Review Round-Up: August-December 2014

The 2 Bears
The Night Is Young

The music that Raf Rundell and Hot Chip's Joe Goddard make as The 2 Bears draws deeply and lovingly on classicist dance forms – house music, most emphatically, but also UK garage, dub and dancehall reggae – with enough soul, variety and cheery playfulness to win over the staunchest technophobes.  The Night Is Young (Southern Fried), album number two for the London duo, packs in a tremendous array of sounds, styles and voices (toasters, divas, psychotropic ramblers and the sweet-voiced South African Sbusiso, to name a few); an almost Basement Jaxx-like level of polychromatic sonic detailing which makes it rather more disjointed than its superb predecessor, despite comparable highs.  Even the seemingly straight-ahead dance-pop banger "Angel (Touch Me)," built around an indelibly tasty piano lick, somehow manages a detour into tribal African village ambience.  While things get a touch unfocused in the final stretch, the Hot Chip chaps are always good for a grandly uplifting closing statement, and the gently expansive, marimba-led title track fits that bill beautifully.

Basement Jaxx
Junto

Junto is a jolt; a juggernaut; an absolute joyride.  Per the sleek, white-dominated cover, it's the most streamlined, frill-free BJaxx album ever: not without its allotment of sound-stuffed, multi-culti diversions – check Mykki Blanco-featuring breakbeat-ragga detour "Buffalo," or "Mermaid of Salinas"' delirious Carnaval vibes – but otherwise a relatively uncluttered mainline of diva-house bangers and soulful dance-pop, complete with the requisite arms-in-the-air comedown closer.  It's also the closest they've come to the ecstatic, hedonistic rush of their holy initial trinity in the decade since.  Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton never really went away – they've maintained a steady trickle of singles while engaging in go-to career dalliances (a film score, an orchestral collaboration) – but it's been five years since their last proper full-length, during which their influence – on post-dubstep "maximalists" Rustie and TNGHT and, especially, pop-friendly dance acts like Disclosure, Rudimental, Calvin Harris and Hercules & Love Affair – has never been easier to spot.  So this return feels perfectly timed, with only one major quibble: the album's not out until late August, when by rights it should be soundtracking beach-bound cruises and poolside fiestas all summer long.

The Juan MacLean
In A Dream

The Juan Maclean play the long game; they won't be rushed.  Now by some margin DFA's longest-running act, this is only their third album since their debut singles helped inaugurate the label back in 2002 – and, per their usual habit, its high points are all epics.  Indeed, there's practically an inverse relationship here between track length and quality.  The album opens with eight drama-filled minutes of Moroderesque robo-disco and closes with ten of darkly romantic, pillowy-soft tech-house; both bookends are majestically expansive and inviting.  Atypically fluid, almost Balearic slo-mo funker "Running Back To You" and the burbling, crisply catchy "A Simple Design" – one of several showcases for Nancy Whang's always-captivating vocals – are seven minutes and pretty great.  Most of the sub-6:30-cuts, though – some relatively undistinguished synthpop stabs, plus "Here I Am"'s improbably handbaggy house – fall weirdly flat,.  It's not that these guys can't do tight, compelling pop hooks – the longer cuts here have some great ones – it's just the kind they craft seem to work best with plenty of room to wriggle and stretch.

Simian Mobile Disco
Whorl

From the era-defining, indie-friendly electro-house of their debut to Temporary Pleasure's misbegotten populism, Delicacies' hard techno turn and Unpatterns' subtler, spirit-ridden shadings – not to mention their freewheeling DJ mixes and last year's fantastic, career-glossing Live – Simian Mobile Disco have, stylistically speaking, more than lived up to the middle third of their name.  Whorl, also essentially an in-concert recording – cut before an audience in the California desert using a small, all-analog hardware setup – is yet another marked departure.  It's easily the duo's most abstract and exploratory work yet, building on and veering beyond their recent focus on acid-flecked techno, and their first outing unambiguously geared toward listening rather than body-moving.  Which isn't to say it doesn't get there: "Hypnick Jerk"'s sinuous minimalism and "Dervish"'s filtered, martial stutter-funk offer two of their most infectious, nuanced grooves.  But it's a patient, meandering journey, punctuated by spacey synth-wash ambience (it's almost ten minutes before the first beat drops.)  Where Unpatterns was an assured culmination, this is a fresh, auspicious strike into new territory from a group that deserves far more recognition.

JJ
V

jj – as they were then styled – emerged mid-2009 with a fully-formed, fascinating aesthetic: all white everything (save the occasional blood splatter), a hazy, tenderly oblique indie-pop sound built around scintillating synths, billowing acoustic guitars and unpredictable samples, and an unabashed, twee-style infatuation with thuggish US hip-hop, all wrapped around Elin Kastlander's drowsy, druggy, offhandedly luscious vocals.  Within 18 months, they'd mined two delicate, magical albums from this inimitable template, plus the deliriously plunderphonic/swag-jacking Kills mixtape, but several ensuing years of intermittent singles largely failed to point a way forward.  Third album V brings some new ideas to the JJ playbook – a level of bombast vaguely befitting their newfound capitalization; a runtime (considerably) longer than half an hour; one half of an almost-rock song – but it plods across ultimately familiar ground, still as plush and pillowy as ever (on rave-flecked dance beats and string-draped, auto-tuned ballads alike), still rhyming "drugs" with "hugs."  The duo's intoxicating sense of endless sonic possibility remains, but the many lovely moments rarely amount to memorable songs, and several pointed shout-outs to their still-enchanting debut feel like cruel teases.

various artists
Beck Song Reader

Never meant to exist – yet probably always inevitable – the record-album [evidently] entitled Beck Song Reader couldn't hope to match the charm and fascination of Beck's Song Reader, the 2012 album (as in loose-leaf folio) of turn-of-last-century-styled sheet music that remains his finest achievement of the past decade – but it's a valiant and enjoyably varied attempt, by a seriously stacked cast of contributors.  As with any V/A grab-bag, not everything's gold (Beck's own offering, "Heaven's Ladder," is hardly a highlight – plus he gets half the words wrong!), but a respectable percentage truly is.  Many renditions veer rootsy and reverent, ranging from quite nice (Norah Jones' country-pop "Just Noise") to just ok – but (perhaps not bespeaking highly of the songs themselves) the best ones furnish more distinctive personality, predictably or otherwise: "I'm Down"'s an unsurprisingly great fit for Jack White's current mad scientist-Americana mode, while David Johansen does well by "Rough on Rats"' Tom Waits-isms, but less-likely candidates Swamp Dogg, Jarvis Cocker and fun. make their selections lovingly their own, while Juanes' sparkling, subversive translation – into Spanish and synth-pop – of "Don't Act Like Your Heart Isn't Hard" may be best of all.

originally published in Magnet Magazine


Music Go Music
Impressions
[Pop]

There are several moments on Impressions (Thousand Tongues), this slightly-ineffable LA outfit's magnificent second LP, when they go out of their way to sound like ABBA.  Take the glorious "Shine Down Forever," which handily elevates "Gimme Gimme Gimme..."'s godless desperation to pure, pious romantic rapture ("you are the sun to me/shine on me always with gentle beams of empathy...") – well before they actuall tease the riff.  Most of the time, though, it happens completely naturally.  But don't think of them as copyists – it's just that, evidently, more bands should make brilliantly melodic almost-funk disco-pop with a curious surfeit of harpsichords. [A]

Jenny Lewis
The Voyager
[Pop-Rock]

Polished and pristine as a SoCal sunset, The Voyager (Warner Brothers) does double duty as one of the summer's breeziest, most easy-pleasing pop records and one of its subtlest, wryest heartbreakers.  Jenny Lewis' not-at-all-difficult third album passes over roots and country (to say nothing of "indie") in favor of a luxuriously crafted '70s L.A. soft-rock throwback (hey there, Haim) – complete with a cast of celebs and studio pros (Ryan Adams and Beck swap out behind the boards) – that's all achingly sunny melody and equally aching, smarting narratives of romantic regret and nagging displacement. [B+]

Spoon
They Want My Soul
[Rock/Pop]

They Want My Soul (Loma Vista) kicks off with decisively Stonesy strut, which is refreshing and anomalous since the remaining 35 minutes are as inimitably, unrelentingly Spoony as Spoony can be, ticking all the band's paradoxical boxes – tidy grit, substantial stylishness, effortless propulsion, layered minimalism, dispassionate rocking-out (in spots, the hardest they have in ages) – all of which, coming after a four-year hiatus, is more than enough to generate the thrill of reuniting with an old friend.  It breaks approximately zero new ground, but then again Spoon don't have to bend – the universe bends to them. [B+]

The New Pornographers
Brill Bruisers
[Pop/Rock]

The hydra-headed indie perennials' previous LP, 2010's Together, was underrated (or overlooked) simply for being more of the (superlative) same; their fifth-straight master class in oblique-angled power-pop euphorics.  The intriguingly synth-heavy Brill Bruisers (Matador) – their sixth, and the closest they've come to a stumble – seems poised to be overrated by way of correction.  Though it ends strong (as usual) and adds a few firecrackers to the repertoire – the vocodey "Backstairs," "Dancehall Domine," some fine Bejar chuggers – it's the first time that treading largely familiar ground has yielded less than thrilling results, with the melody lines too often terse and truncated, the nonsense verse oddly inelegant, the productions shruggably overblown. [C+]

Land Observations
The Grand Tour
[Instrumental]

Following the marvelously meditative, highly thematic albeit instrumental compositions making up his solo debut, Roman Roads IV-XI, visual artist and post-post-rocker James Brooks – who means his musical moniker quite seriously – returns with a second set of geo-historically minded European peregrinations: The Grand Tour (Mute), informed by the post-collegiate Continental gallivants of all those 19th-century English novel protagonists.  Once again, Brooks imbues his solitary electric guitar with a clean, gently crisp tone, shaping it into tidy, meticulously layered metronomic reveries; placid and measured but softly searching. [B+]

Caribou
[Electronic]
concert preview

An obvious career culmination and one of the year's most beautiful albums, Our Love (Merge) swirls together virtually every facet of Dan Snaith's constantly evolving output – the delicate, prismatic electro-acoustic hybrids of his early days as Manitoba, Andorra's psychedelic soft-pop, the genial house and acid bangers of his Daphni alias – raises the stakes with the most personal songs he's ever written, and enlists some help from fellow Ontarians Jessy Lanza (who also opens tonight's show) and Owen Pallett just for good measure. 

Zammuto
[Pop/Experimental]
concert preview

Nick Zammuto's post-Books operation isn't quite as restlessly inventive and cerebral as his old band, but they're no less singular and, in their quiet way, just as playful.  (They also have a ridiculously good drummer.)  Probably the Vermonter's most plainly accessible work yet, Anchor (Temporary Residence) feels like a friendlier (and funnier) take on latter-day Radiohead/Thom Yorke, balancing crisp, gently mathy metronomics with low-key, curiously affecting and slightly folky song-craft.

Steve Gunn
[Folk/Rock]
concert preview

Hot on the heels of last year's quietly luxuriant Time Out and his great recent duo summit with Mike Cooper, rapidly rising six-stringer Steve Gunn's wide-ranging Way Out Weather (Paradise of Bachelors) unfurls at an elastic, easygoing pace that belies his rate of productivity; translating the meditative mentality of American Primitivist ragas into ragged-edged (and at times surprisingly Stones-y) folk-rock.

Rock*A*Teens
[Indie Rock]
concert preview

Atlanta, GA's Rock*A*Teens represent a generally little-remembered chapter of Merge records' (and '90s indie rock) history, though this summer – which marks their first public activity as a band since 2002 – has somewhat improbably seen the release of not one but two live recordings from their heyday: one a stand-alone cheekily entitled A Major Motion Picture (Chunklet), the other packaged as a bonus disc with a reissue of the band's 2000 swan song, Sweet Bird of Youth.  The available evidence presents them as a hard-hitting but surprisingly versatile outfit who were both ahead of and very much of their time, trafficking in everything from gothy rockabilly and woozy, soon-to-be-vogueish carnivalesque psych to tortuous, semi-baroque lit-rock reminiscent of Quasi and Destroyer, while predicting the raggedly earnest likes of Okkervil River (frontman Chris Lopez is an clear influence on Will Sheff) and The Arcade Fire (who cut their first record for Merge four years after R*A*Ts cut their last.)

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

sxsw roundup pt. 2: bragging rights

thursday

got our bikes in gear and cruised down south first to bouldin's cafe, where we had a late-ish tacos breakfast and spotted jeff lewis and some of the jitters. n and i tried to infiltrate the austin convention center to catch billy bragg's 3pm showcase set, but after four escalator flights we found out it was off-limits to mere wristband-holders. so we joined bobby at emo's instead for the shout out louds, a perfectly competent and affable pop-rock band from sweden who nevertheless fail to excite me even as passable peterbjörn+john substitutes. i did enjoy their interpolation of a verse from "train in vain" though, and how long it took me to realize that the second guitarist's hair wasn't actually a hat.

we wandered across to the annex for lykke li, surely one of sxsw's busiest performers (she had no fewer than 9 scheduled performances in three days, which is a little insane), who showed up with her band late and harried (no surprise as she'd had been a busride away for a set scheduled to start an hour and fifteen minutes earlier - but no problem as it meant we had some time to dance to the dj stylings of men aka 2/3 of le tigre, including a sweet "with every heartbeat" remix and some kind of bmore-club-esque track based on "orinoco flow" which i heard again later in the week.) her set was short (five songs) and somewhat stilted - though reading her bio and remembering that she's only 21, her stiff stage manner starts to make some more sense - but the music was enjoyable enough for what it was. (she ain't no robyn, though, that's for sure - but give her some time.)

then on to mohawk, where the clipse closed off an excellent lineup at the rhapsody party, all of which we'd missed except for a catchy final song or two by sons and daughters through the fence as we waited in line. took them a minute to get on too, but when they did they treated us to a lengthy, body-rocking, hit-packed set with most of hell hath no fury (though not "trill"), a couple throwbacks to lord willin' (though not "when the last time") and even "what happened to that boy," and a bunch of other material that i assume is from their latest mixtape. now, i like the clipse as much as i like any straight-up, traditionalist, street-minded hip-hop (save maybe sway, more on whom later), but that's nothing compared to some of the heads in this crowd, singing along with nearly every line. and pusha and malice seemed genuinely touched and even surprised by the level of crowd enthusiasm, basking and revelling in our presence and energy as much as we were in theirs. they put on a professional, spirited performance, and seemed fully at ease in the slightly incongruous all-white-hipster crowd and sunny outdoor setting, but what surprised me was how warm, affable and humorous they were considering their tough, deadly-serious, hardcore lyrical personae. they're obviously very self-aware and incredibly savvy, not just as artists but as businessmen ("it's all in the spirit of competition...we just think we're the best"), and it's clear they recognize this crowd as a core constituency of their fanbase. basically it was a big love-in.

after a somewhat extravagant dinner at miguel's, we headed south of the river to catch the world's greatest active rock band, austin homeboy's spoon, alongside a few thousand of their fellow citizens in a sprawling riverside festival-stage area. i didn't bother getting in a place to really even see the stage (at least until the set-closing "underdog"), was perfectly content to sit back in the grass and smile along. i've now seen them outdoors twice as many times (four) as indoors.

got a little stressy after that, as i scrambled to figure out the location and time of a sway performance i'd just gotten wind of that morning, the delay causing me to wind up at the end of a long static line for the secretly canadian showcase and miss the two low-pro bands i'd been there to see. once i did finally get inside to see the tail end of explorer's club, there was some miscommunication and some exhaustion and some ambiguity of priorities that led to me and nava going back outside and sitting on the lawn opposite the venue as bon iver played his/their set. it sounded great, certainly loud and clear, and it was sorta nice to just sit and listen and not have to worry about the crowd or trying to watch it, though i do wish we'd managed to see something in this prime-time slot, if not bon or sway then, as i now remember and realize we actually should have done, the retribution gospel choir at st. david's church.

got it together and biked over to the cedar st. courtyard an hour early for billy bragg, on the way passing by the english beat on stage at the bizarre, fake 'smokin' music' venue that i'd forgotten they were playing. wish we'd stopped and gone inside there too (the crowd looked pretty sparse), but i'm happy with the bits i did catch: the opening fill and groove of "twist and crawl" and the final verse/chorus of "stand down margaret," which they rather disconcertingly changed to "stand down hillary." hmmmmm. it was no trouble getting into cedar street, though as lovely a space as it is, it's long, narrow, cluttered with furniture and just generally poorly chosen as a sxsw venue. probably would have enjoyed devotchka's late, lovely set even more if i'd been able to see a bit better, but it was good enough catching occasional glimpses of the suave, expressively-eyebrowed lead crooner, goofy sousaphonist and toy-looking squeezebox player.

in any case i'm glad we got there early because it made it easy to get almost up to the front before mr. love and justice, aka billy bragg, the iconic (more like a st. bernard than the eiffel tower, he says) commie troubadour i've been wanting to see for at least a decade now. and he did not disappoint, churning out the jams for as long as they'd let him (it still feels a little funny that the venues have to cut off every show at two on the mark, as they did with every 1am-slot show i saw all week except for the tough alliance.) some material from the new album (!) - "farmboy," "i'll keep faith," "oh freedom" - which is being touted as a return to worker's playtime form (nice to hear that recognized as perhaps his best work), though those songs at least seemed a little mawkishly propagandistic to me - and an excellent sorta-silly "johnny clash" song which i assume is on the album but i'm not sure. but mostly he stuck to golden oldies - "accident waiting to happen," "power in a union," "levi stubbs' tears" (!), "little time bomb" (!!), and of course penultimate sing-along "new england." [also "way over yonder in the minor key" and "world turned upside down."] he also talked a lot - he's very funny, even if he occasionally takes his jokes farther than even i might - and he just generally seemed to be enjoying himself, which was great to see. he offered us a choice between the carpenters and dylan for a 'busking-style' acoustic cover, but after the carps (of course) squeaked a win nobody sang along with the chorus [of "superstar"], so he cut himself off, bemoaned it a 'travesty of democracy' and launched into "don't think twice" instead - okay, but a little whatever. (i heard he did a shangri-la's tune - "give him a great big kiss" - in duet with kate nash saturday afternoon - how effing cool!) anyway, so so good to finally see the man in person, and easily a highlight of the week.

summer stock

whoa hi! what was i supposed to be writing? about how i'm such a foggy fogy that all the music i care about is indy rock oldsters from way back in the ninetees? like em tortoise and mirah and spoon [see above], all of whom i went to see perform in the past week. despite that they haven't even put out any worthwhile new music since like 2001, or 2004, or well last tuesday, respectively. i mean [more accurately/less pointedly] i've been liking these bands since i was in college(!), which in point of fact was not in the 90s, and nor was mirah's recording career. [bbut still it's like i'm stuck in time and i can never advance and embrace new music, right? or wait, my top 5-ish albums of last year were by artists that didn't even exist when i was in college. k nm.]

briefly then:

trts@wrldcfelv
whom i have been wanting to see forever, since somebody told me once that you don't even get the full genius of their compositions til you see them replicate them live. worth the wait? well they hardly even looked at the audience, much less deigned to speak - that was borderline obnoxious. one of them (john mcentire, i hope? that's who it was in my mind) was at least smiling and seeming to enjoy himself.

as well he should, rocking the rock out double-drummer-style, with both kits front and center (that's right, shove the guitarist and bassist upstage), flanking the central keyboard/control module, whence dude'd plunk something cryptic but with unflinching hep. and the mallets, of course, further out on either side of the stage. perchance the gentlemen would rotate.

it was fun - the gentlemen can groove, and the selections are trés well-apportioned, and precisely familiar, as promised (i recognized almost every piece, mostly from the last two albums, though i could only hazard a guess at a couple titles.) discomfitingly mannered for such fluid, empathetic sound, but: exactly what you'd expect, really. neat to run into caroline, with whom i saw my very first post-rock show way back (gybe!, pre-!-shift) in u-city-ish (the long-since defunct 4040) even if she didn't want to talk to me (?)

mrh@frstuntrnchrchbsmnt
the charmer. second time this year (fourth overall?). no surprises, is good news. well, she did do three ten-second preview-snippets-cum-guessing-games from the bugs project - which were predictably adorable (logan was annoyed about this...why?) they had t-shirts for that, but no cds. best part, i must admit, was the encore of "cold, cold water"...there's just no arguing with a great song. also: opening folker benjy ferree got kinda obnoxious, but pulled out a surprisingly affecting magfields cover ("grand canyon") to close his set.

spn@rckfllrprk
whoooo! gonna be writing and writing about spoon this week/month/year, i can tell. so just on the show then: well first off i ran all the way w/ heavy backpack from the wrong subway stop (rector st.) after twofold subway idiocy and general underpreparation, which ended up actually working out ok because i completely missed the rain at that end of the ride. and also they hadn't started, though i was 15m late, it took them another good half-hour, but [blablabla] good pre-show tunes, fittingly motown-heavy, plus "mannish boy," and then, for no reason, right as they took the stage [to fiddle about some more], the opening tracks of illinois(e). ok whatever.

this band....well, should i get into our history together? ell, this post is already getting hella selfy. [it's not, obv., just about being a certain age, or in college, but about developing a personal relationship with the makers of music; most folks just have the time/inclination/emotional latitude to make those attachments in adolescence/academia...] *

the show: better than last summer @p4k, when they were weirdly (slightly) disappointing, and bantered inanely. took a few numbers to really get off the ground. but by an amped-up (+drums) "small stakes" and the horns entrance for "underdog" (!!)...they were off. so glad they're playing "stay don't go" live now, albeit w/o beatbox. most of the new record, selections from the last couple. most exciting was "take a walk." "jon fisk" w/ horns, also excellent. they played most of the songs that had been in my head the preceding week, so well done there.

honestly, spoon are just frigging sexy - i can't think of another band that gets me hot and bothered just watching them play (or even, as earlier that day, strutting down broadway listening to them ga ga in my headphones.) it's everything - every adjective that's overused to talk about their stark, sleek, lean, muscular, gritty, edgy, intense, intimate, dark, rock, music, the tension and release, lyrical (and vocal) obliquity occasionally letting up to reveal warm, brooding emotional core, like art-damaged deep soulful vacant eyes, and then there's britt's physical presence, the guitar in his hands, the jeans on his legs, the spiky of his tousle - faux-punx indeed - and they let you in it with them - being there makes you (me) seductive, toothsome, devastating, too. it'd seem they're hipster-cad-unattainable, but there it is for the taking, and that's why maybe spoon are Great, not just for indies, it's a democratic rock-band sex hip you can access too. so yeah i was dancing and rocking/freaking out basically the whole time - not many other people were - silly them. but i caught some knowing nods. also good flirting on the subway back. knuffnow.

i also sawr:


thdcmbrsts@mnnmsccntr
last night. won tickets. (thanks aka!) cool beans. never been to the mann before. colin claimed they'd never played with an orchestra before, but that's clearly a lie. i guess he meant before this tour. (but that their only other experience with strings was a quartet from the portland youth orch? doesn't make much sense either.)

the decemberists with an orchestra did make plenty of sense, at least as realized in this instance: the arrangements were rich, varied, and well-suited to the songs, and complex enough that i was reasonably impressed by how well the mann pops pulled them off after presumably minimal rehearsals. and they were featured on all but one or two numbers in an hour-and-a-quarter set.

weirdly (for a rock show) it started on time: we strolled into the amphitheater at 8:13 and just caught the second and final utterance of "fontanelle" in "the crane wife parts 1 and 2," which by itunes arithmetic means they must have started at four after. too bad, that's the nicest song on the new record. actually though they didn't end up playing much else from crane wife - just "o valencia" (the "hit"?) and unaccompanied "perfect crime" (er, "2") (meh.) strange set list - "the infanta" and "we both go down together" and "l.a. i'm yours" were all pleasant to hear, but nothing particularly moved me - i guess their coolest move was playing the entirety of the tain ep, complete with time signature wankery, zeppelin-isms galore, and a melodica/mandolin hornpipe breakdown, with meloy on drums. hadn't heard that before; it's pretty neat. [disappointing: despite the month, they didn't play "july, july!", which i'd just described to matt as the only rock song they ever made..."ok, well, maybe the closest they ever got to making a rock song."]

gotta say though...apart from a couple of songs ("grace cathedral hill," "leslie anne levine," "red right ankle"), and fewer of them with each successive album, the decemberists have long since been a band that other people are much more excited about than me. (my parents, for example.) which is okay. it's nice to listen to things that other people like, even if they're not your favorite. it just turns out that what i liked most about them - the unassuming prettiness of some of the simpler, sweeter, not necessarily clever songs on their first album - arguably their less distinctive side - is not what they focused on developing in their later work, or what brought them a larger audience.

but it has been funny to observe their progression, since i first checked them out, for some reason i can't even remember now (a blanket music connection?) when they were still on hush. actually, come to think of it, and not to play the cred card, really, they're one of a surprising number of bands (arcade fire, sufjan, shins) that i got into, basically, before the hype kicked in, who have since managed to disappoint me to a greater or lesser extent, on their way to becoming more or less the figureheads of the indie universe. not, i swear, because of that becoming. (also, sufjan hasn't really disappointed me; i guess i just wasn't super-super-enthused about him for too long beyond the filial novelty kicks of a concept album about my dad's home state.) the strokes, on the other hand, ["pre-hype strokes" is pretty much an oxymoron, but i did see 'em open for gbv, if that counts] seem to have somehow reverted from practically-mainstream to practically-indie, and i still like them just fine. so whatever that says.

anyway. several enjoyable evenings. too many convoluted thoughts about my relationship to indirok that aren't that worth gettting into. a blog post: one in a continuing series! also, sat next to j valocchi, of the phl weekly, and friend, at the dec's show, so hi to them if they stop by here.

*[first band, as it happens, i ever blogged about, fwtw. seen em 5 times now; they put me in their album art; i won their shirts and tix and records etc. etc. you know. matt and i listened to their entire discography (well, i still don't have that lafitte single) the other day, and...yeah, well i love them. new record kicks kicks kicks. more s(p)oon.]