Liars “Drop Dead”

Of all the albums that I have heard in 2010, Liars’ Sisterworld has my favorite guitar tone. It varies somewhat from track to track, but there is a consistent quality to the sound — greyish and sinister, with a harsh attack and a brittle decay. The fast, heavy parts are violent and urgent, an idealized version of the kind of punk rock that feels like being chased around by maniacs. The more quiet parts unfold like horror soundtracks, with grim, winding melodies that build up a genuine suspense from note to note. I am not savvy enough to hazard a guess as to exactly how they achieved this sound — alternate tunings? highly specific uses of amplifiers and microphones? vintage equipment? — but the execution is incredible and extremely evocative. In many ways Sisterworld reminds me of Sonic Youth’s early albums, and the way they delivered a similar balance of punk aggression and intricate melodies with distinctive tones and creepy ambiance. “Drop Dead” is an especially Sonic Youth-ish track, particularly in the way the arpeggiated notes ring out like bells distorted by old VHS tape, and the attack on the riff seems to slash at the speakers in reverse and slow motion. The instruments are presented with a fair amount of clarity, but just enough abstraction to seem eerie and otherworldly.

Buy it from Amazon. You are a fool if you buy this in any format aside from the deluxe vinyl package, and this is why.

Robyn “Call Your Girlfriend”

This is a song in which Robyn tells you how to break up with your girlfriend because you are in love with Robyn. Norman and Chris have already addressed the novelty of this song’s conceit, highlighting the fact that what really sets it apart is the way that Robyn seems first and foremost concerned with the well-being of this guy’s girlfriend. This really does get to the heart of what makes Robyn such an interesting and refreshing pop singer — whereas a lot of pop music has gone very hostile and toxic over the past couple decades, she emphasizes kindness and decency even when she’s stealing someone’s man. But you know, it’s still a song about boyfriend stealing! And if you’re focusing on her uncommon generosity or the fact that, yeah, this guy really does have to call his girlfriend and dump her in the most humane way possible, it’s a feel-good sentiment. But what if you’re the girlfriend in question? If you listen to this from her perspective, it is basically the most smug song in the universe! A universe that includes several dozen Kanye West songs! I mean, it’s awfully easy to be super nice about this when you’re the winner in this situation. I can imagine hearing this song and just resenting Robyn so much, you know? Nevertheless, if you are ever in this situation, you should absolutely take Robyn’s advice. It’s very good and everyone should be so thoughtful.

Buy it from Amazon.

Guido featuring Aarya “Beautiful Complication”

I have a slightly irrational distaste for titles like “Beautiful Complication.” It’s the rhythm as much as the sentiment — “Beautiful Liar,” “Beautiful Stranger,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “Brilliant Mistake,” etc. It’s always such a stilted contrast, and it just looks and sounds ugly and off-puttingly self-satisfied to me. To get into this song, you have to buy into that “lovely pain-in-the-ass” premise, but it’s worth it. At its core, this is pretty standard stuff for modern R&B, but Guido’s track is knocked off balance just enough to seem genuinely menacing, which has a way of making Aarya’s vocal performance come off as more desperate and imperiled that it might otherwise. It’s a song about being attracted to a fucked-up guy who treats you poorly, and it’s very effective in getting across the excitement and allure of this dramatic scenario, but also a very real sense of emotional and physical danger. But you know, as the title suggests, it’s a willful thing, and the awareness of the self-destructive act is the main point of the song.

Buy it from Amazon.

Matthew Friedberger “Shirley”

Matthew Friedberger’s voice always seems to be a little different on his solo recordings than when he sings on Fiery Furnaces records. He’s a bit bolder with the Furnaces, his intonation is more blunt, sort of dense and blocky. I think this is because he writes those songs with and/or for his sister Eleanor, whose tone is always rather assertive. There’s a particular lyrical rhythm to those records, it’s very distinct and unusual and I think if you fall in love with it, you end up being a sucker for pretty much everything they do. His diction in his solo work isn’t dramatically different, but it lends itself to softer, grainier aspects of his voice. You hear more strain in his voice, more grit and character. There are some Furnaces songs where his voice reminds me a bit of Chris Eigeman in Whit Stillman’s movies, sort of brash and imperiously snarky, but he always seems smaller and more human when he’s alone. This isn’t always my favorite thing — he sort of recedes into a lot of Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language School where I’d prefer him to be much bigger and brasher. He has a much sharper presence in “Shirley”, the first track off of Napoleonette. As I’ve noticed in concert and on songs like “Inca Rag,” Friedberger’s voice is flattered by the piano, the characteristic tonality of that instrument just fits nicely with his natural tone, particularly when he’s banging out chunky yet finely articulated chords in a way that recalls Hunky Dory-era Bowie. There’s some surprising harmony in this composition too — I’m not totally certain, but at some points, it sounds like a regularly tuned piano is paired with a pleasantly shrill prepared piano part.

Buy a subscription to Matthew Friedberger’s series of solo albums from Thrill Jockey. Every two months, a new vinyl album will be sent to you, eventually resulting in an eight album box set. This song is from the first volume, Napoleonette.

Das Racist featuring Chairlift “Fashion Party”

One thing Das Racist excel at doing is calling attention to imbalances in social power, and highlighting ways we can be ignorant of and/or insensitive to other people’s contexts often without necessarily having negative intentions. Some of these misunderstandings and tensions get laughed off, sometimes they are cause for sharper words. A lot of the time their critique falls somewhere in between, as they go for a lot of ambiguous targets. There’s always this understanding that these race and class relationships are complex, that histories are tangled and confusing, and we’re usually not aware of when we’re being racist because, well, that’s what ignorance is — not being aware. Das Racist aren’t the types to offer solutions, but they’re really good at pointing out ignorance, and that’s a valuable service in and of itself.

“Fashion Party” is an interesting song for them in that their songs usually only represent one side of a socially awkward encounter, but this one covers both sides, and they are equally uncomfortable. The premise of the song is that the group have been invited to some fashion event, and while both Das Racist and the woman who invited them — portrayed by Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, a surprisingly solid rapper — want something from each other, they’re not really committing either way. The Das Racist guys are attracted to the glamor and money and beautiful women, but they feel out of place. It throws them off and makes them defensive, which in turn sends weird signals to their host, who sings “I don’t know if you want to hit me or if you want to dance.” There’s some desire for connection here, even if it’s just for rather shallow ends, but it doesn’t happen because everyone is too self-conscious. The song sounds smooth and relaxed, but at its core “Fashion Party” is uncertain and too self-aware to actually have a good time. Thankfully, that nervousness doesn’t transfer to the listener and override the soft, luxurious tone of the track.

Get it for free via Das Racist’s website.

Bryan Charles is the author of three books — the novel Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, the 33 1/3 book about Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and the new memoir There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From. That book tells the story of how he moved to New York City from suburban Michigan with the ambition to become a writer, and how the necessity of keeping a day job set in motion a chain of events that led to him being present in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. In this interview, Bryan and I discuss the process of writing a memoir, his experience working on the Pavement book, his thoughts on contemporary fiction, and the way the internet lacks an obvious framework for promoting new writers. Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

Stereolab “Two Finger Symphony”

Late period Stereolab is sort of hard to judge. Most anyone would agree that the band has been in a creative decline, but they haven’t become stagnant — there has been a fair amount of experimentation, particularly in the Fab Four Suture period — and their baseline level of quality is admirable. The problem is that few songs from 2003 onward rise far above this baseline level. It’s all very listenable but little of it commands attention beyond noticing some intriguing musical hook that is nonetheless fairly forgettable. You know how food and beverages can be described as having a good “mouthfeel”? Pretty much anything Tim Gane composes will have a good “earfeel.” It’s always going to be a superficially pleasant experience, but you can’t count on the music being resonant or emotionally urgent.

Not Music, the latest and potentially final release by Stereolab, is culled from the same sessions that produced 2008’s Chemical Chords. The albums sound and feel almost identical. Gane’s tracks all have a jaunty, upbeat tone, and are built upon rhythms that draw heavily from ’60s soul. It’s a good twist on the familiar Stereolab sound, but too much of it comes out sounding too sterile and clinical to fully connect. In some cases, it is frustrating to hear so many good ideas in a song that does not totally snap together. Some x factor seems to be missing, but it’s hard to say what that could be. It could be a matter of some necessary tension being absent from the music, or the process that produces the music. In some interviews, Gane has talked about how the character of each Stereolab album is determined by his collaborators. With this in mind, I wonder if the x factor was personified by Mary Hansen, who was a core member of the group through the peak period in the ’90s and died in 2002, just before the band fell into a creative malaise. At the same time, the dissolution of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier’s romantic relationship could possibly have something to do with the diminishing returns of their creative partnership. Who knows. It could just be a matter of passion and energy — the best Stereolab music comes from a place of anger and restlessness, some critical perspective on modern society. Their more recent material lacks that kind of intensity.

“Two Finger Symphony” is one of the best songs from the Chemical Chords/Not Music sessions, mainly because it has some sense of urgency and humanity to it. The beat is insistent, a choppy dun-dun-dun rhythm that cuts through the polite polish of latter day Gane productions. It’s perky and alert, but Laetitia’s vocal parts are simultaneously assertive and melancholy. As with many of their best songs, these subtle contrasts are what make the tune pop. It’s not just parts fitting together in a lovely way, it’s an expression of something complicated and adult and difficult to define. If the group return from their extended hiatus, I hope they can get back to working with these sort of tensions.

Buy it from Amazon.

Guided By Voices @ Terminal 5 11/7/2010

Tractor Rape Chain / Game of Pricks / I Am A Scientist / Shocker In Gloomtown / Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory / Gold Star For Robot Boy / My Valuable Hunting Knife / Motor Away / A Good Flying Bird / Cut-Out Witch / Matter Eater Lad / Watch Me Jumpstart / Striped White Jets / My Impression Now / Awful Bliss / 14 Cheerleader Coldfront / Lethargy / Break Even / Buzzards and Dreadful Crows / Exit Flagger / Hot Freaks / The Closer You Are / Gleemer / Quality of Armor / Queen of Cans and Jars / Echos Myron / Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy / A Salty Salute / Smothered In Hugs // Postal Blowfish / Hey Aardvark / Pimple Zoo / Bright Paper Werewolves / Some Drilling Implied /// Dodging Invisible Rays / My Son Cool / Don’t Stop Now //// Johnny Appleseed / Weed King

Guided By Voices “Watch Me Jumpstart”

I had forgotten what it was like to be in a Guided By Voices audience. People get very intense; it becomes this very physical and vocal display of deep emotional connection to this large body of work. If you notice, Pollard stacked the top of the show with most of the biggest hits, which resulted in a frenzied energy on the floor for the first half hour of the set. Pollard brings out something rare and special in his fans — most everyone sings along, people move and point and jump and flail about, and it’s all together, people sing along to each other, to total strangers. It seems like you’re all suddenly friends and bonding over these impossibly catchy, ineffably weird, incredibly sad rock and roll songs. A lot of the crowd were holdovers from the old shows, but a rather substantial chunk of the audience were very young — early to mid 20s kids who were experiencing this for the first time. It makes me so happy that this music is finding a new audience.

Guided By Voices “Cut-Out Witch/Man Called Aerodynamics” (Peel Session)

Since I did see GBV several times over between 1999 and 2004, I wondered going into this if I’d miss a lot of the late period concert staples — “Teenage FBI,” “Things I Will Keep,” “Alone, Stinking and Unafraid,” “Subspace Biographies,” “Submarine Teams,” “Glad Girls,” “Back to the Lake,” etc — but no, it was cool. It’d be nice to see them again sometime, though. Late 90s/early 00s Pollard is totally underrated. There were songs from the “classic” era of the band that I wish they were playing, though. Like, where was “Official Ironmen Rally Song,” “Peephole,” “If We Wait,” and “Big School”?

Guided By Voices “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” (Live in Austin, 2004)

It was so sweet to watch the “classic” band guys in action. I’d never seen this version of the band, only the version with Doug Gillard at the center of things. They have a lot of charm, especially Mitch Mitchell, who is a true midwestern rock and roll lifer badass. (He sang both “Lethargy” and “Postal Blowfish” with a cigarette clenched in his mouth the entire time!) It was nice to watch these guys get a chance to be rock stars again, or really, for the first time.

Guided By Voices “Weed King”

I’m not sure how this started, but a thing that people do at Guided By Voices shows is point up at Bob when he sings a line with particular resonance, as if to signal to him “hey, I like that line!” This is an incomplete inventory of lines that inspired my excited pointing last night.

– “Parallel lines on a slow decline.”

– “I never asked for the truth but you owe that to me.”

– “I am a lost soul, I shoot myself with rock and roll, the hole I dig is bottomless but nothing else can set me free.”

– “P.S. dump your boyfriend!!!”

– “THE GOLD! HEART! MOUN! TAIN! TOP! QUEEN DIRECTORY!”

– “Everything I think about, I think about, and everything I talk about, I talk about with you, but you don’t know what I go through – you don’t know.”

– “Do you think she can change your life?”

– “Shoot me down! And bring me down!”

– “Don’t let anyone find out or expose your feelings.”

– “There’s something in this deal for everyone, did you really think that you were the only one?”

– “She told me, ‘liquor’ – I AM A NEW MAN!”

– “The worst offense is intelligence, the best defense is belligerence.”

– “And all of a sudden I’m relatively sane, with everything to lose and nothing to gain, or something like that.”

– “DIS! ARM! THE! SET! TLERS!”

– “But I believed you! No neeeeed for furrrrther questioning!”

– “SOMETIMES I GET THE FEELING THAT YOU DON’T WANT ME AROOUUUND!”

– “Soooooooooooooooo cherry.”

– Pretty much every line of “Weed King” but especially “We can’t keep this violent pace.”

Buy GBV music from Amazon.

Britta Persson “Some Girls Some Boys”

Britta Persson is very good at writing about the confusing romantic stalemates that can occur between a pair of awkward, shy, emotionally reserved people. In previous songs, such as the lovely “At 7,” she came at this from a more frustrated perspective, but in “Some Girls Some Boys,” she’s clear-headed and patient, waiting out the confusion and ready for the moments of genuine communication and connection. The form of the song follows its emotional arc — the verses are pensive and vaguely uncomfortable, ruminating on what could be going on, while the chorus is calm and reassuring, with a gentle reminder that “what you really need is to let go.”

Buy it via the Britta Persson website.

Nicki Minaj featuring Eminem “Roman’s Revenge”

It makes sense to pair Nicki Minaj and Eminem. Most obviously, he’s still a commercial juggernaut, and she could use the boost. Beyond that crass consideration, Nicki and Em have a lot in common. They share a talent for radical shifts in delivery and slipping into cartoonish voices. They’re both from outside the dominant black male paradigm in rap, and compensate for that social disadvantage with impressive technical prowess and over the top personality. They’ve made themselves into characters so fierce that they cannot be ignored. So yeah, this team-up was pretty much inevitable.

The problem with “Roman’s Revenge” is that while Nicki and Eminem are quite similar, they are at very different points in their career arcs. Nicki is still new to the scene, and she’s hungry. Like most any rapper, she’s thriving in the moment where she has a bit of recognition, but still needs to prove herself. That mixture of earned confidence and underdog status amplifies a competitive quality that can bring out the best in artists. I hope she can keep this up for a while, because right now she is as colorful, refreshing, and listenable as it gets in hip hop.

Eminem, on the other hand, is a guy with nothing to prove, other than perhaps a continued relevance as he ages in a genre that has never been kind to elder statesmen. His craft is still remarkable, but it hasn’t progressed much since the early ’00s. He’s still telling the same mean-spirited jokes, but he’s no longer funny. He used to say awful shit and get by on playfulness and charm, but he’s so serious and angry now that he just sounds like a full-on creep. His verses on this song are joyless and hateful, a sad contrast with Nicki’s gleeful arrogance and camp absurdity. It says a lot about how much I enjoy listening to Nicki that I’m willing to put up with his parts at all. But really, I just wish I could get a version of this track with all his vocals removed and replaced with someone who isn’t a pointlessly bitter asshole.

Buy it from Amazon.

My main takeaway from this fall’s solo releases by Avey Tare and Panda Bear is that both of these artists produce better work together in Animal Collective than when left to their own devices. I suppose this is a pretty standard thing for solo work by artists who are part of famous bands, but in this case, the difference may provide some insight into Animal Collective’s unusual group dynamic.

Most obviously, Avey and Panda’s most recent offerings are considerably looser and less polished than their most recent Animal Collective work, which was by far the most accomplished music of their career. It’s pretty reasonable to expect that they’d back away from pop songwriting and discipline on their solo projects. For one thing, it gives them a chance to work through musical tangents that may not be right for their regular gig, which suddenly has to live up to very high critical and commercial expectations. Also, part of the point of doing solo work when you have a full-time band is the opportunity to cut loose without compromising your ideas. All the same, the diminished craft on their solo material makes me wonder how they edit their work when they are writing as part of a band. Is it simply a matter of the two men having excellent creative chemistry? Is the tunefulness and focus of their post-Feels work something we can attribute to the presence of the Geologist, whose function in the group has always been somewhat difficult to discern? Hmm.

Avey Tare “Ghost of Books”

Avey Tare’s first proper solo album Down There is a strange, murky set of songs that cycle through some fairly dark emotions and experiences. It’s still Avey though, so the material has an oddball levity that keeps it from getting too bleak. Panda Bear tends to produce prettier, more heart-tugging music, but Avey Tare is much better with melody and structure, and has a stronger singing voice. This is an advantage for his solo work, though he is also more indulgent and eager to sabotage his compositions with ugly musical elements that distract from his strengths. This seems to be at least some of the point here, though — it’s supposed to be this uncomfortable, sorta icky album. However, despite some songs like “Ghost of Books” and “Lucky 1” that push hooks to the foreground (or at least close enough the foreground to click), the album is easier to admire than love.

Buy it from Amazon.

Panda Bear “You Can Count On Me”

Unlike Avey, Panda Bear faces high expectations for his solo material as well as whatever he does as part of Animal Collective. His album Person Pitch is already considered a classic; to many people he is the star attraction of the group, despite the fact that Avey has traditionally been the primary lead vocalist. I’ll admit that I’m something of an Avey partisan — I generally prefer his long melodies, spirited intensity, and thoughtful lyrics over Panda’s heavily treated vocals, simplistic words, and penchant for extended drones. Even still, Panda has an emotional directness that can be difficult to resist, and I can understand how for many people that trumps his collaborator’s more nuanced and playful approach. “You Can Count On Me,” the a-side of the second single from the forthcoming Tomboy album, is close to what people seem to want from his work, but it seems a bit off and underdeveloped. It’s more like a sketch than a fully formed song — pleasant but not entirely resonant. It’s too nice to be entirely dismissed, but to some extent this comes across like a parody of Panda’s aesthetic rather than an example of what he can do when he’s fully inspired or working with partners who complement his voice and/or compensate for his shortcomings.

Buy it from Amazon.

Mr. Dream “Learn the Language”

I put off listening to Mr. Dream for a while because two members of the band are colleagues of mine. I try to avoid music made by people I know for reasons you can probably understand if you give it a bit of thought. I’m glad I set that aside and gave it a shot because as it turns out, they are making exactly the kind of brainy yet very physical rock music that is always desirable but generally scarce, especially in the past decade. “Learn the Language” is a lumbering giant of a song, loud and violent and difficult to ignore. There’s not a lot of subtlety to it in terms of form and function, but there’s a hidden grace in the band’s performance that makes it ruthlessly effective rather than blunt and dumb. They lock in together with great intensity, but keep things loose enough that even the expected moves seem slightly unpredictable, and you kinda flinch with each dynamic shift. Adam Moerder’s vocal performance is fantastic all on its own — an unaffected deadpan at some points, a self-aware laugh breaking through one line, and a unrestrained holler at the climax. Every bit of this song is very well-thought out, but it’s played on instinct, which is always an ideal balance in loud rock music.

Visit the Mr. Dream MySpace page.

George Michael “One More Try”

So much of the tension in this song comes from George Michael’s use of the word “teacher.” Taken literally or metaphorically, it makes it clear to the listener that the context for this heartbroken ballad is an imbalanced power dynamic. To take it as a metaphor — and this is reasonable since he extends it with phrases like “teacher, there are things I don’t want to learn” — they could very well be the same age, but the implication is the singer came into this now bitter romantic entanglement naive and new to the complexities of love and lust. This in turn makes Michael’s passionate, nearly melodramatic vocal performance seem all the more poignant, as it is basically the sound of a young man’s sweet earnestness turning to sour cynicism. It is absolutely gutting when he sings “so if you love me / say you love me / but if you don’t / just let me go.” He sounds used and confused, and just about to reach the point of emotional exhaustion. It’s notable that the musical arrangement is fairly static, a simple organ dirge paired with a spare drum machine rhythm and a bass line adding subtle dynamic changes — his mind is running in circles, but the prevailing mood is sad, flat and seemingly endless.

Buy it from Amazon.

Pigeons “No Other Way”

Very few of the words being sung in this song actually sound much like words to me. This is just fine, mainly because the emphasis in this arrangement is a bit skewed — what would normally be foregrounded is shifted to hazy accompaniment, and the noodling lead guitar part is presented with sharp focus. Luckily, this doesn’t destabilize the track. If anything, this makes the whole thing seem warmer, richer, cozier. It’s got that feeling of super-comfortable exhaustion, when your mind softens up a bit and you focus on detail rather than form and meaning. In this, it’s all about the abstract pleasure of horn parts that float through the piece like little fluffy clouds, and a guitar solo that radiates gentle empathy.

Buy it from Soft Abuse.

Reading Rainbow “Always On My Mind”

It wasn’t too much of a shock to find out the two members of this band are a married couple — they sing with each other like people in love. “Always On My Mind” is about struggling with a long-distance relationship, and missing someone very badly and hating every moment of being apart. Given that this is a married couple who are also an indie rock duo, I imagine this means they are singing about their ultimate nightmare. The song itself is a brilliant, elegantly constructed, extremely catchy indie-pop gem. It’s a bit lo-fi, but its charms come from its old-fashioned hooks, not an affected haziness. In a field overcrowded with lo-fi indie rock, this stands out as a keeper.

Buy it from Hozac Records.

James Rabbit “Options”

No one makes neuroses sound as fun and exciting as James Rabbit. “Options,” basically a song in which Tyler Martin freaks out because he can’t figure out a way to get through to an elusive girl who is “free of all media”, places all its emphasis on the thrill of the chase. The song barrels forwards, totally urgent but also quite gleeful, and eager to take on the challenge. It always sounds good-natured and sweet, but that especially comes through when the song drops into a slower waltz section that contrasts a genuine romantic whimsy with the girl-crazy anxiousness of the verses and chorus. And man, what a chorus — it goes from hook to hook to hook, bursting with ideas like a guy who can’t keep his mind in one place despite focusing on only one thing.

Get it for free from James Rabbit’s Bandcamp page.

Matthew Dear @ #offline Brooklyn Bowl 10/23/2010

Honey / Monkey / Soil To Seed / Shortwave / Slowdance / You Put A Smell On Me / Tide / Little People (Black City)

Matthew Dear “Little People (Black City)”

This was a strange show. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Matthew Dear’s live performance — I half-suspected it would be a guy-with-computer-and-sequencers deal, but as it turns out, he augments that setup with live drums, bass, trumpet, keyboards, and guitar. Dear and his band are dapper pros, and perform with an aloof intensity. There were two guys up near the stage who started dancing wildly even before the funk in the music started to kick in, and as the set progressed, they got even more rowdy and took their shirts, revealing chiseled, muscular physiques. These guys were fist-pumping, air-grinding, bro-ing the fuck out. As Matthew Dear played increasingly funky material, their enthusiasm became contagious, and the dudes started going back into the crowd to rev people up. By the time Dear started in on his epic funk suite “Little People (Black City),” lots of people were totally down for it. It was kinda awesome. Matthew Dear should consider hiring these dudes to be his aesthetically incongruous hype men.

Buy it from Amazon.

Marit Larsen @ Oya Festival at CMJ, Public Assembly 10/22/2010

The Chase / Ten Steps / Solid Ground / Only A Fool / Don’t Save Me / If A Song Could Get Me You

Marit Larsen “Don’t Save Me”

It’s hard to imagine that any act at CMJ was more wholesome and sweet than Marit Larsen, a young woman who is basically Norway’s answer to Taylor Swift. Larsen was incredibly friendly and polite — I think she thanked the audience at least 20 times in a six song set, and she made some self-deprecating remarks about her tendency to write extremely sad songs with very cheerful melodies. She’s about as professional, poised and adorable as you might expect, and didn’t have to work to sell her immaculately crafted hits to a small audience mainly comprised of Europeans. I suppose it would have been nice if more of the young people who do CMJ had showed up, but let’s face it — this is not their music, and it’s just kind of a lucky fluke that this happened at all. Well, at least for me — I’ve been wanting to see a Marit Larsen show ever since “Don’t Save Me” came out in 2006!

Buy it from Amazon.

Marnie Stern @ #offline Brooklyn Bowl 10/22/2010

Nothing Left / For Ash / Transformer / Transparency is the New Mystery / The Crippled Jazzer / Risky Biz / Prime / Vibrational Match / Her Confidence

Marnie Stern “Transparency is the New Mystery”

Marnie Stern and her band played seven shows in the span of four days at CMJ last week. This set was the second show of Friday, and I couldn’t hear much wear and tear on their sound. The songs seemed a bit streamlined in a good way — her current drummer isn’t quite on Zach Hill’s level, and it sounded to me like he was simplifying the drum parts in a way that placed a more traditional emphasis on the guitar hooks. And really, that’s great — people fixate on the flashiness of Marnie’s playing, but I’m sold on the tunes and the emotional weight of it all. The new songs came off very well, most especially “Transparency,” which hits a great peak on its chorus, and “Her Confidence,” which is just towering and epic stuff. I would love to eventually watch Marnie rock to a room full of fans. That would be the best.

Buy it from Amazon.

Arcade Fire “Month of May”

A few weeks ago, I woke up with a melody running on a loop in my head. It was a simple, vaguely eerie keyboard riff, it made me think of cars zooming along roads at night, turning around curves, lights moving along lines in darkness. The part was isolated in my mind; I couldn’t place it. I’ve heard so many songs, figuring out what it was would be a needle-in-a-haystack endeavor. I forgot about it.

Not long after, I was listening to the Arcade Fire and realized that the keyboard part was at the end of “Month of May,” one of the best songs on their new album. It’s actually a fairly prominent part of the composition, but it’s the big blaring guitar, shouted vocals, and rhythmic hooks that take up space in your memory. You remember the Neil Young-ness, you remember the uncharacteristic punk-ness, and the moody synth part digs into your unconscious.

“Month of May” distills all the anxieties on The Suburbs into a four minute burst of restless energy. It’s the feeling of needing something more, of driving around aimlessly in pursuit of some ill-defined excitement, of wanting something that just isn’t coming. It’s the sound of trying to be active, but having nothing to do. The noise builds and the beat has a violence to it, but it’s all thrashing around for nothing, like trying to kick and punch at the very concept of one’s boredom while believing in stuff that’s probably just as illusory — “some things are pure and some things are right.” Yeah, yeah. So why are the kids still standing with their arms…folded…tight?

When the keyboard part comes in, that’s when the sinking feeling hits, and you resign yourself to futility after acting out. It’s knowing that you can’t escape that desire for something else, even if the idea isn’t fully formed in your mind. The grass is always greener, the lights are always a bit brighter on the other side of wherever you are. Even still — rocking out, making a record about how you feel, trying to start again — it’s worth a shot.

Buy it from Amazon.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow “Drink, Drank, Drunk”

The most surprising part of this song comes at the very beginning — a clear, bold lead vocal in a Sunny Day In Glasgow song! As the song moves along, we get back into their comfort zone of soft-focus haziness. It’s a gentle slide from lucidity to dreaminess, and the shifts in the composition mirror the progression in the title. The lyrics follow a similar path — they start off very assertive and direct, attempting to talk someone out of bad behavior, but as the song gains momentum and layers of sound, the words become more emotional and vulnerable. Eventually, it’s just feelings without words, inarticulate longing and complexity rendered in sad, beautiful, epic music. It’s a very clever piece of music, and another fine example of why Ben Daniels is the most interesting and inventive artist working in the shoegazer genre.

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Victoire “I Am Coming For My Things”

The most obvious thing in this composition is the sound of the phone message — “I am coming for my things,” repeated a few times over, rewinding the memory to make sure it happened, or going back over the thought as if to underline it and make it more real. It was said, it’s over, you have to stick with it. The music is deeper, darker, totally abstracted. I hear shock, I hear loneliness, I hear self-pity, I hear anger, I hear relief. The emotions seem isolated to different instruments in the arrangement, but they overlap — never quite coming together on the same plane, but relating in some way. It’s the feeling of having all these thoughts and feelings, and not yet knowing how it all connects. The past is a painful memory, the present seems like an agonizing eternity, and the future is inconceivable.

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