Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique “Set Me Free”

I felt vaguely bad about not connecting with Robyn’s EP with Röyksopp last year, as if I was in some way betraying an artist I’ve loved and supported for a very long time. When this sort of thing happens, I’m inclined to feel very “it’s not you, it’s me” about the artist, and give them the benefit of the doubt. You’re not always going to be on the same page. But here we are a year later, and this new Robyn track is outstanding, and exactly the sort of thing I want to hear from her. So maybe it was really just a problem with Röyksopp? “Set You Free” is right in Robyn’s sweet spot as a vocalist – a joyful song that’s weighed down a bit by melancholy and a touch of anxiety. The sound of the track screams “Madonna remix circa ’89-92,” but that’s a great fit for Robyn and that vibe feels very fresh right now in the context of a lot of dance music that either skews more atmospheric, or bludgeons you with post-dubstep noise and intensity.

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Silver Jackson “Melodies and Bass”

I am reasonably certain that this is the first artist based in Alaska that I have featured on this site in its 13 year history. Alaska is one of those cultural dead zones where even if there’s cool arts stuff going on, it just never seems to make it out of there and into the culture. Silver Jackson’s music definitely sounds like something made in relative isolation – it’s very odd and distinct, and comes across as the sort of music a person works on obsessively alone over long stretches of time. It’s not entirely sui generis – I can hear traces of artists like Gonjasufi, cLOUDDEAD, and other forms of stoned, abstracted R&B in his tracks – but it’s certainly not ordinary, and it’s so off-center that even moments of straightforward melody are disorienting. “Melodies and Bass” is essentially an R&B song, but it sounds like it’s made of rattling, broken parts, and swinging on a busted hinge. But still, despite the roughness of it all, there’s a gentle grace at the core of it.

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Oddisee “That’s Love”

Oddisee’s verses on this song are great and it’s a very well-made track across the board, but to be honest, I’m mostly here for that organ tone. It’s like the musical equivalent of super-saturated bright color, and I love the way this two-chord vamp somehow signals both urgency and relaxed vibes. I love the way it contrasts with that simple, elegant horn hook that drops in on the chorus, and how the lead organ part that comes in seems to skip the surface of the groove like a stone on a pond. Oddisee is rapping about love and gratitude, but I think you’d pick up on that theme just by hearing the track. It just radiates a warmth and kindness.

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Swindle featuring Ash Riser “London to L.A.”

This is as surprising and formally strange as a song can probably get while also being very, very, very chill. Swindle’s arrangement is built around a lovely, jazzy chord progression played on guitar, but the rest of the song is constantly shifting – an early lead part that sounds very Stevie Wonder to me; a funky keyboard riff that could belong to a Justin Timberlake song; a full-on dubstep drop sequence that somehow doesn’t derail the mellow vibe. And then there’s a horn solo and a string section. It’s kinda amazing to hear him pull this off, and make everything sound like it all belongs in the same song. Even the parts that contrast the most with that central guitar part seem to just give in and go along with its flow.

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Titus Andronicus “Lonely Boy”

A thing I appreciate about Titus Andronicus is that as the band goes along, they seem to gravitate towards an early Springsteen/mid-period Clash sound – the strut and the hooks of glam, but rowdy and humble and aggressively working class. There’s a bunch of songs like this on The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but “Lonely Boy” is the one that really stands out, in part because it plays so well at face value while Patrick Stickles’ lyrics and vocals project a misanthropy that’s at odds with the music’s amiable, accessible vibe. Stickles is very funny here – he’s totally self-aware, and though he’s singing about very real antisocial tendencies, he sees the humor in it. This is just one part of a sprawling song cycle about manic depression, but I think it works well on its own as a microcosm of this emotional push-and-pull, and boom and bust cycle of having the energy required to get out there and live.

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Micachu and The Shapes “Oh Baby”

Mica Levi is a genius of finding beauty in ugly, atonal sounds and harsh, clunking rhythms. Her earliest work with Micachu and The Shapes had a manic, restless edge, but at this point in her career, she’s embraced slower, more loping rhythms that feel more like a stupor than a frenzy. “Oh Baby” sounds like a Alabama Shakes type song that’s been dosed with downers – you can hear a bit of dub and chopped & screwed influence in the effect of it, but the actual sound is more unsettling and disconnected. That music tends to have a warm, womb-like vibe to it, but “Oh Baby” feels brittle and cold, and like it could break down at any moment.

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U2 @ Madison Square Garden 7/18/2015
The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) / The Electric Co. / Vertigo / I Will Follow / Iris (Hold Me Close) / Cedarwood Road / Song for Someone / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Raised by Wolves / Until the End of the World / [The Fly remix intermission] / Invisible / Even Better Than the Real Thing / Mysterious Ways / Elevation / Ordinary Love / October / Every Breaking Wave / With or Without You / City of Blinding Lights / Bullet the Blue Sky / The Hands That Built America -> Pride (In the Name of Love) // Beautiful Day / Mother and Child Reunion -> Where the Streets Have No Name / One

• This was my 9th time seeing U2. I’ve seen them on every tour from Popmart onward, and I think this may have been the best U2 show I’ve seen. It’s definitely the best in terms of staging and lighting design – this was, BY FAR, the most immersive concert experience I’ve ever had in an arena – but I think I also just got lucky to see them on a particularly good night.

• The staging for this tour, along with what Nine Inch Nails was doing on the Tension arena tour in 2013, is very far ahead of the curve of what pretty much anyone else performing in arenas is up to. U2 have always been major innovators of the arena concert – the now standard mid-show b-stage and acoustic mini-set was invented by U2 on the Zoo TV tour in 1991. But what they have going on this time around is brilliant, and the logical next step from what they were doing on the Elevation and Vertigo tours. Basically, they have a minimal main stage on one end of the floor, and a smaller round stage at the other end, and the two are connected by a runway that bisects the general admission area. The runway is sometimes just a runway, but as the show goes on, there’s also a huge screen that sometimes has video art, and other times serves as a massive jumbotron equivalent. The are two levels when the screen is down, so Bono can walk around in the center of an animated image and interact with it, or the entire band can perform within the screen and appear or disappear inside the imagery. I’m not a big fan of the animation style they are using, but the craft is impeccable and at least a decade ahead of anyone aside from NIN.

• One of the things that makes the Innocence + Experience tour work so well is that unlike the Elevation, Vertigo, and 360 tours, there is an actual reason for U2 to play their new songs aside from promoting a new record. There is a clear narrative arc to this show, and even if songs like “Iris” and “Song for Someone” aren’t necessarily the band’s best work, they are compelling and moving in this context. The latter, a sorta schmaltzy ballad about Bono meeting his wife when they were teens in Dublin, gains some emotional weight from a visual that places him in the humble surroundings of his youth. That moment of gentle sweetness transitions directly into a particularly grim reworking of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and a dramatization of domestic terrorism just before the excellent “Raised by Wolves,” and it’s genuinely jarring. Bono singing about being a young punk fan can seem a bit indulgent, but this recollection of being suddenly shoved from “innocence” to “experience” is powerful, and gets to the core of why they’d spend an entire record looking back on this phase of their youth.

• “Until the End of the World” follows “Raised by Wolves,” and the new context gives it some new meaning. This time around, it’s as though the older Bono is singing to his younger self, and it’s about becoming hardened, cynical, and defeatist in the aftermath of tragedy. It’s about the end of innocence, and in doing so, giving in to despair. The song closes the first act of the show with flood imagery, and suddenly this song that was originally written about Judas and Jesus Christ is brought back into the Old Testament.

• “Bullet the Blue Sky” is back in U2’s set for the first time in a decade, which is another way of saying it was left out of the 360 tour. (You really have to see U2 when they come around, since they only seem to tour every four or five years now.) The band have a long history of reinventing “Bullet” on each tour, and making it about something else – on Zoo TV it was about racism, it was about the military industrial complex for Popmart, on Elevation it was about gun violence, and it was about violence inspired by religious extremism for Vertigo. Now it’s about money, and the Americanization of the world, and Bono imagining how a young version of himself would think of the old, rich Bono of today. It’s about feeling guilty for his wealth, and mocking his excesses. “I can see those fighter planes” from the original version is replaced with a snarky “I can see those private planes.” I think this take works really well, in large part because he’s dramatizing his mixed feelings about his success and what that means, and his complex feelings about the United States and what America is an idea vs. what the country is in reality. Bono shouted out recent events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, and it didn’t come off as cheap. It was his way of confronting a very white and affluent audience, and pushing them to consider a grim reality that can be easily ignored if you feel safe and complacent in your own life.

Wilco “Random Name Generator”

First off, Wilco naming their new album Star Wars is funnier than any Wilco joke you will ever make. Second, the “dad rock” thing is such a tired diss on this band, and is actually sorta infuriating when people who publicly praise extremely bland indie/folky stuff throw it at them, when Wilco has very often been a band that’s willing to be abrasive or weird. That’s certainly where they are on Star Wars, a record that has a relaxed spirit, but a frazzled, messy sound. It’s very much the sort of album you make when there’s no particular pressure on you, and you have the freedom to do whatever you want. There’s good and bad in that – on one hand, I really enjoy the aesthetic of this record and there’s a great stoned glam rock energy to “Random Name Generator” and “King of You,” but it does feel like the low stakes of this project had an impact on Tweedy’s songwriting, which is OK but not really at the level of the best Wilco material for the most part. They can get by on vibe, but I can’t imagine much of Star Wars having the enduring emotional impact of, say, “Jesus, Etc.” or “A Shot in the Arm.”

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Gardens & Villa “Fixations”

In simplest terms, “Fixations” sounds like Tame Impala trying to make a Warm Jets/Tiger Mountain-era Brian Eno song, but that’s a bit unfair in that I think this is much better than the vast majority of Tame Impala material. Gardens & Villa certainly have better taste in keyboard tones, and far more interesting lyrical themes – this is basically a meditation on inspiration and trying to avoid anything that would compromise your creativity. I love the call and response part in the chorus – partly because I’m a sucker for early Eno and it’s the most obviously Eno-ish thing in the song, but mostly because it splits the song’s perspective in a way that keeps the sentiment from getting too simplified. “My whole life fixation” gets answered with “see if we can make it underneath the radar,” and I think the implied disconnect between the first and second half of the statement is important, because I don’t think the singers are entirely sure of themselves.

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Teen Girl Scientist Monthly “Games”

The first Teen Girl Scientist Monthly record leaned fairly twee, but this time around they’ve sharpened up their edges a bit, and embraced a morbid streak that contrasts nicely with their clean-cut aesthetic. “Games” is harder and harsher than anything they’ve done up to this point, even if the core vocal melody is something that would’ve worked just as well in their sunnier, perkier material. I love the way this charming, playful melody is framed by these tight, tense rhythms, and how that contrast is echoed in the lyrics, which conflate sexual passion with violent hunger. The general feeling of the song is flirty and inviting, but that’s just the way the predator lures you in.

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The Rolling Stones “Moonlight Mile (Live 2015)”

My friend Sean often says that out of all the major “classic rock” bands, The Rolling Stones are the ones who are worst served by classic rock radio because when you reduce them down to just their biggest hits, you lose a lot of what they’re truly capable of doing. You get to hear some of that in The Beatles and Led Zeppelin’s biggest hits, but you lose most of the Stones’ grit and swing and funk and drama. You certainly miss out on a song like “Moonlight Mile,” which is as grand and cinematic as rock music gets without veering into contrived bombast. Thousands of musicians have written “lonely on the road” songs, but few come close to this, with Jagger conveying the slow drag of his journey home, the nervous anticipation of getting closer but still feeling so far away, and the pure romance of just yearning to be with the one you love again. It’s a song that comes from a place of exhaustion, but you can sense a real love for the road in the music – part of what makes “Moonlight Mile” so rich is that there’s a tension between his passions, and a resignation to this just being the way life is going to be. I mean, I am not a driver, but there are few other songs that make me want to drive around at night more than this song.

This recording is from just a couple months ago when the Stones played all of Sticky Fingers in concert; the show is now available as a live album. “Moonlight Mile” comes across particularly well 44 years after it first came out. This is partly because Jagger’s voice has aged so well, but I think more in that the sentiment and mood of the song suits the older Jagger well. There’s a lot of grace and dignity to the song, and he really highlights that in his performance today.

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Archers of Loaf @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 7/10/2015
Step Into the Light / Let the Loser Melt / 1985 – Fabricoh / Harnessed in Slums / Dead Red Eyes / Lowest Part is Free! / Freezing Point / Mark Price, P.I. / South Carolina / Wrong / Web in Front / Revenge / Nostalgia / Smokin’ Pot in the Hot City / You & Me / Might / Plumb Line / All Hail the Black Market // Audiowhore / Greatest of All Time / White Trash Heroes

I’d seen Archers of Loaf once before, back when they first reunited for a tour a few years ago. I remember that being a good show, but this one was much better – the band were really on, and the audience was very enthusiastic. It seemed like almost everyone in the venue was passionate about this band, and was having some sort of catharsis when they played the big ones – “Harnessed in Slums,” “Wrong,” “Web in Front,” “Lowest Part is Free!,” “Nostalgia,” etc. It was exactly what I would’ve wanted an Archers of Loaf show to be like when I was a teenager, except they would’ve played “Nevermind the Enemy.” I don’t get not playing that song – if I was in a band and had a song like that, I’d play it three times in a row every night.

Archers of Loaf “Greatest of All Time (Live)”

“Greatest of All Time” has always been one of my favorite Archers songs, but I wasn’t expecting it to move me as much as it did in this show. It’s an odd song – fragile but dramatic, bitter yet sentimental, ironic but also wistful. It’s essentially a song about how easily music fans can turn on their heroes, and maybe also a bit about the absurdity of making these people into “heroes” in the first place. We elevate people to mean something, but the moment they lose their semiotic usefulness, they’re either turned into a joke or relegated to being “legends,” frozen in time and discouraged from being anything else. Maybe the song is more poignant now that Archers themselves are in that legend role, and seem to be this band frozen in amber. I’m sure none of this is lost on Eric Bachmann as he sings it, and that he probably knows that “the underground is overcrowded” has a very different resonance today than it did 20 years ago.

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Veruca Salt “Eyes On You”

Last year I saw the original lineup of Veruca Salt play together on their first tour since 1997 and was amazed by how much power and chemistry they have together after so much time apart. This year I’m amazed by Ghost Notes, the new album they made once they got back together, which is just as good and sometimes even better than they were in their heyday. It makes me so happy that Veruca Salt have returned at exactly the point in time when their influence would be most apparent in younger bands, and when enough time has passed that people who were around in the ’90s can really understand how painfully underrated and pointlessly mocked they were back then. Rocking well is the best revenge.

Ghost Notes is a great record in large part because the band aren’t trying to reinvent themselves, but instead tried to reconnect with the things that made them special in the first place. Chief among those things is the rapport of Louise Post and Nina Gordon, and their ability to alternate between sharply contrasting one another and blurring together like this Cool Girl hive mind. But there’s also the core of their aesthetic, which boils down to “write highly melodic pop songs, and play them with the raw power of metal.” I’ve written before about how they more than any other band epitomized the aesthetics of alt-rock, and it’s still true now. The genre is all about melody and dynamics, and in giving you the raw thrill of ROCKING OUT. The heavy parts of the best alt-rock songs aren’t just cathartic – they feel liberating, like you’re just stomping on a pedal and immediately feeling free of tension and overloaded with joy.

“Eyes On You” is my favorite song on Ghost Notes, and in another time and another place, it’d be a huge hit. The hooks are amazing, but the feeling of it is even more potent. This is basically a song about figuring out exactly where you stand with someone, and trying to make the difficult decision of whether or not it’s worth holding on to them. It’s an emotional cost-benefit analysis, and I don’t think it comes to a real conclusion. The song just lives in that moment of being totally unsure whether your passion leans more towards anger or love.

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Bilal “Open Up the Door”

Bilal is the kind of artist who expresses himself more in his ability to successfully perform in a range of styles than claiming one of his own, and so he can be sort of hit-or-miss depending on what vibe he’s getting across. But this sort of Stevie Wonder vibe suits him very, very well, and flatters his keyboard playing as well as his voice. “Open Up the Door” is easily one of the best Stevie Wonder pastiches I’ve ever heard – it nails the way Wonder’s melodies often curl into these loose circles, and his world weary but genuinely optimistic world view. Bilal fits so well into this that the song comes across more as him channeling Stevie’s positive vibes than just playing dress-up.

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The Internet “Just Sayin’/I Tried”

This composition is a diptych made up of two very distinct sections, but it’s remarkable how seamlessly they flow together. It’s very easy to not even really notice the shift from the more rhythmic and emotionally sour part into the second half, which has a jazzy, airy style and is far more vulnerable and contrite. It’s the second half that really gets me – the chords are just lovely, and the sentimentality and generosity on display is a lot more potent than the anger and defensiveness of the first section. But I think the point in this song is that all these feelings exist in a continuum, and both parts are equally true in emotional terms.

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Wolf Alice “Your Love’s Whore”

“Your Love’s Whore” is kind of a harsh and provocative title, but this is actually a rather earnest and romantic song about love. The lyrics escalate as it moves along – at first, she’s talking about taking things slow and the possibility of being someone’s “perfect girl,” and then she’s imagining getting older and having a mature but still sexy relationship. She’s getting ahead of herself. When the song reaches its climax, she’s entirely in the moment – overcome with lust, and declaring “I could only love you more!” The whole song is about building and relieving tension, but that moment is so powerful in how it shoves fantasy aside for the passion of the moment.

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Basement Jaxx @ Central Park 7/1/2015
Good Luck / Unicorn / Power 2 The People / Red Alert / Taiko / Back 2 The Wild / What’s The News? / Oh My Gosh / Everybody / Never Say Never / Romeo / Jump N Shout / Buffalo / Raindrops / Do Your Thing / Rock This Road / Where’s Your Head At? / Rendez-Vu / Bingo Bango

Basement Jaxx “Back 2 the Wild (Jaxx Extended Mix)”

The problem with seeing shows in Central Park these days is that the volume of the music is so low that it doesn’t totally register as actual live music. This is a problem for any music that’s designed to physically move you – the bass frequencies are buried, and the snap of beats have little to no impact. When I saw Spoon a few weeks ago, Britt Daniel apologized to the audience for the quiet sound at their Central Park gig last year, and said that he was furious about it. I was at that show, and yeah, it was by far the weakest Spoon show I’ve ever seen, and that had nothing to do with their actual performance. It just barely felt like they were there.

I’ve seen Basement Jaxx once before, and it was one of the most transcendental live gigs I’ve ever witnessed. It was at Webster Hall, and it was very loud and everyone was dancing like maniacs in close quarters. I distinctly remember the floor shaking most of the time. Basement Jaxx’s live band show is a huge spectacle, with lots of singers and dancers and guys in gorilla suits. It’s the ideal manifestation of their musical aesthetic – joyful, soulful, hyper-physical, over-the-top. Their show last night in Central Park was all of these things, but definitely far too quiet. But despite that, the audience went crazy anyway, because how do you respond to all that stimulation without surrendering to it? How do you hear songs like “Red Alert,” “Back 2 the Wild,” “Do Your Thing” and “Where’s Your Head At” without flipping out? Why on earth would you go to a Basement Jaxx show if you didn’t come to dance? The Jaxx machine is so relentless and powerful that being a bit too quiet is not going to stop it.

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Shania Twain @ Madison Square Garden 6/30/2015
Rock This Country! / Honey, I’m Home / You Win My Love / Whose Boots Have Your Boots Been Under? / I Ain’t No Quitter / Love Gets Me Every Time / Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You) / Any Man Of Mine / Ka-Ching! (instrumental) / I’m Gonna Getcha Good! / Come On Over / Party for Two (with Gavin DeGraw) / Up! / Today Is Your Day / No One Needs To Know / You’re Still the One / From This Moment On / That Don’t Impress Me Much / (If You’re Not In It For Love) I’m Outta Here! // Man! I Feel Like A Woman!

Shania Twain “Love Gets Me Every Time”

Shania Twain was way ahead of her time in many ways, particularly in how she and Mutt Lange brought the aesthetics of ‘80s arena rock into country music. Smuggling that type of rock into country was a brilliant move – not just in that it brought a different edge and accessibility to country, but because those aesthetics weren’t really welcome in mainstream rock at the time, and had to go somewhere. The best possible haven for it was a genre mainly loved by working class people who weren’t too cool for big spectacle, sledgehammer hooks, and earnest emoting. It’s an extroverted, populist aesthetic, and when you do it right, it’s always huge.

Shania Twain’s show leans heavily on the rock side of things, and it’s big on crowd-pleasing spectacle like fireworks and pyro. She puts a lot of effort in connecting with her fans, and does whatever she can to get in physical proximity with the audience. (I was particularly fond of her being wheeled around on a trolley around the edge of the arena during “Any Man Of Mine,” which is such a great, inexpensive way to make a LOT of people very happy.) The main thing I got out of seeing this show is just marveling at how well-written all her hits are. She and Lange were remarkably disciplined in their song craft, and while each song is made up of strong, immediate hooks, they never make it feel overwhelming or relentless. I think that’s where the “country” really comes through – it’s very focused music, but she makes it seem relaxed and easy going.

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The Last Hurrah “Can’t Wait No More”

The Last Hurrah’s first two albums bent and stretched a Norwegian take on traditional British and American folk music into odd shapes, with a particular emphasis on contrasting harmony with drones. Their third record, Mudflowers, pushes in a very different direction, with the duo of HP Gunderson and Maesa Pullman going for a more straight forward blend of classic country pop and blue-eyed soul. It’s not as unusual or distinctive as what they had going on their first album, but it suits them rather well. Pullman’s vocal performance is very impressive on “Can’t Wait No More” in particular, with her conveying a wounded cynicism on the verses that shifts into earnest yearning on the chorus.

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Metric “Cascades”

The sound of “Cascades” is heavily indebted to Kraftwerk, which is typically a sign that This Is A Song About The Future And Technology. Thankfully, that is not the case for this song. Emily Haines is instead using a cold, precise, robotic sound to convey the feeling of stoic repression of emotion. This is basically about trying to power through your feelings and keep moving and functioning, and knowing full well that you can only bottle up so much before it spills out one way or another. This is a very melancholy piece of music, but the saddest part to me is the phrase “keep whatever it is that’s compelling you on.” There’s something about the word “compelling” that feels so hopeless, like the singer can’t think of any motivation to stay alive aside from biological imperatives and objective goals.

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