Here are some shitty phone camera photos of the show I went to last night!
David Bazan played last night at Bowery Ballroom, supported by openers Say Hi, who came out and more than earned the crowd’s attention as an opening act and followed that up by performing again as part of Bazan’s band. On Bazan’s left from the perspective of the audience, Lev Tolstoy shredded the lead guitar.
Vocal harmony, phenomenal lyricism, astounding musical complexity, and a huge wall of rock sound all combined to form a tight canopy of good feelings that hung over the crowd despite the often heavy subject matter. Bazan bantered freely between songs, requesting questions from the audience. He performed most of his encore unaccompanied save for the noise he was making with his electric guitar.
I have very little to say other than that this was a great, great show.
Time does get away from one. When living a life you keep under your hat inarticulate, sometimes you fall back on making lists of songs that would go well with a chilly autumn Saturday afternoon. Don’t you know it. http://listen.grooveshark.com/widget.swf
What have I been doing? I managed to get out to see Jesse Malin and Gaslight Anthem last night at the luxurious Brooklyn Bowl. Brooklyn Bowl is a place out of a fictional New York. It’s something from a movie about New York at the height of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street era hubris with a little of that vulgar Cash is King Saturday Night Fever mentality about it. When you’re inside the squeaky clean and enormous cathedral of entertainment beneath its gleaming TV screens and ensconced in its unreality you have a hard time reminding yourself that, hey, there aren’t places like this in New York City, because there you are.
Jesse Malin finished his set with a tirade against the largely unmoved crowd, a tirade about precisely that suburban imperialization of the city, a city in which everyone is hip and brand name and friends with everyone else- everyone’s cool and it’s cool because, as Malin mentioned, you’ve gotten rid of everyone else who isn’t like you in imperial Williamsburg. I’m not sure the crowd even knew who he was. Shame, because he played a great set. He definitely played a better set than the marble-mouthed and groove-impaired Murder by Death who who followed him. The kids really went all in for liking those guys, but there really wasn’t much in the messy miasma of their sound to like. They play a breed of music that jumps the shark while chasing authenticity. It’s like wearing Americana as drag. It’s been 150 years since it was 150 years ago, guys, and you’re not Lazarus back from the dead.
They need to get rid of one of their bassists. I say the big dude takes a hike- the cute blonde was positively molesting her cello and I was rapt.
Gaslight really didn’t put on a show with the same verve and messy punk swing to it as I’ve seen them do before. The bookmarks are falling out of their fakebook and the highlights are fading from the songs they reference. It’s amazing what this band was able to do- create an entire critically lauded album imbued with positive energy out of references to other songs. I love the album, but their hearts didn’t seem to be in it last night. The bros really seem to have gotten into these former scrappers, and Gaslight threw them the bone of doing a Pearl Jam cover. Something tells me they’re heading into a serious sophomore slump. I guess you can take some guys out of Jersey but you can’t necessarily take the Jersey out of some guys.
I saw the Dodos on Wednesday, clean whiteboy twee without an ounce of soul, but man that guy can play the acoustic guitar. The band has great vox and mastery of the ax, but can’t anyone play a sleazy sexy beat anymore? Does everything have to be happy and copacetic? This is how the yuppies relax in their natural habitat.
Tomorrow is David Bazan and next week is Atlas Sound, and for these I am genuinely excited.
Tuesday night my copy of Andrew Weatherall’s A Pox on the Pioneers arrived par avion from the UK. Needless to say, I have been listening to nothing save for this record for about 72 hours.
Released September the 14 on Weatherall and his Two Lone Swordsmen partner Keith Tenniswood’s Rotters Golf Club label, A Pox on the Pioneers is in an unexpected mode of continuity from 2007’s The Bullet Catcher’s Apprentice, the EP that marked Weatherall’s first self-credited record.
Where The Bullet Catcher’s Apprentice sounds like a From the Double Gone Chapel era Two Lone Swordsmen record made with Giorgio Moroder standing over the engineer’s shoulder, an almost industrial lurch coupled with plastic four-on-the-floor disco bass, beats and the occasional Gaynor-esque female vocal solo, A Pox on the Pioneers adds a T. Rex shuffle and boogie-woogie lightness to the still heavily effected and echoing atmosphere and vox. The dirty guitars swimming in the reverb’s bright murk suddenly come to have something in common with garage rock; there’s a little Marc Bolan swagger thrown in, alleviating a little of the old dread. The guitars sometimes stand out ahead of the engineering and the electronic programming on some songs to where suddenly you wonder, ‘am I listening to a rock record?’
And that is the trait, carried through from the Two Lone Swordsmen into Weatherall’s solo records, that has set Weatherall’s music apart. It truly is, as the Gracenote track naming service informed me when it fetched the CD track names and info upon the disc’s insertion into my computer, unclassifiable.
Weatherall is one of the only musicians working today consistently making music that I can really get into. Ever since hearing 2004’s Two Lone Swordsmen record From the Double Gone Chapel, I’ve been on the lookout for more of that darkly reverbed, lurching disco sound they did so well there and on the subsequent Big Silver Shining Motor of Sin EP. Hearing their cover of Gun Club’s “Sex Beat” still evokes paroxysmic dithyrambs to issue from between these lips and a conspicuous tapping to issue between the bottom of my shoes and the subway car floor.
Here is the Gun Club’s original version of that sleek and perfect tune, evoking all the flashing glitter of first walking into a party, a gone glimmering kind of time when all the best people are assembled before hangover and disappointment set in, an instant where youth might deceive you into thinking anything can happen:
Below is the noisy and disaffected 2004 update, a too-cool take whose energy is more mechanical than animal, a story of a party that goes on without inhibitions more out of fidelity to the laws of inertia than a genuine enthusiasm drawn up from the well of ignorance of what comes next. Even icier than this is the remix they did on Big Shining Silver Motor of Sin.
The bright tone that has snuck into Weatherall’s new record finds its culmination with the outstanding closing track, “Walk of Shame”. With its immediate, punching, absolutely huge drums seemingly engineered under the influence of Sparks’ “Tryouts for the Human Race”, the opening synthesizer arpeggio that carries on throughout, and the loping, sleazy low end octave modulation of the synthetic disco bassline always hanging one easy instant behind the beat, the record finishes amid Another Green World-era Eno guitar feedback and the sense that, as the narrator of the song has made up his mind to turn his back on the lifestyle that has stunted him, the listener has been gifted an honest piece of art and a real glimpse at hope.
Henry Miller wrote in his essay “My Life as an Echo”:
It was only when I got to France, where I came to grips with myself, that I realized that I alone was responsible for all the misfortunes which had befallen me. The day that truth danwed on me- and it came like a flash- the burden fo guilt and suffering fell away. What a tremendous relief it was to cease blaming society, or my parents, or my country. “Guilty, Your Honor! Guilty, Your Majesty! Guilty on all points!” I could exclaim. And feel good about it.
So a smile crawls across my face when I hear the song’s lines: “I don’t want to take the walk of shame/I have got to go home/I have only got myself to blame/I have got to go home.”
I nod my head, and I take a moment and breathe, vicariously, the scent of a little humanity unshackling.
There aren’t many other places as well-matched for this very simple story to have been located in. A tired-looking blue-collar type approaches a vending machine in a sleeping Japanese village, only to have voice and music issue instead of refreshment. What does the fellow do? Well, the machine intelligence suddenly at play in the bank of vending machines has nothing to do with him, does it? He looks on, nonplussed, until he can finally get the beverage to dispense. When it does, he walks back to his truck and drives away. It’s like a scene out of a Murakami novel- an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance willfully remains ordinary.
Oh, crushingly abetted modernity.
This is from glitch pioneer and sound artist Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto) and collaborator and French sound poet Anne-James Chaton, the project issued under the name unitxt in 2008 from Raster-Noton.
David Bazan, the morose and introspective poet of faith and anomie behind the ponderous Pedro the Lion and Headphones, releases today his absolutely incredible solo record Curse your Branches on Barsuk Records.
There is a great article from the July 30 Chicago Reader linked to from the cover image below describing Bazan’s return to Illinois’ Cornerstone Christian rock festival this year. He had been kicked out of the dry event in 2004 for being in possession, both in the metaphysical and tactile senses, of a jug of vodka. Please don’t ignore but do look past the annoying fishing for cred the writer of the article engages in, and instead focus on the glances into a very weird and frankly scary Christian rock scene she provides where teenagers are “referring to scripture the way gang members throw signs” and where people hear songs and openly weep. Seriously, how on the edge with unhappiness are these people?
That set of his audience aside, Bazan has a no-holds-barred incisive moral talent for stitching stories together from those microscopic moments of personal ignominy or grand hubris that are the hallmark of our modern slavery to write songs that make you feel like you’re being shaken by the shoulders and told in an incontrovertibly definite manner you have no capacity to doubt that, hey, man- this is it, right now, fucking put yourself together with your human limitations and be, finally, a good person.
On his new album, his break-up record with religion, it’s not only the humanity out there in the trenches, but his former faith itself he’s putting on notice, all with the low, morose vocals, rich synthesizer tones, and echoing harmonies that make this, after all the analysis of his fantastic tales of fallen friends and long awaited triumphant ripostes, an unbelievably good pop record, a real joy to the ear.
You can download and listen to “Bless this Mess” from Curse your Branchesfrom Barsuk.
I especially like how he cancels out the concept of hell with a bluesy and easy James Taylor vibe on “When We Fell”:
When you set the table, when you chose the scale, did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail? Did you make them tremble so they would tell the tale? Did you push us when we fell? What am I afraid of? Whom did I betray? In what medieval kingdom does justice work this way? You knew what would happen, and made us just the same, and you, my lord, can take the blame.
Lest the timid listener pigeonhole Bazan into that Christian rock thing, have a listen to his 2005 side project Headphones, and the beautifully articulated disappointment in the state of the art of art that is “Hot Girls” I love the fuck you to mindless pop embedded- beddazzled, even- in this weirdly kiltered pop gem. This one line has kept this song on rotation in the limited data real estate of my 1GB iPod Shuffle for months:
I tried to warn you, but it looks like I was wrong. I called to beg you not to write that stupid song. But, as it happens now, it’s burning up the charts and breaking hot girls’ hearts as it masquerades as art.
And, hey, have a listen to “Hot Girls” by Headphones
My only thing with this guy as regards his realization of the contradictions of Christianity is, yeah, what took you so long? Most of us figured this out by the time we reached the 8th grade.
Witness the Shat dressed to go camping in front of a mountainous canyon backdrop on a soundstage somewhere, cut and pasted out of his previous no-less-bizarre, I’m sure, narrative moment and into the mode of musical entertainment. I don’t mean the kind of musical entertainment Mr. Shatner normally engages in.
This shockingly amusing video was put together from preexisting footage and technology by Fall on your Sword. Based on the video on their site of a live performance (or performances?) they gave as a band in NY this year, the group appears to be a mixture between a video artist remix collective and a tired new wave band. It’s too bad that as a band they sound so much like the Faint circa Blank Wave Arcade. That record, all 20 or 25 minutes of it, was the jolt in the rectum that bent the musical tide back toward total dependence on synthesizers, and it still sounds great today, but not even the Faint have been able to come out with anything since that remotely justifies their continued existence (or terrible lyrics) in light of it.
Not to get off topic, what I mean to say is, dudes stirring up some techy jokey nostalgia should stick to the techy jokey nostalgia or really blow some socks off when they man the rock ramparts. More discomfiting collages like “Back to the Ship”, fewer Roxy Music covers, please, Fall on your Sword!
An animated Japanese series about private military contractors, or mercenaries as they were once known, taking shit out in the fringe states of the former Soviet Union. How about that?
Some of these scenes are more graphic than what I can recall seeing in a live action movie, and I can’t help but cringe at the racist, or at the very least unflattering, implications of the choice of animals being used to depict the citizens of different countries. I’m probably way off base here- Japanese people aren’t ever known to be racist are they? Cute bunnies knocking odious Mohammedan camels down in close combat and shooting them in the face? Too adorable to be violence! Conveniently separating citizens of different nations into easy-to-define and hard-to-deny categories of absolute difference from one another? Too visibly true to be racism!
I’d love to see this whole series to see if there is any commentary being made as part of the story that goes against the immediate impressions I get from the trailer. Standing on its own, though, and with my Japanese reading skills at an all-time nadir, the trailer is pretty damning.
I plugged into the hype surrounding Jay Reatard last year when I picked up the Matador Singles ’08 record. A good buddy had been extolling the necessity of climbing onboard the shortwagon (that’s a painful and awkward metaphor for joining a lot of other people in liking a guy whose stage name is a creative spelling of retard, a slur meaning a person of limited abilities who has to ride to school with other like-impaired people on a short bus- painful metaphor all my doing, no need to impugn said good buddy), and the Matador Singles had just come out. I skipped Bloodsongs. I skipped everything this guy did from the age of 16, and I just jumped right into the boutique-y, specialty audience stuff. Yeah. Boutique-y.
Jay Reatard carries off extremely simple song structures mainly on the merit of the the sense of urgency he performs them with. He frequently lapses into needlessly confrontational self-centered lyrics, though he breaks away from this this record’s excellent tracks Wounded and Before I was Caught. However, most of the rest of the record still has that eerily sociopathic Jay Reatard vibe that hangs coldly over all the tracks, no matter how quickly or brightly the guitars are strummed, like a cold, dead hand tapping time on your shoulder as you listen. Is it possible for a record to want to kill you ‘soon as look at you?
The speed with which Jay Reatard came out with new material until now seemed to be at the expense sound quality. On Watch me Fall, this is no issue. You’re listening to the guy play in surround sound. He’s separated so many layers of instrumentation and orchestrated them into each song that, while you’re still getting knocked to the ground with too-hot guitars and yelping vox, it’s happening from all sides by a million sweaty, angry Jay Reatards- and some of them with a nearly sixties pop sensibility, albeit a thanatoid, undead zombie hippie pop sensibility, like a band out of a Pynchon novel. This is a Jay Reatard record, and it’s also pretty and quiet in places. This is probably what the Paranoids or the Boards would have sounded like
So, here’s the disclaimer.
I’m behind on my Jay Reatard news. It’s dismaying to find out after I’ve gotten myself all excited to hype an album that dude gets all fucked up and punches people at his shows. You can read about it at these music blogs.
As a huge fan of someone like Ted Leo, a guy with a pretty militantly humanist ethical streak, a guy who steps off the stage to break up fights in the audience, I feel ripped off. Jay Lindsey (Reatard’s nom de real) has made a record that sounds great and makes me want to recommend it to other people, but I am uncomfortable promoting his music. Stories of onstage violence like this tell me that creepy air of general, you wouldn’t call it disdain exactly- maybe human disregard, flavoring Reatard’s records seems to have documented expression.
This is Ted Leo breaking up a fight at one of his shows. This is an example of class:
Talent or even mere access to resources (which everyone with a computer has now) doesn’t equal entitlement. This attitude, seemingly held by a lot of acts today, disturbs me. The cold, vacant stare of guarded antipathy so many bands put on (or is that just folks in front of a camera trying to keep it together as they suffer from paranoid reactions to awful hangovers?) has an inhuman feel. It’s the sign of folks taking themselves too seriously. Does no one smile except calculatingly anymore? Can no one relate to anything other than their own image?
What can I say? Even if the NY Times’ keen ear to the street (please hear my sarcasm?) fashion beat reporters are declaring the guy safe as milk, I feel pretty weird about this album.
I know that I talk ad nauseum about the band Deerhunter, and I know that my friends are also quite aware that I talk incessantly about the band Deerhunter when the topic of music comes up. I have written a thing or two about Deerhunter, I have listened to Deerhunter records, Deerhunter, Deerhunter, Deerhunter.
So, how happy am I that they are playing the free JellyNYC show tomorrow afternoon at the East River Terminal Park in trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn? That is a rhetorical question the answer to which is meant to be very obvious, but you are free to conjecture in the comments form. A free Deerhunter show is free Soma. Ford is in his flivver, as far as I am concerned.
I gushed about the band here in the recent past to inaugurate the release of the Rainwater Cassette Exchange, and I mean everything I say about the grand happy circumstance of having such a committedly new band hard at work providing the world new vistas to think on.
Rainwater Cassette Exchange is excellent, but the record I cannot stop playing to this day, that will not be removed from my iPod, is the full-length preceding it- Microcastle/Weird Era Continued. There is no comparison between the production value of the the new EP, which shares a muddy chromosome with the recently released Atlas Sound single, and last year’s double LP. What I am hearing when I listen to the increasingly degraded sound quality of each consecutive recording (Rainwater to Atlas Sound) is a band that is trying to play to a preconceived idea of what they think they should be doing instead of just doing those things that define their genius.
Atlas Sound is one of Deerhunter hetman Bradford Cox’s side projects. The new Atlas Sound single, “Walkabout” (you can hear it at Pitchfork), sounds a lot like something off of The Russian Futurists‘ The Method of Modern Love from 2001. Below is The Russian Futurists “The Science of the Seasons” from that record.
The Atlas Sound aesthetic has always been something striving toward a lo-fi prettiness, and that is part of the problem. Lo-fi is an affect. Bradford Cox and Deerhunter find their strength precisely in their ability to synthesize their influences into surprising configurations- They please and surprise in those quiet moments when the plink of a piano reminds you so strongly of a Neu! song you are shocked that the mix of the vocals or the tempo of the guitars take you in an entirely new direction, not when they are giving a ready-made notion a 1-dimensional try. Deerhunter has a works cited in the appendix of their catalog longer than the King James Bible, but, for the necessity of all that musical knowledge in creating their sound, it is only incidental to how they synthesize it into a new whole.
The new Atlas Sound single sounds lazy by contrast, almost as though it is more dependent on out-of-the-box Acid loops than its genre forebears from the beginning of the decade, as though striving toward a sound that they think they need to achieve is standing in the way of letting them use their tools to create the sound they want to play.
As an oblique strategy this can definitely unlock new potential for a band, but it shouldn’t take top billing on the Marquee of their creative output.
This concludes my critical moment. Now back to leaping with anticipation for tomorrow’s show, crossing my fingers in hopes that the rain holds off at least until they’ve finished playing, however appropriate playing a show in support of an EP with rainwater in the title during a shower might be on a neat symbolic level.
COERCE YOU 