Review Round-Up: March 2013

Rhye
Woman

The music Mike Milosh and Robin Hannibal make together as Rhye isn't worlds away from what each has crafted separately before – the former (as Milosh) on three solo albums of electronics-infused bedroom songwriting; the latter in a string of excellent, mostly one-off avant-R&B projects including Quadron and the sumptuously quirky Owusu & Hannibal. But there's a purity of purpose, a subtle, stirring potency to what they've achieved together on this calmly wondrous debut which sets it apart, marking theirs as a rare, richly fruitful collaboration.

Maybe it has to do with communication – there's a refreshing sense of directness, not necessarily in the words themselves (although their lyrical appeals – "stay open"; "make love to me" – are plenty explicit), but in the sound of the music which, for all its abundant, unabashed prettiness and orchestral elegance – harps, quivering strings, tenderly fragile falsetto – maintains a stripped-down, unaffectedly human scope. Simply said: this, here, is Soul – not the backwards-looking stylistic cul-de-sac of retro signifiers and disclamatory prefixes, but the living breathing music which seemed to get sidelined decades ago in favor of the more technical (if often woefully inaccurate) but nowhere near as expressive "R&B " – as though that word somehow just started sounding a bit too real. Like its necessary-not-sufficient constituents, groove and vibe (here, naturally, in spades), it's a mighty elusive thing. But when you hear it, you'll know.

The Strokes
Comedown Machine

You’re not gonna get another Is This It, alright? Be quiet; you already got two. The Strokes have long since evolved into something stranger and altogether more interesting. Comedown Machine may not quite hit the heights of the band’s masterpiece-to-date (that’d be 2006’s First Impressions of Earth), but it continues their healthy trend of finding curious new ways to twist and complicate their by-now instinctively recognizable sound, taking apart and reassembling their precision-tooled interlocking arrangements to burrow ever deeper into jittery new wave. Rock saviors or no, they’ve always (secretly?) been a pop band at heart; that’s clear here right from the “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” groove and attendant Jacko falsetto (a surprisingly recurrent Julian Casablancas tactic here – sometimes a dubious look, but he commits to it) of “Tap Out,” which kicks off an electric four-song run to stand alongside any in their catalog. From there we get pinched-voice tin-can punk, drowsy Beach Boys harms, an oblique, ersatz-exotica closer, an electro-kissed softie with a melody worthy of a piano-bar crooner standard (“Chances”) and, in “Partners In Crime,” another fine entry “Someday”-style in their ongoing slap-dash swing-beat sweepstakes. Not bad for a bunch of dads.

Fol Chen
The False Alarms

Quirky can be a double-edged sword. On their promising if inconsistent first two LPs, Fol Chen found compelling pop in unlikely places, but undermined it with a sense of oddball overload: willfully mysterious presentation, inscrutable narrative conceits, a general whiff of cloying pretension. With The False Alarms, they've mostly dropped the conceptual schtick (and accompanying numbering scheme), keeping the focus on their actual, legitimately intriguing music. And happily so: this is their sharpest full-length yet, gaining cohesion from the (often mechanically warped) vocal presence of improbably named new frontwoman Sinosa Loa. It's still not a far cry from its predecessors – indeed, immediate album highlight "A Tourist Town" lifts its twitchy, baroque robo-funk practically wholesale from previous-album highlight "In Ruins" (hey, if it ain't baroque...) Should-be-single-wise, "I.O.U." – a twinkly, kittenish strut pit against glitch-industrial beats and a slinky, Eastern-tinged guitar figure – may be even better. From there out things get murkier, at least figuratively; the amusingly electroclashy "Boys in the Woods" aside, it's tough to slot anything here into much of a genre. But despite the improbable aural density on offer – untold electronic plinks and micro-sampled percussion, but also string sections, kalimba, timpani, harp... – they somehow maintain a sense of airiness even at their most impenetrably dark. Curiouser and curiouser...
originally published in Magnet Magazine


DJ Koze
Amygdala
[Electronic]

Hamburg's Stefan Kozalla – alias DJ Koze – titled his 2004 mix album All People Is My Friends.  Amygdala, released on his own masterfully-curated Pampa imprint, strives to prove the point, inviting like-minded pals Caribou, Ada, Apparat, Matthew Dear and Milosh (of Rhye) to join him for a leisurely joy-ride through kaleidoscopic post-Kompakt pop.  The resulting album, aptly named for the brain's emotional processing center, is a hazy fantasia, a paisley patchwork wending its way through warmly personable tech-house, daydreamy downtempo, deliciously improbable covers (Kings of Convenience? Rodgers & Hart?) and intermittent Marvin Gaye samples, all of which should win him plenty more friends.

Space Dimension Controller
Welcome to Mikrosector 50
[Electro/Funk]

Welcome to Mikrosector-50 (R&S), the first full-length transmission from Space Dimension Controller (Earthname Jack Hamill) is just your basic retro-futuristic, time-traveling, electro-fried robo-funk space opera.  The album's nutsoid narrative concept – unfolding primarily on the titular planet in the year 2357 AD – is even more of a cheeseball sci-fi goof than, say, Janelle Monae's ArchAndroid, undertaken with a truly inspired degree of commitment.  Even more impressive: somehow, the myriad computerized voices (both spoken and sung) and Hamill's freaky/cheeky, easy/sleazy Egyptian Lover-style rhymes manage not to detract one bit from his suitably epic, electric, eighties-indebted galactic grooves, which recall Dâm-Funk and Daft Punk in equal measure.

Flume
s/t
[Electronic]

A little bit Dilla, a little bit Skrillex, the self-titled debut from Flume – a.k.a. 21-year-old Australian Harley Streten – suggests a post-dubstep take on the something-for-everyone, pop-happy mentality of prime Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx (albeit without the dancefloor-slaying ambition.)  While Streten's shimmery, bouncily broken beats will get heads nodding, the real star of Flume (Mom + Pop) is the abundance of freely pitched 'n' spliced vocals, from "Holdin' On"'s hip-shakin' gospel-soul samples and "Stay Close"'s lovelorn robot-vox to guest spots from Dido-ish lounge-cheese chanteuse Moon Holiday, moaning rock-dude Chet Faker and absurdly-named NY rapper T.Shirt.

The Embassy
Sweet Sensation
[Indie Pop/Electronic]

Swede-pop sweethearts bumming over the relative silence of The Tough Alliance, Studio, jj et. al. should take heart in the lusty, long-awaited return of their spiritual forebears: indie-dance darlings and Gothenberg hometown heroes The Embassy.  If the cover's Spacemen 3 homage and Freestyle-nodding title didn't give it away, Sweet Sensation (International) finds the duo partying like it's 1989 (again); drifting from Madchester to Majorca on breezily unbuttoned house grooves and lusciously thick, New Orderish basslines which veer into fleeting flashes of 303 squelch, while glinting acoustic strums bring the soft-focus sunshine and singer Fredrik Lindson's wan, perennially flat intonation keeps it effete.

Panda Riot
Northern Automatic Music
[Rock/Pop]

Formerly Philly duo Panda Riot dropped their gem of a dream-pop debut way back in 2007.  They've long since decamped to Chicago and expanded to a four-piece (adding a drummer; keeping the drum machines), but it's taken them a while to dive back into that luscious headspace for a full-length follow-up.  Northern Automatic Music (Saint Marie), belying its coldly mechanistic title, is polished but still hugely personable, molding the smoothed-out squall of textbook shoegaze into intriguing, too-short instrumentals and full-blooded pop songs atop which vocalist Rebecca Scott veers between ethereal and conversational, even sneaking some Kathleen Hanna-style slackster smarm into "Good Night Rich Kids."

Lady
s/t
[Soul]

Lady is actually two ladies – big-voiced R&B vets Terri Walker and Nicole Wray – tag-teaming their way through a spunky, good-natured self-titled bow on Truth & Soul.  Their soul is unambiguously retro, but it's tough to pinpoint specific referents beyond a loose turn-of-the-'70s window; you'll hear peak-era Motown punch, Philly International polish and a touch of conga-abetted blaxploitation funk, beefed up with gleaming production and never-overstated hip-hop-indebted muscle.  Like Mayer Hawthorne and lamentably few others, they also manage songwriting that's just as potent as their grooves, resulting in a total package that sounds classic – though never slavish – but still feels modern and totally distinctive.

Swamp Dogg
Total Destruction To Your Mind/Rat On!
[Soul/Reissue]

Hyped-up unearthings of vintage funk/soul "lost classics" are practically a dime a dozen nowadays, but it's not often you encounter something as truly strange and striking as the first two long-players from Virginian soul auteur/eccentric Jerry Williams, a.k.a. Swamp Dogg.  Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! (1971) – remastered/reissued on Alive/NaturalSound – make good on their gonzo titles and even loopier artwork with faintly absurd yet deeply, bitingly salient satire on war, consumerism and race politics, intermingled with some good old-fashioned horndog cheatin' ballads and a straight-up, testifying Bee Gees cover – all backed by roiling, no-punches-pulled Stax-style funk.

Chris Darrow
Artist Proof
[Country/Pop/Reissue]

"Beware of time, it can make a fool of you," twangs LA country-rocker Chris Darrow (and friends) on one of his debut LP's sharpest hooks.  But forty years of the stuff haven't blunted the ample, casual charms of 1972's lost-in-the-shuffle Artist Proof (handsomely reissued on Drag City.)  Given his resumé – co-founding psych-folk hippies Kaleidoscope; session work for a veritable Laurel Canyon-era who's-who – it's no surprise that Darrow nails that warm'n'mellow oh-so-SoCal vibe (a bucket of Bakersfield, a dash of Haight-Ashbury...), but his songwriting shines just as bright, spanning languid, raggedly rootsy pop nuggets, tear-stained ballads, Stonesy rockers ("New Zoot") and boogie-woogie yarn-spinning ("Cocaine Lil.")

Phosphorescent
[Folk/Country]
concert preview

Matthew Houck – the primary agent behind Phosphorescent – has wandered a ways over the years, from spare, narcotized one-man folk to the rangy, full-band country rambles of 2010's Here's To Taking It Easy.  Muchacho (Dead Oceans) draws a little from both sides of that fence, but it also finds Houck exploring some surprising new pastures.  The album opens (and closes) with a serene, synth-dappled choral invocation to the sunrise, and its two finest moments – each one an easy career highlight – similarly evoke the glowing comfort and reassurance of a breaking dawn: "Muchacho's Tune" with its calmly defiant, getting-up-from-the-gutter optimism and curiously soupy sonic meanderings; the glorious "Song for Zula" – a sweeping, radio-ready epic with echoes of U2's "One" and the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" – with sumptuous, string-suffused beat loops that make an unexpectedly effective fit for Houck's drowsy, rough-edged drawl.

Night Beds/Indians
[Folk/Pop/Indie]
concert preview

The field of mellow, well-mannered, quietly earnest indie modernism has seen no shortage of contenders over the last ten years.  Here come two more, each taking some cues from perhaps the paradigm's most exemplary recent standard-bearer, Bon Iver.  Indians, the brainchild of Copenhagen's Søren Løkke Juul, takes the expansive electronic-folk-as-quasi-ambient template of that band's eponymous second album in both spacier and poppier directions; Somewhere Else (4AD), with its dainty puffball synths and Juul's elastic, attenuated tenor, bears some timbral resemblance to Animal Collective at their most sedate.  Night Beds' Winston Yellen, by contrast, is more of a traditionalist – definitely a For Emma type – with a richly formidable voice capable of frail Vernonian falsetto, hushed Sufjan solemnity and soaring Wainwright/Buckley quaver as well as the occasional earthier barroom bluster.  Country Sleep (Dead Oceans) feels like Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker as filtered through a decade of mannered Andrew Bird/Iron & Wine chamber-indie politeness; a trifle reluctant to really rock out, but still one of the most striking alt-country debuts in ages.

Valgeir Sigurðsson/Nadia Sirota
[Classical/Experimental]
concert preview

A lynchpin of the indie-classical crossover community, both within and well beyond his native Iceland, Valgeir Sigurðsson's resumé includes arranging, engineering and production work for the likes of Björk, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Feist and CocoRosie on one hand; Nico Muhly and the Kronos Quartet on the other.  He also founded the pioneering label/collective Bedroom Community, home to Muhly, Ben Frost and Sam Amidon.  His third outing under his own name, last year's Architecture of Loss, began life as the score for a dance piece by Stephen Petronio, but it's intriguing and evocative stuff in its own right, culling haunting, elegiac grace from an unpredictable range of orchestral and subtle electronic textures.  A central presence on the album, and along for the ride to help recreate it tonight, is violist Nadia Sirota, whose own Bedroom Community debut, Baroque, featuring bespoke compositions by Muhly and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden among others, is out this week.

Benoît Pioulard
[Experimental/Ambient/Folk]
concert preview

Thomas Meluch's evocative, understated recordings as Benoît Pioulard nestle neatly alongside his Kranky labelmates' in the hazy interstices between tentatively song-based (Grouper, Jessica Bailiff) and purely sound-oriented (Tim Hecker, Windy & Carl.)  Hymnal, his fourth full-length for the label, was inspired by the churches and religious iconography he encountered while living and recording in England and mainland Europe, making his appearance at the First Unitarian's chapel even more fitting than it already would be given his work's hushed intimacy.  That said, the album rarely evokes faith or divinity in any overt, straightforward sense; while certainly graceful and contemplative, it conveys none of the heavenly purity of, say, Julianna Barwick.  The ambient/drone pieces (despite titles like "Gospel" and "Censer") often feel downright grubby, conjuring a sense of dust and corporeal decay akin to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, while the interspersed folk-flecked vocal numbers, though sweetly, wispily pastoral, carry a slightly disjointed, creepy tinge.

Sondra Sun-Odeon
[Folk/Psych]
concert preview

Of the various individuals presently fuzzing the borders between acoustic folk and dreamlike textural abstraction – Grouper, Charalambides, and Ben Chasny's 200 Years all come to mind – Sondra Sun-Odeon takes a notably dramatic approach, even if it isn't initially apparent.  Aetherea, the Brooklynite's self-released solo debut (she also makes up half of "dark-world-psych" outfit Silver Summit) is deceptively front-loaded with restrained, somnolent finger-picked dirges in which her arresting voice – a mesmeric, melancholy thing recalling the laconic drawl of Moon PIx-era Cat Power – is foregrounded against the thrumming, occasionally turbulent undercurrents of cellist Helena Espvall (of local psych-folk lynchpins Espers.)  It isn't until its stormy back half that the album reveals its full agenda, with several of those unassuming ditties swelling into epic torrents of churning, swirling, doom-laden noise-drone.  Sneaky!

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
[Rock]
concert preview

Following the boisterous rave-ups of 2008's Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! and the brief but ferocious two-album tenure of Grinderman, Nick Cave's fifteenth album with the Bad Seeds – the first not to feature career-long co-conspirator Mick Harvey – is a decidedly slower burn, seemingly a retreat to the gentler, statelier mode of contemplative mid-career efforts like The Boatman's Call.  But don't mistake the smoother sound (and relative dearth of guitars) to mean the man's getting soft in his mere mid-fifties.  Push The Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd.) may be a restrained affair – but only in the manner of something that just might erupt if not forcibly held back.  These purring, organ-drenched instrumental atmospheres float atop an ever-lingering sense of menace and mystery, perfect shrouds for Cave's evocative, increasingly surreal storytelling – as likely to reference quantum physics and Wikipedia as ancient mythology and blues folklore – whose poetry remains as primal and libinal as ever.

Chelsea Light Moving
[Rock]
concert preview

Thurston Moore was never just a member of Sonic Youth – the guitarist's litany of outside collaborations and solo projects stretches back to the early '90s, right up through his well-received recent solo albums and last year's self-explanatory Yokokimthurston – but with the dissolution of his nearly three-decade marriage to Kim Gordon and the uncertain future of their alt-rock-defining flagship band, Moore's current affairs now seem like more than just extra-curricular dabbling.  In that light, Chelsea Light Moving (Matador) and the eponymous quartet it introduces – bassist/violinist Samara Lubelski, guitarist Keith Wood (Hush Arbors), drummer John Moloney (Sunburned Hand of the Man) – have the flavor of a carefree rebound relationship: loose, messy, playful; maybe not the weightiest thing in the world, but a whole lot of fun in the moment.   Through fuzzed-out skronk-pop, blank-eyed noise-sludge, hard-and-fast punk and smirking beat poetry, it feels like nothing more or less than an attempt to embrace the mantra of deceptively low-key album opener "Heavenmetal": Be a warrior and love life.

Tensnake
[GENRE]
concert preview

Things haven't quite unfolded for Tensnake like it seemed they would back in 2010, the year of his sun-soaked, vibraphone-enabled smash "Coma Cat," not to mention his nearly-as-ubiquitous remix of Azari & III's "Reckless With Your Love," with its memorably cheeky C+C Music Factory interpolation.  Despite a stage seemingly set for worldwide disco domination, the Hamburg DJ/producer, born Marco Niemerski, has kept things relatively quiet since then, averaging only one single per year (in 2012 it was the '90s-jacking hip-house of "Mainline"), but his steady trickle of remixes (for Little Dragon, Hercules & Love Affair and Aloe Blacc among others) and a recent session for BBC's Essential Mix series – including some tasty unreleased originals possibly slated for a forthcoming LP – attest that he's still got his finger on that mid-tempo good-times boogie pulse.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

pan the riot

seems like as good a time as any to talk about going to see some local bands play last night. a fair amount to think about; i'll try to think it quick though as it's late late late. went to danger danger, a nexus of the local underground/diy music community, for the first night of their aquarius fest. i only ended up seeing three bands, as i was offered a ride home at that point and my other friends were leaving or not coming; that was okay, though i was curious to see if the rest of the bands would be in a similar vein or if there would be more variety for the rest of the night. the ones i saw were probably the ones i was most interested in: bear is driving, who are friends of mine, but whom i haven't seen perform in a long time; grandchildren, who i've been hearing about for a while (and are friends of matt, who used to live in the house - as do all the members of grandchildren), and normal love, who i think matt said are his favorite philly band.

all three, i would say, played progressive rock music; or progressive punk rock might be even more apt. bear is driving have a harder, metal-ish edge, and normal love are extremely abstract and have a violinist (and play written-out compositions - i could barely see through the crowd but i did make out sheet music on a stand in front of the drummer, which is impressive.) grandchildren were a little harder to get a sense of - they were the most song-oriented of the three (the only one with vocals, but they were almost impossible to make out), though not everything they played was very song-like. in general, all three groups had a pretty similar musical approach; complex, mathy, aggressive, guitar-heavy, fairly abstract and non-melodic.

i liked it - i mean, i enjoyed myself - BiD were definitely my favorite, and had the most distinctive and memorable pieces; the compositions are intense but accessible, with fun mathy polyrhythms and some very powerful grooves. they're also extremely tight and technically exciting players (and they just sounded better than the other groups, which was probably not the other groups' fault, considering the circumstances of the show.) grandchildren i had been expecting to be more folky, and they weren't at all (although their myspace songs are); i feel like they didn't come across very well in that setting, but they still rocked out pretty well. normal love were a disappointment; to some extent they're just not my style, but i think it was also not the best environment in which to appreciate them (particularly not being able to see them.) i hadn't realized it would be that abstract and aggressive.

anyway. i know that not all of the other bands playing at the fest were as much in the progressive/math camp as those three, although i imagine a lot of them were more or less punk, probably quite a few were fairly aggressive, and not many were very poppy. that's just my assumption. and that's okay. i don't necessarily think that the danger danger folks have any illusions about booking a truly wide range of acts - but i do also think there are some (probably largely unspoken) limitations to what kinds of groups are likely to be accepted in that community. for example, i've never really heard about any singer-songwriters or similarly-oriented bands playing at danger danger or any of the similar houses in west philly (though to be fair i'm not hugely aware of what's going on in that scene.)

i don't mean to put this just on the people who book the shows - i'm sure there are similar self-imposed limitations set by the people that would think about forming bands and wanting to play in this scene. (i'm also not condemning any of this - i definitely don't have a firm basis for doing that, but i'm not particularly interested in doing so anyway.) but it would be interesting to think more about this phenomenon and its ramifications. (apparently there's somebody at penn writing his grad thesis about danger danger.) in some ways, i guess it's a little disappointing that an independent, youth-based, community-oriented music scene would have their primary focus on a relatively narrow range of musical styles, since they have the freedom to set the parameters as wide as they want (whereas more established musical outlets, beholden to sales and marketing concerns, would have less freedom.) punk rock is the foundation of - and synonymous with - the DIY tradition, but nothing says it has to always stay that way, especially now that the generally held conceptions about genre that fomented and undergirded punk at its outset have been almost completely exploded.

anyway... one of the local bands that was not among the twenty-several acts on the bill for the aquarius festival is panda riot, whom i mentioned a little while back. i like them a lot - on the basis of having listened to their cd a bunch of times and knowing them pretty tangentially. it's not hard to peg them as indie/shoegaze (though the triphop/portishead references are way off, drum machine and chick singer notwithstanding.) they call themselves dream-pop/swirl-pop i'd said that the cocteau twins are the best point of reference, but maybe it's mbv after all - i'll need to go listen to my ct albums again and reconsider. it's kind of uncanny how accurately they channel the sound of the early nineties - more so when i actually think about it, since otherwise i might assume that that would be some kind of "default" setting for bands to sound like, since it was what they sounded like as i was coming of age and shortly thereafter. in fact, it must be extremely intentional - and since not nearly as many bands are doing that as you would expect - or at least, i don't come into contact with many (which i guess is not surprise)... - i think it's pretty cool of them.

not sure which is my favorite track on their disc: song 3 is pretty sweet, and the one about andy warhol is catchy, though the best half-hook is probably the one that goes "hey! lookout" (though the rest of the chorus after that is not as good.) and the opener does this really sexy (very cocteau twins-y) disembodied vocal loop thing at the end and for a split second at the beginning (unless it's a synth that sounds like a vocal)

8 ["yours was the face on the tip of my tongue"] ♥ panda riot

but this is the one that seemed most appropriate for valentimes, even though i'm not 100% sure it's a happy love song and not a regretful or sarcastic or ironic one. but that repeated line (i'm not sure what the title is) is simultanously dirty and sweet enough to be exile-era liz phair. and rebecca's vox really do sound like an early, bored (yes, pre-sellout) liz.

sometimes genre can be your friend.

taking (live)stock

yee-haw, it's for a concert round-up.


i saw akron/family play at olde club the other night. man, olde club is on fire this semester, it's almost like them glory days of old before your time (or mine), though it's too bad they don't book three or four acts for every show, like time was. no deal this time though 'cause these crazies played for like two hours, at least! i kept thinking their set was about to be over, but, nope.

even before they started with the flat-out jamming (around the middle hour or so of their set), i kept thinking about phish, perhaps in part because de facto main dude seth olinsky (on the far right in that photo) has a definite
trey anastasio thing going on. (on the other hand, since phish were in some ways the first contemporary rock band, i may be predisposed to find their resonances in other groups - for a long time i mentally conflated trey with steve malkmus.)

well, sure, call it hippie music if you like. "jam band" is such a loaded term at this point that it's hard to use it profitably in any context. "experimental" is even more meaningless, especially when it's used to mean the same thing (in which case it's more a value judgment than anything.) and they certainly have this almost adorable mystical/spiritual bent which is not what one expects from indie rock these days. in any case, a/f put on a cracking good show, and i think got everyone in the room to relax and just enjoy it in spite of themselves. you could say that they never let the noise/"skronk" go on for too long without injecting some sweetness and melody (and harmony!) - though at the beginning of the set i did think that balance was a bit off - but i think it's more apt (and more impressive) to note how they gradually allowed the chaotic and potentially off-putting aspects of their music to develop into something approachable in their own right, without toning down their intensity or lunacy.
it takes guts to do little more than bang out an unadorned "tribal" rhythm for upwards of thirty minutes; it's the kind of scenario where either the crowd follows you all the way through sheer force of will, or else you're just sunk. hard to say what, but these guys know what they're doing, and they do it deliberately, playfully, intelligently and - this is so key - lovingly. after over an hour of slowly mutating jams (which on one or two occasions unexpectedly imploded into group chants and other clearly precomposed segments), they kept right on, returning to more folky, song-oriented material, notably "a song about their t-shirt," the quietly anthemic "love is simple," and eventually inviting much of the audience onstage to dance and play maracas, recorders, finger cymbals, etc.

crowning loveliness of the night, however, was getting a hugely helpful ride back to philly with panda riot, whose opening set i had unfortunately, unwittingly missed. they gave me their cd, which i listened to all day yesterday, and it is fantastic - highly redolent of mbv, "pre-sellout liz," and, most especially, the cocteau twins (conspicuously absent from their "influences" list), but fantastic nonetheless(?). i highly recommend you check out the tunes on theirspace. i shall endeavor get them to play at totally wired in the coming months.


the night before that i sawr jonathan richman and tommy larkins at johnny brenda's, with my mom and then tara (after the first five or six songs, at which point my mom couldn't take the exhaustion and heat.) always great to see jojo of course, this was time no. 4, and right up there though not as thrilling as SF '01. (couldn't have hoped to be, so that's no problem.) i do think he's getting more and more eccentric every time i see him. and he's pretty eccentric to begin with, so...

in general, no surprises. he did more modern lovers songs than i'd ever heard: "pablo picasso" of course, and "girl fren", and also a substantially reworked "old world." "her mystery," "springtime in ny," "lesbian bar," "the world was showing it's tricks," "give paris one more chance" - no surprises. (except i'd never thought before about how we ought to be appropriating the title of that last one.) some great new (to me) ones though, notably "love and hate" ["i too inspire love and hate/first i charm, then i irritate"] and "stupenda e misera citta." one song each in italian, french, and spanish - but the definite high point of the whole thing were his virtuoso polyglot characterizations of a jilted boyfriend and his defiant ex (times four different languages and cultures) in the middle of "let her go into the darkness."

last weekend alyssa and i saw david byrne and company at carnegie hall, performing music from david's new project with fatboy slim, here lies love, based on the life of imelda marcos. at this point it's essentially a narrative song cycle, with (in this case) byrne providing some necessary exposition in between numbers, but ultimately it wants to be "something more theatrical," which is to say a musical. as this article suggests, the work is decidedly still unfinished; hopefully a further realization will do a better job at fleshing out the narrative. i felt like too much of the running time was devoted to the early days, which were fairly conventional bio material (country girl grows up, moves to the big city, falls in love) and it took way too long for the darker elements of the story to appear.

the music was reasonably effective but also seemed somewhat conventional, like competent "traditional" or i guess music-theatre-style songwriting (except for the dancy rhythmic emphasis, which i enjoyed even though it sometimes distracted from understanding the songs themselves), along the lines of some of the more straightforward songs from grown backwards. (this was particularly notable on several songs where mauro played marimba, and even more so when an orchestra joined for the last few numbers.)

on the other hand, the few songs on which david took the mike really shined. he tends to write a lot of short phrases, which the other two singers didn't necessarily do much with, but he knows how to draw them out and make them really soar. plus his voice is really distinctive and enchanting and powerful. and they might not have been miked very well.

specifically: "a perfect hand," sung from the perspective of ferdinand marcos, probably the catchiest and most dynamic number in the show, david's encore rendition of a song that we'd heard earlier, "the rose of tacloban," which is a sweet and simple folky-sounding song that includes lyrics taken from imelda's high school yearbook, and the set-closing reprise of the title tune, whose chorus melody sounds a lot like some pop or possibly country song that i still can't place.

anyway, it was fun to be there (way way way high up in the balcony) and amusing to see david so jittery and nervous, and it was neat to see this stage of the creative process, but it definitely made me want to see it revised and broadened and presented in a more finished form. so hopefully that will happen.

i also saw camera obscura recently, at olde club. they were as adorable as you'd expect, an probably even more convincing/commanding as live musicians. (even unassuming as they look.) they played everything from LGOOTC ("country mile" as an encore) and most of my favorites from the earlier record, but not "books written for girls." they seemed open to my request, but traceyanne said, "what, do you want to depress everybody?" and i sort of shrugged and the crowd murmured dissent, so they played something more upbeat, but they promised me they'd play it next time.