Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ Siren Music Festival, Coney Island 7/19/2008

The very fact that I went to this show is a testament to how much I love Stephen Malkmus and his Jicks. I really can’t emphasize enough how much I loathe the Siren Festival — it’s gross, overcrowded, always has terrible sound, and it’s totally out of the way. (It took me about 90 minutes to get there, which is about the same amount of time it would take for me to go visit my parents in the Hudson Valley.) I was there out of love, but I’ve got to say, I did feel a bit of resentment about having to go out to this thing.

CSS “Believe/Achieve” – In retrospect, I suppose a lot of people were justified in assuming the worst of CSS when they arrived in America a few years ago. There was already a glut of hedonistic hipster-centric dance-rock bands, and we hardly needed another one, much less a band with songs that name-checked the likes of Paris Hilton and Death From Above 1979. CSS were exactly what they appeared to be, but they happened to have two major advantages over their peers: Their songs were well-crafted and relatively diverse, and they had a frontwoman called Lovefoxxx (!!!) who was capable of investing lyrics about crushes and hipster culture with soul and humanity. 

Gospel Supremes “Do, Lord, Remember Me” – Art Rosenbaum recorded the music found on the Art of Field Recording box set over the course of five decades, and as a result, the quality of the audio varies from track to track. There are some unexpected, unintentional benefits to this approach. For example, some of the more recent digital recordings document singers such as Mary Lomax, who performs unaccompanied traditional ballads dating back hundreds of years. Those records are clear and pristine, and place the emphasis on her voice and the words rather than an aural patina of oldness. On the other hand, the relatively poor quality of this recording of the Gospel Supremes from 1977 serves to compensate for the fact that the song’s arrangement is one of the most modern sounds in the set — the band play electric instruments, and the gospel tune is clearly shaped by R&B influences. The fidelity may be shaky, but the recording gives us a strong sense of time and place, and that context adds quite a bit to the charm of this already brilliant performance. (Click here to buy it from Dust-To-Digital.) (Originally posted on 12/24/2007)

Elsewhere: I’m going to be idolatin’ on Idolator today. Come see.

Breakbot “Happy Rabbit” – Most of the time, a groove starts with the bass line, and builds up to a point where the bass is guiding the composition, but you’re probably thinking about something else in the arrangement. “Happy Rabbit” flips that dynamic. The grooves pile on from the start, but when the bass comes in, it’s so bold and prominent that it may as well be a lead vocal. The bass part is immediately ingratiating — it’s just tight enough to to snap into the beat, but loose enough to have a swagger that sets it apart from the other elements in the mix. It certainly sounds more tactile than the other sounds in the recording. Whereas the keyboard parts feel a bit airy and removed, you can almost feel the sensation of the bass strings vibrating beneath your fingers, or flopping casually above the fretboard. The rest of the song sounds like a fantasy, but that bass — it feels so real, like something actually happening to you. (Click here to buy it from Moshi Moshi.)

Elsewhere: One Person Trend Stories is one of the best usages of the internet that I’ve encountered all summer.

Simone White “I Didn’t Have A Summer Romance” – This song was originally written and performed by Carole King, who sang the song with the declarative melancholy of a person who very much wants you to notice that they are sad and is fishing for some consolation. Simone White’s version is a bit more straightforward. Her voice is soft and she lacks King’s assertive edge, making her come across more like a traditional wallflower. She plays the character as someone who is just painfully lonely, and is heartbroken by her lack of heartbreak, and exhausted by living vicariously through friends and fiction. She doesn’t seem bitter or overly depressed — if anything, she just seems like this easygoing person who truly appreciates romance and intimacy, but rarely gets her shot at it. You hear the song, and you imagine this girl, and I think you’re supposed to feel something like “wait, why didn’t anyone tell me about her?” Whether or not you actually had a summer romance, you start to wish just a bit that it had been with her. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Fluxcast #1 (NEW LINK, NEW FILE) – Over the weekend, I made this demo podcast. It’s basically an hour-long show in the college/freeform radio format. I’m not going to tell you what songs are in it because that sorta defeats the purpose, but it’s a mix of new material (much of which will be familiar to regular readers) and some wild card oldies. Let me know what you think — if enough people enjoy/find a use for this, I’d be happy to continue making these things on some kind of regular basis. You just have to tell me that you liked it, or I’ll assume that you didn’t.

Regular posting resumes tomorrow.

Alphabeat “Fantastic 6” – Though the lyrics of “Fantastic 6” may register as being a bit odd at first, the song is so thrilling and camp that it’s pretty easy to just tune out the words and just go along for the ride. It sounds like the midway point between Bis and Abba, and the song effortlessly pulls the listener into its spirit of cartoon superhero triumphalism, leaving you feeling both silly and invincible by the time it’s over. The lyrics, as it turns out, mirror the sound of the song perfectly. The band are singing about some sort of international police organization that monitors our every move from outer space via sophisticated omnipresent surveillance, and protects us all from evildoers. (Part of the chorus is sung in German, and that’s where it’s all spelled out for you — they refer to “weltpolizei,” which translates to “world police.”) There are two ways to interpret the intention of this song: Either Alphabeat are being sarcastic and they are off on a “who watches the watchmen?” riff, or this is an unironic celebration of the notion of a quasi-fascist international police regime. I’m inclined to think that it’s definitely the former, but either way, their command of propaganda kitsch is potent and undeniable. (Click here to buy the inferior UK/European version of the album from Amazon UK.)

Melee Beats “Distraction” – I’m very fond of the way this track implies a depth of field within its range of sounds. Listening to the song is like watching a 3D movie — keyboard parts recede drastically behind the beat, and overlap with these cosmic Kraftwerk parts that pop so much that they seem surreal and slightly disconnected from the thumping bass line. The singer seems somewhat passive to the sound, as though he’s just sort of passing through these amazing electronic textures in a simulated physical space, just like the listener. (Click here to buy it from Melee Beats.)

Jean Grae & 9th Wonder “Don’t Rush Me” – Hip hop has a long tradition of artists who present their persona as an absolute thing, as if the construction of their identity and reputation is the only thing they can truly own and control. In this track, Jean Grae discusses her identity as a work in progress, and speaks openly about her insecurities and attempts to improve herself without sacrificing the proud swagger of a sharp MC. Grae’s verses critique her flaws and reflect on her moments of doubt, but there’s an optimism and confidence in her words and delivery that keeps the song from seeming overly defensive or defeated. If anything, Grae sends the message that if you’re not doing what you can to mature and reconstruct your own character, you’re the one who ought to be pitied. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

I hope that you appreciate the fact that I very seldom post more than one song from the same album at once, but this is rare case in which I think the songs — which segue into each other on the record — work too well together to be considered on their own.

Shannon McArdle “Leave Me For Dead”

Shannon McArdle “I Was Warned”

“Leave Me For Dead” and “I Was Warned” are essentially the same story told from different angles. In the former, McArdle is telling a recent ex on no uncertain terms “You can say that it’s over, but I’m not finished with you.” She seems a bit manic, and the music bears that out with a cocky groove and a saturated organ texture that seems a bit bold and rude. She’s flirty and pushy, and her attempt at a double-entendre in the last verse comes out sounding like clumsy pornography.

If “Leave Me For Dead” is acting out on drunken impulses, “I Was Warned” is the regretful, depressive hangover, complete with an odd scraping sound that simulates a distracting headache. The song hovers and drones as she dryly reiterates her ex’s critique of her behavior: “No one goes for that kind of talk…brash and balls out, an aversion to subtlety.” The song is lost in an emotional limbo, somewhere between her self-pitying side ceding his point, and wanting to tell him to fuck off for asking her to behave in a manner less threatening to men. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Catcall “August” – This song is a state of post-traumatic shock rendered in super-saturated synthesizers and a beat that keeps on moving, but only seems to pace around in a circle. As the music expresses numb confusion, the vocals convey a slightly muted form of anguish. At some points in the song, Catcall’s voice recalls Courtney Love at her most vulnerable, and that association serves the song well. After all, Love always excelled when we could hear her tough facade disintegrate into raw grief mid-track. (Click here to buy it via Catcall’s MySpace page.)

Sonic Youth @ Battery Park 7/4/2008

The RZA (featuring Rev William Burk, Crisis & Thea van Seijen) “Good Night Kiss” – Digi Snacks is a long, long, long away from the RZA’s best work. Lyrically, he’s not giving us anything we haven’t heard him do before with more energy and inspiration. Musically — well, I’m going to be very charitable and suggest that his efforts amount to an experiment yielding mixed results. All of the tracks on Digi Snacks, including a handful of cuts not produced by the RZA himself, have a sparse, zoned-out sound that feels mellow and relaxing when heard a track or two at a time, but taken as a whole, the music begins to feel disconcerting and vaguely uncomfortable. He’s especially obsessed with these keyboard parts that seem to hover slowly in mid-air, seemingly disassociated from the other elements in the arrangements. Like all of his work as Bobby Digital, the sounds on the songs have an unreal crispness to them, like the musical equivalent of digital animation that dips into the uncanny valley. The overall effect is more chilling than chill, at best evoking the mindset of a deeply medicated person who has become slightly removed from reality, and at worst like having an aggravating itch while incapacitated in a coma. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Tricky “Puppy Toy” – I’m on Tricky’s side, and I always have been, but he doesn’t make it easy. (Indeed, it is very tricky to be a Tricky fan.) Since the late ’90s, he’s spend most of his time either distancing himself from the sound of his best-loved work, or trying in vain to reconnect with the inspiration that yielded Maxinquaye and Pre-Millenium Tension. Though it’s unlikely that he’ll ever make another classic album, it’s important to note that he is still capable of producing good work. Every Tricky record has at least one great song on it — for example, I highly recommend “For Real” from the otherwise dire Juxtapose — and for some reason, he’s intentionally relegated a number of strong tracks to total obscurity. He’s a perverse guy, and because of that, I don’t trust his judgment at all.

Knowle West Boy, his first album in five years, is probably his best album since Angels With Dirty Faces, but it’s still a mess. A solid third of the record is tainted by his consistently terrible taste in male vocalists; another third of it is kinda formulaic and neither here nor there. The successful tracks are the most dynamic– his solo “rap” turn on “Council Estate;” his twisted approximation of new wave pop on “Far Away;” the feminine aggression of “Veronika” and “Puppy Toy.” Though Tricky is clearly still trying to find the perfect Martina Topley-Bird soundalike, the vocalists on the latter two tracks do well to avoid the sleepiness of previous faux-Martinas, and play up the tone of sassy defiance that made Topley-Bird so compelling in the first place.

“Puppy Toy” actually comes closer to sounding like “Together Now,” Tricky’s collaboration with Neneh Cherry on the Nearly God record, than anything he ever made with Martina. The song applies the soft-loud-soft dynamics of ’90s alt-rock to a song that alternates between skewed lounge jazz and rock n’ roll cabaret. It’s a bold, bombastic number that contrasts some fine sonic detail — layers of humming electric guitar, fluid acoustic bass, a string arrangement — with a huge chorus that tramples everything in its path. (Click here to buy it from Domino Records.)

Beta Satan “666” – Beta Satan is the new incarnation of the Danish pop band Tiger Tunes, who have been featured here at least three times before. There are a few differences in terms of personnel, but the most significant change is that they’ve married their quirky pop sensibility to hard-driving, super-dynamic rock, resulting in catchy tunes that often match the gut-punching intensity of the late, great McLusky.  “666,” the band’s most brilliant track to date, pairs lyrics expressing severe yet trivial anxiety about a girl to a ruthless mechanical stomp that is simultaneously violent, visceral, exhilarating, and hilarious. I can’t help but imagine that there’s at least a couple million people out there who would absolutely LOVE this song — seriously, just trying listening to that depth-charge beat without picturing a mob of maniacs moshing in a muddy field — so if you like this one, I strongly encourage you to pass it around.  (Click here for the official Beta Satan site.)

Seelenluft “La Concierge” – This arrangement starts off grounded with a firm dance beat that carries through much of the track, but as the song progresses, it eventually drops out, and the music begins to float away like a helium balloon. The airy lightness is with the song from the start, but that untethered feeling at the end is lovely, especially in the way Seelenluft simulates a slow, graceful ascension into the clouds. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)

High Places “Sandy Feat (7″ version)” – It can be hard to hear the songs on Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes without thinking “wow, if only they had made a really nice version of this in a studio, it’d be amazing!” Of course, those records have a deliberate aura and charm, and it’s not some accident of laziness. They are the result of a fully-formed postmodern aesthetic, and even though they may have often sounded better in concert, they always feel more special and magical in their unfinished form. This isn’t really the case for High Places. They write some very nice songs, but as far as I can discern, their records sound like extremely thin demos, and that’s that. If there is any postmodern intentionality, it’s not apparent. Like too many young bands from this era, nods to lo-fi, drone, electronic music, shoegaze, ambient, and “world music” seem like default decisions rather than considered aesthetic positions. The duo have a knack for simple, ingratiating melodies, skipping beats, and audio texture, but they don’t yet seem fully formed as a band. Which is fine enough, don’t get me wrong — they’re just starting out, and this is normal and healthy. They’ve got promise; I’d love to see them follow through on it with their next record, even if I’m worried that they will continue to follow their worst Animal Collective-esque impulses. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

The Dead Science “Monster Island Czars” – This is very unusual. The Dead Science are part prog, part modern classical, part no wave/noise rock. The singer not only sounds quite a bit like Craig Wedren from Shudder To Think, but Wedren actually has a guest appearance on the album. (Katrina Ford of Celebration also turns up, and there’s certainly some similarities to her band as well.) A majority of the lyrics are either about comic books or the Wu-Tang Clan. (The album is dedicated to the Wu-Tang Clan, and when you open the gatefold of the packaging, it reads “It’s Yourz.”) The music is jagged, violent, dramatic, cinematic, and perversely romantic. It draws on all these things that are familiar to me, and yet it still sounds somewhat alien. “Monster Island Czars” is particularly compelling in the way it slashes, collapses, rises, and burns through so much ground in less than four minutes without sounding the least bit disjointed. (Click here to buy it from Constellation Records, and here for the Dead Science’s official site.)

Pearl Jam @ Madison Square Garden 6/24/2008
Hard To Imagine / Save You / Why Go? / All Night / Corduroy / Faithfull / Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town / Down / Unemployable / Given To Fly / Who You Are / Whipping / 1/2 Full / Even Flow / Present Tense / Daughter / Do The Evolution // Love Reign O’er Me / W.M.A. / Leash / Spin The Black Circle / Wasted Reprise / Porch /// No More / Crazy Mary / Comatose / I Believe In Miracles (with CJ Ramone) / Alive //// All Along The Watchtower / Indifference

I’ll have a different, more show-focused review of this concert over at Stereogum later in the day, but for now, I’m going to be indulgent. (It’s up now, with lots of great photos by Maria Tessa Sciarrino.)

This was my first Pearl Jam concert in a little over ten years. That last show was a brief festival appearance, and so it’s really my second full Pearl Jam gig, the first being a stop in Connecticut on the No Code tour back in 1996. Looking over this setlist, three things come to mind:

1. Wow, I got really lucky. They played my favorite rarity right at the start, and then threw in “Faithfull,” “Corduroy,” “Whipping,” and “Unemployable,” all of which would be near the top of my personal wish list. (“Wishlist,” however, was not, but that’s not really a comment on the quality of that song.) Aside from “Even Flow,” which you’re definitely going to see no matter what, Pearl Jam setlists are very random, and really, any song from a pool of about 200 could pop up in any given show. Sure, they didn’t do “I Got Shit,” “Grievance,” “Not For You,” or “Breath,” but I think I made out pretty well. Bonus: They did not play any songs that I actively dislike, like, say, “God’s Dice.”

2. I kinda wish I could send 13 year old me a letter telling him “Hey, be patient. You’re going to see Pearl Jam play “Hard To Imagine” in 15 years, and it’s gonna rule. Also, believe it or not, they’re actually going to do “W.M.A.” too, but with a slightly different arrangement.”

3. The teenage version of me would’ve known a little over half of the songs played in this show, i.e. all the songs written and in the group’s known repertoire before 1997.

I wasn’t sure what to expect to feel at this show, but I’m glad that what I did feel wasn’t just a lot of distanced nostalgia. I may have significantly toned down my Pearl Jam fandom over the past 15 years, but it never really went away. I may not listen to the band with any sort of regularity now, but I never stopped loving any of those old songs, and I never lost interest in their newer material. I felt very present at the show, and part of that comes down to the intense, unanimous enthusiasm of the audience, and most of it comes out of the fact that the band are effortlessly compelling. Eddie Vedder has got his showman tricks, but he doesn’t lean too hard on them, instead just sinking himself deep into the songs, and letting his natural charisma do the rest. Their show is totally no-frills — standard lighting, no real backdrop. It’s just the band on stage, playing songs for nearly three hours. It sounds so simple, but how many bands can pull that off in a room of that size, pretty much anywhere on the planet, and have pretty much every single person in the room totally pumped and singing along the entire time? It’s extraordinary.

Pearl Jam “Hard To Imagine” (Live @ Van Andel Arena Grand Rapids, MI, 2006) – This is wrote about “Hard To Imagine” three years ago…

When I was a teen, I was very obsessed with Pearl Jam, a condition that was exacerbated by the intense fandom of many of my friends at school, some of whom had been buying cd bootlegs featuring unreleased songs that the band had been playing live. At that point, half of the fun of being a Pearl Jam fan was being amazed by how much excellent material the band was willing to relegate to b-sides and soundtracks, or just not release at all. I had a live version of “Hard To Imagine” dubbed to a cassette from my friend Steve’s cd, and I would listen to it over and over again, totally baffled as to why the band would just abandon what was clearly one of their very best songs. I’d dub copies for friends, and talk it up with any Pearl Jam fan who would listen, totally confident that the band would put it out on their next record. Vitalogy came and went, and I rationalized – it just wasn’t right for that record, it would obviously pop up later on. When the tracklisting for No Code was announced in Ice, I convinced myself and others that the song “Present Tense” HAD to be a retitled version of the song. I mean, isn’t it obvious? The chorus is “things were different then, all is different now” – like, it’s the present tense!!! But no. Though I liked No Code and still do, my interest in Pearl Jam fell off sharply around 1997, and has only dimmed with time.

A studio version of the song was finally released in 1998, tossed off to the soundtrack of an obscure movie called Chicago Cab. At that point, it was hard for me to muster much enthusiasm. I never bought the soundtrack, and eventually just downloaded it from Audiogalaxy. It’s a lovely version of the song, though not quite everything it could have been. It still sounds lonely, nostalgic, and majestic, and the guitar at the beginning still evokes wet snow on the ground and the scent of smoke from wood burning stoves mixing with crisp air (probably just my sense memory from when I first heard the song, but whatever). I maintain after all of this time that it is certainly one of the best songs the band has ever written, and when I was looking at the band’s recent setlists a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but to feel extremely jealous of the audiences who’ve seen them play it, as it has become a semi-regular song in their rotation following the release of their b-sides collection, Lost Dogs. I’m pretty sure that there was one show in Canada where they played this, “Breath,” “I Got Shit,” “Not For You,” and “Release” all in the same set, something that would’ve totally blown my mind when I was sixteen. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Oh, by the way, maybe someday I’ll tell you all about the Vitalogy book I wanted to write for the 33 1/3 series. Not today.

Architecture In Helsinki “Hold Music (Max Tundra Remix)” – Given the explosion in remixing over the past decade, I reckon we’re at the point where something like 98% of all remixes are totally unlistenable and awful. The bad remixes are usually either glitchy, self-indulgent garbage that amounts to some idiot making some terrible new composition out of fragments of the source material, or someone taking the source material and finding a way to dumb it down or otherwise strip it of its original appeal. Max Tundra’s Architecture In Helsinki remix is one of the 2% that get it right. His somewhat cartoonish style is immediately apparent, but it doesn’t eclipse the personality of Architecture In Helsinki or their song: The two aesthetics blend harmoniously, as if they had collaborated on writing and arranging the tune from the start. Tundra did nothing to change the basic structure of “Hold Music” — pretty much everything that worked well in the song is intact — but he adds more color and bolder dynamic shifts to the arrangement. The result is bouncy and restless, and filled with a nearly overwhelming variety of textures. Better yet, Tundra makes some sense of the title by setting the chorus sections to bits that actually sound like hold music. (Click here to buy it from Polyvinyl Records.)

Sloan @ Bowery Ballroom 6/20/2008
Believe In Me / All I Am Is All You’re Not / Don’t You Believe A Word / Everything You’ve Done Wrong / I’m Not A Kid Anymore / The Dogs / Sensory Deprivation / Burn For It / Ready For You / Witch’s Wand / I Am The Cancer / Ill-Placed Trust / Emergency 911 / Down In The Basement / Something Wrong / I’ve Gotta Try / Living The Dream / Take Good Care Of The Poor Boy / Friendship / The Other Man / Money City Maniacs // Flying High Again / Who Taught You To Live Like That? / Deeper Than Beauty / She Says What She Means / The Good In Everyone

Elsewhere: I was on NPR’s The Bryant Park Project to talk about Girl Talk’s new album.

R.E.M. @ Madison Square Garden 6/19/2008
Living Well Is The Best Revenge / These Days / What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? / Bad Day / Drive / Hollow Man / Ignoreland / Man-Sized Wreath / Leaving New York / Disturbance At The Heron House / Houston / Electrolite / (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville / Driver 8 / Harborcoat / The One I Love / Until The Day Is Done / Let Me In / Horse To Water / Pretty Persuasion / Orange Crush / I’m Gonna DJ // Supernatural Superserious / Losing My Religion / Begin The Begin / Fall On Me / Man On The Moon

* OMG “Disturbance At The Heron House” and “Harborcoat”! I actually don’t even have anything to add to that, it was just a really lovely fanboy experience to get those two songs in the set.