Free Energy “Free Energy”

Free Energy are all about the type of rock and roll that sounds like a promise of a better life to come. Fun is around the corner! Freedom is imminent! Optimistic anticipation, wrapped up in sweet hooks and driving grooves. “Free Energy,” the song, works well as a statement of purpose. It sounds like the world coming alive with excitement and meaning, if just because you will it to be that way. It’s a song about escape, but as much as these guys talk about the big city, this is more about getting away from feeling trapped by circumstance and hesitation, and saying “Hey, it’s our time. Let’s go!” There’s always a welcome place in the world for rock tunes like this.

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Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Round and Round”

I’m constantly writing about songs about anxiety. I’m not actually a very nervous person! I know people who deal with some serious problems, full-on anxiety attacks. Luckily, I’m not one of them. I’m mostly just responding to the good music that comes my way, and a lot of it deals with these emotions for reasons that are fairly obvious and perhaps a little mysterious too. “Round and Round,” a fairly polished song from the typically lo-fi Ariel Pink, cycles through a series of grooves and is essentially a meditation on living with anxiety. It never sounds especially tortured, though. If anything, it seems medicated — mellow, spaced-out, dimly aware of its own dread but trying to “hold on” and keep it together. There’s more beauty in this song than ugliness, and more pleasure than pain. Nevertheless, there’s a resignation to it, this feeling of “Oh, this is how my life is, so I have to just learn how to deal with it.” It’s a mixed-up mess of barely-defined emotions, but it’s very potent and evocative.

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White Hinterland “Bow & Arrow”

The new White Hinterland album is a creative departure for Casey Dienel, whose music had previously been focused on jazzy piano chords and fairly obscure lyrics. The piano is almost entirely missing now, replaced by synthesizers and a variety of percussion, and her words have taken a refreshing turn toward direct, economical language. She’s opened up emotionally, and her high voice has more room to emote in arrangements without as much treble and far more negative space. “Bow & Arrow” is one of the most successful of the new songs, and one of her best arrangements to date. As the music shifts between clattering nervousness and a forthright yet placid groove, Dienel sings from the perspective of a woman trying to navigate a difficult patch with her partner. It’s a very mature and sensitive song, avoiding hysteria and owning up to her own complications without seeming weak.

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Caribou “Odessa”

Dan Snaith’s style shifts considerably from album to album, but somehow he manages to have a consistent, identifiable core aesthetic. However, it’s not easy to explain what that aesthetic is — it’s something intuitive about his tones and song structures, and the way he balances an icy exterior with a subtle warmth. Andorra, his previous album as Caribou, was mostly spaced-out harmonic psychedelia, but this time around he has gone deep into an apparent Arthur Russell fixation. It’s in his voice, which has taken on a similar soft, sensitive affectation (you may also hear a bit of Erlend Øye in there), but more importantly, it’s in the music, which has absorbed the atmosphere and grooves of Russell’s disco work. It’s not a total clone of Russell’s music. Snaith’s compositions include a lot of modern and classic house influences along with elements of freestyle, ambient music, and psychedelia, but there’s a similar sense that the songs are musical microclimates cut off from their surroundings. “Odessa” layers its rhythms and textures into a careful lattice of sound, rich in detail but abundant with negative space. It feels like a very specific space — either a particular time and place, or state of mind. I get a bit of déjà vu just listening to it.

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Liars “Scarecrows On A Killer Slant”

There are a lot of guitar parts on Liars’ Sisterworld that are genuinely frightening and startling. The band have not reinvented the wheel — their parts lift from horror soundtracks, hardcore punk, art rock — but they’ve mastered the textures and dynamics, resulting in amazingly vivid and visceral music. “Scarecrows On A Killer Slant,” the album’s centerpiece, is bleak and extremely violent. It sounds like you’re being chased down by maniacs, adrenaline pumping in fight-or-flight survivalist mode. Or it could be that you’re the predator stalking the prey. In the middle of the track, the violent fantasy kicks in: We should punish the creeps! Drag them out in the street and kill them! Retribution! When the chorus kicks in again, it’s even more deranged, and it’s hard to tell the difference between random violence and street justice. It’s just this bloodthirsty cycle of power and aggression. The song seems to burn itself out, collapsing into a wreck of smoking rubble at the end. The rage dies down, but doesn’t go away.

Buy it from Amazon. Here is my feature-length interview with Liars on Pitchfork.

Gonjasufi “Duet”

I’m not going to front, okay? When I first heard about Gonjasufi, I was being told the name out loud and my immediate thought was “Oh, that is ridiculous and definitely not for me, as I am not some ridiculous stoner.” But you know what? I really like a lot of stoned music, and in actually listening to the album, I was a sucker for its slo-mo grooves and dubby atmosphere. Gonjasufi’s voice has a cool, bitter soulfulness. Rather than disappear into head-nodding oblivion, he always comes across as sharp and lucid, and just a bit aggrieved. “Duet” floats over its percussion, but as much as it feels comfy and relaxed, there’s no getting around the tension and frustration at the core of it, and in his voice. It’s like trying to patiently out-wait aggravation.

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Ted Leo and the Pharmacists @ Knitting Factory 3/9/2010

The Mighty Sparrow (with the director of the song’s video on vocals) / Mourning In America / Ativan Eyes / Even Heroes Have To Die / The Stick / Bottled In Cork / Woke Up Near Chelsea / One Polaroid A Day / Where Was My Brain? / Bartolomeo And The Buzzing Of Bees / Tuberculoids Arrive In Hop / Gimme The Wire / Last Days

The karaoke portion of the night included most of the songs listed here, plus a number of TL/RX tunes like “Ballad of the Sin Eater,” “Me and Mia,” “Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?,” “A Bottle Of Buckie”, “Shake The Sheets”, “Timorous Me”, and “Counting Down The Hours”. I got to do Fugazi’s “Merchandise” with Brendan Canty from Fugazi sitting in on drums, which was, as you can probably imagine, both totally crazy and extremely awesome. I hope I did okay! This entire show was a thrill. Ted and his band are as talented as they are friendly, charming, and entertaining. Which is saying a lot.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “Bottled In Cork”

It’s rare that a song so inviting comes in such a strange shape. “Bottled In Cork” is like a Ted Leo greatest hits album boiled down to one perfect three minute tune, switching up between a series of immediately ingratiating hooks before settling on a perfect chorus in rounds at the end. It’s basically a travelogue in the tradition of “Ballad of the Sin Eater,” with its hero zipping around the globe and accruing experience and wisdom, all to end up with that delirious, out-of-nowhere digression: “I tell the bartender, ‘I think I’m falling in love.'” I really like how that conclusion is not at all foreshadowed by the rest of the lyrics — it opens with the line “there was a resolution pending on the United Nations,” for crying out loud! — but it is hinted in the brightness and swing of the music. The final rounds are gorgeous, floating up and out over chimes as the song fades out, and maybe the character blacks out. It’s so appropriate that this song ends so elliptically. It’s not as if the story is actually over, you know?

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Gorillaz featuring Lou Reed “Some Kind of Nature”

Plastic Beach is an album about junk, but it somehow avoids being shrill, judgmental, or dogmatic. It’s mostly colorful and groovy, with an undercurrent of melancholy and dissatisfaction cutting through the bounce of the beats. “Some Kind of Nature” contrasts the old crank voice of Lou Reed with an especially perky track, but here’s the great part: Reed comes across like a slightly weird guy making sense of a world overflowing with garbage and spiritual bullshit, drawing connections between things and finding the joy in absurdity, while Damon Albarn is the one sounding sad-eyed and world-weary. Reed isn’t exactly playing against type, but it’s a brilliant aspect of his style and persona for this context. It’s halfway between a “fuck it” shrug and a kook imparting incoherent wisdom.

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My (10.0!) review of Quarantine the Past, the new Pavement retrospective compilation, is up on Pitchfork today. As a supplement to that piece, I’m re-running one of my favorite posts from my R.E.M. catalog review site in which I wrote about Pavement writing about R.E.M.. For yet more Pavement, here is my in-depth interview with Stephen Malkmus from last year, and here is a tumblr I’ve put together tracking the band’s activities on their current reunion tour.

Pavement “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”

Before I ever owned a copy of Reckoning, I was obsessed with a song called “The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence” from the No Alternative compilation. It was the very first song that I ever heard by Pavement, who would eventually become my all-time favorite band, and it just happened to be a tribute to R.E.M. in general and Reckoning in specific. On a very basic level, it’s a song about the magic of discovering music without knowing all that much about it, and the way enthusiastic, imaginative fans can rush to fill in their own history and meaning to art when they are not weighed down by the baggage of a shared culture.

In 1984, R.E.M. was a mystery for Stephen Malkmus to solve, just as his band would become a puzzle for me in 1994, and I’m certain that both bands benefited enormously from withholding information the public, and forcing the listener to develop their own context based on what they could glean from the records and whatever made it into the mainstream press. As usual, imagination allows for greater drama and insight: “Unseen Power” starts off with Malkmus identifying with the band’s southern roots despite having spent his own formative years in California, and ends with him imagining R.E.M. as stoic defenders of Georgia who confront General William Tecumseh Sherman at the end of his devastating March to the Sea. It’s all rather colorful and strange, but in an intuitive way, it summarizes the band’s appeal in the early ’80s than most anything else I’ve ever encountered.

In the second verse, Malkmus provides a quick recap of R.E.M.’s discography as of 1984, with a decided focus on Reckoning and its tracklisting. Though I knew “So. Central Rain” and “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” at the time because I had a dubbed copy of Eponymous, some of the titles were warped by my adolescent ears, i.e., for some reason Reckoning came across as “Black Honey.” Through the verse, Malkmus seems awed by the songs, and so when I finally heard “Camera,” “Harborcoat” and “Pretty Persuasion” for myself, I was acutely aware of their legendary status, at least in the mind of the guy from Pavement. However, he made one thing very clear in that verse: “Time After Time” was his least favorite song. “TIME AFTER TIME” WAS HIS LEAST FAVORITE SONG!!!

R.E.M. “Time After Time (Annelise)”

“Time After Time” is not my least favorite song on Reckoning. Not even close, actually. Bill Berry and Peter Buck shine on the album version, with the former filling out the space between the latter’s loose, trebly notes with a variety of light percussive textures. The song gradually builds up to a rather majestic peak, but even still, the tone remains decidely mellow and understated. This is in part due to Michael Stipe’s cool, reserved vocal performance, and an airy arrangement that seems to evaporate into the atmosphere just when it rises into the sky. In a way, it’s the song on Reckoning that comes closest to what Malkmus achieved on his records with Pavement — it presents an extraordinary and specific sensation in a disconcertingly casual sort of way. In other words: “Time After Time” is slanted and enchanted.

Buy Quarantine the Past and Reckoning from Amazon.

Society of Rockets “We”

The Society of Rockets build their futuristic psychedelic pop songs out of the scraps of previous artistic visions of tomorrow. The sound is comforting and familiar, but there’s also a vague sense of disappointment in the subtext: Our utopian concepts never work out. Nevertheless, the dream of progress does come true, at least in ways compromised by reality, so optimism is justified. “We” charges headlong towards some endless horizon, buzzing with excitement and courage. The band lifts its sound from Stereolab and Neu!, the vocal harmonies owe more to the Beach Boys. The song is simultaneously ominous and sweet, a tribute to every future we can imagine but could never exist.

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Spiritualized “Come Together”

Is there anyone else who can self-flagellate with as much elegance, wit, and grandiosity as Jason Pierce? “Come Together” is a masterpiece of over-the-top self-loathing, a thunderous mass of shrieking guitars, blaring fanfare, and gospel bombast all at the service of a scathing lyric sung by Pierce in the first person, tearing himself apart for being a junkie. As always, Pierce’s vocals are a shell-shocked deadpan, but he can barely hold back his self-directed venom when he spits out lines like “Little J’s a fucking mess, but when he’s offered, he just says yes.” On other tracks from Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space, the waves of sound are comforting and numbing, but in this, it pounds down on you, like he’s trying to beat some sense into himself. It’s futile, though — as the song tapers off and bleeds into the woozy opening section of “I Think I’m In Love,” it’s like slipping back into a stupor.

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Spoon “The Mystery Zone”

What is a mystery zone?

1. It’s a liminal state. Neither here nor there, but on the threshold of something new. Everything is uncertain, opportunities abound. It’s exciting and terrifying.

2. It’s the period of time before you really get to know someone, but you’re aware of each other’s existence. You had no idea you’d be significant to one another. It’s back when all there was to it was attraction, curiosity, and possibility.

3. It’s everything that goes on in everyone else’s life when you’re not around, or when you’re lost in your own head.

4. It’s an alternate universe version of your life in which you made totally different choices.

5. It is the realm of the “information troll”.

6. It’s the moment before physical impact. What will it feel like?

7. It’s before you kiss someone, before you have sex with them. It’s all of the things you can’t know about a person just by talking to them, and everything you can glean by touching them.

8. It’s anywhere except for where you are or where you have been.

9. It’s the love you’ve never received, and the love you’ve never given.

10. It is whatever happens next.

Buy it from Amazon. Here’s my review of Transference on Pitchfork.

Wild Beasts @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 2/28/2010

The Fun Powder Plot / We Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues / Vigil For A Fuddy Duddy / This Is Our Lot / Two Dancers I / His Grinning Skull / Two Dancers II / Please Sir / Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants / All The King’s Men / Hooting & Howling // The Devil’s Crayon / The Empty Nest / Cheerio Chaps, Cheerio Goodbye

Everything I wrote about Wild Beasts in concert a few months ago still stands. If anything, they’ve only gotten better and more confident with American audiences. Let’s talk about a song, shall we?

Wild Beasts “This Is Our Lot”

There’s a lot of violence and romance in the music of Wild Beasts. Sometimes the violence is very literal, as in the brutal gang rape described in “Two Dancers I” or the loutish behavior of the thugs in “Hooting & Howling,” and sometimes it’s more subtle or metaphorical, hidden in the peculiarities of social ritual or a character’s callous entitlement. Even when the band sing from the perspective of aggressive men, there’s an odd passivity in their language, as if their bold, selfish actions are something thrust upon them due to their relative status or physical power. Two Dancers in some ways seems like an album-length argument that humanity is doomed to both perpetrate and suffer violent action because we’re always living out some narrative based on our status relative to other people. We’re always stronger than someone else, and weaker than someone else. We push on other people as much as they pull on us. It’s all a vicious cycle, and sometimes it gets very grotesque.

“This Is Our Lot” is one of their more romantic songs, but it’s got a very potent sense of dread. The setting seems to be formal ball, the mood is celebratory but anxious. Sexual tension is everywhere in the room, but it’s all hemmed in by custom and ritual, making the character frustrated and agitated. The song builds to a climax in which he exclaims “I couldn’t be more ready!”, as if he’s about to burst. It stands out on the album as a moment in which aggressive desire is trampled by culture, and a character suffers for not being transgressive in his behavior.

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Quadron “Buster Keaton”

They used to call this sort of thing “sophisti-pop”, right? Immaculate, subtly synthetic versions of classic soul, with a bit of ironic distance contrasted with polite earnestness. “Buster Keaton” is a hard song to pin down — from moment to moment, the band is referring to totally different eras of R&B and pop, and though the basic structure and melody of the piece scans normally, it has an oddly vertiginous quality. I’m especially fond of the way the vocals and the horns in the chorus seem to swing like pendulums just out of synch with each other, though I could maybe do without the spoke “girl…” bit, though it is fairly cute.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Mark Richardson is the managing editor of Pitchfork, and in my opinion, one of the site’s best writers. He’s consistently fair and thoughtful, and has a gift for writing about complex, arty works in layman’s terms, both humble and erudite. In other words, he’s the polar opposite of the worst stereotype of a “Pitchfork writer.” Mark’s first book, a volume about the Flaming Lips’ 1997 album Zaireeka for the 33 1/3 series, was just recently released. It’s one of my favorite books in the series, in part because it gets to the heart of what makes the Flaming Lips such a special and inspiring band, but also in that Mark goes on some very thought-provoking tangents about the way we engage with recorded sound as technology advances and how we are conditioned to listen closely to music alone. We get into some of that in this interview, but rest assured that this conversation only scratches the surface of what’s in the book.

Read the rest of this entry »

Serena-Maneesh “I Just Want To See Your Face”

“I Just Want To See Your Face” is basically a brief, catchy indie pop song, but its production and arrangement lend the piece an exaggerated depth of field implying that clusters of sound in the recording exist on overlapping physical planes. In some moments, you get the sensation of elements rushing suddenly into the audio equivalent of your field of vision, and in others, a sense of distance from musical elements that relate to and complete each other. The most dramatic overlaps remind me of how when you’d manually record television to VHS tapes, two different recordings would bump into each other, resulting in a fascinating and unique audio/visual glitch. The general effect of the recording makes the sentiment of the lyrics that much sweeter — it’s like trying to recreate a memory of someone, but not quite having your emotional impressions and visual recollection line up exactly.

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Pantha Du Prince “Bohemian Forest”

The brightest notes in this piece all sound like circles to me. Spheres in three dimensions, floating on their own, or in clusters of bubbles through the air. It’s almost impossible for me to hear this any other way, though the title suggests a dark, dense landscape for the circles. Maybe it’s like glowing orbs hovering through the woods at night, like unknown, otherworldly insects. You could see it, and it would seem peaceful and beautiful, but a little uncomfortable and vaguely menacing because you’d have no idea what it is.

Buy it from Amazon.

Dum Dum Girls @ Mercury Lounge 2/21/2010

Hey Sis / Catholicked / I Will Be / Don’t Talk To Me / Yours Alone / Brite Futures / Play With Fire / Bhang Bhang, I’m A Burnout / Jail La La / Rest Of Our Lives

Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La”

I didn’t expect to love the Dum Dum Girls’ debut album as much as I do, but quite simply, their songs are very difficult to resist. In aesthetic terms, they are working in well-mined territory, but Dee Dee’s songwriting is a cut above and the production has this ideal balance of lo-fi grit and professional sparkle. They’re going for a classic sound, but unlike many artists who attempt to ape a reverb-heavy style, the material goes beyond recreating a surface. The best of these songs have an evergreen quality, and would be just as good if recorded in a variety of styles.

In concert, the band is sharp and focused, but not overly rehearsed. There is a bit of awkwardness to their set, particularly as Dee Dee pauses to tune her guitar between every song, and her band mates mostly stand around in silence. Near the end, she explained that she thought we’d rather hear the songs in tune than very quickly, and while that is true, they may want to figure out a way to work around this in the future. (Maybe they can get successful enough to have their own guitar tech!) The set was also a bit too brief. I understand the notion of “leave ’em wanting more,” but the band have at least another five absolutely amazing songs on their album that they did not perform, and they could have easily played another ten minutes or so. While it’s true that I now just want to go see them again in the hopes that those selections will become part of their regular set, I am a bit confused why they’d opt not to play songs as excellent as “It Only Takes One Night” and “Everybody’s Out.” At least they played “Rest of Our Lives”, though — that’s the one that melts my heart, and it was lovely in concert.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Happy Birthday “Girls FM”

I have not heard any of Happy Birthday’s studio recordings besides “Girls FM”, so I was a bit surprised by their live performance last night opening up for Dum Dum Girls. This recording suggests a cleaner sound owing more to latter day Sub Pop acts, but their show is more early Sub Pop, with obvious roots in early ’90s indie rock and grunge. At their best, they came across like a bubblegum version of Royal Trux, or a K Records take on Dinosaur Jr. I’m curious now to hear how this album came out. Did all the grunge elements get cleaned up? Are they more indie-pop and less rockin’ in the studio? They’ve certainly got some charm and hooks; we’ll see where this goes.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

These New Puritans “Three Thousand”

These New Puritans aren’t breaking new ground for apocalyptic grimness in music, but they are quite good at synthesizing very different strains of doom pop into something that sounds rather fresh. “Three Thousand”, for example, is the midpoint between the A Frames’ dead-eyed, deadpan monotone punk and the chilly, broken-machine clunk of Def Jux-style hip hop production. The sound throughout their new album Hidden is consistently shiny and immaculate, which makes its loud martial rhythms sound as though they’ve been freshly minted for destruction. Somehow the rigid order and cleanliness of the music makes it seem much, much more creepy and paranoia-inducing.

Buy it from Amazon.

Fight Like Apes @ Mercury Lounge, 2/17/2010

Something Global / Digifucker / Lend Me Your Face / I’m Beginning To Think You Prefer Beverly Hills 90210 To Me / Do You Karate? / Jake Summers / Tie Me Up In Jackets / Knucklehead / Lightsaber Cock Sucking Blues / Battlestations

Fight Like Apes rock out. They’re funny. They chat with the audience, and make sure that everyone in the room participates. They do goofy theatrical stunts in concert. Every song is super catchy. Basically, they are ridiculously entertaining. They should not be playing to small crowds in America. This is a band that should have a rabid cult following. There should be hundreds of teens and college kids totally losing their shit at their shows. Yeah, they play with irony and come out of indie, but they should be playing to emo and mall punk kids. The people who might really appreciate them. Can we get them to tour with Paramore or something? Can I convince anyone in NYC to go see them play Union Hall tonight? Who knows.

Fight Like Apes “Something Global”

So yes, Fight Like Apes are fun and goofy, and they indulge in some ironic humor, but what makes them so appealing is how earnest they can be. May Kay may sing some nonsense, but the emotional content of these songs always rings out loud and clear. “Something Global” is especially straight forward: They feel out of step with music culture, but they love it and hate it and love it and hate it. It’s a statement of intent — they want to get people excited and they’re not afraid to be pop. It’s a bit “take us or leave us,” but it’s mostly “you’d be a fool not to love us.”

Buy it from Amazon. The price for the mp3 download is very low!