Lil Wayne “Rollin’ (Freestyle)”

This freestyle isn’t exactly special in the sprawling Lil Wayne discography, but it’s a fine example of the way he builds momentum as rhymes spill out of his head. He’s done a lot of variations on this type of flow, but it never fails to sound exciting, particularly when there’s always this moment where he knows he has dropped a particularly clever line and seems eager to top it. The performance comes across as very athletic, but it’s ultimately more of a cerebral thing, like a highly entertaining and musical equivalent of some guy burning through a difficult crossword puzzle.

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U2 @ New Meadowlands Stadium 7/20/2011

Even Better Than the Real Thing / The Fly / Mysterious Ways / Until the End of the World / I Will Follow / Get On Your Boots / Magnificent / I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For / Stay (Faraway, So Close!) / Beautiful Day / Elevation / Pride (In the Name of Love) / Miss Sarajevo / Zooropa / City of Blinding Lights / Vertigo / I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight – Discotheque / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Scarlet / Walk On // One – Hallelujah / Where the Streets Have No Name /// Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me / With or Without You / Moment of Surrender / Out of Control

I wrote a full review of this show for Rolling Stone. Let’s talk about “Zooropa.”

U2 “Zooropa”

“Zooropa” is as close as U2 has ever come to expressing their artistic philosophy in song. They are true believers in music as a communicative medium that can work on a massive, global scale. When Bono sings “skip the subway, let’s go to the overground / get your head out of the mud, baby,” he means it as an indictment of every talented artist who shrinks from the possibility of engaging with a large audience. While I can certainly understand the point of view of such artists, I’m very inclined to agree with Bono on this in a broader sense. I genuinely believe that challenging, imaginative artists should push their ideas as far into the mainstream as possible rather than retreating to the margins. When Bono sings this part, he sounds heroic. The music swells to an anthem like many U2 songs before, but it’s still has an odd, slightly detached feeling. I think that climax is very well-earned in this piece, in part because I think this pledge to “dream out loud” is genuinely courageous, even if it sounds a bit corny.

It’s perhaps a bit ironic that this was the only song in this concert where U2 themselves were barely visible to the audience. The band performed within a cone of cascading lights and words, a visual set piece that countered the indifference of some audience members who didn’t recognize a relatively obscure album track. At several other points in the show, Bono did his “mugging directly into a camera at close range” trick. I couldn’t help but think that maybe that move should’ve been reserved for “Zooropa,” a song that could have benefited from a bit of eye contact.

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Royal Trux “The Banana Question”

Even without Jennifer Herrema growling “Is that a fucking question???,” “The Banana Question” would still seem like a rude song, a piece of music that seems to lunge out at the listener to invade their personal space. It’s gleefully manic, bouncing and spinning around without any sort of focus. It’s a perfect blend of whimsical and belligerent, like punk rock designed to emulate the mood of an overstimulated and cranky little kid.

Royal Trux “Blind Navigator”

I love the way this song balances this fairly loose groove with Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema’s desperate yowls and howls. They’re not quite hysterical — it’s more like they’re just super-charged with passion. Nevermind the blues riffing and the bizarre psychedelic flute-like synthesizers, this is Royal Trux’s version of gospel, with the two clinging to some agnostic, strung-out version of faith. Their vocals tangle up, veering in different directions at some points and colliding in others. They’re both lost, but it’s like they’re trying to find their way back to each other in a game of musical Marco Polo.

Eleanor Friedberger “Heaven”

Eleanor Friedberger’s debut solo album Last Summer is packed with enough highly specific references to locations within New York City that it practically begs fans to go visit them all, or at least make an annotated Google map. “Heaven” is the exception. It’s a somewhat atypical song in the Friedberger & Friedberger canon; at least in the sense that it draws some of its power from lyrical ambiguity rather than narrative and context. Eleanor sings to someone named Lee — even at their most vague, the Friedbergers can’t help but include these sort of concrete details — but seems to lament that while this person feels lost and restless, a sort of peace exists within them. That’s a great idea, but it’s complicated by this bridge: “I mention your name / only in hell / it’s the same.” It darkens the sentiment in an interesting way; it leaves me a little unsure of the relationship at the core of a song that otherwise seems gentle and loving. Truly, this is one of the most light and relaxed recordings in the overall Friedberger discography — Matthew may have been inclined to overwork the tune and crowd it out with too many sounds, but Eleanor’s elegant arrangement frames her voice at its sweetest with subtly majestic horns and a gorgeous piano solo.

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Paul McCartney @ Yankee Stadium 7/16/2011

Magical Mystery Tour / Jet / All My Loving / Junior’s Farm / Drive My Car / Sing the Changes / The Night Before / Let Me Roll It / (brief Foxy Lady instrumental jam) / Paperback Writer / The Long and Winding Road / Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five / Let ‘Em In / Maybe I’m Amazed / I’m Looking Through You / I Will / Blackbird / Here Today / Dance Tonight / Mrs. Vanderbilt / Eleanor Rigby / Something / Band On the Run / Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da / Back in the USSR / I’ve Got A Feeling / A Day in the Life – Give Peace A Chance / Let It Be / Live and Let Die / Hey Jude // Lady Madonna / I Saw Her Standing There (with Billy Joel) / Get Back /// Yesterday / Helter Skelter / Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight – The End

Paul McCartney “Let Me Roll It” (Live in 2009)

This show was such a thrill; one of the best large-scale shows I’ve ever seen. Aside from the pyrotechnics and fireworks that accompanied “Live and Let Die,” this show was pretty light on spectacle. And really, how much spectacle do you really need when you’re watching a Beatle perform mainly Beatles songs for three hours straight? And yeah, that’s right — three hours, with only two brief encore breaks. McCartney is 69 years old, but performs with the energy of someone a third of his age. He was in great voice; his band was virtually flawless. I don’t think I really need to sell you on the greatness of this man or his body of work, but it’s hard to come out of a show like this without feeling awestruck. It’s rather like when I finally got to see Prince a few months ago — these are living legends who can get by in concert simply by showing up, but they both perform with such skill and passion that you come away realizing that a lot of why they have this incredible stature comes from fully committing, pushing themselves as far as they can go and clearly taking great pleasure in showing an audience a good time.

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tUnE-yArDs @ Pier 54 Hudson River Park 7/14/2011

Do You Wanna Live? / Gangsta / Es-So / Powa / Fiya / Bizness / Real Live Flesh / Hatari / You Yes You / My Country // Killa (with fireworks display!)

tUnE-yArDs “My Country”

In comparison to other tUnE-yArDs shows that I’ve seen, this show was a bit weak — the audience wasn’t as rowdy, the band was slightly out of practice, Merrill Garbus had a bit of trouble with her higher register — but it was still a thrill. Garbus is so on point lately that an off night is still astonishing. She mentioned being a bit nervous about playing to such a large audience, but by the halfway point in this gig, you’d never know it. She’s a natural for this sort of thing: wildly charismatic, huge voice, very theatrical. (This show ended with a fireworks display, which made perfect sense.) I’ve seen her perform enough times to recognize her tricks, and they work every time. I’ve had more fun seeing tUnE-yArDs in small venues, but it’s becoming apparent that she’s going to have to move up the bracket to the big rooms soon. I just hope the next time she plays NYC she books a better space than Terminal 5.

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Wild Beasts @ Le Poisson Rouge 7/13/2011

Plaything / Loop the Loop / Deeper / The Devil’s Crayon / We Still Got the Taste Dancing On Our Tongues / Albatross / This Is Our Lot / Bed of Nails / Reach A Bit Further / Hooting and Howling // Lion’s Share / All the King’s Men / End Come Too Soon

Wild Beasts “End Come Too Soon”

Wild Beasts’ third album Smother is a rather luxurious work of art: Elegant in its design and rich in detail; the sort of record that you need to spend time with in order to fully appreciate its nuances. Time is valuable, of course, so I can understand why a lot of people seem to be passing it over in favor of other recent albums that sketch out a more clearly defined mood without suggesting any complicated ideas. The group remain an exceptional live act, or at least the sort of band that impresses with top-class ensemble playing. Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming are both incredible, charismatic singers, but the main draw here is probably a hard sell for most folks: Wow, check out that subtlety! Such a fine balance of raw style and musical sophistication! What a fascinating take on male sexuality in pop music! Even still, even if they’re presently erring on the side of understatement, they still know how to go epic. “End Come Too Soon,” the grand finale, was extended slightly to amp up the drama of its climax, which seems to lament the brevity of the male orgasm.

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Animal Collective @ Prospect Park Bandshell 7/12/2011

“Change” / “Stop Thinking” / Did You See the Words? / “Long Time Ago” / “Take This Weight” / “Knock You Down” / Brother Sport / “Mercury” / “Your Choice” / “Frights” / We Tigers / Summertime Clothes // “I’d Rather” / “Little Kid” / Taste

Animal Collective “Taste”

I knew that Animal Collective had been playing new material in their recent shows but had avoided actually listening to any of it because I knew a lot would get lost in shitty fan-shot YouTube clips, so I held out to either watch the music performed in person or hear the finished studio recordings. I’m glad I did. I quite enjoyed being surprised by these new compositions over the course of the show — certainly much more so than I expected.

A few notes on the new material:

1) The band set up is basically: Deakin on guitar and sometimes percussion, plus he sings lead on “Change.” Geologist doing his regular Geologist things with electronic instruments that are not visible from the audience. Panda Bear on drums with a bit of keyboards and vocals. Avey Tare on keyboards, guitars and lead vocals. (Panda only sang lead on three of fifteen songs in this set: “Take This Weight,” “Brother Sport” and “I’d Rather.”) Though there was a lot of guitar being played, it very seldom sounded anything like a guitar.

2) Given that Avey has gone back to being the dominant vocal presence in the band and there are no harmony parts on the new tunes, it would be tempting to say that this batch of songs very Avey-centric. But it’s not exactly true. Panda’s percussion is crucial. Whereas Merriweather Post Pavilion was all about melody and harmony, this new record seems to be more about rhythm and groove. It sounds as though they are filtering elements of funk and R&B through their very distinct aesthetic. I am dying to hear how this stuff comes out in the studio — specifically “Long Time Ago” and “I’d Rather,” which struck me as rather incredible pop songs straight away.

3) Deakin’s song was pretty good! Who knew?

4) Panda’s “Take This Weight” was, at least tonight and for me, the dud of the bunch. Too droning, too Tomboy-ish. Doesn’t really fit in with what they’re doing on the other songs.

Nearly two years ago I saw Animal Collective play at the same venue, and it was one of the most memorable concert experiences of my life for a handful of reasons. Mainly, the audience was wonderful. Joyful, energetic, totally passionate. This crowd was very much the opposite. No matter where I went in this audience, I was surrounded by chattering jerks who seemed to have almost zero interest in the performance. Well, aside from “Brother Sport” and “Summertime Clothes,” that is — the hits got people going. I totally understand wanting to hear your favorite songs at shows, but I don’t get just talking through the entire set and generally showing no respect to the band or the people who really wanted to pay attention to the songs. As much as the audience from two years ago reaffirmed my faith in young music fans, this crowd just made me feel bitter and irritable.

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R.E.M. “Just A Touch”

Somewhere on this planet (most likely in Missouri), there is a video cassette titled It Takes a Nation of Midgets to Hold Us Back. I filmed the majority of its contents on a camcorder in 1996, and it was intended to be a gift for an acquaintance of my friend Todd, who filmed everything else, and appears in most of the scenes. The idea was to show her around the Hudson Valley and (hopefully) to make her laugh. It’s a weird tape, full of goofy tangents and jokes that were probably only really funny to the two of us at that moment in time. She never actually received the tape. I held on to it for the longest time, and now Todd has it. He and I are not currently in touch, and I’ll probably never watch it again.

I mention all of this because “Just A Touch” is very prominently featured at the beginning of the tape. We kick off the movie in the same way that we began all our little adventures — riding in Todd’s Suzuki Swift down Main Street in my home town. Normally, this part of Cold Spring is very quaint and bustling with tourists from the city shopping for antiques and whatnot, but on this particular winter day, the town looks miserable, grey, empty, and nearly inhabitable. “Just A Touch” plays over the car stereo — my selection, my tape — and the contrast between its wild, cheerful tone and the bleak imagery is (unintentionally) hilarious.

“Just A Touch” is one of the rowdiest, most joyful numbers in the entire R.E.M. discography, and though it appears on 1986′s Lifes Rich Pageant, it actually dates back to their pre-Chronic Town period as a party band in Athens, Georgia. If I recall correctly, it’s got something to do with Michael Stipe’s confused recollection of the day Elvis Presley died, but the lyrics are besides the point — it’s all about the spirit of the performance, and the reckless enthusiasm expressed in every moment of the recording. Stipe sounds especially unhinged, particularly toward the end when he’s totally flipping out before seeming to fall over with his final shout: “I’m so goddamn young!!!” Few songs sound as fully alive as “Just A Touch,” and if the Presley thing is true, the King couldn’t have asked for a more fitting tribute.

Buy it from Amazon. This review was originally posted April 2nd 2007 on Pop Songs 07-08, where I wrote about most every song in the R.E.M. discography through 2004.

Lady Gaga “Yoü and I”

“Yoü and I” isn’t merely a love song. It’s a grandiose display of affection; a monument to the man Gaga loves. It’s a power ballad about Gaga and her on-and-off boyfriend Lüc Carl, a guy who, by all accounts, is the love of her life. He’s a rocker dude, so it’s a big rock song. There’s a bit of Shania Twain country rock in the mix, but it’s mostly a pastiche of Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses and Queen. Since Gaga has the economic leverage to achieve stylistic verisimilitude through hiring her influences, Def Leppard/Shania mastermind Mutt Lange produced the track, which samples Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and features a guitar solo from Brian May. (Maybe an alternate version exists in which Axl Rose sings back-up vocals.)

The song plays power chords and glam metal solos on my heart strings. I get totally overwhelmed by the starry-eyed passion expressed in this music. I feel her joy, but I also feel a pang of envy. “Yoü and I” makes me want to love someone this much. It makes me wonder what it must be like for someone to love you so much that they need to pay tribute to you with a stadium anthem.

There’s an aspirational quality to this song. It’s a fantasy of something pure and wonderful, but also flawed. They break up, they screw up. She’s chasing him down for years and hoping that this time it might work out. This is the flip side of “Bad Romance;” the version where the drama and angst results in the happiest possible ending. In either case, Gaga presents her relationship as a narrative, an epic romance between two archetypes — the New York Woman and her Cool Nebraska Guy. As a result, her love life becomes a work of art as thoroughly aestheticized as any of her songs, outfits, videos or performances.

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Gardens & Villa “Carrizo Plain”

I’m not usually into this sort of slow, sad, cinematic cowboy music but I find myself entranced by the way this unfolds over five minutes. The guitar, percussion and keyboard parts hang loosely in place, but suggest a heavy gravitational pull. The vocal melody winds around gently until it seems to knot like a noose on the repetition of the line “you and I are intertwined.” A lot of bands try and fail to capture this sort of desperate, desolate vibe, but this is exactly right. It sounds sorta like the Shins dying slowly in the middle of an endless desert.

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Charli XCX “Stay Away”

It’s funny. Only a few months ago I was thinking about how T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul” was rich enough with ideas to provide the basis for several other songs, and here comes along “Stay Away,” a single that wears that influence on its sleeve with great pride. It goes to a darker place, though – whereas the T’Pau song is all about trying to draw in a big, big love, Charli XCX is pushing it away. It’s pouty and a bit goth, but as much as it tries to put on a chilly front, the chorus can’t help but betray some warmth.

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Elvis Costello “Beyond Belief”

The lyrics of “Beyond Belief” undoubtedly rank among the finest ever penned for a rock song; Costello’s words are so finely chosen and edited that a novel’s worth of character and nuance gracefully unfold in just over a couple minutes. It’s a miracle of lyrical economy and precision. I’ve been obsessing over this song for a few weeks, replaying it incessantly and alternately dissecting lines and taking in the seedy, desperate ambiance of the music.

Costello’s pick-up artist is bereft of soul but he’s not a shallow caricature – more than anything, he seems bored senseless by the empty ritual of his predatory routine. The intensity of his self-loathing has totally soured whatever pleasure he gets from scoring with these women. The pick-up is equally ruthless and half-hearted; he’s distracted during the actual sex act.

One of the most stunning aspects of Costello’s composition is that when the sex arrives in this narrative, the pace suddenly picks up and the sound builds to a brief, frantic peak. In a clever turn, all of the singer’s metaphors contain vaginal imagery – fault lines, vaults, canals. But he’s so lost in his angst and self-awareness that he seems even more alone. His voice changes in this section: more pinched, more hollow. The treble in the arrangement surges and then climaxes: “I come to you beyond belief.” Climax, come. You get the idea.

The song shifts back into its primary mode. It’s like snapping back into reality. After that night’s “Alice” is discarded, the character takes in the scene for a moment before getting sucked back into his head. The chorus finally comes at the end and repeats into fade-out, suggesting an endless loop. That’s when you get a sense of consequence. This time the phrase “beyond belief” takes a slightly different meaning: “Once this seemed so appealing, now I am beyond belief.” It could be the low moment that inspires him to change. Or he could just loop back to the start: “History repeats the old conceits.”

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John Maus “Believer”

I love the way John Maus gets the keyboards in this song to sound as though he’s spraying the listener down with some kind of sparkle hose. The sparkly keyboard part nearly drowns out the rest of the arrangement, which seems to be the point – it’s like how shoegazer bands foreground distorted guitar in order to simulate an overwhelming sensual experience. But whereas the best shoegazer music push the raw sexuality associated with guitar rock into soft focus, Maus’ keyboards ring out with great clarity. He’s not changing the way we think of this keyboard sound, only amping it up so that the dreamy romance we associate with synthpop is totally overpowering.

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Sloan @ Knitting Factory 6/30/2011

Follow the Leader / The Answer Was You / Unkind / The Marquee and the Moon / Snowsuit Sound / 500 Up / Shadow of Love / Everything You’ve Done Wrong / Who Taught You to Live Like That? / Anyone Who’s Anyone / She’s Slowin’ Down Again / Something Wrong / Traces / On the Horizon / It’s Plain to See / Your Daddy Will Do / Don’t You Believe A Word / I’ve Gotta Know / Coax Me / Beverly Terrace / Losing California // People of the Sky / C’mon C’mon / Underwhelmed / The Good in Everyone

Sloan “Beverly Terrace”

A lot of music culture, particularly music criticism, thrives on artists having some sort of narrative. I think that Sloan have suffered for this over the course of their career – they’re consistently very good and entertaining, but it’s surprisingly hard to sell people on “oh, this is a good rock band!” these days. You need an angle. So, with this in mind, Sloan are wise to emphasize their 20th anniversary as a band this year. It makes an asset of things that get taken for granted very easily: Longevity, having a large quantity of great tunes, somehow having the collective temperament to balance out the egos of four distinctly talented songwriters.

This show at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn was, like all Sloan gigs, a no-frills rock party. But it was also a celebration of back catalog – they played a bit from most of their albums and dusted off a bunch of songs that had been out of rotation. Each of the band members went “off list” at some point in the performance and played a song they had not rehearsed. Patrick Pentland proposed at one point that their next tour in the fall should be entirely “off list,” which is kind of a cool idea for them that takes advantage of their deep back catalog. I just hope that if they do that, it doesn’t come at the expense of material from The Double Cross, which all comes across really well in concert. I was particularly impressed by “Beverly Terrace,” which was a bit less refined, but emphasized a Spoon-like tension I had not really noticed up until just then.

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Lloyd featuring Andre 3000 and Lil Wayne “Dedication to My Ex (Miss That)”

When Lloyd was recording this, it must have crossed his mind at least once that if Cee Lo could score a smash hit with a song called “Fuck You,” he may as well push the envelope for vulgarity and create an equally irresistible neo-soul song that repeats the word “pussy” a couple hundred times in four minutes. Cee Lo cleaned up his song by switching the title phrase to “Forget You,” which barely makes sense. I figure Lloyd can swap out “pussy” for “lovin'” and the song will still mean the same thing. (I’m not sure what he can do about the verse in which he describes the fit of his ex’s vagina in graphic detail, though.)

There’s a lot of angst in this track, but it’s comical. Even though Lloyd’s lyrics are all about getting mad at his girlfriend for cheating on him, I don’t really pick up on negative vibes when I hear this song. The music and his voice mostly conveys a deep thrill, like he’s focused all of the song’s power into communicating just how amazing and satisfying it was to have sex with her. It’s like the song is his way of getting back to that feeling.

Also, bonus points to Andre 3000 for dropping the phrase “Uncanny X-Men” into his verse.

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The Last Hurrah!! “The Ballad of Billy and Lilly (parts one and two)”

There is a strange Rorschach-blot quality to the Last Hurrah!!’s debut album Spiritual Non-Believers. I’ve been listening to the record regularly for two weeks, and every spin reveals a new detail or association. It’s a record that somehow manages to be rather simple and straight forward — it is basically a collection of catchy Norwegian folk songs — and wonderfully complex and ambitious. There are only three cuts on the album: An obscure Norwegian psychedelic pop cover at the start, a 31-minute suite about a doomed love affair at the center and a gorgeous bossanova-shoegazer-surf-twee-krautrock melange at the conclusion. It’s all fascinating and engaging, but the main attraction is the epic, which cycles through dozens of hooks and musical ideas in a way that is both surprising and intuitive. At various points I hear echoes of Joanna Newsom, Wilco, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, the Fiery Furnaces and Animal Collective, but the overall effect is ultimately rather distinct in its style and charm.

I’ve been obsessing over this record for days, and I still feel as though I’m only just scratching the surface in my understanding of it. I heard the album finale at least a dozen times before noticing it was not sung in English. I heard the second part of the “Billy and Lilly” suite even more times before I fully registered this brilliant line in its chorus: “Hit me, hit me, with a bottle or a stone / as long as you are physical I’ll know that I’m not alone.” I’m still picking up on the nuances of transitions between sections, interesting rhythms and tonalities, bits where harmonies seem to fall slightly out of phase. This is a rich, immensely rewarding record and I hope to write about it in greater detail down the line. For now I’m still just enjoying the fact that I still haven’t fully learned all its twists and turns.

Buy the full album for $2.99 from Amazon.

Beyoncé “Countdown”

A lot of songs have a “best part” that grabs you, that compels you to rewind to hear it again right away. “Countdown” is a track comprised entirely of these moments. It’s so densely packed with hooks and interesting flourishes that it’s actually sort of amazing that it holds together so well as a composition. The construction is very clever and dynamic — it’s overwhelming, but not overbearing or incoherent. It’s an expertly crafted pleasure delivery system.

Or, more accurately, it’s a Beyoncé delivery system. I cannot imagine anyone else singing this song. So much of what is exciting here is specific to the sound of her voice and the force of her character: “Me and my BOOF and my BOOF BOOF ridin’ / all up in the black with his chick right beside him.” Can you imagine anyone else singing that with the same charm and authority? And that’s just a small portion of this song! I’ve spent a lot of time just focusing on this loop of the BOOF BOOF part; I feel like I could spend just as much time obsessing over other bits in isolation: “London speed it up, Houston ROCK IT!,” “Griiiiind up on it, girl, show him how you ride it!,” “My girls can’t tell me nothing, I’m gone in the brain!,” the countdown sequence with the Boyz II Men sample. And that’s just the vocal stuff — the drum fills, horns and keyboard parts are just as worthy of focused attention.

But really, as much as each part is thrilling, what makes this one of the best pop songs of the past several years is the way these thrills are strung together, and how it breezes from highlight to highlight so quickly that it kinda zooms right by you. It’s like being on a roller coaster, but you don’t have to wait in line to get back on and relive the thrill. You can just put it on repeat.

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Archers of Loaf @ Webster Hall 6/26/2011

Strangled by the Stereo Wire / Wrong / Plumbline / Nostalgia / 1985 – Fabricoh / Dead Red Eyes / Let the Loser Melt / You and Me / Might / Revenge / Smoking Pot in the Hot City / Greatest of All Time / Lowest Part is Free / Freezing Point / What Did You Expect? / Web in Front / Slow Worm // Step Into the Light / Audiowhore / Harnessed in Slums / All Hail the Black Market /// Scenic Pastures / Form and File

Archers of Loaf “Let the Loser Melt”

The weird paradox of Archers of Loaf is that Eric Bachmann’s lyrics were mostly focused on music scene politics and being the subject of a major label bidding war, and yet somehow the songs come out sounding like relatable anthems. All these years later on the band’s reunion tour, the social context for these words has either changed a lot or vanished completely, but the “we’re all in this together” thing has an even greater resonance. It’s funny how the lyrics of certain songs — “Let the Loser Melt,” “Nostalgia,” “Greatest of All Time” — seem as if they were written to have maximum ironic value when sung on a reunion tour, but when they actually performed them, it seemed more triumphant than funny-ha-ha-the-joke’s-on-them.

I never saw the Archers the first time around, but I was a fan in high school. I had no idea Bachmann was such a hulking, imposing dude. (Or that he seems to have the same stylist as present-day Bob Mould.) I like the way that physically amplified the aggro quality of some songs, and in other cases, displayed more of a gentle giant thing. He seems to have grown into his voice and character rather well. With that in mind, I don’t feel cheated by never having seem the younger version of the band.

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Mr. Dream @ Webster Hall 6/26/2011

Knuckle Sandwich / Crime / ? / Trash Hit / Holy Name / Croquet / Unfinished Business / Winners / Scarred For Life / Learn the Language

Mr. Dream “Unfinished Business”

Another excellent set from Mr. Dream. This time around, the band was joined by Matt LeMay on guitar, who added a bit of additional noise and treble to the band’s muscular, bottom-heavy sound. I’ve met Matt a bunch of times socially over the years, so it was a revelation to see him up there manhandling a guitar. It was a little like how when you see Ira Kaplan play and he’s playing the instrument like he’s trying to strangle the life out of it. Matt doesn’t seem as murderous as Ira, but he’s still pretty intense.

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Handsome Furs “Memories of the Future”

A few days ago I got a vinyl copy of Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock in the mail. It’s one of favorite records, it was something I listened to quite a lot during some very miserable times in my late teens and early 20s. I put it on for the first time in a while and it felt very comfortable and worn-in. I knew every note and every word. I thought about how that album is connected to a lot of bad memories, but I can’t really remember any of them. The lyrics still have a lot of resonance — the “It’s not real / you don’t need to tell me that it’s not real” part in the title track will probably always make my heart sink in bitter recognition — but I don’t remember many details of the personal context I had for this music. I have a hard time remembering a lot of my past, really.

This is part of why “Memories of the Future” clicks with me. I sorta nod in agreement when Dan Boeckner sings “I don’t remember anything at all.” And the part of me that hates to be sentimental will gladly sign off on a hook like “nostalgia never meant much to me.” I think that particular line works because Boeckner sings with the sort of passion that is rooted in some kind of sentimentality. You can definitely be sentimental about not being sentimental. At the song’s climax, he sings “I throw my hands to the sky / I let my memories go,” and that rings true to me too. It’s nice not to carry this baggage around. Memories can be overrated and unreliable. Forgetting is underrated and sort of beautiful.

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