Pavement @ Williamsburg Waterfront 9/19/2010

Cut Your Hair / Date With IKEA / Rattled By The Rush / Ell Ess Two / Grounded / Frontwards / Shady Lane / Unfair / Perfume-V / Fight This Generation / Silent Kid / Box Elder / Stop Breathin’ / Two States / Father To A Sister Of Thought / Heckler Spray / In The Mouth A Desert / We Dance / Summer Babe / Fin / Stereo // Spit On A Stranger / Trigger Cut / Starlings Of The Slipstream / Gold Soundz / Kennel District / Range Life

When I saw Pavement at the Pitchfork festival back in July, it was a very intense experience. I would’ve been freaking out no matter what, but my energy level was pushed to an extreme by a large and very enthusiastic audience. Pure fanboy bliss. This show was a lot more mellow. There were definitely a lot of people having a good time, but this wasn’t a crowd of excitable superfans. It was more just like a normal show. Which is weird, right? I may be seeing Pavement play almost every day this week, but it’s not like you get to see a Pavement show every day. My theory is that all the hardcore people will be at the Central Park shows, which were the first reunion tour gigs to go on sale a year ago, and this Williamsburg show was for the less committed stragglers. This was a great gig and I had a wonderful time and got to see the band perform songs I’d never seen them do before, but I’m looking at this one as a warm-up. The main event begins tonight.

Memorable moment: During “We Dance,” Bob brought out Stephen’s wife Jessica, and danced sweetly with her on the right side of the stage. After the song, Stephen said “That was for Jessica Hutchins. She put out on that one.”

Pavement “Box Elder” (Live in Hollywood, 4/24/1994)

I don’t think I ever appreciated “Box Elder” as much as I did Sunday night. It’s a simple, compact tune, and aside from a couple strange lines, one of the most direct songs Stephen Malkmus has ever written. It’s from their very first 7″, and it begins a theme that carries on through Malkmus’ most recent material: Hey, I’m moving on, can’t stick around here. Gotta keep going. See ya. This tour is about as sentimental as Malkmus gets, and well…he certainly doesn’t seem that way up on stage. “Box Elder” resonated with me because I was connecting its desire to move on with someone else, but maybe I was also tapping into something in Malkmus’ performance — he’s here and present, but he’s got his eyes on the exits, and ready to go somewhere new.

Buy it from Amazon.

of Montreal @ Terminal 5 9/18/2010

Black Lion Massacre / Coquet Coquette / Our Riotous Defects / Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider / Godly Intersex / Sex Karma / Girl Named Hello / Suffer For Fashion / St. Exquisite’s Confessions (with Nate “Rocket” Wonder on guest vocals) / Like A Tourist / Enemy Gene (with Janelle Monáe) / Hydra Fancies / She’s A Rejecter / Tonight / Casualty Of You / Around The Way / Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse / For Our Elegant Caste / A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger // Thriller – Wanna Be Startin’ Something – PYT

of Montreal “Like A Tourist”

There was some very negative buzz for the first few shows of this current of Montreal tour, and though I don’t doubt that the band was rusty and hadn’t totally figured out their approach to the setlist and presentation, I can assure you that they got over that stuff in time for the NYC shows, and that the NYC audience looooved it. Seriously though, what is not to love? The False Priest material went over pretty well, and the hits from Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping, not to mention the Michael Jackson medley at the conclusion, are total audience nukes. There’s been some complaint about the band’s show slipping into spectacle for spectacle’s sake, but I don’t think they’ve gone overboard at all, and if anything, they have streamlined this aspect of the stage show over time. There have been times in the past when I have seen the band and the skits during the songs come across like “hey, put on some costumes and get weird out there,” but in this show, the costumes were more evocative, and there was some vague narrative implied in which Kevin Barnes was always either confronting some freaky creatures or getting roped into some kind of ritual. I suppose I understand why some people may be getting bored with or alienated by of Montreal’s current direction, but I wasn’t with any of those people and I’m very glad about that.

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Janelle Monáe @ Terminal 5 9/18/2010

Dance Or Die / Faster / Locked Inside / Smile / Sincerely, Jane / Wondaland / Mushrooms & Roses / Cold War / Tightrope / Come Alive

Janelle Monáe “Dance Or Die”

Every so often during Janelle Monáe’s performance I would think: How is this woman for real? This is getting away from the songs, the singing, the dancing — there’s just something about her that seems just beyond real, as if she’s a drawing or cartoon character made flesh. She and her band glide effortlessly from strength to strength, with an easy mastery over showmanship. It’s kinda amazing just how much production value they get simply from sticking to a black and white formal wear dress code. There were some points in the show in which the of Montreal company joined with her back-up players for some performance art, but that was never as exciting as what Janelle Monáe and her sidemen did on their own, or dropping black and white balloons into the crowd during “Tightrope.” They’ve got a great show, and as much as they come off like total pros, you can tell they’re still figuring out all their tricks. This was an elaborate performance for an opening act — I can’t wait to see what they do once they’ve got a headliner’s budget.

Buy it from Amazon.

It has been interesting to watch the popular alt-rock bands of my teen years adjust to their aging audiences and major changes to the business model of selling and marketing music. Pearl Jam settled into becoming grunge’s answer to a jam band, and the Foo Fighters became its equivalent to Tom Petty. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead eventually shed their major label contracts and leveraged their cult and cred to successfully give away and/or sell their music online on their own terms. Green Day kept their focus on being a band for teenagers and stayed huge. All of those guys aged gracefully and made good decisions. And then, of course, there is Billy Corgan.

If Thom Yorke and Trent Reznor are the Gallants in this scenario, Corgan is the Goofus. The guy seems doomed to always make the wrong decision and rub people the wrong way. Since reforming the Smashing Pumpkins, he has done a lot to erode fan interest, from releasing mediocre or straight-up awful new music to embarking on a tour in which he regularly and deliberately insulted his own audience.

The Smashing Pumpkins “Freak”

More recently, he seems intent on undoing some of that damage. The current Pumpkins tour has featured a more reasonable balance of new material and radio hits without any obnoxious antics. Even better, most of the new songs released for free on the Pumpkins site have been pretty good! I mean, it’s nothing extraordinary, but aside from the dreary “A Song For A Son,” the Teargarden by Kaleidyscope tracks have been tuneful, totally decent songs that play to Corgan’s strengths as a writer and performer. “Freak” in particular is probably the most radio-friendly song he has produced in a long time.

Corgan’s current model for releasing music is both simple and weirdly complex. The simple part: He is giving away a new song on his site every few weeks. The complex part: It’s all part of an eventual 44 song album with a cringe-inducing name, and every four tracks comprise an EP that gets its own physical release. There are obvious advantages to this strategy — fans get a steady trickle of new material, and there is a possibility of circumventing the regular hype cycle of the internet. Theoretically, Corgan can be a constant part of the music news cycle since he always has something to promote. The problem, though, is that if there is always some new Pumpkins mp3 going around, it’s not special. It just becomes part of the noise. At the very least, people take it for granted. I’ve been a Smashing Pumpkins fan since I was a young teen and I know that I tuned out for a bunch of these mp3 releases and only recently made a point of catching up with things.

Corgan has said that he’s doing this in part because he feels that audiences don’t care about albums anymore. I can see why he’d feel that way — there’s plenty of evidence to suggest this is true — but I think he has confused things somewhat. Yes, music culture has swung hard in favor of a la carte consumption. This doesn’t mean that people don’t want albums, or that every artist is suddenly a singles act by default. I think that even when people choose to cherry pick songs from records, they still appreciate albums as a unit, as a way of making sense of a discography and understanding the artist’s intentions and chronology. Albums give us something to focus on, something larger than a random song.

If Corgan wanted to — and had the capacity to edit, or had a good editor — he could easily put out a strong, tight album that would have decent commercial prospects and would garner him some renewed critical goodwill. Instead, he’s giving people a steady stream of music with no larger framework to focus on aside from yet another grandiose project that feeds into the perception that he’s lost the plot. It’s a bad way to present the work of a prolific artist.

Get more free songs from the Smashing Pumpkins’ official site.

Weezer “Trainwrecks”

What is a better way? Well, I think Rivers Cuomo has the right idea. Cuomo has embraced a very old-school model that makes better sense for today’s marketplace than just deciding “it’s all single tracks, who cares” and giving up control over presentation. Basically, you get one Weezer album every year, and each album is supported by a single or two. Weezer has always been a singles-oriented artist, so this makes sense — none of these albums are meant to be statements, they’re just collections of songs. You don’t like this one? Oh, well, there will be another one next year. See you then. This is how it was in the 60s and 70s, before labels started to look at albums as long-term platforms to be milked over the course of two or three years. It seems like Cuomo gets just how disposable records are now, and is catering to a market with a very limited attention span. Over the past three Weezer albums, he’s figured out how to get attention for just enough time to promote a new release, and then come back with something new before people start wondering “whatever happened to Weezer?”

It’s cynical, probably, but it looks like Cuomo and his band have been having a blast. In this model, they get to put out a lot of songs — sure, a lot of them suck, but whatever, that’s not the point — and all the silly stuff they do to grab attention is consistent with the character and promotional tactics they’ve been going with since their first album. Maybe they’re being tacky and lame sometimes, but they always seem to be having a good time, and even if he’s largely abandoned the notion of good taste, Cuomo is always pushing himself to try something new, whether it’s encouraging his band mates to write and sing their own songs, swapping off instruments, or collaborating with people outside of the band. As far as I am concerned, he’s still the same terrific singles artist he’s always been, even if tunes like “Memories” and “I’m Your Daddy” are just okay when compared to high water marks like “Say It Ain’t So,” “El Scorcho,” and “Keep Fishin'”. (I quite like the three singles from the Red Album, though.)

At any rate, Cuomo has figured out a system that makes perfect sense for what he does. It’s a smart blend of time-tested record business practices and internet-ready memes. I think this points in the direction of a workable future for pop and rock acts — just keep the music coming in easily-understood bundles, and do what you can to get some attention. Not everything has to be a big deal event, you don’t always have to be making the best record of your career. Have fun with lowered expectations.

Buy it from Amazon.

Vampire Weekend @ Radio City Music Hall 9/15/2010

Holiday / White Sky / Cap Cod Kwassa Kwassa / I Stand Corrected / M79 / Bryn / California English / Cousins / Taxi Cab / Run / A-Punk / One (Blake’s Got A New Face) / I’m Going Down / Diplomat’s Son / I Think Ur A Contra / Giving Up The Gun / Campus / Oxford Comma // Horchata / Mansard Roof / Walcott

Ezra Koenig is an unusual and very likeable frontman for a rock band. He comes off as erudite and polite, but he doesn’t have any of the awkwardness you might expect to along with that. He’s smooth and confident and totally comfortable being himself onstage. In that way, he reminds me of Stephen Malkmus. On the other hand, he’s extremely friendly and inviting, a guy who understands why you may feel self-conscious but encourages you to have a good time. He’s generous and open-hearted. In that way, he’s not much like Malkmus at all, at least in that Malkmus always puts up some kind of aloof front. I think in some ways, Koenig and his band is filling the same cultural niche that Pavement filled in the mid-90s: They’re the super-smart band with accessible tunes that bridge the gap between pop and something a bit more sophisticated. Talking Heads, R.E.M., Pixies, Elvis Costello, Modern Lovers, Belle & Sebastian, Blur — those are just a few of the other bands in this lineage. It’s a very good place to be, culturally. You tend to stick around and mean a lot to people.

Vampire Weekend “California English”

Koenig is a fantastic lyricist, particularly on Contra. He’s become less precious and more precise, filling his verses with evocative concrete detail while avoiding the trap of packing the songs with too many signifiers and not enough heart. He sketches out a recognizable world and fills it with characters and complications, and crucially, he doesn’t judge. He’s not trying to call anyone out. If he’s pointing you at something that may be dubious or potentially corrupt, he’s also asking you to consider that maybe this institution, this person, this cultural practice, whatever, isn’t all bad. Contra is basically optimistic — yes, there are things wrong with class, economics, etc, but pretty much everything in this world is tangled up and we’re all complicit in something negative somewhere along the line. It’s not about looking for an excuse to let people off the hook, but on some level, it’s about trying to humanize people and understand the world rather than living life based on endless variations on an us vs them schism. The songs on Contra are all in some way trying to make sense of this — finding a way to be reasonable in a world of conflict, and there’s no easy answers to be found outside of just trying to see the connections between things and be understanding of complication.

Buy it from Amazon.

Beach House @ Radio City Music Hall 9/15/2010

Walk In The Park / Better Times / Gila / Norway / Silver Soul / Used To Be / Zebra / Take Care / 10 Mile Stereo

Beach House “Norway”

I find it weird that it took me through halfway through this set to finally realize that Victoria Legrand both looks and sounds a bit like Patti Smith. That realization makes some sense of Beach House too — like Patti, they’re going for something dramatic and romantic, but also intimate. They’re not much of a live band, but they sound good in concert, replicating the texture and mood of their current album without seeming too tight and stuffy. Thank goodness for their light show, though. The music stayed more or less the same through the show, but the lights added a necessary sense of dynamics. They waited until “Norway” to introduce a blinking starfield light pattern behind them, but it was well-timed, gorgeous, and incredibly well-suited to the sound of the song — I think I gasped.

Buy it from Amazon.

Dum Dum Girls @ Radio City Music Hall 9/15/2010

Play With Fire / Hey Sis / Catholicked / I Will Be / It Only Takes One Night / Bhang Bhang, I’m A Burnout / Baby Don’t Go / Jail La La / Rest Of Our Lives

Dum Dum Girls “Bhang Bhang, I’m A Burnout”

The last time I saw Dum Dum Girls, it was at the Mercury Lounge. That venue is better for them in terms of size, but Radio City Music Hall served them better in terms of sound. They get a lot of space for their reverb to, well, reverberate. But it’s also more crisp and clear, allowing for a nuance and subtlety that isn’t as evident on their studio recordings. The main revelation of last night’s set was that Dee Dee is a far better singer in concert than she seems to be on record. Her tonality is much sweeter and richer in person. It gave some songs a greater depth, and flattered the contours of her best melodies — the dreamy chorus of “Rest of Our Lives,” the pre-chorus of “Jail La La,” and most especially the “really, it just opens doors I never knew could be” line in “Bhang Bhang, I’m A Burnout.”

Buy it from Amazon.

William Brittelle “Vivid Culture”

“Vivid Culture” starts off with a strange bait and switch. For the first 30 seconds, you might think you’re entering something like an Andrew W.K. album, with some guy shouting about a “vivid culture,” setting you up for something huge and energetic that never comes along. Instead, you get this melancholy orchestral ballad that veers off into prog territory. William Brittelle’s new album runs through different permutations on this oddball brand of soft rock, but this track may be the most compelling, or at least the one that most fully expresses the overall work’s bleak melodrama. The first half of the piece following the intro establishes its protagonist as a lost, lonely, utterly bored man barely getting through life without inspiration. As the song becomes more psychedelic and grandiose, the singer gets drowned out by the music even as he raises he voice, swallowed up by this bigger, louder thing outside of him, making him tiny and irrelevant. It’s a simple metaphor and it’s been done before, but I think it works very well here, particularly in the way the shift in scale is gradual like a camera slowly pulling away from a close-up into a widescreen panorama.

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Spoon @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 9/13/2010

Car Radio / Nobody Gets Me But You / The Mystery Zone / You Got Yr Cherry Bomb / Trouble Comes Running / The Ghost Of You Lingers / Written In Reverse / Someone Something / Modern World / The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine / Don’t You Evah / Finer Feelings / Everything Hits At Once / Don’t Make Me A Target / I Summon You / No Time / Got Nuffin / Black Like Me // Who Makes Your Money / Stay Don’t Go / My Mathematical Mind /// I Turn My Camera On / The Underdog

Do I need to spend more time telling you how brilliant Spoon is; that they are a live rock band with few peers at the moment? This was a set with some nice surprises — “Car Radio” at the start, interesting Wolf Parade and Jay Reatard covers, a particularly spirited version of “Finer Feelings” in the middle, and a slightly under-rehearsed run through one of my top favorites, “The Mystery Zone.” The Music Hall of Williamsburg is a smaller room than they’ve been playing recently, and you can tell — their sound is bigger than the room in some ways, even though their songs make more sense in this sort of intimate setting. I found it odd that they chose to play “My Mathematical Mind” here but not last month at Madison Square Garden. If they had any song built for an arena, that’s the one, but they reserved that for the smallish club where it felt even more towering and epic than usual. Maybe a little perverse, but I like it. It’s Spoon.

Spoon “Written In Reverse”

Try to sing this song and get it right. It’s available at a lot of karaoke bars now, so you can try it for yourself. Do it, and you’ll get a vivid sense of what an incredible rock and roll singer Britt Daniel is. It’s not just the bits where he shreds his vocal cords belting out a chorus full of bitter irony. It’s in every line, he’s always putting an expressive spin on the words, and his voice seems to dance loosely around the tight, overstated downbeat. On paper his words seem a little cryptic, but in context you get exactly how he feels — led on, confused, ready to give up and cut his loses but unwilling to let go of whatever love is keeping him in this awful situation. He sounds thrilled by the drama but totally beaten down by it too. There is so much frustration in this song, but also a fair bit of self-aware humor. The thing that kills here is that he totally gets that it’s funny that he’s still hanging on to this, when there’s nothing there. The song ends on the grim punchline: “I want to show you how I love you / I can see you blankly stare.”

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Chromeo “When The Night Falls”

“When the Night Falls” is basically a song in which this guy attempts to talk an old flame into a booty call while he’s passing through town. And you know, more power to him. The thing that makes the song charming — aside from some very strong mid-80s style hooks, of course — is how hard he seems to be working to make this happen. He’s suave up to a point, but as the song goes on, I just think “wow, you’re still talking about this, guy?” It’s cute, though. This could easily be a super sleazy song, but it comes out sounding respectful and sorta sweet, and you start to actually buy into the notion that this is all, in fact, very romantic. Okay, maybe he’s full-on suave after all.

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Black Milk with Royce Da 5’9 and Elzhi “Deadly Medley”

I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out why this song sounded so familiar, and then I just gave up and did a Google search. As it turns out, Black Milk built this track around “Yeah Yeah” by Black Rock, which featured on the Chains & Black Exhaust compilation that came out back in 2002. I hadn’t heard it in at least three years. I like what Black Milk has done with it — the guitar parts have this great worn-yet-sturdy sound, and in the new context, it’s like a pause for deep reflection before one of the rappers digs into a verse. I also appreciate the way the drum fills make it sound like the track is advancing to another plateau, emphasizing incremental movement over momentum.

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Belle & Sebastian “Write About Love”

I’m starting to think that Stuart Murdoch is slowly stockpiling songs for an eventual Belle & Sebastian jukebox musical about the drudgery of office life. Surely we could make one just with what we’ve already got, and this title track from the new album. It’s always been a good setting for Murdoch’s characters — romantics stifled by the limitations of ordinary life — and, well, he couldn’t keep writing songs about teenagers, could he? Even still, the moment guest singer Carey Mulligan says that she hates her job on the chorus, it seems too easy and predictable. “Write About Love” is a good song with modest charms, but it doesn’t sound very inspired to me. It sounds like Murdoch doing his regular thing, which is a step backward from the ambition and craft of the band’s previous album The Life Pursuit, which I maintain is their very best collection of songs.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Interpol “Lights”

The new Interpol album is depressing in a way that is unlike the sadness of their previous work, or really, most other miserable albums. The music itself sounds like extreme clinical depression. Most sad songs are an invitation for the listener to relate, but this stuff shuts you out. It wants nothing to do with you, but it wants you to pay attention to it. It’s like a rock band marching into the ocean, killing itself in the slowest, most melodramatic way possible. It sounds like Interpol destroying the very idea of Interpol, and the image on the cover echoes that notion. Aside from “Lights” it’s not especially good, but it’s fascinating in a morbid sort of way. I have no idea how they can come back from this — it seems like the only good options are to either break up or completely reinvent themselves.

Buy it from Amazon.

My interview with Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, concludes here. In this part of the conversation we discuss the way radio changes music, the “loudness war”, and some music that Greg thinks is particularly well-recorded. A mix cd featuring all of those songs is included as a .zip at the end of the interview.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greg Milner is the author of Perfecting Sound Forever, an excellent book surveys the history of recorded sound, and thoughtfully examines the way technological advancements change the way we make and experience music. It’s incredibly informative, but not overly dry. Milner is an exceptional storyteller, and so whether he’s writing about public “tone tests” for Thomas Edison’s early phonographs, the creation and marketing of early synthesizers, the “loudness war“, the innovations of King Tubby, or the complex recording process that yielded Def Leppard’s Hysteria, it’s page-turning thrill. It’s a must-read for anyone who makes music, writes about it, or just listens to it. In the first part of our conversation, we discuss whether or not people care about sound today, the resurgence of lo-fi and cassette culture, different approaches to recording music, and the changing role of producers in modern music.

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Jenny and Johnny “Big Wave”

“Big Wave” sounds like it should be uncomplicated and carefree, a summer fun song about surfing or whatever. Instead, it’s about debt and financial recklessness, with Jenny Lewis singing about bankruptcy and loans in the same wounded sweetheart tone she reserved for up tempo Rilo Kiley tunes like “Portions For Foxes” and “It’s A Hit.” It’s not the most mind-blowing irony you’re going to find, but it works, and the breezy, “hey, who cares, everything is gonna be fine” tone of the music is an appropriate sound for a topic that a lot of people try not to think too hard about at their own expense. What makes the song really work is that it’s very much about the emotional toll of economic distress, and Lewis’ voice hits just the right note of sadness and wounded pride throughout the track, but most especially during the bridge up to the chorus. She doesn’t go too far with it, but she gets across enough to suggest that she’s only skimming the surface of the “big wave” of sorrow, confusion, and regret coming her way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Robyn “Include Me Out”

Robyn is most compelling when she’s singing about heartbreak and complicated romantic drama, but it seems wrong to focus too much on that aspect of what she does, or to expect her to always be tugging at your heartstrings. “Include Me Out” is a thrill at face value, this pulsing, beeping wave that crests out with the kind of sticky, mildly anthemic chorus that turns up on a lot of great pop albums but rarely on the songs selected to be singles. It’s a low drama song — it’s basically just Robyn mentioning a lot of people worthy of love, respect, and gratitude, and radiating a good will she hopes will be returned in kind. I understand where she’s coming from, but she shouldn’t worry. With songs like this, she’ll always be beloved.

Buy it from Amazon.

of Montreal featuring Solange “Sex Karma”

Kevin Barnes is typically bipolar on his albums, shifting back and forth between declarations of love and lust and bitter, cruel condemnations. He’s very good at expressing both extremes, but on the whole, I prefer the songs that convey genuine sweetness and desire if just because those are more scarce in modern pop. “Sex Karma” is very much one of those. It’s flirty and light, a head rush of infatuation and fascination that feels almost as good as the real thing. It’s not overly serious either. It’s playful and goofy, the lyrics put it in the terms of child-like wonder, enthusiasm, and exploration. I love that Barnes has Solange sing “you are my only luxury item, if anyone tries to steal you, I’ll fight ’em.” For one thing, it just comes out sounding adorable, but in terms of pop music subtext, it’s a total flip on the usual dynamics of the lyrics in her famous sister’s hit singles. Instead of putting attraction and relationships in terms of accruing power and riches, this is simple and not at all crass: You’re what matters to me, everything else is just stuff.

Buy it from Polyvinyl. It will ship now, ahead of the release date.

Destroyer “Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever”

Here’s a fun thing to think about: Imagine that Dan Bejar has been commissioned to record a cover version of John Williams’ score for the Star Wars movies in the style of Destroyer. Not instrumental, by the way — he is expected to sing the entire thing, and reinterpret the films’ story in his lyrics. I can conjure this music in my mind, but only up to a point. I can get the sound of it, but I’m not nearly clever enough to translate Star Wars into Bejar-ese, though I can definitely get a sense of where he’d go with it, especially in terms of Princess Leia’s sexuality and royal privilege. Daughter of the evil king! Romantically pursued by her brother and a scoundrel! That sounds like the makings of a Destroyer song to me.

There is something in Dan Bejar’s voice that makes it impossible to tell the difference between artsy seriousness and intellectual campiness. It’s all a blur, intentions are always tangled, and mixed up in base urges. Through Bejar, all of life is droll comedy, and all of civilization is just endless posturing and pageantry. “Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever” may be my favorite Destroyer song, and I think it captures the essence of the band, or at least what is most appealing to me. All of Destroyer’s Rubies sounds like it is set deeper and deeper into the night, but “Sick Priest” sounds as far into the night as you can go before tripping into the dawn. It sounds like the part of night that most feels like a secret, the bit most everyone sleeps through, but there you are stumbling through it, and somehow reaching an understanding that you’ll just forget by the time you finally pass out. Bejar is typically obscure on the verses, but as he leans into the refrain, he’s reassuring: “That’s okay, yes, it’s fine…” You just take his word for it.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kanye West featuring Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Bon Iver, and Benjamin Bronfman “Monster” (Uncensored)

There’s a lot of guys rapping and singing on this track, but all of that is a warm up for Nicki Minaj’s performance in the second half of the song. It’s a true tour de force, one of the most impressive, exciting, and distinct rap verses in a long time. Minaj has been building her reputation as a song-stealer for the past two years, dropping inventive, wildly charismatic verses on a string of hits, but “Monster” is a clear tipping point. It’s the culmination of everything she’s done to date; the place where she totally upstages two of the biggest rappers in pop music; the song that announces her as a STAR and not just a promising rapper or a great guest.

One of the great things about Nicki Minaj is that she fully embraces camp. This is most apparent in how she presents herself visually — she’s a “Harajuku Barbie;” she’s the heir of Missy Elliott’s avant garde video style; she’s the African American answer to Lady Gaga. Her campiness is more exciting on record, though. She’s not afraid to go way over the top, and her voice bounces around between cartoonish extremes with incredible ease. She seems most comfortable playing dress-up and make believe, transforming herself into something larger than life. She creates an image, an armor, a voice, and runs loose inside it — in a lot of ways, she’s like a drag queen! It’s a natural fit, really — why wouldn’t that kind of flamboyant character and self-made ego fit naturally in the context of rap? It makes you wonder what rap could become if more MCs took cues from stuff like Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Paris Is Burning.

Minaj’s tics and funny voices may grate on some listeners, but they give her a dynamic, often totally unpredictable presence on tracks. She gives you bits to listen for, little moments that are exciting and interesting and make you want to rewind over and over. That bit in “Lil Freak” where she goes “they wetter than the RAIN THEN / Usher, buzz me in / everybody loves RAAAYMOND!” is a prime example. Typing that out barely hints at the subtle strangeness of her inflection, the tiny bits of personality that come through to make it so sticky and silly.

If you go through lots of her stuff, she doesn’t really do the same trick twice. She’s always finding a way to say something in a compelling, ear-catching way. The best rappers do this in their own way, the boring and so-so rappers, not so much. In some ways I’d compare her to Ol Dirty Bastard, in that she has that willingness to go far out to get a line across, and also this musical delivery that steps outside the boundaries of strictly rapping rhymes without actually singing. She’s not exactly inventing anything — you can trace bits of her skill set to a number of the best rappers ever — but she’s in the process of refining her persona, and mastering a lot of tricks essential to being a truly great MC. I can’t wait for her next move.

Laetitia Sadier “One Million Year Trip”

Laetitia Sadier’s previous non-Stereolab work — Monade, for the most part — sounded too much like Stereolab to fully register as something distinct. This song, from her solo debut, is a bit different. Her voice and aesthetic is too central to Stereolab to sound unlike Stereolab, but in this track, you can hear the essence of her style cut away from that of Tim Gane. “One Million Year Trip” has an intriguing shape to it, full of gentle twists and curves that contrast sharply with Gane’s taste for schematic arrangements and lateral progressions. The tonality, particularly in the guitar, has a sad, emotive quality that has been almost entirely absent from Stereolab music since the late 90s, when Gane’s music became increasingly clinical and remote to the point of negating any attempt on Sadier’s part to invest the songs with emotion, as on her numerous songs mourning the death of her bandmate Mary Hansen.

“One Million Year Trip” is another song about loss and mourning, or more specifically, accepting that someone is gone. The grief is subtle, the emphasis is placed on the process of adjusting and rationalizing: “She went on a million year trip and left everything behind.” There’s a clarity here that I find very moving, particularly as she sings about letting the pain go, acknowledging that “there is no point in holding on.” The notion of death as a voyage into the unknown is an appealing version of the afterlife. I tend to believe that death is the end of the line, but we can’t really know. If anyone would, it’d be the dead, out there on a journey through eternal oblivion.

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Scissor Sisters @ Terminal 5 8/25/2010

Night Work / Laura / Any Which Way / She’s My Man / Something Like This / Whole New Way / Tits On The Radio / Harder You Get / Running Out / Take Your Mama / Kiss You Off / I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ / Skin Tight / Skin This Cat / Fire With Fire / Paul McCartney / Night Life // Comfortably Numb / Invisible Light / Filthy/Gorgeous

If you have only encountered the Scissor Sisters’ studio output and music videos, it would make sense if you thought Ana Matronic was just a sidekick or a back-up singer. She gets one spotlight track per album, and her personality doesn’t fully translate in the studio. On stage, it’s another story. There she’s central to the group’s appeal, and just as charismatic as Jake Shears. She’s a delight to behold — gorgeous, sassy, immensely entertaining. She’s the emcee, the hype woman, the foil. She is the woman that drag queens aspire to become. Scissor Sisters shows wouldn’t be nearly as fun without her. If only every pop band had someone like her. Bless you, Ana Matronic!

Scissor Sisters “Harder You Get”

The audience for this show was fine and fun, but it seemed as though a significant chunk of the audience wasn’t super familiar with the new material from Night Work. This is to be expected whenever a band tours shortly after releasing a record — a lot of the point of touring for an album is to introduce your fans to new tunes — but it was a little disappointing. Out of all the Night Work selections, the two that clearly connected with the crowd were “Harder You Get” and “Running Out,” which happen to be my favorites, followed closely by “Invisible Light” and “Skin This Cat.” It’s not surprising that these two rocked-up songs would get people going. They’re both just slightly off-brand enough to reveal something new about the band, and allow for a lot of physicality on stage.

“Harder You Get”, with its Judas Priest-gone-disco vibe, comes alive on the stage, and Shears revels in the opportunity to slip into domineering leather daddy mode. It’s the best example of the wonderfully sleazy, aggressively sexual place they’ve gone to on Night Work, and I’d love it if they explored this S&M quasi-metal style some more in the future. Or I could just put it on repeat, which is usually how I hear it. Which, of course, explains why when they finished performing it last night, I just wanted them to start over and play it again.

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Electric Six “After Hours”

The world of Electric Six is tasteless and full of preening, anxious douchebags. It’s sad and desperate and vulgar and dumb. It’s basically the culture that we are trying to escape when we embrace things like indie rock. “After Hours,” the opening number on the band’s seventh album, sounds like the theme song to an expensive, ultra-tacky Meatpacking District bar full of all those mysterious affluent people moving into all those new luxury high-rises. It’s a bad scene. The music has a frightened urgency; Dick Valentine spits out his lines with maximum venom, his voice whipping you at the end of every line — HOURS, HOURS! FIRED, FIRED! He sounds bitter and disgusted, resigned to being trapped in this stupid, stupid hell. It’s meant to be funny in a grim sort of way, but it’s getting to the point that Valentine’s deadpan satire is starting to just come across like realism. What is even exaggerated anymore? You scrape away the humorous hyperbole and the ironic distance, and it’s a scathing indictment of idiocy and excess: “That’s how organs shut down and brain cells DIE.”

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This time last year I was visiting my father at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side nearly every day of the week. He had been sick for years, but had generally been living life normally until his luck started to run out somewhere around June. He was hospitalized in late July, and except for a brief stint back at home, he was there through the end of September. After that, he returned back to the house he bought in his early 20s, the house where I grew up, and he died in mid-October. I’m glad it happened there, and not at the hospital. It’s how he wanted it to be. In my mind, though, my father died at Sloan-Kettering center, and I watched it happen slowly in small installments spread out over days. Every truly painful memory is tied to that place, when he finally passed away at home, it was mercy. It was relief.

I hadn’t been in that neighborhood since then. It’s on the far eastern edge of Manhattan in the north 60s and there isn’t much reason for me to ever be around there. I recently got it in my mind that I should go back up there, walk around. Not so much in this “I need to confront something” sort of way, but more like…on some level I missed the routine of taking long walks in that area every day. I put it off for a while, in part because I knew that, yes, I was going to have to confront something, but I finally went back there last Thursday. As it turns out, there really wasn’t much to face. It was mostly a matter of retracing lines. The incredible anger, depression, and hopelessness I felt at the time when I was in that area every day — most of it to do with my dad, but certainly not all of it — was long gone. All that was there for me was nostalgia, and passing through familiar places tied to bad memories.

I mostly thought of songs. Animal Collective was a revelation to me back then. They’re about my age, they’d been through some similar things, and expressed something about those experiences in ways that resonated with me in a comforting way. There’s this patch of 68th or 69th Street near 1st Avenue that’s tied in with Liz Phair’s “Explain It To Me.” I spent most of my time with music that echoed my anger and despair. The problem was, there really wasn’t very much of it, and none of what worked for me was at all recent. The records that really did the trick for me at this point in time were Hole’s Live Through This, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and Nirvana’s In Utero. I feel like at some point in the mid 90s, rage and anguish became very uncool in music, and was more or less ceded to metal, emo, post-grunge, etc, and in those genres, expressing these negative feelings was often just a hollow, and in many cases very petty and whiny, ritual. I have my theories as to why this happened, but as it stands, it’s rare to find clever, tuneful musicians expressing agony and fury these days.

Hole “Violet”

It’s not like just anyone can make music like this. The pain really has to be there, and I think most of us can tell the difference between a singer who is really putting it out there vs. someone who is servicing the conventions of their chosen genre. I hate to say this, but I don’t think an artist can go to this place without a complex of mental health issues. Depression, narcissism, exhibitionism, self-destructive impulses, the works. Craft is important too — you want something with hooks, something with thoughtful dynamics, not just a bunch of formless bile. It goes deeper when it’s actually musical, when the artist really knows how to make you feel how they feel. How many people really have the combination of problems and talents necessary to produce this stuff? And the support system too! Labels simply don’t have the funds to bankroll brilliant basket cases like they did back in the boom years.

So yes, an album like Live Through This is sort of a miracle. The two songs from that record that worked for me last summer were “Softer, Softest” and “Violet.” The former tapped into my feeling of impotence and hopelessness, and I still wince every time I hear Courtney Love sing “the abyss opens up, it steals everything from me.” That image was so vivid and real to me at the time. Everything was going wrong, and I could only be passive. “Violet” expresses a painful passivity too, but it doesn’t sound like it. The chorus is all desperate surrender — “GO ON, TAKE EVERYTHING!” — but even if Courtney didn’t follow that up with a bitter “I dare you to,” it would still sound entirely defiant. The song has the dynamics of a brutal storm. You hold tight in those lulls, the chorus blasts at you like a choir of hurricanes.

Hole “Softer, Softest”

The loudness and violent dynamics in this music is the key to what makes it so therapeutic. The cathartic peaks makes it feel as though you’re fighting back. “Softer, Softest” sounds fragile for the most part, and unusually pretty for a Hole song. It’s not a song that demands for a release, but when it comes, the shift in scale is jarring. Courtney sounds small in the first two minutes, she sings about feeling powerless. When the song builds up, it’s like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. The tiny, wounded woman is gone, replaced by this rampaging, avenging giant: “BRING ME BACK HER HEAD!” It’s empowering. It’s not real, but that’s part of what makes it so important: It’s a clear example of art giving you something that you need that you can’t often have in reality.

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Steely Dan “Peg”

As a direct result of reading Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, I’ve been thinking a lot about methods of recording, the way things sound, and the way people respond to various technological advances and the resulting aesthetic decisions. One of the aesthetics I find most interesting at the moment is the very “dry” sound that was very popular in the 70s, most especially the stuff that was recorded in California. Steely Dan is an extreme example of this style — clean to the point of being sterile; jazz/rock fusion performed with surgical precision. I get why a lot of people hate this sound. If you want guts and grit in your music, this is the radical opposite. It’s not physical, it’s not soulful. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made ruthlessly cerebral music, and everything that made it to their records was a fully formed idea rendered as perfectly as possible. Every sound in the recordings is discrete, nothing bleeds together. It’s not meant to simulate the sound of people playing together, it’s just a pure representation of a musical arrangement.

Solos, traditionally an aspect of music that at least offers the front of being a moment of inspired expression, were auditioned. Fagen and Becker ran through seven session players before finding the ideal solo for “Peg,” a song that would become one of their most memorable and zippy productions. If you watch this video, the duo play a few of the rejected solos, and it becomes clear why they were so picky. Those solos were awful, just really tacky and lifeless. The keeper, performed by Jay Graydon, is among my favorite guitar solos ever, in part for its fantastic contrast with the rest of the composition. The center of the piece is the interplay between this exceptionally sleek keyboard part and the subtle syncopation of the drums — tightly written and performed, but it comes out sounding fluid and intuitive. When the solo comes in, this already mellow tune seems to relax and slide into this even more stylish and smooth zone. The guitar tone is astonishing — rich, but with a touch of distortion — and the notes glide along the track with an unreal grace. You could record “Peg” in other ways and the song and that solo would still be great, but think the nuances in the arrangement and performance are flattered by the understated, dry approach. Nothing is oversold, nothing is obscured.

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Steely Dan “Show Biz Kids”

The dry sound suited Steely Dan in part because the music itself was so cool and aloof. The lyrics have a bitter, deadpan wit; they lean hard on irony and unreliable narration. It’s cynical music about cynical people, so there’s no room for warmth. “Show Biz Kids,” from their second album, is a prime example of their fixation on shallowness and sleaze. As the title suggests, the singer is talking about hedonistic young LA creeps — it’s basically a Bret Easton Ellis novel before such a thing existed. It’s perhaps uncharacteristically judgmental, but I think we’re meant to think the narrator is an asshole too. The arrangement is brilliant. The guitar part is relatively loose and dirty for them, it’s the most dynamic presence in this piece that mostly sticks to this dead-eyed repetitive groove. The backing vocalists sound like they’re in a trance, the chorus runs even colder. It’s a grim sound — Los Angeles rendered as hell with palm trees and swimming pools.

The best part is a temporary shift out of the main groove at 3:48, as the beat is enhanced by a metallic jangle and Fagan delivers a sharp indictment: “Show business kids / making movies of themselves / you know they don’t give a fuck / about anybody else.” In context, it’s catharsis, but it’s an extremely fleeting moment that disrupts the listener’s desire to linger longer on that part. Super Furry Animals looped the last line into something more crowd pleasing; Elvis Costello’s cover version hits that part with a sputtering rage. Those interpretations have their appeal, but I prefer Becker and Fagan’s intentions — you only get to feel that muted indignation for a few seconds before you slip back into that creepy complacency.

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Steely Dan “Parker’s Band”

“Parker’s Band” is basically Steely Dan’s equivalent to Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” a song expressing appreciation and admiration for a jazz great. (For Stevie, it’s Duke Ellington; for the Dan, it’s Charlie Parker.) This is as earnest and effervescent as Steely Dan gets. Though they made a lot of music that errs closer to jazz than rock, this is certainly a rock song about jazz music. That’s a lot of the appeal — the rock aspect of this conveys enthusiasm and echoes wonder in the lyrics, though the jazzy touches in the syncopation of the drums lends the piece an usually breezy grace. I love the way the percussion and horns have a weightless quality in the mix, and seem to casually orbit the guitar at the center of the arrangement. It’s not as extraordinarily ecstatic as Stevie’s tune, but there’s certainly a lot of joy in this track.

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