Saturday May 8, 2010: The High Line

The wind was gusting in New York all day Saturday, enough to nearly pick me up off my feet at times or push me out in front of an oncoming car- despite my typical inclination to avoid that sort of thing.

High winds signal a change in the weather, and those of a literal bent were not frustrated in their devotion to cause and effect. We got that weather change- 30- and 40-degree weather ensued to general consternation, to great elbow hugging and shoulder-hunched complaint in the fast lanes of New York leisure. But I, being of a more metaphysical persuasion, took it as portent of greater changes afoot. On the last big New York day and night my fiancée and I will take together before our move across country, as we embarked on one of those weekend days only found in a city that is bigger than itself, a day exploring new territory and never-before-discovered neighborhoods, sites, and restaurants, as we inadvertently took the rare cab ride through the sights we will not see together until we again visit this city as a couple, strong winds were blowing. Many miles were walked, many blue-skied and alien views of the suddenly unfamiliar skyline were revealed to us. Overlooked and out of the way street corners yielded the rest and repast and unexpected charm that is New York’s reward for the risk taken when you walk through a door on a side street with nothing more than a pasted up menu to recommend it. We had one of those Saturdays that made us both appreciate this city way back when we first met it.

The High Line at 14th — From the high-end shopping mall that sprung from the site of industry and absolute human degradation that was the Meat Packing District, we walked the High Line to its current terminus. It can be argued the human degradation stands out today in yet sharper relief on this end of 14th ST where you can't buy a belt for less than $200.

The day ended at the Bowery Ballroom, where, alas, I took no shitty cell phone photos of Caribou astounding me with their ability to play an album live that I had thought had to have been entirely pasted together from loops and sequences in a DAW. Their rendition of the first single off this year’s Swim was a bit too fast, causing the band to drop notes or lyrics here and there (the only time during the whole show), but overall the band played extremely well.

Unjustifiably Shitty Photos of… Deerhunter at the Showbox at the Market, Seattle

Crusading music writer sits down comfortably for entire show, eschews the inconvenience of walking nearer the stage to take nicer pictures!

[singlepic id=41 w=320 h=240 float=]

Wednesday evening found me at Seattle’s Showbox at the Market to see a band I talk entirely too much about, Atlanta’s Deerhunter. Unless you live in a lightless, airless tomb outside of time (I’m talking about YOU, Cthulu), you probably already know that Deerhunter is back after about a year’s hiatus touring in support of their most recent record, that record being the excellent Halcyon Digest.

The band hasn’t lost a step in the year or so they took off from being Deerhunter- they still play their songs way faster live than they do on the albums, and the emotion that they display during their performances surpasses the often sadly philosophical tone they strike on their recordings. Bradford Cox’s sudden eruption into nearly screamed vocals during the much heavier and more punked up version of Don’t Cry was the welcome surprise that makes seeing a good band live worthwhile.

[singlepic id=47 w=320 h=240 float=]

It’s also a pleasure to see a band that is so talented that they simply can’t lose each other. At times one got the feeling that one or another component of this elite musical unit was pushing to go AWOL, but that kind of thing can’t happened when all the members’ skills are so evenly matched. What results instead is the feeling of an added, embedded tension, a new edge to familiar material.

And now, a word about Deerhunter’s backline: Moses Archuleta is an unflappable human metronome of frightening precision.

[singlepic id=46 w=320 h=240 float=]

Lockett Pundt’s presence as stage forward vocalist is a welcome addition to the Deerhunter oeuvre, one of the things that made the sound of this new record such a huge evolutionary step for the band. Where Microcastle/Weird Era could be said to have been a polishing, a realization of the sounds hinted at on a Cryptogram tune like Hazel St., Halcyon Digest is a departure into new atmospherics. The band has the advantage of being as tight as it was on Microcastle, but the quiet, musing tone struck by so many of the loop-heavy tracks almost makes it sound like it was recorded by a different band. Lockett has a subdued rock tendency that’s a counterpoint to the Atlas Sound-reminiscent technological flourishes on the new album, and his wistful, detached, confident style of singing seems to be singlehandedly resurrecting the dying American Monomyth. Where Deerhunter subject matter seems to swirl unanchored in memory, he haunts the record like Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, calmly coaxing us out to take up our executive privileges on the perimeter on the Halcyon Digest track Desire Lines, which song was flawlessly performed on Wednesday, by the by. I

[singlepic id=42 w=320 h=240 float=]

Bear Claw – No Band Can Be this Good

Rich Fessler of Bear Claw hurting his bass as much as it hurts him.

During the chilliest years of the Cold War a secret project was undertaken here in the United States of A. to develop the most obviously superior rock music ever conceived for export to countries whose youths were sustained with with inferior rock knockoffs and black market Finnish socks. It was hoped that this would so demoralize the youth on the other side of the iron curtain that they would abandon their national heritage in droves for the chance to star as extras in an interminable series of sequels to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The project was disbanded suddenly with little explanation, but not before the only two products of this secret cultural war were incubated and brought to term in giant tanks covered in tubes and amplifier cords. One of those is a man named Logan, better known as the Wolverine. His vicious spiky hands and hot temper, it is rumored, were the prime mitigating factor in the continuation of the project. However, if the top brass had taken the time to plug him into a Marshall Stack they would have nocturnal emissions listening to that sustain. I mean, adamantium just rings out forever. Then maybe the other legacy of that project, Bear Claw, would be a household name today. Bear Claw combined the best of both worlds- vicious, crystalline, clear and precise aggression tempered with compositional complexity and tightly controlled tone- and no spikes coming out of the hands.

Bear Claw has a new record.

Released on Tuesday and available as a CD/LP combo or digital download, Chicago’s Bear Claw released their Steve Albini-recorded, Bob Westen-Mastered Refuse this Gift via Sick Room Records. Have a listen.

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2763829747/size=grande3/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB//

Early Man, New Town

[singlepic id=38 w=320 h=240 float=]

Stunning myself with the constant call for new adjustments, suffering the jetlag, of all things, even a slow ride across these United States produces, I’m in the Emerald City, and I’m breathing air as sweet as chewing gum. On a given day I’m sneaking hungry peeks across the city to see if her mountain might be showing today, her peak that rises as gradually as piled sugar to the south.

America is big. Nearly 7 years in Mordor helped me to forget America is an alien place where people talk to one another, point out the reasons for their local pride, hold a camera for a stranger’s photo at a roadside attraction. 5 years crammed behind a desk and into the chrome colored cars of the city abattoir day in and day out while I was sucking my worldview out of a million airless straws, a million little feeds, voices you don’t want to hear that won’t shut up… 7 years of New York City life helped me to forget that places can be new, the states are wide, and people are nice.

America is big, and we crossed it in our overloaded hybrid that couldn’t go over 80 if it was a windy day, splitting the shift of 8 hours a day with breaks for leisurely lunches.

We crossed the high plains desert of scrub and cattle and vast swathes where there was no immediate human habitation, landing at the end of the day in towns positioned on the edge of yet another such endless stretch, there by virtue of the human need to sleep, seemingly by the virtue of its distance from the last town where a traveler could flop. How many such towns between have passed back into dust since we transitioned from horse to car?

We climbed up into space accidentally, lost in the dark, and joined the flight pattern over Pittsburgh on a road that snakes through the heights that tower taller than the downtown skyscrapers. We passed through other towns whose sun had long ago risen and fallen, and towns, too, that, with the help of nostalgia, the alchemy that transforms the phantom ache of a town’s long-gone boom into money, were riding new thermals by repurposing the sites of their industrial heritage for use in the leisure industry.

We saw Rushmore by twilight.

[singlepic id=48 w=320 h=240 float=]

And now I am in a big city that thinks it’s small at the far Western edge of the world, inundated by conversation with strangers, partially ashamed by and partially insistently indignant on the propriety of my guardedly creeped-out reaction to all this unsolicited verbal exchange. I’m in a city where people go out of their way to avoid running over pedestrians. I’m not only on another coast, I’m on another planet.

I’m hopped up on Pacific Northwest coffee, while good music, in addition to new, is rafted onto the ether at such physical intensity that I can hear KEXP without electrical amplification in the non-conductive epoxy of my fillings.

I’m up early in a new town.

[singlepic id=49 w=320 h=240 float=]

Chicago Grammar – Mayor for Life On the Use of the Perpetually Authoritative Case

Angel Eyes/Mayor for Life/Czar at Quenchers 8/21/10

Though, much to my detriment, I did not arrive in time to see Chicago’s Angel Eyes pull the scab off this amazing bill to get the vital essences exposed to air, I did take a face-full of rock from tone-freak virtuosos Mayor for Life, following that with a sail on the seas of metal when Czar took the stage.

I saw bassist Rich Fessler’s other band, the genius, mind-bendingly aggressive Bear Claw, last Saturday, August 14th at the Empty Bottle ahead of the Del Rey, and they absolutely stole that show from the Del Rey’s comeback kids. Mayor for Life brings the straighforward rock element to Rich’s dark, meticulously husbanded bass arrangements by way of guitarist Todd Rabideau’s punctual strumming and the ambient shimmer he bends from the wires strung across his custom Aluminum-neck guitar.

Saturday’s Mayor for Life show found me standing in the midst of a fully-formed scene untrammeled by the vigorous vanity and commercialism of the over-exposed and twitter-inflated mediocrity maquiladora of a place like New York. I was in a room full of people who just knew what rock is and weren’t concerned with much else.

Mayor for life exercises the full priveleges of their office- Not since the first time I saw Deerhunter play live over two years ago and I was stunned to a happily stupored drool by the start of the guitar solo on “Nothing Ever Happened” have I had as many smiling “What? What did they just do?” moments when watching a band perform.

Here’s to hoping Mayor for Life continue to occupy their office without surcease and the tubes in their amps remain always warm.

Friedmann Space/The Rich are Different from You and Me

Fellow humans:

As I gather my things to roll communal internal combustion Conestoga across the great plains of the middle western desert, I hand off to you a couple of pieces of reading material.

The first is a quick review of some research done on the impact of money or social status on generosity that appeared this past week in The Economist.

The second is an excellent story from Victor Pelevin, courtesy of Google Books, excerpted from 2010’s Best European Fiction about how money changes everything.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Gd528cEhJ8cC&lpg=PA259&ots=nI4i8ad2pt&dq=friedmann%20space%20pelevin&pg=PA259&output=embed

Summer Living/Summer Listening

I’ve been marinating in my own musky grown-up smells with the ample help of 90 degree 100% humidity weather all summer as I work on reacquiring my foreign language skills. My bar slouch is turning into a desk slouch.

That’s where I’ve been.

I have managed to listen to just a very few things since I’ve been out here, but they have been very, very good things, and they’ve mitigated the occasional (and trivial) stresses brought on by the very good problem I have had of having to study a lot this summer.

Wild Nothing – Gemini

The strong wash of good feelings and reverb on this record makes me happy to be alone when I am alone.
http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fdeepseadiver-2%2Fsets%2Fwild-nothing-gemini&secret_url=falseWild Nothing – Gemini

LCD Soundsystem: This is Happening

http://listen.grooveshark.com/widget.swf

This record about getting older, disillusionment, and knowing what you want warms my fuckin’ heart. It’s just as though Brian Eno traveled through time from the ’70s to release a dance album about how much I personally came to loathe New York and the culture you get sucked into while you’re in it.

Kurt Vile

I only recently discovered Kurt Vile for myself thanks to a comrade at whatwearelisteningto and was lucky enough that Philadelphia’s constant hitmaker passed through Bloomington this summer. His music has the looping atmospherics of a Deerhunter or Crooked Fingers and the wry personal lyrical touch of a Paul Westerberg wrapped up in a psychedelic sandwich.

One of the lucky strokes of coming late to the party a musician like this is throwing is that he has an extensive back catalog to comb through and get familiar with, which I have been doing at my leisure. He is also in Philly’s The War On Drugs, but his solo material with the Violators is far, far superior. Here’s his record Childish Prodigy for the streaming.

http://listen.grooveshark.com/widget.swf

Matthew Dear: Black City

http://listen.grooveshark.com/widget.swf
Matthew Dear has a vocal fetish. Where James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem applied himself to perfecting Brian Eno’s weird choruses, Dear has taken the idea of layered vocals with weird chords outside the bounds of simple harmony, and he’s put deep effects on all his vox. Voila. Signature sound. This is a very visual record whose sounds almost come across as monochromatic, all bright whites and shadowy blacks with the occasional wash of orange. Am I even making any sense? Have a listen and let me know. Dear’s music has departed from its now barely recognizable minimal house roots, focusing more on strange atmospheres and laborious exploitation of tone, reverb, and the stereo field.

Shitty Cell Phone Photos of: Kurt Vile

I’m out here for the summer on the humid prairie, blown to and fro by the hot moist winds. Bloomington, Indiana is a theme park town about an hour south of Indianapolis that has all the urban amenities you might want as a student or a visiting scholar- nice restaurants, plenty of bars, cheap drink- with none of that access to the outside world you might be expecting. It’s really in the middle of nowhere. It also has a hipster venue where all the traveling acts passing through the midwest stop off to dance their jigs for proud townies and college students alike.

Luckily for me, Kurt Vile came through on the 15th and put on a really excellent show. He’s got a sound that’s a cross between Deerhunter and Paul Westerberg.

I present to you three shitty cell phone photos of that show, one of which is of in the main boring opener Real Estate.

[nggallery id=10]

Interpol’s Secrets… REVEALED.

It was about a year ago that a good friend of mine revealed to me that he had unwittingly quite possibly discovered the secrets to New York City Barons of Blasé Interpol’s incontrovertible- even despite their last couple albums- awesomeness.

It was not Joy Division that the band took after most, as some mused when the band’s first record, Turn on the Bright Lights, appeared on record store racks at a special Matador-reduced price intended to to move those units. Sure, both Joy Division and Interpol were bands whose music was at times dark and sparse, but there was something cavernous and distant about Interpol’s attitude and sound that didn’t match up with the barely contained fury of Ian Curtis and co. Joy Division was suffused with a similar darkness, but something about the two styles didn’t mesh when the bands were compared.

Unflagging devotion to what band gave these well-dressed dudes the edge over other indie wunderkinds?

Here is the video for the new single, “Lights”, from the forthcoming self-titled 9/7 CD release.

http://listen.grooveshark.com/songWidget.swf

Do these two songs bear any significant resemblance to one another?

Is this Chameleons record the shard of Krypton that lies at the cool, cool heart of Interpol’s fortress of attitude? If so, they deserve their accolades for bringing back a cool sound and doing it really, really well.

COERCE YOU