another genre but rather the striking, elegant beauty of his compositions and the distinct, remarkable evocative tones created by his manipulation of his piano's strings and hammers. "Cube" is an especially gorgeous piece. I can't hear much techno influence on this one, but it could be in there somewhere -- I find I get too caught up in its ever-shifting melodies, rhythms and tones to get hung up on trainspotting. Buy it from Amazon.

Katy B "Movement"

"Movement" has the sound of cool sophistication, but that barely conceals its feeling of restlessness and eagerness to break free from an aggravating stasis. Katy B's vocal performance gets the tone just right, conveying a mild anxiety without overselling it and seeming like a wreck. The sadness in this song is manageable, and possibly even constructive -- she sounds like a person with agency who is going to do what she has to do in order to get out of a rut, but is just finding the right moment to act. It could be that she's waiting for the right beat. Buy it on import from Amazon.

Destroyer @ Webster Hall 4/3/2011 Chinatown / Blue Eyes / It's Gonna Take An Airplane / Downtown / My Favorite Year / Kaputt / 3000 Flowers / Painter In Your Pocket / Suicide Demo For Kara Walker / Song For America // Bay of Pigs

Destroyer "Song For America"

There was a guy next to me for most of this show who was very, very drunk and very, very high and very, very loud. He was also very, very, very into Destroyer and took every opportunity to express this feeling. Between each song he shouted stuff like "I LOVE DESTROYER!!!," louder and more emphatically as the show progressed. He seemed a bit flustered because no one else would join in. Maybe a little bit more flustered because no matter what he did, Dan Bejar would not acknowledge his existence in any way. It wasn't just him, though. Despite a small amount of banter, Bejar seemed almost entirely indifferent to the audience. He was present in his songs, singing the words but doing nothing at all to be theatrical. I've seen Bejar perform before as Destroyer and with the New Pornographers, so it wasn't a big surprise to me, though I think there's still a part of me that lives with these records and imagines a much bigger, more flamboyant character than the low-key bohemian I see on stage. And of course the Bejar we actually get is very much a character too, albeit a life-size one -- he's iconic, magnetic, fascinating. He seems genuinely shy. I'm not sure if he likes being on stage, but he obviously loves the music. Sometimes it looked like he was happy to just kneel down and watch the musicians play. Even when he was reading his words from a page, he sounded totally engaged in the songs, if not the "performance." I never got the feeling that he was trying to entertain anyone, but I definitely got the sense that he wanted the music to be as amazing and transporting as possible. This maybe explains why I enjoyed this concert most when I closed my eyes. Buy it from Amazon.

LCD Soundsystem @ Madison Square Garden 4/2/2011 Dance Yrself Clean / Drunk Girls / I Can Change / Time To Get Away / Get Innocuous! / Daft Punk Is Playing At My House / Too Much Love / All My Friends / Tired // 45:33 part one / 45:33 part two / Sound of Silver / 45:33 part four / 45:33 part five / 45:33 part six / Freak Out/Starry Eyes /// Us V Them / North American Scum / Bye Bye Bayou / You Wanted A Hit / Tribulations / Movement / Yeah / Someone Great / Losing My Edge / Home //// All I Want / Jump Into the Fire / New York, I Love You When I was reading through Pitchfork's excellent You Were There: The Complete LCD Soundsystem last week, I kept thinking that I was glad that I wasn't a part of that project because out of all the bands that mean a lot to me, LCD Soundsystem is probably the only one where I don't think I could successfully write about them in a way that was not personal. Also, I've never been happy with anything I've written about this band. When the early singles were coming out, it was all about the thrill of discovery for me, and I wasn't good enough back then to articulate what made the music so compelling. Later on, I shied away from getting at why certain songs connected with me because there are simply some things I don't want to discuss in public, or in many cases, with other people at all. My favorite LCD Soundsystem songs are tied to some of the most crucial (and often most painful) parts of my life. "Us V Them" and "North American Scum" are connected to little epiphanies; "I Can Change" is tied to a moment of horrible self-awareness. I saw them play "Jump Into the Fire" on the day I learned that my father had cancer and it provided an intense catharsis. "Someone Great" was exactly how I felt when he died, right on down to the description of the phone call.

LCD Soundsystem "Yeah"

The LCD song that means the most to me is "Yeah." It changed the course of my life. When that song came out I was a recent art school graduate with very little going on in my life, and no direction. This site was still in a very early stage, with a tiny readership mainly comprised of internet friends. At that point in time, it was all enthusiasm. The writing wasn't there yet, and I didn't really think of myself as a writer at all. In December of 2003, I posted a leaked mp3 of "Yeah" and it basically put this site on the map. The traffic spiked, and miraculously pretty much everyone stuck around. That set off a chain reaction of press coverage and attention and other people starting similar sites and it completely changed everything for me. It pushed me to take this very seriously, and to become a real writer. I can't understate the importance of this site in my life: Almost everything good about my life in the past decade is a direct result of doing this site, and I credit LCD Soundsystem and "Yeah" for creating this opportunity for me. At least in some way I owe my career to James Murphy. "Yeah" happens to be the song that best summarizes what LCD Soundsystem was all about. The major reason why Murphy is an inspiring figure is that he will never half-ass anything. He is all about total commitment, and executing every idea as well as possible. "Yeah" is a song that expresses deep disgust toward those who only talk about their ideas. Murphy houses this loathing and frustration in one of the most ambitious compositions of his career, a work that is even more impressive in concert if just by proving that a live band can absolutely nail a complex house music track with zero compromise. Murphy raises the bar for everyone, not just musicians. His achievement is a challenge to everyone to do better. In this way, "Yeah" never stops changing my life. I hear the sentiment in this song (and also some very similar words in "Pow Pow") and I get anxious. His words sting because I know I am implicated and I know he's right and I just want to prove him wrong. He makes me want to work. Buy it from Amazon.