Archive for 2007

Sloan @ Bowery Ballroom 1/18/2007
Flying High Again / Who Taught You To Live Like That? / Will I Belong? / Ill Placed Trust / The Other Man / The Lines You Amend / Fading Into Obscurity / Golden Eyes / Love Is All Around / Living With The Masses / HFXNSHC / Blackout / All Used Up / C’mon C’mon / Everybody Wants You / I Understand / You Know What It’s About / Someone I Can Be True With / Money City Maniacs / I Can’t Sleep / I Know You / Something’s Wrong / I’ve Gotta Try / Everything You’ve Done Wrong / Can You Figure It Out? / Penpals / The Good In Everyone / Another Way I Could Do It // Anyone Who’s Anyone / Chester The Molester / If It Feels Good, Do It

Sloan “Flying High Again / Who Taught You To Live Like That?” – If you recall, back around October I went to see Sloan play during the Pop Montreal festival, and part of the motivation for that was that I wanted to see them perform in front of a bunch of intense superfans in a nation where they are mainstream rock stars because I didn’t think I would get a similar experience in the United States. Though the audience in Montreal was pretty into that show, they could not compete with the enthusiasm of the (larger) crowd at the Bowery Ballroom last night. I don’t know, maybe the room was full of Canadian expats, but it was exciting, and the band earned their adulation with a generous 31 song set focusing mainly on their latest and greatest album, Never Hear The End Of It.

For a record containing 30 tracks penned by four different songwriters, Never Hear The End Of It is remarkable for both its density of high quality material, and its thematic and musical consistency. The songs go off in a number of lyrical tangents, but each member spends a bit of time coming to terms with the state of their career with varying levels of ambivalence, suggesting that they had some sort of quiet collective midlife crisis that resulted in a re-energized commitment to their craft rather than an unfortunate implosion. It’s telling that “Flying High Again” is the song that kicks off both the album and the setlist — it’s a show of solidarity in that it’s the only song in their discography featuring lead vocals from all four members, and even though the lyrics are riddled with uncertain language, its sentiment is both optimistic and defiant; basically “hey, we’re better than ever, and we’re not going away because we have nowhere to go.” (Click here to buy it from Yep Roc.)

I was also lucky enough to help out with their live session at WFMU earlier in the day. I’ll come back and discuss that a bit more at a later date, but those recordings will debut on a forthcoming episode of Terre T’s Cherry Blossom Clinic. The band made use of the new WFMU studio piano, and performed moody rainy day versions of “Another Way I Could Do It,” “HFXNSHC,” “Everybody Wants You,” “Who Taught You To Live Like That?,” and “Blackout.” The latter came the closest to the feel of the album arrangement, though they were performing it in rehearsal with heavy reverb and a somewhat motorik-ish beat that they were calling the “Stereolab version” of the song. They were also rehearsing a piano-based version of “Ana Lucia,” but unfortunately that didn’t make it to the final session etiher.

Yoko Ono and Le Tigre “Sisters O Sisters” – Though Yoko Ono is covering familiar ground in this collaboration, she ultimately sounds like she’s a special guest on a song that could have easily fit on either of the last two Le Tigre albums. It’s an inspired combination — few living people represent the aesthetic of 60s progressive activism as completely as Ono, and Le Tigre made a career out of trying to revive it in a new context. Like a lot of their respective music, it contains a lot of protest language that may seem anachronistic, corny, and cheap, but they know that, and at least part of the point is to make the listener question why they feel that way about this sort of thing even if they essentially agree with the politics. (Click here to pre-order it from Amazon.)

Boris with Michio Kurihara “Starship Narrator” – Boris and Kurihara lock into a heavy groove at the start, but it’s just a formality, something to carry us toward a brilliant, visceral guitar solo at the center of the cut that pretty much defines the phrase “rock ultimate.” Brandon Stosuy liked this track to the sound of Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins over on Pitchfork yesterday, and I think he’s right on about that. Unlike Billy Corgan, Boris and Kurihara aren’t beholden to pop song forms, but there’s a similar spirit and power to this music, especially if you compare it to live recordings of the Pumpkins back when Billy was more interested in expressing spirituality through sublime psychedelic noise than chasing commercial success. (Which is not to say that pursuit didn’t yield some fine work, but you know…) (Click here to buy it from Amp Camp.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site with mp3s from Ornette Coleman, Noonday Underground, and Klanguage. It’s one of the best sets of songs in the history of the column, so definitely check that out.

Welcome “This Minute” – Welcome spend three minutes documenting the passing of just one, splitting their time between commenting on its content with arch self-awareness (“this minute is a good minute”), lyrically backtracking over its events as they are processed by an inebriated consciousness, and feeling its dramatic tension play out wordlessly via sickly electronic shrieks and strangled guitar strings. (Click here to pre-order it from Fat Cat.)

Sophie Ellis-Bextor “Catch You” – Since I am not British, this song lacks the crushing weight of context that comes with Ellis-Bextor’s fame and career arc. This is both good and bad — on one hand, I can just sort of turn my mind off and enjoy it as it passes by in a whoosh of head rush hooks and brisk, computerized beats, but on the other, I’ve got little to say about it other than “wee, this is a fun ride!” That’s no bad thing if you’re a listener, but writing anything about the track is a bit of a chore. (Click here to pre-order it from HMV UK.)

A Sunny Day In Glasgow “Lists, Plans” – There are few moments of lucidity on A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s debut LP Scribble Mural Comic Journal, and even those seem delirious and disconnected from reality. The structure of its centerpiece “Lists, Plans” implies a narrative, but like the rest of the songs on the album, it’s all abstracted sensation without any concrete details aside from some vague allusion to lists in the otherwise incoherent and ghostly vocals of the Daniels sisters. The composition cuts between sections like scenes in a film, conveying movement through time and space, as well as some recognizable but barely understood drama as the track progresses. Ben Daniels’ command of texture and gift for intuitive musical storytelling is remarkable — he really ought to be up to his neck in offers for soundtrack work by the end of the year. (Click here to pre-order it from Notenuf.)

Elsewhere: Just before closing up shop and moving to a new address, Mike Barthel gives us Clap Clap’s Greatest Hits; The Reeler offers up The Top Ten Worst Top Ten Movies Lists of 2006; and Paul O’Brien riffs on the absurdity of Dark Speedball.

Bjorn Again “Stop! (More)” – Back in 1992, the ABBA tribute act Bjorn Again recorded ABBA-ized versions of “Stop!” and “A Little Respect” as a response to Erasure’s release of their ABBA-esque covers EP. As you can imagine, the results test the limits of sublime cheesiness, and if you ever thought that Erasure had their camp straps pulled tight on their original recordings, you will be amazed by the impossible tautness of these Bjorn Again versions. “Stop!” is already a perfect song, and topping the original is more or less unthinkable, but interpreting it with an eye toward its stylistic roots and the goofy stylistic excess of ABBA is inspired and exciting, and one of the more interesting applications of the tribute act aesthetic. (Click here to attempt to buy it from EIL. Thanks to Elisabeth Vincentelli.)

Dean & Britta “You Turned My Head Around” – Not unlike her partner Dean Wareham, Britta Phillips specializes in an aloof, understated vocal style that presents emotions in a muted, yet undiluted state. However, on this cover of an old Lee Hazlewood/Ann-Margaret number, her voice shoots up in the chorus like a burst of fireworks as she’s overcome with love and amazement. It’s still sort of mannered and restrained compared to many other performers, but it’s a revelation in the context of their album and within the song itself, which reverts to a familiar Luna-ish languor on its verses. (Click here to buy it from Zoe Records.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site with mp3s from Sally Shapiro, Deerhoof, and Menomena.

Also: Sean Michaels digs deep into Pavement’s “AT&T” on Said The Gramophone. Actually, I’m the guy that he knows who “buys a spritzer whenever he’s in Manhattan” in honor of the song, though I haven’t really done that in ten years. When I was in high school, I took a weekly class at Pratt, and that’s when I would do that. I’m in Manhattan way too often now to be constantly buying spritzers, but maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.

Field Music “A House Is Not A Home” – Field Music absolutely nail a specific yet slippery English pop sensibility with a scholarly eye for minute detail, and though they are self-consciously working within an established tradition, their work on Tones Of Town sounds fluid and natural, as though they have access to the same well of inspiration as the songwriters that they emulate. “A House Is Not A Home” seems effortless in the way that only the best songs can, and has a way of sneaking into the back of your mind and setting up residence like a welcome, yet uninvited guest. That’s only appropriate given its set of lyrics, which ponder the notion of what it is to have a home, and seem to posit that a healthy mind can only come from a life full of compromise and cooperation, because otherwise a person grows cold and stagnant if their habits and tastes are consistently unchallenged. (Click here to buy it from Midheaven.)

The Pipettes “I Love You” – It has become clear to me over the past two weeks that I made a small mistake by omitting the Pipettes’ debut album from both of my critics poll ballots. (Not that it would have made all that much difference in their rank on the Idolator poll.) All of their songs aside from “Pull Shapes,” “One Night Stand,” and “Dirty Mind” (all of which resided on a frequently-played iPod playlist) had fallen out of my rotation in the fourth quarter of 2006, and so I just was not thinking about the record very much. Upon revisiting the album, I’ve realized a few things, chief among them that a) We Are The Pipettes is a lot better than I remembered it being, b) that it is a more consistently great record than half of what I actually voted for, and c) that some of the tracks that I had mostly ignored at first have become some of my favorites now.

Of those initially ignored cuts, “I Love You” is the one that followed the most dramatic arc, starting off as a brief song that I barely acknowledged to ending up among my four or five favorites on the record. As I came to appreciate We Are The Pipettes as an album rather than a collection of singles, I realized that “I Love You” was not simply a quick, sentimental track tacked on at the end but rather the logical conclusion of the set. Throughout the sequence, the Pipettes present themselves in high esteem, and at least half of the songs come at the expense of the men who objectify them, culminating in the cheerfully cruel “One Night Stand.” “I Love You” comes only a couple minutes later, and lyrically, it’s a complete 180 — the girls are self-deprecating and a bit insecure, and suddenly quite open to the notion of unconditional love if only the object of their affection would return the favor. They seem overwhelmed and helpless by realizing that they love this guy (it’s sorta weird speaking about them collectively when this is clearly a song sung from a singular point of view!), and the song is less a declaration to the person in question than an admission to themselves.

It reminds me a bit of that amazing scene in the most recent episode of The Office in which we’re all expecting Melora Hardin’s stern Jan Levinson to tear into Steve Carell’s Michael Scott for semi-accidentally spreading a revealing photo of them both on vacation in Jamaica, but she instead (SPOILERS, obviously) spins off on an emotional tangent that serves to explain her previously inexplicable attraction to him, and totally befuddle both Michael and the audience. Essentially, Jan is a lonely, troubled woman with a self-destructive streak who is seeking some measure of happiness, even if it means totally redefining the word. She acknowledges that Michael is all wrong for her, and yet she wants him anyway, perhaps not realizing that this utterly clueless yet genuinely well-meaning man is just as lonely (if not more so), and actually cares for her even if he has the emotional maturity of a pre-teen boy. The funny thing is, the song works just as well for either character – the sudden, perhaps mildly terrifying clarity is definitely more Jan, but the recognition of inadequacy is a match for Michael, who knows that he’s in way over his head, and has almost no idea of what to do about this baffling situation that has fallen into his lap. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

The Fiery Furnaces @ North Six 1/5/2007
Nevers (instrumental intro) / In My Little Thatched Hut / I’m In No Mood (with Nevers instrumental interlude) / Black-Hearted Boy / Bitter Tea / Waiting To Know You / The Vietnamese Telephone Directory / Oh Sweet Woods / Borneo / Benton Harbor Blues (with Nevers instrumental tag) / Whistle Rhapsody / Teach Me Sweetheart / Bitter Tea (“Crazy Crane” part) / Name Game / Birdie Brain / South Is Only A Home / Quay Cur / Slavin’ Away / Single Again / Blueberry Boat // Japanese Slippers / Police Sweater Blood Vow

The Fiery Furnaces “Japanese Slippers (Live in session for Face Culture, 3/4/2006)” – I had been anxiously waiting to hear this version of the Fiery Furnaces for months. If you’re not aware, they’ve been playing since September in a line-up consisting of Eleanor Friedberger on vocals, Matt Friedberger on organ, Jason Loewenstein on guitar, Bob D’Amico on drums, and Michael Goodman on all manner of percussion. The majority of the set was comprised of a medley of Bitter Tea songs, running in roughly the same order as they are heard on the LP, but performed with drastically different arrangements. (I know, what a shock.) The show came with extremely variable results. The highs were exceptional (“Teach Me Sweetheart,” the second appearance of “Bitter Tea,” “Single Again,” the cheerful new tune “Japanese Slippers,” and the danceable sing along version of “Police Sweater Blood Vow”), and the lows were incredibly frustrating.

The band’s focus throughout the evening was placed almost entirely on rhythm, and so Eleanor followed suit by either mangling or completely abandoning her melodies in favor of staccato syllable blasts, in effect killing the appeal of more than half the setlist. In previous live incarnations, the band’s altered arrangements were exciting because they found new ways to present familiar melodies — no matter how dizzying the 2004 medley shows were, if you knew the records, you could sing along from start to finish. Increasingly, they are just shoe-horning their lyrics into new forms without any regard for anything other than maaaaybe meter. It’s a perverse thing because it seems to assume that the lyrics were always more important than the melodies, and though I do love their words, this approach is extremely out of touch with their strengths as musicians and performers, especially when Eleanor speeds through so many of her lines that they become an incomprehensible blur through much of the show. The band was playing consistently interesting music, and I would have much rather heard Eleanor spout new words that fit comfortably within that jagged syncopation rather than listen to her jam the lyrics of some of my favorite songs into those structures for no other reason than to say “hey, here’s an oldie.”

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of the show came when she actually sang the tunes as they were written, though those selections seemed arbitrary — “Teach Me Sweetheart” and “Police Sweater Blood Vow” are certainly songs with melodies that ought not to be screwed around with too much, but why don’t they feel the same way about “Inca Rag/Name Game,” “Birdie Brain,” and “South Is Only A Home”? The encore was easily the best part of the show, since those performances effortlessly blended the percussive elements with pre-existing melodies and song forms, allowing the rhythms to add to the songs rather than knock them out their orbits. I’d love to see the band play an entire show in the audience-friendly manner that they performed “Police Sweater Blood Vow,” but the Friedbergers seem so hell-bent on fucking with their audience that I can’t imagine them doing something so simple and wonderful for quite some time. (Click here to watch the entire Face Culture session.)

Pase Rock/Spank Rock “Lindsay Lohan” – There’s a good chance that you’ve heard this — several other blogs jumped on this the moment that it hit the internet, but nobody really said anything about it other than something to the effect of “SPANK ROCK LINDSAY OMG LOLZ,” which is pretty disappointing given that this song is more ripe for critical dissection than most anything else that has turned up in the past few months. For one thing, this could be the single most confused song about sex that I’ve ever heard — multiple voices trade off verses, and no one can decide whether or not they want to fuck her, insult her, or tell her to put on some panties. It’s a rather brilliant musical expression of the creepy cycle of post-TMZ tabloid sleaze in the way it begins with lust directed toward the sexualized young celebrity that mutates into a contempt that intensifies to become a quasi-S&M hate-fuck impulse before collapsing into self-loathing. The song spins through that cycle so rapidly that the lyrics pass by in a vertiginous haze of ideas about sex, celebrity culture, and class without forming any sort of coherent stance on anything, which is, of course, exactly how most people feel about this sort of thing. The best part of the song comes at the end, when a gravel-voiced dude barks an especially raunchy verse that concludes with the exclamation “I don’t care about sex! / No, wait a minute, I LOVE IT!” before breaking into a giggle fit that acknowledges his own conflicted ridiculousness. (Click here for the Spank Rock MySpace page. Needless to say, this song is extremely Not Safe For Work.)

Elsewhere: Idolator’s Jackin’ Pop critics poll is up, and you can see my ballot here. Something to keep in mind is that my ballot is not intended to be some sort of proper year-end list for myself or this site (there will never be list features on Fluxblog), but rather a vote and nothing more. (I’m glad to see that some of my ponies did very well in this race!)

I also voted in the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll, and when that is online, you will notice that my ballot for each is a little different, as is the list I did for the Insound mailing list. I put them together on different days, and things shifted a bit. The singles ballot is not meant to be understood as my favorite songs of the year. In order to narrow things down, I followed two simple rules — songs must be actual singles (no favored album cuts) and songs from my albums list were disqualified to make room for more artists in an attempt to broaden the scope a little bit. There’s a lot of wonderful records that I feel very strongly about that didn’t make it to these ballots, and as you might have picked up from reading this site over the past few years, I like a lot more music than can be stuffed into 20 slots on a ballot.

Jay Reatard “My Family” – Over the (long, boring) weekend, I saw a large chunk of Don Lett’s endlessly self-congratulatory documentary Punk: Attitude on the IFC channel. It’s about as awful as its name implies — it’s a nonstop nostalgia-fest that haphazardly and incoherently cuts around through the timeline, ignores all sorts of key artists while exalting the obvious and the overrated, and generally acts as though the genre’s history ended with Nirvana. Most egregiously, it only flirts with the concept of punk rock as a sort of traditional music — Henry Rollins talks a bit about how musically conservative punks can be, but the film is too hung up on the notion of punk as an inherently rebellious movement to deal with the reality of what it has become over the course of three decades. More often than not, contemporary punk bands (especially hardcore bands!) are extremely practical entities that churn out music with a limited, modular set of elements and a rather precise sense of purpose that boils down to “music for punk rock shows and punk rock people.”

In context, there’s nothing wrong with this sort of thing, or any sort of utilitarian music, and it only signals the creative death of the genre if you’re deaf to the many permutations of punk that continue to pop up, or are willing to write off a guy like Jay Reatard, who writes vibrant, urgent songs that fall firmly within the tradition without seeming stale or overly beholden to the past. In its way, his most recent album Blood Visions is not unlike the work of the Scissor Sisters, Belle & Sebastian, Phoenix, Marit Larsen and the New Pornographers — it’s about mastering the craft of an established form that has since fallen out of fashion, and finding ways of modernizing and/or personalizing its tropes. It wouldn’t be hard to convince someone that Reatard’s album was actually released by a bunch of dudes obsessed with UK punk in 1980, but there’s something about the album, and I honestly can’t isolate exactly what it might be, that seems inextricably rooted in the present tense. (Click here to buy it from Midheaven.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site, with rather excellent mp3s from Of Montreal, Field Music, and Busdriver. I’m very fond of the new Field Music album, and if anyone makes a better album than Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? in 2007…well, then that album is going to have to be pretty damn astonishing. I’ll certainly come back to both of those records on this site in the months to come.

Charlotte Hatherley “Behave” – Charlotte Hatherley is easily one of the most underrated rock guitarists of her generation, mainly due to her own unfair obscurity, but also because her parts tend toward subtlety and rhythmic nuance rather than flash. “Behave” is a carefully tangled knot of muted emotions, and even when it loosens up, it’s impossible to find the beginning of any particular thread. Her lyrics only complicate the matter by introducing a matching theme of co-dependence and willful submission, and her vocal performance obfuscates her intentions — is her peace offering just a stay of execution for a troubled relationship, or a genuine act of contrition? Does she actually want to cling to an unhappy status quo, or is she back-pedaling after an unsuccessful attempt to break free? Everything about this song suggests that it’s all of the above, and probably a lot more. (Click here to buy it from Charlotte Hatherley.)

Noonday Underground “Put You Back Together” – Think of this as being song one, side A for 2007. Aside from simply sounding like a fresh start, it overflows with measured yet confident optimism, and that’s certainly something that ought to become a running theme for the coming year. Even with a mediocre vocalist, this song would be vibrant and energizing, but Daisy Martey’s performance pushes the recording way over the top as she blasts her voice through the red and into the white as though she’s attempting to burn a hole in the universe with her last high note in the chorus. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)

!!! “Yadnus” – !!! have a tendency for cluttered, busy arrangements, but “Yadnus” (hey look, it’s Sunday backwards, huh…) has a streamlined sound that balances out their skill for both rhythmic rigidity and fluidity better than anything else that they’ve recorded to date. The track mixes a bold swagger with a sound that feels like a shorthand for big money urban decadence, like a bunch of wild west thugs busting up some lame high-end bottle-service bar. (Click here for the !!! MySpace page.)

Elsewhere: I saw the best asses of my generation deployed by YouTube, starving hysterical naked and so forth.