Electric Six @ The Jewel (Rocks Off cruise) 7/22/2014
Nom de Plume / After Hours / Electric Demons In Love / Down at McDonnelzzz / The New Shampoo / Gay Bar / Gay Bar Part Two / She’s White / Hello! I See You / Pink Flamingos / Randy’s Hot Tonight! / Night Vision / Everywhere // Cheryl Vs. Darryl / Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother) / It Ain’t Punk Rock / Devil Nights / Formula 409 / Show Me What Your Lights Mean / Synthesizer / Boy or Girl? / Future Is In the Future / Danger! High Voltage / Adam Levine / Dance Epidemic / I Buy the Drugs / Dance Commander

Electric Six “She’s White” (Live)

It had been a few years since I saw one of Electric Six’s summer booze cruise shows on the Hudson, so I was happy to find out that the event had improved a bit since my last outing. This time it was on a better boat on a better route on the East River, the audience was more varied, and the band played two sets instead of booking an opening act. It got just as rowdy as the shows from a few years back, but not right away – the first set was relatively relaxed, but the second half of the second set got really intense with the moshing, attempts at crowd surfing, and general lunacy. (“Adam Levine” was the song that really made the audience go wild. People really want that guy to burn in hell.)

Electric Six are the ideal band to see in this situation. They’re popular enough to have a devoted cult, but not so much that they’re too big to play a boat gig. Their music is fun and ironic, but their audience is completely sincere. Their shows feel like a party, and you don’t want anything too emotionally heavy in this setting. You go on a boat to drink more than you would normally, and to dance, and to sing along. Electric Six’s most sincere moments are in embracing dumb, low-class fun, and finding uncomplicated good times in cultural constructs that are actually quite complicated and strange. Karaoke all night long, macarena til the break of dawn!

Also, this is only loosely connected to the band’s performance, but there was a moment halfway through the intermission I won’t forget: Dancing on the top deck of a boat circling the Statue of Liberty while a DJ blasts “Temptation” by New Order, while fireworks went off in the distance. If you can somehow make that exact combination of things happen for you, I strongly recommend it.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bernhoft “One Way Track”

My first impression upon listening to the new albums by this Norwegian R&B singer is that it’s one of the best engineered and mixed pop records I’ve heard in a while – it’s just got this wonderful presence and clarity, and this perfectly warm and fully central bass sound. The producer is Paul Butler and the engineer is Dave Granshaw, and they pull off this thing that I always love, which is making you feel very aware of musicians playing in a room while taking advantage of the imaginary space that only exists in a studio recording. The best recordings tend to feel like idealized live performances, even if it’s unlikely a lot of the instruments were even being played simultaneously. Butler and Granshaw’s work really elevates Bernhoft’s songs and vocal performances – he’s very good at what he does, but a lesser producer could easily make this feel flat and bland, especially if they’re working too hard to get this on the radio. There’s a lot more air and space in these recordings, particularly this song, and it lets you really feel the melodies in a way you just wouldn’t in a lot of contemporary music production.

Buy it from Amazon.

Absolutely Free “Beneath the Air”

It’s pretty rare that a song can become its own genre, but that’s definitely what happened with The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s impossible to hear anything with that particular type of rhythm and whooshing psychedelic ambience without thinking of The Beatles’ original, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a surprisingly open-ended and versatile aesthetic, and while a cut like this song by the Canadian group Absolutely Free is clearly built on the same blueprint, it has a very different feeling to it. Their melodies feel more naïve to me, and they fill their midrange with chiming tones and whooshing sounds, leaving a lot less ambiguity at the song’s core and giving the entire piece a more innocent and playful vibe.

Visit the Absolutely Free website.

Bleachers “You’re Still A Mystery”

I interviewed Jack Antonoff from Bleachers a few months ago, and I was impressed by his candor and ambition. We talked a lot about disappointing the indie world has become, and how it’s awful when artists consistently hedge their bets, especially when it comes to projecting real emotion in their work. At that time, I’d only heard a couple songs from the Bleachers record, but it was clear enough that he wasn’t holding anything back, and was trying to make actual pop music.

A lot of the songs on Bleachers’ debut are more low key than I expected from how he was talking. For the most part, these lower-energy songs are ballads that give the album a bit of dynamic range, but in the case of “You’re Still A Mystery,” it’s more about balancing a big, passionate song with a more measured, sober delivery. It strikes me as being like late ’80s Depeche Mode trying to pull off something that feels more like Bruce Springsteen or something from a John Hughes soundtrack. This approach works for me, and definitely suits the lyrics, in which he’s trying to be rational and analytical about a wonderful, irrational emotion.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Acid “Basic Instinct”

The Acid are a great example of something that in only a few years will sound very specific to this period of time, this pocket of years in the first half of this decade. This particular song sounds a lot like the more famous Alt-J, but I think this is a bit better than anything they’ve done – they have the same desolate folk + moody electronic vibe, but the vocals are far less affected and The Acid are more willing to push the ambient elements of their music from an eerie, evocative hum to an ugly, overwhelming buzz.

Buy it from Amazon.

Phish @ Randall’s Island 7/12/2014
AC/DC Bag / 46 Days / Yarmouth Road / Devotion to a Dream / Free / My Sweet One / Back on the Train / Halfway to the Moon / Sparkle / A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing / The Line / Run Like An Antelope // Punch You In the Eye / Carini / Ghost / Wingsuit / Rock & Roll / Harry Hood /// Tube / Joy / New Tube

Phish “Wingsuit” (7/12/2014)

I’ve known about Phish for most of my life, but had avoided their music up until just recently because I bought into the received wisdom that they weren’t very good, and the whole “jam band” thing was inherently lame. In recent years, I had at least a dim realization that what Phish does isn’t that far off from some bands I really love – Wilco, Malkmus, later Sonic Youth, Neil Young, etc – but still kept a distance, thinking “this isn’t for me.”

Two things happened that made me decide to give Phish a real chance: My friend Bryan became a big fan and got deep into their lore, and their current PR company invited me to watch them tape a special show at David Letterman’s Ed Sullivan Theater. I will go see most any famous artist play for free, so I went for it. It was only going to be an hour – a third of the time they would normally play – so it was as low-risk as it could possibly be. I ended up enjoying that set, and having a nice time. I remember thinking two things: “No one ever tells you that Phish write some good melodies,” and “Why do Phish fans get such a bad rap when they’re such a nice balance of relaxed and enthusiastic?”

A few days later, the same PR company invited me to see one of the band’s three shows at Randall’s Island, and I took them up on it. I enjoyed the studio taping, and was curious what a real show would be like. As it turns out, it was like the taping but on a much, much larger scale. I really can’t emphasize enough how pleasant their audience is – the last time I went to Randall’s Island was for the Governors Ball festival in June, and there were so many asshole bros and miscellaneous tools in that audience that it wrecked the experience for me so much that I’m reticent to go to another festival ever again. The Phish audience, on the other hand, is as mellow and unpretentious as it gets.

The nature of a show like this is such that you don’t feel compelled to pay close attention to every moment of the set, and can really just enjoy the environment as much as the music itself. My friends and I mostly hung out at a picnic table halfway through the park, but we could’ve hung out on a hill, or gone closer, or found a spot with a lot of space further back in the park. One of the best parts of my experience was taking a walk around the back end of the park during “Harry Hood,” and just feeling far more relaxed and physically comfortable than I ever do in day to day life. (I was not high, by the way.)

I really enjoyed just existing in this space, and tapping into the music when it got especially interesting, and just kinda going with the flow once they settled into an instrumental jam. I went into both of these shows only knowing a bit of their catalog, so I could be surprised by a particularly good melody or sound – the Led Zep riffing on “Carini,” the great classic rock-ish hook on “The Line,” the Stevie Wonder-ish funk on “Tube.” The part that really got me in the moment was the first half of “Wingsuit,” which turns out to be a cut from their newest album. It’s a moody ballad anchored by a gorgeous piano part that reminds me specifically of something, but I can’t exactly place it. My instinct is that it’s a krautrock thing maybe, but I still don’t know. It’s a really lovely song, though.

I’m not deep into Phish now and doubt I will be, but I do like them and I’m glad I’ve given them a chance and that I’ve come to know a bunch of their songs. I feel dumb for buying into this conventional wisdom about them, especially since it clearly is rooted in a punk disdain for hippies that I know is total bullshit. Phish is a lot more imaginative, inclusive and open-minded than most bands, and the same is true for their audience. That is almost never true of punk rock, though.

Buy the full show from Phish’s site. Buy the studio version from Amazon.

Got A Girl “There’s A Revolution”

Dan the Automator and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Got A Girl calls back to a lot of music from the mid-20th century, but specifically sounds like a record from the very late ’90s that we’re only just hearing now. To a large extent this is just the Automator being the Automator – his aesthetic is always going to be tied to his glory days, and it really does feel refreshing to hear something that’s very him since it seems like he’s been away a long time. This is the funny thing that happens with a lot of artists that work with pastiche and kitsch – at the time it’s new, you clearly hear the reference points and interpret the work that way, but years on, the aesthetic and mutations are what you hear more clearly because that gloss is now just as nostalgic as the sounds it was framing the first time around. So yes, “There’s A Revolution” calls back to French and Brazilian pop from the ’60s, maybe some more things too, but I mainly just hear a catchy tune that probably would’ve gone over great on KCRW back in the day.

Buy it from Amazon.

Caribou “Can’t Do Without You”

Dan Snaith is very good with using negative space in his music. On his last record as Caribou back in 2010, he seemed obsessed with the way bass notes reverberate in space, and every other sound in the mix existed in a direct orbital relationship to the bass groove. This time around, he’s switched that almost completely – there’s very little sense of center to “Can’t Do Without You.” It’s built on a repeated part, but it just sort of hangs in the air, and flows around through the space. At some points, the song changes shape if just to fill an implied void that’s opened up around some imaginary curve. It’s a very different sensation from what he was doing a few years ago, but there’s still this same feeling at the core of it. It’s like an echo.

Buy it from Amazon.

Brian Eno & Karl Hyde “Time to Waste It”

The core of this song – the repeated guitar hook, the steady rhythm – is very calming. There are songs where endless repetition becomes numbing or anxiety-inducing, but this arrangement is so loose and airy that it encourages your body to loosen up, maybe even go slack. All the tension is placed in the vocals, which are pitched and warped in peculiar ways so Karl Hyde always sounds confused and somewhat anguished. He comes across like a man who has become very disappointed in himself, but not in a severe way. For the first few minutes it sounds like two distinct signals overlapping on the radio, but near the end, it feels more integrated, as if he’s just yielded to the mellow vibe of that endless riff.

Buy it from Amazon.

Beck @ Central Park 7/1/2014
Devil’s Haircut / Black Tambourine / Soul of a Man / One Foot in the Grave / The New Pollution / Blue Moon / Lost Cause / Country Down / Modern Guilt / Think I’m In Love / Loser / Que Onda Guero / Paper Tiger / Heart Is A Drum / Wave / Waking Light / Soldier Jane / Girl / E-Pro // Sexx Laws / Debra / Where It’s At

Beck “Sexx Laws” (Live at the Budokon, 2000)

This is the third summer in a row where I’ve seen a Beck show outdoors, which I suppose has become the new tradition in place of seeing Sonic Youth play an outdoor summer show every year in NYC. The interesting thing about Beck shows is that in making an effort to play selections from all over his eclectic catalog, the mood of his setlist is all over the place, and this particular show ranged from about as depressed and desolate as music gets – “Wave,” “Lost Cause” – to the ecstatic silliness of stuff like “Sexx Laws,” “Debra,” and “Where It’s At.” It’s a very well rounded experience, and he and his band really commit to every extreme. I suppose that if I could have my way, it would’ve been all in that Midnite Vultures/Odelay/Guero mode, but that does give short shrift to a man who’s capable of so many moods and tones. But yes, as a hardcore fan of Midnite Vultures and a person for whom “Sexx Laws” is a karaoke staple, watching him perform “Sexx Laws” and “Debra” back to back in the encore was an extremely happy experience. I was lucky enough to be in a pocket of the audience where there were many people very enthusiastic about those songs in particular, so it got to be as physical and participatory as I would’ve hoped. I wish I could do it again today.

Buy it from Amazon.

Slow Club “Suffering You, Suffering Me”

“Suffering You, Suffering Me” initially doesn’t seem to stray too far outside of Slow Club’s established comfort zone – sure, Rebecca Taylor’s voice is a bit more overtly “soul” than usual, but it’s more or less in the same sort of slow, melancholy space as much of their first album. But once it gets going, it shifts into a full-on Motown stomper, and she really cuts loose. I’ve written about how great Taylor is as a vocalist before, but her performances on Slow Club’s new record Complete Surrender are at a whole new level of confidence, and she’s learned to write to this strength pretty effortlessly. But you know, a lot of people can do a convincing R&B voice – the thing that really puts Taylor over the top is how she sings it all with this genuine wounded vulnerability that makes it seem like she could break into tears at any moment. There’s a real sense of urgency in her voice that keeps it from being just another “northern soul” pastiche.

Buy it from Amazon.

Museum of Love “Monotronic”

Museum of Love is a new band led by Pat Mahony, the drummer from LCD Soundsystem. Mahony is hardly a James Murphy clone, but you can definitely hear how working with Murphy has influenced the way Mahony writes his own music, or maybe it’s more that you can hear how they were very simpatico to begin with. A lot of the first Museum of Love record feels like the more low-key LCD songs, but with even more space and a more relaxed tone. Murphy couldn’t help but be bold and extroverted on even his most pensive songs, but particularly on a cut like “Monotronic,” Mahony seems gentle and a little distant. The vocals are a big part of the song, but it sounds like he’s made them seem smaller in scale to the rest of the music, which feels like this wide-open, oceanic space. He doesn’t just sound like he’s being humble – it’s almost as though he’s forcing this humility upon himself as his thoughts go kinda zen.

Buy it from DFA.

FKA Twigs “Two Weeks”

FKA Twigs’ music very often puts a higher priority on interesting texture and ambience than melody, but “Two Weeks” shows just how incredible she can be when the melody and lyrics are as engaging as the surface of the track. The hooks in “Two Weeks” are still relatively subtle for a pop song, but the way the track unfolds is very seductive, which is ideal for a song that is in fact about seducing someone. The lyrics strike a very interesting balance between aggression and submission – she’s in complete control, but is demanding to be acted upon. Her voice is soft, but the words are hard.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow “Crushin'”

I’ve been listening to A Sunny Day in Glasgow for a long time, and I think they are always at their best when Ben Daniels takes a relatively conventional sort of song and then cracks it apart and rearranges the layers without totally sacrificing the form of it. The core of “Crushin'” – the vocals, the bass, a keyboard motif – is very pop, but everything that orbits the main melodies feels unstable. The song makes you feel like you’re standing in place, but the ground keeps moving beneath you. There’s always a sense of being a sensitive, passive person in ASDIG’s music, but this feels less like you’re being acted upon and more like you’re just lost in a feeling. And in this case, that feeling would be sweet, confusing love.

Buy it from Amazon.

Clipping featuring Cocc Pistol Cree “Work Work”

The complaint I’ve seen around about Clipping is that the quality and character of the group’s production style is greater than the actual rapping on the record, and I think I can agree with that up to a point. I have no problem with the rapping on the album – it’s definitely not bad, and certainly a notch above competent. But yeah, there’s no question that the raps are the traditional element at the center of music that otherwise pushes in willfully strange or outright abrasive directions. I think this makes sense, though – to really make good use of unusual musical ideas, you kinda need a basic structure. Clipping aren’t really asking questions about the possibilities of rap; they’re more interested in the possibilities of how you can frame it. A song like “Work Work” isn’t even that alien or cut off from tradition, it’s just like “how about we put this otherwise very catchy and accessible rap song in a track that sounds like a busted Four Tet song?” And of course I’m going to like that.

Buy it from Amazon.

Tune-Yards @ Webster Hall 6/22/2014
Hey Life / Gangsta / Sink-O / Real Thing / Powa / Time of Dark / Real Live Flesh / Stop That Man / Bizness / Water Fountain / Find A New Way // Fiya

Tune-Yards “Water Fountain”

This was the first Tune-Yards show I’ve seen in some time, and the first show I’ve seen Merrill play with her new expanded band lineup. There’s a lot of good things about the new band: They add a lot of layers of sound that Merrill previously would have needed to build up in loops, and cutting out a lot of that looping time frees up some time in the show. The strange, unexpected result of this is that her performances with the new players seem a lot less immediate than when she’s just playing with bassist Nate Brenner. Those songs – pretty much all the cuts from nikki back – felt a lot more restrained and over-practiced than the older numbers, which were mostly performed as they always have been. Merrill remains a fierce and charismatic vocalist, but I couldn’t help but feel that the edge of the band had been dulled down by the additional musicians. I’m not quite sure if it’s because there WERE additional musicians – probably not? – but because the particular players were good but not quite on Merrill and Nate’s level. I mean, at least in the sense that those two have such musical chemistry that they can improvise a lot in the moment, and that didn’t seem as much like a possibility when the band filled out.

Buy it from Amazon.

How to Dress Well “See You Fall”

Am I wrong to hear The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” lurking underneath the pretty, delicate layers of this song? You catch it in some pauses, when the saccharine vocal melody and the gentle tinkling of piano keys recede, and you feel that slight dissonance and anxious pulse. Without that buried beneath it all, this wouldn’t be quite as effective – lovely, sure, but not as moving. With it, we get a context for emotion, and a suggestion that everything Tom Krell is singing is a lot darker than he’s telling you in his words.

Buy it from Amazon.

Priests “New”

Priests are a punk band, and they’re good at it. This is important to say because the sort of things they do very well – convey urgency, project defiant aggression, give off a general vibe of violence and danger – are all conventions of the genre that many untalented bands can barely handle. The thing that frustrates me about a band like this is that while they nail these things, they seem indifferent to pushing beyond convention. And I think that’s a fair enough thing a lot of the time – most music is part of some tradition or another – but that eagerness to conform to expectations seems at odds with the sentiment of the music. This is the problem of punk rock, really – people are so brainwashed into thinking that it’s all transgressive and cool that most people working within it don’t realize how conservative their art is. There’s a lot of power and venom in this band, but they’re still new – I’d like to think that they might do something more bold with their music later on. I’m not gonna count on it, though.

Buy it from Amazon.

Alvvays “Adult Diversion”

My relationship with twee and “indie pop” has always been a little tricky. I mean, I definitely love particularly artists in that realm, but for the most part I have no particular sentimentality or reverence for that canon. I tend to think of indie pop artists as cutesy underachievers with a willfully narrow range of musical influences. In other words, a song in this genre needs to be exceptionally well made and charming to appeal to me. This song is one of those: The tonality and melodic style is familiar, but the execution is fantastic. Like a lot of the best songs in this genre, it’s effective partly because the wistful tone of the song matches the relatively small emotional scale of the lyrics. This is basically just a song about a crush, and not even a particularly intense one. She’s trying to understand it, but there’s no particular urgency. This could be a bad thing for some songs, something that forces your to think “who cares???”, but “Adult Diversion” really connects with the vague pleasure that comes with having this kind of non-problem in your life.

Buy it from Amazon.

Lana Del Rey “Shades of Cool”

At least part of Lana Del Rey’s success is owed to the fact that she’s pretty much the only notable artist in pop music who is entirely devoted to performing melancholy ballads and torch songs. That style of pop has been out of fashion for so long that the irony in her music is necessary – the audience’s associations with this particular sort of melodrama and sentimentality are removed from historical context. The music has to be a commentary on its own genre because it’s such a self conscious and contrary thing to embrace, and the modern details in the lyrics should be slightly at odds with the tone of the music. She’s gone overboard with the winking in the past, but with her third album Ultraviolence, she’s found a way to dial down the irony and focus more clearly on the emotion in her songs.

“Shades of Cool” is particularly great because it takes on a very James Bond theme sort of grandeur while keeping the lyrics very direct. This is very plainly a song about a woman who is dealing with a severely emotionally unavailable man, and reckoning with the reality of the situation. She has no illusions about him – the most powerful moment of the song is the part of the chorus in which she sings the words “You’re unfixable” with this odd, trilling tone – but she’s still holding on to some hope that things will work out. It’s a simple and lovely sentiment, and entirely merits this melodramatic arrangement.

Buy it from Amazon.