colors and colours and cullers . . .

dan 'flava' flavin, marfa-style: hot like neon fucking neon. photo credits: c. hoffman, g. bear, d. byrne.

sigh - another post of 'prefatory remarks' that ended up getting unintentionally entangled and, er, long. well, the point of bringing all that up was mostly just to say:

1.) i saw hot chip last week. it was pretty great. the best part was the crowd, who were way into it, dancing more enthusiastically from the get-go than any audience i've seen in a while. it was a concert, but it felt as much like a party. (my friends and i were up front for the first third or so, then split to the back where there was more room to move.)

i was especially amused by joe goddard, the keyboards/electronics guy off to the side. he looked just slightly out of place - a bit portly, and dressed in a goofy colorful t-shirt unlike his bandmates more 'tasteful' attire (though two of them eventually took their shirts off, in frontman alexis taylor's case to reveal a wendy's wifebeater) - a jovial average joe in a band of twerpy hipster nerds - although he's actually one of the two main songwriters. he does the spoken-ish bits of the vocals ("i'm in no fit state..."; "bendable, poseable..."; the list of moves in "wrestlers") and he delivered them so gleefully and emphatically, and deliberately off-rhythm, that i had to laugh. ("bend away...bend a-fucking-way.")

they did the bulk of the new album (11/13, omitting a couple of ballads), one oldie ("crap kraft dinner" - pretty nice), and only three from the warning, which was a little disappointing, since i've only grown to adore that album in the last year or so. serves me right, though, maybe, for dismissing them when i first saw them (fall '05, opening for four tet.) i remember they played "colours" and i'm like "what is this dopey crap? colors and colors and colors and colors? right..." then it took me a year or something to get around to their album, which i now feel that stylus was apt in ranking as #2 of the year, and this time i was disappointed that they didn't play "colours." but it's okay. (at least they did "no fit state," the album's semi-secret best song.)


my initial response to made in the dark was that it's essentially a very similar album to its predecessor, right down to the curiously jerky opener and rather blah ballad closer, (with plenty of better stuff in between), but that it pales substantially in comparison. having taken more time to process and reflect, i recognize that the last album did have a couple of somewhat lesser songs (well, at least two: "arrest yourself" and "won't wash"), while the new one has has plenty of highlights, if nothing to compete with the run of obvious singles that is tracks 2-5 on the warning ("ready for the floor" is the only no-brainer, with its two neighboring tracks probably the closest behind.)

most of the other dance tracks don't really do it for me (yet?) - not quite sure why; "touch too much" for instance seems like it should be great, but the melody and phrasing kind of annoy me. "one pure thought" is the big exception, the closest this album comes to a "no fit state" and maybe the best song on here. "wrestlers," which is reminiscent of "the warning" both lyrically and musically, is a great, quirky, catchy album track. then there are the ballads, none of which i've found as affecting as the gorgeous "look after me" and "so glad to see you," though the title track is certainly pretty.

hot chip's best songs tend not to feature just a single arresting hook or an extended melody line, but rather several fairly simple and repetitive melodic motifs, alternating and interspersed throughout, modularly, over shifting sections of the groove, and sometimes eventually layered together, in an expansion beyond straight verse/chorus structure. ("colors" is maybe the clearest example.) my sense is that a lot of new album's songs are more straightforward in their construction, and hence not as colorful and satisfying. i'll keep listening though.

2.) i been listening to neon neon. specifically their debut album stainless style.

it's a collaboration between gruff rhys of super furry animals - once one of my favorite bands, in whom i have lost a substantial amount of interest (though i'm curious to hear their latest, eventually...the last two albums were pleasant enough but ultimately pretty watered-down, save the transcendent "slow life") - and quasi-hip-hop (right?) producer boom bip, whom i've liked scattered tracks by, but never really delved into. it's something of a surprise, and total treat.

a surprise because i wouldn't have expected a full-length collaboration from these two, i wouldn't have expected it to sound like this (gleaming neo-80s electronic disco-pop, with occasional sleaze-rap interjections), and i wouldn't have expected to be this into it. on the other hand, it's not so surprising that it's pretty great. the leftfield nature of the duo had me fearing a strained, pointedly eclectic mish-mash of a collabo record by a self-consciously oddball pairing, plus novelty rap guests (like gorillaz but with a less-infallible britpop-ringleader, or - worse - the rudderless gnarls barkley), but this is pretty straight up: a synth-pop record made by a dependably tuneful '60s-loving indie pop songwriter and an accomplished, musically savvy electronic producer, which sounds more like the postal service (a good thing.) (although stainless style doesn't, really - it's much richer-sounding, dancier, sillier and more poignant at the same time. if anything, a lot of it recalls some of the more inventive tracks from the great rings around the world, a path not taken by SFA in 2000s.)

the album's wikipedia article explains a lot: it's an intentional break from the artists' previous work, and its channeling of the 1980s on multiple levels, which is much deeper and more integral to the proceedings than your average '00s '80s throwback, is very deliberate and was carefully developed from a production standpoint and otherwise. it's also a concept album, about "playboy engineer" and '80s archetype john delorean, though that's loose enough notto get in the way of the songs. but it's also just a really fun, upbeat, and paradoxically modern-sounding (see!) pop record.

the biggest standouts (for me, so far) are "raquel" (a funky, melodic ode to ms. welch, whom i'll always associate with the rather perverted, sex-obsessed forrest gump - the book, not the movie - whose melodic hook bears some similarity to lennon's "oh yoko"), the slightly dark, twitchy italo-style duet "i lust u," and "belfast," an epic-sounding new wave disco jam (which, in keeping with the album concept, is probably not really an ode to the city per se, though it is addressed to it - i was trying to make a list: mirah's "jerusalem," lcd's "new york i love you," the pogues' "london you're a lady." of montreal's "little rock.") but it's really pretty consistent in quality, with a handful of other songs that could work equally well as singles. even the three or four rap tracks, featuring the jokey likes of spank rock, yo majesty, har mar superstar, and fatlip, aren't as obnoxious as they seem like they should be. superficial on the surface but deeper underneath, this could easily make my top ten for the year.

3.) i got the new cut copy record, on semi-impulse.

my first listen was through headphones, walking to the subway for a gig, as the sun was setting on one of the first gloriously summery april days, and not surprisingly i was mesmerized and swooning. "instant album of the year (?) (!)" i thought, as the caribou-style psychedelic swirls of "feel the love" gave way to crystal-clear indie-pop acoustic strums, bouncing italo synths, an immediately hummable melody, vocoded background vocals, and a laid-back but distinctly dancy electro-organic groove, all in the same song... i also thought, how the hell does he have all of this stuff going on without this sounding like a total mess? and: can the rest of the album possibly keep delivering the goods at this level?

yes, as it turns out, the whole album is pretty damn seamless, and indeed remarkably consistent in both quality and quality, er i mean in terms of both sonics and goodness. and it remains a befuddling mystery of alchemy. it's hazy but it's bright. it's languid, but it's propulsive. it's indie pop/rock, but it's electronic/dance. it's unabashedly derivative, but it's uncannily fresh. it sounds like the '60s and the '80s, and, okay, it really sounds like the '00s. it sounds like new order, but i like it.

a lot. or maybe i just like it pretty well. i'm still having a hard time figuring that part out, because i could see myself going either way - continuing to listen and finding more to enjoy and bring me back, or setting it aside as a pleasurable trifle with diminishing returns. in some ways it is a very surfacey record; sounding great, nay awesome, and with some solid hooks to be sure ("far away," and the singles "lights and music" and "hearts on fire" - that's as far as i've got), but possibly somewhat lacking in truly durable songwriting, and also somewhat formulaic. of course, a good formula is worth milking, and i've definitely got nothing against surface pleasures. so we shall see.

hot like neon fucking neon

there is a certain kind of music - one of the most definitive and popular kinds of the 2000s, and arguably one of the few truly new ones - which does not have a name. (not unlike the decade itself, come to think of it.) i know, it seems veritably impossible for this to be true, but it is.

sure, people have had to try to come up with things to call it, inevitably sweeping trans-genre portmanteaus like "electro house", "dance rock", "disco-punk," "indie/electronic", "electro-pop" and perhaps most promisingly, but ill-fatedly (too belittled, too late), "new rave." but none of these really come that close to hitting the mark. in each case these terms most properly designate something too specific for them to stand in comfortably for what must by now be accepted as a full-fledged, albeit hybrid and certainly multivalent, genre of its own.

the making time folks - who are the kings of this thing here in small-town philadelphia, end up making up their own endless, goofy, hyper-hyphenated (orjustshovedtogether) descriptors for every new party flyer.

when i've had to call this genre anything i've usually resorted to "hipster dance," which at least seems vague enough not to alienate large swaths of what i mean to talk about - and then there's the recently vogueish "blog house," which is somewhat more imprecise than it maybe suggests (is it actually supposed to refer to house music? not as far as i can tell - it seems to be used in pretty wide-ranging and indiscriminate ways.) but there are some serious problems with defining music in terms of its primary/perceived/intended audience - hipsters; bloggers (each of them more or less a stand-in for "music fans," anyway) - notably that they don't tell you much about the music, and they almost inevitably take on a derogatory tone. see: "teen-pop," "mallpunk," "yacht rock," "handbag house," "bubblegum," and "anorak pop" (if that's a term), (possibly: "backpacker hip-hop," "stoner rock" and "beardo disco." "college rock" on the other hand isn't derogatory, just meaningless.)

"blog house" has the additional problem of being sort of self-defeatingly oxymoronic, um, by which i mean that dance music (which, above all, is what this is) is by definition social music, not intended for sitting around the house (yeah, i know) and listening to on the internet. that sucks!! besides, "blog house" doesn't even have a wikipedia entry (shocka!) so it must not really exist. (i've certainly never heard it!)

anyway, it's pretty clear what the genre is: roughly, the point of intersection between pop, rock, dance, and electronic music. those are all nice broad umbrella terms, perfectly useful for what they are. (though "dance" is often vague nearly to the point of uselessness; it being basically, as i've argued before, a doublespeak substitute for "disco") and it's okay to use three or four of them in combination to describe an artist, as i've found myself doing on numerous occasions recently. but given the large and growing set of artists who are setting up shop in the considerable, roomy overlap between these four ultra-expansive genuses, owing allegiance to no one of them in particular, it would really be handy to have shorthand for the region of that intersection, which could at least serve as a starting point for further hyphenated neologisms.

for starters, you could try to identify which are the artists who trend more to one side or the other: the rapture, phoenix, mgmt and !!! on the rock side; junior senior, the go! team, the tough alliance, and maybe datarock slanting pop; simian mobile disco, mylo, justice and soulwax holding it down for electronic dance, while junior boys, royksöpp, goldfrapp, and the knife kick it electronic pop. whew, that was hard to do, and definitely imprecise, even as an example, and some of these are just the fringe cases; artists towards the outer edges of this territory i'm staking out, though definitely significant contributors to its development. you could also throw in folks with more overt hip-hop elements (m.i.a., spank rock, diplo - certainly very much a part of the same cultural milieu) and go further in the dance-pop vein (annie, robyn, erlend øye, lykke li) or the indie-pop vein (architecture in helsinki, of montreal, los campesinos!), and not forget the scene's immediate electro-clash forebears (felix da housecat, tiga, fischerspooner, adult.) there are the djs (optimo, a-trak, girl talk, dave p), producers (playgroup, maurice fulton, calvin harris, joakim), labels (modular, kitsuné, vice) bands (bonde do role, ladytron, scissor sisters, css, out hud), visionary/iconoclast solo acts (peaches, jamie lidell, muscles.)

and, of course, there's the james murphy, aka lcd soundsystem, aka 1/2 of DFA (plus tim goldsworthy) - both the remix/production team and the would-be genre-defining record label - pretty much the godfather/figurehead of all of this activity, who fits into every one of the above categories. and just might be the most important/pivotal/whatever, awesome, musical person of the decade.

and those or just the people i know and like. i haven't listened very actively to chromeo, new young pony club, klaxons, ghostland observatory, or the presets. and i'm just starting to digest the most recent crop: teenagers, crystal castles, does it offend you yeah?, hercules and love affair, neon neon.

blah blag blog. okay, so why am i bringing this up? (well, it is pretty interesting isn't it? i mean, i'm sure that this has been discussed before, given the prevalence of these artists in - it cannot be denied - the blogosphere. but i haven't really read an attempt to taxonomize or analyze in an overarching, big-picture way, what's going on here.)

for a couple years now, i've had this section of my cd shelves (er, back when i had cd shelves), which started as a small hodge-podge (le tigre, dopo yume, some dfa stuff, couple of electroclash things, whatever) wedged in somewhere abutting and imprecisely connecting the sections of mainstream dance-pop and dance-oriented electronica of yesteryear and today. as i found myself repeatedly forced to stick things in there that didn't fit anywhere else, it gradually grew into an extremely colorful (lots of pink spines!) and unruly shelf or two which was nevertheless impossible to deny a certain sense of cohesion. at this point i'm experimenting with 'alternative' methods of music storage, and have accepted a stalemate in the ongoing game of arraying my music collection as a visual/physical representation of my mental musicographical organization scheme. but it's still fun to talk about genre.

without feeling any compulsion to make explicit definitions or draw strict boundaries (you can put them wherever you like, but as usual they won't help too much), i'd reflect for a minute on what the specific qualities this music are, apart from the broad strokes of its adjacent mega-genres. certainly pastiche - an accumulation of multiple and various distinct stylistic sources - in a sense, a specific aesthetic of derivativeness - is a central (not quite defining) feature of many of these artists. yknow, yr basic postmodern schtick.

but there was pastiche-pop in the '90s too, if not, maybe, in quite the same way, too too much before that. cornershop, the beastie boys, st. etienne, pizzicato 5, cibo matto, and maybe most especially beck, among others have plenty in common with all of this stuff - dance-focused (or at least beat-based) artists who incorporated pop, rock, hip-hop, electronica and r&b, generally in a sunny, fun-loving vein. i've talked about this milieu before; no need to rehash much here.

in contrast to more recent stuff though: those '90s artists are more cutesy, even "jokey" in a fairly self-aware way. even the campiness of junior senior or the go! team feels unabashed in a way that can't be said for the arty stereolab or dimitri from paris or even shibuya kei (deee-lite is another matter, but they're of a slightly earlier epoch.) which doesn't necessarily mean that one era's music is more authentically fun than another, but there is a straightforwardness to the current stuff, especially in terms of its relationship to danceability (significantly, the culture surrounding this stuff in '90s was not really dance culture - which was more focused instead on somewhat segregated strains of electronica; raves, etc. - but rather alt/rock culture - britpop; the college rock c. the indie revolution; new york "downtown" art music scenes, among other things.)

another distinction of the '00s corpus i'm discussing is that a lot of it rocks, hard, with big stupid guitars. with the exception of garbage (pioneers, as i always maintain), it's hard to think of any '90s groups that fused pop and dance music with real rawk guitars, despite their popularity as sample fodder for big beat artists like fatboy slim and apollo 440. this could certainly be related to my point about straightforwardness, as rock often entails an earnestness and assuredness that doesn't really work aside winking cuteness. (unless it's a wink that specifically references rock, a la electric six or the darkness, who may or may not be that winky anyway.) (something could also be said about 90s and 00s eclecticist dance music in relation to the electronica of its era - trip-hop, IDM and big beat vs. the more unilaterally house-inspired 'minimal,' micro-house, techpop, neodisco and what have you.)

also, the reference points for '90s artists tended to be the 1960s, and especially what i like to talk about as an 'internationalist lounge aesthetic,' if you glean my meaning. (though straight-up '60s pop/rock too, though girl-group and motown would have to wait a bit longer for true resuscitation.) these days, on the other hand, it's all about the '80s - mostly, as mr. murphy said and i love to quote, "borrowed nostalgia for [an] unremembered" probably reductionist version of that decade - post-punk, new wave, synthpop, fringy/mannerist disco excess, etc. in the '90s, apart from obviously being too recenet to revive, one might argue that some of it was still feeling the brunt of disco backlash, a couple decades on. the 60s>90s/80s>00s dichotomy is evident all over the place, in pop culture, politics, american society in general, and this isn't the place to get into that (it's been discussed before too, for sure.) (what happened to the '70s? well, lots of things. mostly that people get that confused with the '60s a lot. also punk.)

to be honest, "pastiche" isn't all that good a word for talking about '00s hipster dance music and culture. it skews appropriationist, to be sure, but the synthesis is smoother than that (the collage aesthetic of mashups and quick cuts and endless remixes notwithstanding), and plenty of groups stick within one relatively defined style or sound (even if its a hybrid one), rather than flaunting their eclecticism. in fact, the primacy of sound and style, over compositional/lyrical content - beats, grooves, riffs, and hooks (easily snatched and recontextualized for a bit o' the ol' thrill of recognition) over memorable songs or even melody per se - is a rather curiously defining feature of 00s dance music. consider the canon: "house of jealous lovers," "losing my edge," "galang," "let's make love..." "d.a.n.c.e," "hustler," even "move your feet" and "over and over." who are the songwriters in this scene? you might point to james murphy, again, but we can't really expect the man to do everything for us, now can we?)

finally, there is truly a recognizable "scene" surrounding all of this, which i'm not sure (i guess i wouldn't know?) can really be said about that '90s stuff. there was a lot of bellyaching in the late 90s and early 00s about kids not dancing - something that has surely changed (tho, i dunno, the rapture were still whining about it two years ago in "wayuh," but who cares about the rapture anyway.) there's just critical mass. these artists are constantly remixing one another, touring together, putting each other on their curated mix compilations, etc. etc. in philly, anyway, most of them play dance parties rather than proper concerts - new rave, indeed! and sure, there's plenty to dismiss and dislike about the spazzy/dayglo myspace aesthetic, the rampant disposability of plenty of this output (many of those aforementioned remixes, to be sure), the hyperactive, compulsive download/messageboard culture, and the weirdly unconvincing brand of hedonism that accompanies a lot of it. also, who asked for an '80s revival in the first place?

thing is, stuff gets tagged eighties-throwback so often these days that it's become all-but-meaningless, if not inaccurate. i don't pretend to really remember the eighties very well (much less do i feign nostalgia), or even the earliest nineties (though i probably should.) but if it sounds like it's from the eighties, it's probably going to sound like the 2000s. and, somehow or other, that's still managing to sound pretty good. more on this to come...

hold on, the wait is over

while you have, of course, been diligently enjoying my handily compiled collected works: january 2008 edition, and awaiting review round-up vol 3: february-march (it'll be around the same length, since i was basically m.i.a. for march) - expect it soon, and henceforth they'll probably be monthly and promptly, but i've gotta at least intersperse with some original mincxlusive content, doncha think? - i have somehow written a total of fifteen bios and reviews in the last twelve days (!)

but also, during that period, as sure as the springtime, it's gradually dawned on me that 2008 in music is, like, totally upon us; exploding like the trees all over this silly city, blossoming, burgeoning, already well past the verge of shifting from a distraction into full-on brain-drain on my attention-resources. and does feel like an emphatically recent explosion too, well-past post-sxsw (where, perhaps chagrinably, i mostly stuck to old 'n knowns rather than 'bout-to-break buzz-bombs), though that's kinda a function of perspective.

i was largely checked out of new music in january-march, inundated with piles of (mostly backcatalog, mostly scandinavian, mostly c. 2004-2007) promos; playing catch-up to some extent, like you do; only occasionally encountering bona-fide '08 releases in the line of duty (white, hukkelberg, yokota if it counts, and i'll say it does.) at least once, somebody asked and i couldn't even bother to remember the single actual new album i'd purchased, attended to, and enjoyed so far this year - the mountain goats' heretic pride, on which i'll have to do a fanboy-lowdown at some point. (bottom line: took a sec to remember not every darnielle song needs to be brilliant - this might be the spottiest, which is not to say the weakest, of his hi-fi period albums, but that won't keep it from my top ten.)

plus i just haven't cultivated a desire for some that new new until now, april, as i'm back to being in philly and plugged inter the net and, after nearly a six-week lacuna, perusing a.k.a. and thereabouts (newsflash! there's a new record store in westy! actually it's a satellite of the beautiful world syndicate, which i still haven't actually been to. d'oh! well, i've got my turntable setup in my room now, so we'll see...)

actually to be honest i don't so much have the desire to be hearing new music as the sense of obligation not to fall behind. and downloading torrents only goes so far to quell the sense that that's happening anyway (luckily so far it seems to be about far enough.) why am i saying all this? why am i up at 4:01 rambling in way over-meticulous diction about ... not music, really, anyway? (and listening to the new m83 - quite nice, 'tis!) is it because, although i am certainly in the process of familiarizing myself with a hefty handful of c. 4/08 new releases, three of which i actually purchased, new, this weekend (and two of which three i've listened to - they're the ones bolded at the top of my sidebar list which if you haven't figured it out is the major primary source document for this post), i don't feel up to saying anything concrete about any of them yet, save for the ones i've already dissected for amg (most recently retribution gospel choir and the sally shapiro remix album, both of which are awesome - no surprise since they're both, to an extent, reworkings of two of my favorite albums of 2007 - and both of which i turned around in 48 hours or less)?

yeah, maybe. i do have something i want to say about hot chip (whom i saw last week) and cut copy (whose new album is either rather quite good or TOTALLY AMAZING, i haven't decided) and neon neon, and (here's the tricky part) the like...but it appears that i don't actually have the impetus to say it, just quite yet. [so that'll be next time, we hope.]

and, however, relatedly, also, i've just just as-if-inadvertently plunged back into rock-crit-o-sphere, by which i mean thinking about it. and it has nothing to do with EMP, which happened last week and i didn't even notice or know about until i looked up the dates just now. it's just, really, that i happened across posts on both simon reynolds' blog and franklin bruno's blog wherein they discuss what they've been listening to recently (well, like you do) - in the former case it's a mega-post covering some twenty-five or so items, of which i'd heard two, heard of maybe five more, and would like to hear well over half, in the latter, it's the whole blog-project of trying to review/comment on 365 albums in elevenish months. in both cases, i was struck and inspired to equal-parts envy and admiring enthusiasm by how breezily, off-handed(-seeming?)ly witty and well-worded the writing is, how engagingly, unpretentiously knowledgeable the writers, and how free and nonchalant their approach to their wide-ranging subject matter. the envy part is maybe to some degree irrational - age, experience, fame, and promo-influx-rate aside, those guys probably don't have anything on me, particularly - but the enthusiasm part is the more salient and prominent, and it's a good thing. to be excited about criticism, about the potential for critical engagement, about the value of what casual critical comment can achieve. hyeah. that's about it. also, how much these writers allow their idiosyncratic personal relationship with the music to inform and even overtly factor into their writing about it. (again, like i don't do that? well, at amg i don't, much, but that's different?)

meanwhile, my peerless peer dave bedbugs has been doing his thing over at his place - without an external writing gig at this point, he's been able to engage with (mostly new) music in (accordingly) quite different ways - and recently published a major, excellent post, characteristically epic post, both helpfully recapitulatory and considerably revelatory, titled notes on the death of rolling teenpop (r.i.p.!), which is, among other things, no less than a detailed (personalized) history of a specific (if very likely the only) strain of teenpop criticism, c. 2005-2008, which gets at many of the concepts and contradictions which were central to that conversation, and some more that should/could have been. it seems unlikely that anybody reading this who isn't already familiar with bedbugs and that history would be inspired to read it on my say-so - and i'm not quite sure how much of it is accessible to the uninitiated - enough, certainly, though it does have something of necessarily insider stance. but...read it. it's
a great piece of writing and relevant in all kinds of ways.

apropos of that, i'm currently eagerly awaiting the forthcoming ashlee simpson album, due in two weeks, which i have requested to cover for allmusic; likewise the aforementioned cut copy - on the one hand i feel it's somewhat unlikely that i'll be granted either assignment, and i'm prepared to accept that (after all, they are outside my 'officially sanctioned' purview), but it would be a thrill to do them, and i think i would bring a fairly unique and useful perspective in both cases (the ashlee particularly.) sigh. if not, it'll just give me more to write about here.

so that's what's been going on, for the most part. some things are gonna have to change around here, possibly including the entire layout of this blog - especially now that i've got the URL on my nifty new business cards, i want to make things a bit more user-friendly and explanatory - specifically in terms of the sidebar - and i also want to start including information on my dj appearances, and possibly set up info on my mixtape activities differently.

and maybe i otter get with the 2008 and start muxtaping. (or is that so the-first-week-of-april?) i've been enjoying the ones i've checked out, and unsurprisingly i love the concept, although i'm having a bit of trouble conceiving of them as mixes/mixtapes, as opposed to extremely easy-to-use streaming mp3 playlists (much better than the things i was toying around with for my 'podcasts' last year.) it's maybe a little too easy to pick and choose your listening experience in this format. also, perhaps predictably, i'm rather whelmed that the potential for actual 'mixing' and transitions is very limited, essentially nil. still, will be good for talking about songs. whenever i feel like doing that.

AMG review round-up, volume II

just a (hopefully) handy dumping ground/teaser sampler/link collection for the writing i've done at the wonderful all music guide. since 1) nobody who's interested would ever be able to track down my pieces otherwise, 2) it's a lot easier for me to access them this way, should i ever need to, and 3) just perhaps you'll take some interest in the insights and recommendations conveyed in this writing (if so, please do click through to read the full reviews!)

these are most of the artists and albums about which i wrote this january. the first installment (covering november and december) is here.

Sugababes: Three and Taller in More Ways reviews

"Sugababes' straightforwardly titled third release may have lacked a single quite as striking as "Freak Like Me," the tremendous electro-clash/mash-up cash-in smash from their breakthrough sophomore set Angels with Dirty Faces, but otherwise it improves on that album in many respects. Following the same essential template -- tuneful, R&B-inflected dance-pop with fresh-sounding but accessible productions, along with a healthy smattering of big droopy ballads -- with an expanded stylistic range...

[...] It may seem incongruous for such unabashed sentimentality and frankly conventional arrangements to coexist with electronic dance-pop so thoroughly modern in sound and sensibility -- and indeed it's easy to imagine listeners attracted by one aspect of Sugababes' pop-craft being turned off by the other. But ultimately they are two sides of a coin -- timeless if sudsy ballads and flashy novelty dance tunes -- both very much in keeping with the great interpretive pop tradition, of which Sugababes are among our most consummate and sophisticated modern exponents."

Linda Sundblad: bio and Oh My God review

"Oh My God sounds like a bit of a throwaway as an album title, but it works perfectly to reflect the handful of recurring lyrical topics (religion, sexuality, and teenagerhood) and to allude to the '80s influence that pervades the album -- the most obvious touchstones being early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, both of whom Sundblad bears a substantial resemblance to vocally as well as visually. "We're the babies/Born in the '80s," she sings in "Pretty Rebels" -- Sundblad was born in 1981, which means she was eight when Like a Prayer was released, and 26 at the time of this recording. Even if the generational math doesn't quite add up, there's a compelling sense of nostalgic juvenilia that informs both the music and lyrics, most of which deal with love and relationships. It's standard pop subject matter, of course, but Sundblad approaches it with a uniquely teenaged sensibility, alternating between enthusiasm and desperation..."

Aberfeldy: Do Whatever Turns You On review

"In 2007 they landed the distinctly '00s-style promotional coup of having one of their songs (the infectious "Summer's Gone") featured in a widely seen commercial (in keeping with a time-honored rock & roll tradition, it was an ad for Coke), but even as like-minded Europeans such as Peter Bjorn and John and I'm from Barcelona were racking up stateside accolades, Aberfeldy's 2006 sophomore album still failed to see a U.S. release. And it's a crying shame, because Do Whatever Turns You On is, if anything, more immediate than its predecessor: it's bigger, bolder and shinier, without sacrificing a single ounce of charm -- a larger recording budget meant they weren't limited to a single microphone this time out, but it still sounds wonderfully intimate and welcoming -- and most crucially, without losing their penchant for endlessly hummable indie pop melodies."

Sally Shapiro: bio and Disco Romance review

"The cover photo for the North American edition of Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance depicts the Swedish singer in winter, her cheeks rosy, her blond hair and eyebrows dusted with snowflakes, smiling to herself in spite of the chill. It's a fitting image for this undeniably wintry album, conjuring not just the glacial sweep and frosty twinkle of producer Johan Agebjörn's synthesizer fantasias, but also the faint but glowing presence in the heart of the blizzard: Shapiro's soft, fragile voice, which is so thin and devoid of inflection that it ought to be impenetrably icy, but is somehow instead as warm and enticing as a cozy fire in the dead of February. A closer examination of that cover image reveals that what look like snowflakes are in fact tiny stars, computer-generated pentagrams (though they almost look hand-drawn) that could be read as a subtle reminder that the intimacy and poignant sincerity of these songs came about, in a sense, only through layers of artifice."

R. Kelly: Double Up review

"Yes, Kelly's familiar, almost cartoonishly overstated brand of sex-obsessed misogyny is as rampant here as his increasingly eccentric humor -- more so than ever, on both counts. So if you're not of a disposition to stomach the 40-year-old (whose still-pending child pornography trial was set to commence several months after the album's release, before being delayed yet again) boasting about his plot to seduce a pair of "freaky" first cousins for a ménage à trois (in the title track), or warning listeners to steer their girlfriends clear of his restlessly prowling libido (in "Flirt": "the moral of this story is 'cuff your chick'"), this could be a painfully long and humorless listen, or worse. But cut the man a little slack, at least on record -- or allow him the indulgence of his already comically blatant perversity (at least he doesn't present himself as someone who expects to be taken very seriously) and it's either an absurd explosion of standard R&B tropes (nightclub bangers, baby-makin' slow jams, overwrought breakup songs) or simply a treasure trove of questionable-taste comedy gold."

Lucky Soul: bio and The Great Unwanted review

"Pitched somewhere in between the Pipettes' campy, winking co-optation of 1960s girl group pop and soul and Camera Obscura's more understated, less mannered evocation of same, Greenwich sextet Lucky Soul's debut album represents an exemplary model for retro revivalism in the context of modern indie pop. It hardly shies away from its readily apparent stylistic touchstones -- the timeless, immaculate popcraft of Phil Spector and Motown; the Anglified sophistication of Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw -- but neither is it slavishly imitative. Crucially, the style never overwhelms the substance, which is to say that as extravagant as the lush, period-appropriate orchestrations get -- and they're pretty extravagant, with all the horns, handclaps, strings, and auxiliary percussion (bongos, tambourines, cowbells, castanets) one could hope for -- it's all in the service of some top-notch songwriting."

Candie Payne: I Wish I Could Have Loved You More review

"In a year when everything 1960s was hip again -- at least when it came to female-fronted semi-indie pop music -- from Amy Winehouse's stylized, Motown-appropriating crossover R&B to Lucky Soul and the Pipettes' peppy girl group revivalism to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings' pedigreed retro soul, Liverpudlian singer Candie Payne emerged with a debut album that drew from an under-plundered side of that golden decade's pop landscape: the arch sophistication of British soulsters Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark and the cinematic decadence of Nancy Sinatra and Shirley Bassey. [...] Curiously, just as the scrupulously clean production approach nevertheless yields a beguilingly murky atmosphere, the profusion of '60s signifiers -- never obtrusive but always apparent -- winds up sounding unexpectedly modern, a potent cocktail of classic sounds with contemporary indie rock and electronica flourishes: the strangely familiar and the familiar made strange. For the most part, the songs themselves, while pleasant enough, don't quite hold up to the intriguing potential of their constituents, making this something of a victory of style over substance; an album that still sounds great with repeated listens, but doesn't necessarily grow much deeper."

Billie the Vision and the Dancers: bio and Where the Ocean Meets My Hand review

"Yes, the cutesy index is predictably high -- it's not irretrievably cloying (it doesn't quite reach I'm from Barcelona levels, for instance), but it's certainly pervasive enough to dissuade most anyone with a weak stomach for twee (you know who you are). Unless they're particularly good at ignoring lyrics: much of the cutesiness comes through in lead singer/songwriter Lars Lindquist's [(not Billie, though he is unmistakably a vision: a statuesque transvestite with blue eyes and shocking, fiery red-gold hair)] story-songs, most of which revolve around real or imagined encounters with fellow musicians -- the Pipettes, Erlend Øye, the Ark's Ola Salo, Jeff Buckley -- or possibly invented characters named Pablo and Lilly."

Nôze: bio and How to Dance review

"Parisian techno knuckleheads Nôze serve up a barrage of outlandish but propulsive dancefloor workouts on their second long-player.... How to Dance...offers at best a somewhat unconventional outlook on its titular concern. Its herky-jerky, mechanistic grooves -- slightly demented strains of what might broadly be termed minimal electro and microhouse, though they seem unlikely to concern themselves with subgenre niceties -- are just nervously funky enough for the floor, but they're unlikely to assuage the tentative.

...the gruff, muppet-like sprechtstimme of "Tulip Schnaps" and "Kitchen" is in a class unto itself, though in the latter case the goofy kitchen-seduction narrative and inane refrain are merely the jumping-off point for some psychotic overdriven synth and inside-the-piano mayhem."

The Ark: We Are The Ark, In Lust We Trust, State of the Ark, Prayer for the Weekend and Racing with the Rabbits reviews

"Like Scissor Sisters and the Darkness (both of whom the Ark predated by several years), they took considerable inspiration from the theatricality of '70s glam rock, especially in terms of visual styling, but musically too, with their gleaming guitar leads, frequent falsetto vocals, and liberal use of choral and orchestral accompaniment. [...] Sure, it all smacks of the ridiculous, and usually more than faintly. Salo acknowledges as much in "It Takes a Fool": "If you think I'm corny then it will not make me sorry; it's your right to laugh at me." In a sense, the Ark's willingness (and ability) to embrace that silliness, without sacrificing either their consummate musical artistry or their profoundly personal content -- their insistence on having it both ways -- is what makes their work so daring and so effective."

"Lyrically, In Lust We Trust moves beyond We Are the Ark's somewhat introspective focus on self-exploration and assertiveness for a more outward-looking but no less personal approach that effectively amounts to -- as the title suggests -- a political manifesto on sexual and romantic themes. As with Canada's similarly oriented Hidden Cameras (it's no coincidence both groups were featured on the soundtrack to John Cameron Mitchell's polysexual, controversy-mongering Shortbus), the sexual-personal is the socio-political for these guys, and even if they're not quite as graphic about it, they're certainly just as enthusiastic. Sometimes it's topical: "Father of a Son" is doubtless the highest-charting -- and most ebulliently self-vindicating -- song ever written about homosexual adoption rights, and if the gorgeous, unabashedly romantic "Disease" is truly not about AIDS (as Ola Salo, the band's openly bisexual lead singer and songwriter, has claimed), it sure sounds like it. [...] But as the spirited summing-up of the album's concluding track reminds us, even these commonplace romantic pursuits can take on a political significance: "The Most Radical Thing to Do," Salo croons, "is to love someone who loves you." If that's a sentiment you can get behind, and as long as you're amenable to hyper-meticulous, hyper-melodic post-ironic pomp-pop of a somewhat histrionic persuasion, it would be practically treasonous not to fall for this album."

"State of the Ark is a tour de force from start to finish, and one of the most perfectly-crafted pop or rock albums, Swedish or otherwise, to appear in the 2000s."

[also: "one of the finest pop albums of 2004, 2005, or 2006 -- depending on where you live and how closely you follow glitzy, chart-topping Scandinavian dance-rock"]

texas livestock: mincetapes does austin

sxsw roundup roundup
pt. 1 (tuesday-wednesday)
pt. 2 (thursday)
pt. 3 (friday)
pt. 4 (saturday-sunday)

and just for posteriority, these are the bands i (mostly) saw (best ones bolded):

A-Trak, Billy Bragg, The Blow, Bon Iver, The Clipse, DeVotchKa, Diplo, El Guincho, Explorer's Club, Freezepop, Hanne Hukkelberg, Holy Fuck, Innerpartysystem, Jeff Hanson, Jeffrey Lewis and the Jitters, Jens Lekman, Kaki King, Kelley Stoltz, Kimya Dawson, Lindstrøm, Lykke Li, The Mae Shi, Men (djing), MGMT, Okkervil River, Peter Moren, Robyn, The Ruby Suns, Shout Out Louds, She & Him, Spoon, Sway, Tally Hall, The Tough Alliance, Throw Me The Statue, Van Morrison, Was (Not Was), White Shoes and the Couples Company, Why?

sxsw roundup pt. 4: south by (not west) a.k.a. last plane from jakarta

saturday

the first three days of southby were pretty great, no doubt, but saturday practically blew them out of the water. maybe because of a stacked lineup for the final day of the conference - though it hadn't seemed especially more promising - more likely because we'd finally gotten the pacing and rhythm of sxsw down, as tends to happen on the last day. also, we got our earliest start yet, so as to pack in that much more.

started at probably the best day party of the week, the seattle-themed function at the lovely palm door (which, fittingly, had a vague sort of seaside b&b feel to it, with its painted wood and exposed rafters), featuring very tasty free "northwest-style" food, free drinx, excellent schwag including emp rock trivia card decks, and, best, a noon-o-clock set from throw me the statue, who gave easily one of the best performances i saw all the week, especially in the rock-band category. totally sweet, fun, bouncy, hooky, energetic pop-squawk-rawk. and hey, that goofily kinetic bell-player is my buddy (and former bandmate) aaron - so great to see him and to see him making good on the rock'n'roll dream. good lookin' out! by the way, though they were plenty loud, this was the only set of the week for which i didn't put in my ear plugs.

we decided to skip the block-long line for the rachael ray party (and the hour-long wait for black moth super-digitalism at stubb's) and went back to the current radio broadcast corner to make some t-shirts (and some more buttons - elvis c., crossword, cabbage, warholized hillary, sister rosetta tharpe.) nava's says no topless frying, which is rule #3 of her apartment. you'll probably see what mine says soon enough. befriended some michiganders in line (hyperkinetic stereokids) who made a flint happens shirt. then to the fort in search of free ice cream (sandwiches!), free drinks (green yuck!), and a wristband for nava, and also a david banner
set that never materialized. (not sure what happened there.) we waited around anyway though, and soon lykke li came on, looking much fresher and more confident than when we'd seen her earlier, and played a substantially more enjoyable (though not all that many songs longer) set that considerably improved my opinion of her, so i'm glad we caught it.

after that though we skedaddled to lambert's to finally watch the explorer's club, whom i'd narrowly missed seeing twice so far. it was well worth the wait and effort, as they're so sunny and good-natured and goofy on stage that it's pretty impossible not to have a good time watching them (with free corn mini-muffins to boot!) their (mid-to-late period) beach boys fixation is so over-the-top it's almost preposterous, but they've got what it takes to pull it off - upwards of three fully competent vocalists, a general genially scruffy appearance including at least one dude with shaggy blond shoulder-length locks, a trove of secret-weapon instruments from lap-steel to sleighbells, and, crucially, some pretty darned effective melodies. not sure if anything quite tops "forever" (which is itself an undeniable pastiche), but several of 'em came close, and if nothing else their set-closing "johnny b. goode" cover (which had me and n off our stools and dancin') cut to the good-vibes essence of rock'n'roll.

next stop the fire hall (or something), where a small circle was huddled in rapt attention around local-ish (dallas?) hip-hop posse ddc, one of whose members (though not the one in the oversized wonderbread t-shirt) declared himself the greatest rapper ever, past or future. well all right. they were pretty sweet, and i'm looking forward to checking out their mixtape, but we were there to see sway, the british-born/ghanaian-raised/uk-reppin' rapper who's probably my favorite mc, and whom i never particularly expected to be five feet away from. his set was shortish but packed, including several highlights from this is my demo - "little derek," with the audience echoing the end of each chorus line, credit-card debt anthem "flo fashion," anti p2p diatribe "download," and of course "up your speed," for which all the place names were changed to austin ("up your speed") or texas ("change gear"), which sort of confuses the driving conceit - some stuff presumably from the upcoming signature, like the goofy but neat "say it twice" (on which he 'repeats everything he says'); a couple of a cappellas and a freestyle or two; lots of audience engagement (mostly getting us to say his name a lot of times); and much mileage taken from the fact that 'sway' rhymes with 'u.k.' and (for his freestyle on crowd-chosen topics) 'rachael ray.' being full of yourself is more or less allowed (/encouraged) in hip-hop, so i can't really hold that against him. anyway, he's just as charismatic and fun and technically impressive in person. hope he does manages to do okay here in the states... if any british rapper could make it he's probably the one.

speaking of rachael ray, we went to her party next - there was no food left by this time, so getting in wasn't too hard (though, i guess, that kind of defeated the purpose), but there were pre-mixed mojitos that, as nava said, tasted just like mojitos except that they weren't good. impressive culinary feat, that. there was also holy fuck, who sounded pretty cool and funky though i couldn't really see them that well through the crowd. (looked like they were mostly fiddling around with things on tables, but in a more energetic and interesting-to-watch way than that typically implies.) there was also dj efrin ramirez, aka pedro from napoleon dynamite, though i sure wouldn't have recognized him - but he held it down pretty well when we were there/leaving, including a good remix of beck's "guero" and an excellent mashup of "closer" and "in da club." and there was ms. ray herself, who took the stage to wish us goodbye and hope that our minds had been blown.

pretty good so far. then it got better. we biked east of downtown to the french legation museum, where one of the best lineups of the week was serenading the beautifully green and spacious grounds of the former seat of local government. we'd rsvp'd but there was enough space for anybody to just walk in, grab a $4 hamburger (skip the epic beer line though) and a free ice cream snack, and lay out on the grass - as we did for most of she & him's very pretty, if hardly riveting, decidedly classic-sounding set - or take a seat under the tent, as we did for okkervil river. actually, we sat (on the ground, forward of the many rows of seats) for about ten minutes before the set started, but by the time the band took the stage we were up on our feet, and pumped. oh man. i'd seen okkervil twice, and knew they put on an awesome show, but i'd forgotten just how tremendously, emotionally intense they are, in the best possible way, with will sheff seemingly pouring every ounce of his being into his singing and playing, and the rest of the band right there alongside him. this may have been particularly impassioned, being a hometown show, but i still don't know how he does it, especially since they had another gig (at stubb's) starting in a little under two hours after they finished this set. it wasn't a particularly long set - the whole party had been running late, for one thing - but it was action-packed, kicking off with "westfall," ripping through several from the last album ("plus ones," "unless it's kicks," and "our life is not a movie or maybe" - whose title, i hadn't realized, is apparently meant to preface the first line of the song), and the rockers "the latest toughs" and "for real." "movie" and "for real," in particular, are just such cleverly, powerfully constructed songs, in ways that translate so well to live setting, with the band wringing every drop of tension and energy out of them. damn, what a great band...

let's see... then we met a norwegian guy in the line for the men's room (don't know if i'd ever seen gendered port-a-potties before - they were even color-coded, pink and blue), who turned out to live a block or two away from where bobby had lived in san francisco. by the time kimya dawson went on the tent had cleared out a fair amount, and we took some chairs towards the back for probably the gentlest and sweetest (and funniest) set of the week. kimya may somewhat resemble a big baby - as she almost overheard somebody saying about her a little too loudly over the hushed crowd - but i'd like to see her actual baby, whose name is panda. probably the best part of her set were several songs from her forthcoming childrens album, including "alpha-butt" (an alphabet song of farts and butts) and song about us being animals too. also her closer, where an interstitial cover of "on the road again," which at first seemed to be an appropriate appropriated chorus turned out to be the beginning of an extended 'impression' of changing stations on the road-trip radio.

and then it was saturnight. quick bite at progress with matt, then off to see hanne hukkelberg at emo's iv. actually she was at emo's jr. (my mistake), which meant it took a while to get in, not because of people lining up to see her, but for the raveonettes/donnas/x lineup happening later on at the connected emo's (main). so we missed the beginning of her set ("berlin" and "cheater's armoury," i gathered from paper-plate setlist), and the room was noisy with street-noise and slowly-filtering-in bar talkers - in all a markedly poor venue choice - but it's okay because everything about the set itself was simply stunning. for such a seasoned player, hanne's not much of a performer, but her shyness draws you in, and introversion suits her music anyway. every member of her band (jazzy drummer, sick fake-hollow-body guitarist, bassist and a very impressive harmony vocalist/multi-instrumentalist) was technically great, and they played really well together, fleshing out the odd and intimate sound-world of the album (most of the set was from rykestraße 68, plus "ease" and maybe one other from little things.) dramatic conclusion of the pixies cover and "ticking bomb," which packs so much into its short running time it's kind of overwhelming. she's truly something special, and it was a treat to get to see her even in suboptimal conditions. go norway.

things did get a bit derailed at that point. nava and i went to check out volume, where flosstradamus, cool kids, a-trak, etc. were scheduled to appear in a half hour or so, and got in so easily (to a funky but only half-full club) that i decided to leave and come back in a bit, so as to check out innerpartysystem, the suburban phillyites i'd at one point been scheduled to play a gig with. as per katehawk[atwork?]'s insistence that everybody should see them. i am glad i saw them - they play a kind of u2-intense, darkly shiny, melodramatic electronic dance rock with a swanky, flashy stage-light show and a big-league professionalism rare at sxsw back-patio tent gigs, and i was duly impressioned, though it's probably not something i could stand to listen to for more than twenty minutes at a stretch - but it turned out to be a mistake as when i returned to volume not a half-hour later there was suddenly a mega-line, mass confusion, and seemingly dwindling likelihood of getting into the apparently now-at-capacity club.

i found myself without a great contingency plan for that slot (i made it through the whole festival without actually carrying a schedule, or anything more than a long-sleeved waist-tied shirt, to weigh myself down), but figured i'd go check out tally hall, a fave band of mark's who i figured might be entertaining at the least. actually it was by far my least favorite set of the day, which isn't necessarily saying much, and is also partially due to the staggeringly overheated buffalo billiards upstairs room where they were playing, but... yeah, they were just kind of bland and musically uninteresting and utterly un-groovy, and not even funny (not that i could really understand the words, which is a problem for this kind of group), cute outfits and nifty introductory video notwithstanding. oh well, can't win 'em all.

was totally made up for by the next band, white shoes and the couples company, an incomprehensibly anachronistic indie pop outfit from indonesia, jakarta (as they say it.) "indonesia has many islands!" a giddily slippery bobby shouted out after one of their songs. not only are these guys from halfway around the world, they seem like they're from about four decades in the past - on the other hand the cultural reference points are so up for grabs that it's hard to say just how much winking calculation (some, surely?) is involved in their pitch-perfect evocation of a particular late-sixties internationalist lounge-chic aesthetic, in everything from their faded press photos and period-appropriate semi-formal wardrobe (white suits; the adorably boyish drummer sported a bowtie and a floppy bowl-cut) to their unabashed exotica-flavored lite-disco and easy-listening grooves. lead singer/dancer/finger-snapper aprilia apsari's hundred-watt beam (puts even rachael ray to shame) certainly wasn't letting slip any inkling of convoluted post-colonial semiotic self-awareness. nevermind that though - she and the band as a whole (grinning and funky-dancing pint-sized bassist, sweetly demure pianist/violinist, endearingly dopey acoustic guitarist - unfortunately the lead guitarist was missing due to late visa clearance) put on a pitch-perfect, flawlessly good-natured performance, complete with an extended, jokey swing-style drum solo. and we were eating it up - it's hard to say whether the band or the audience was having a better time, but it was certainly a pretty magical moment.

and then there was time for just one more set. i'd been hoping for a finale that might approach the out-of-the-blue awesomeness of last year's junior senior gig, and after a bit of deliberation i stuck with my inclination and found it, for sure, in the form of was (not was) out-of-retirement appearance at la zona rosa, which was not merely (as i expected) entertaining and unpredictable but (as i probably should have expected) pretty much mindblowingly great on just about every level. as the grinning, dredded, shade-wearing and be-hatted don was informed us, this was the band's first gig in texas in twenty years and their first time playing with all three of their original vocalists since 1992 - they're (back) together now having recorded what will be their first album in eighteen years. but they hardly sounded dusty.

who is this band again? was (not was) are a project spearheaded by the fictional (white) brothers don and david was, featuring some seriously soulful (black) r&b vocalists (notably sweet pea atkinson and sir harry bowens, who for this gig were seriously decked out in natty three-piece suits and fedoras) and assorted other mostly detroit-based musicians (as don made sure to point out), who in this case included a completely sick (black) electric guitarist (randy jacobs), a no-slouch-either (white) saxist, and, freaking, james gadson, a drum legend (shame on you wikipedia!) whose credits include ray charles, bill withers, marvin gaye, diana ross, etc. etc. i first heard them via my dad's cassette copy of are you okay?, their 1990 swansong (until now), which i mostly dug for the oddball lyrics and weirdo sing-speaking of songs like "i feel better than james brown." also g. love e. (as he was known then) rapped on their cover of "papa was a rolling stone." they turned up again in the early 2000s as an inclusion on the first disco (not disco) compilation (hmm, title?), first shot fired in the hipster reclamation of forgotten '80s semi-disco semi-punk weirdness, and they've also recently shown up in the dj mixes of hipsterdance figureheads tim sweeney and james murphy. so where were the hipsters? watching x or black moth super rainbow or dr. dog or the tough alliance (ha, joke's on them), i guess.

they certainly weren't at this show (at least not the young hipstery ones), where the crowd (not huge, but respectable) was decidedly older and boomerier than your typical sxsw audience, which is only part of what set this set decidedly apart from the rest of the week. i was trying to come up with the right comparison - there was definitely something of the stop making sense-era expanded talking heads about it (say no more!), if david byrne (who in this case would correlate to flutist/vocalist david was, the author of those weirdball lyrics and by far the schlumpiest dresser on stage, though it fit his mildly manic, off-kilter persona) was mostly relegated to the background; an equally semi-valid reference point might be the steely dan of the showboating, talent-studded early '90s reunion tours. actually, w(nw) are in many ways kind of like the dan of the '80s - a point driven home by the fact that don's real last name is fagenson - though ultimately, i think, much more good-natured, and certainly more consistently dance-oriented, if also even weirder and spazzier. whatever - you could also compare was (not was) live to a less outlandish, reined-in george clinton/p-funk gig, or to the most righteously grooving wedding funk band ever.

i'll admit that the new songs (single "crazy water," the funkier "your luck won't last") didn't quite overwhelm me, though i'll give em some time. but they came through with the old jams, including the hits "walk the dinosaur" and "wheel me out," and "i blew up the united states," which medleyed into both "sunshine superman" and "superfly." and pretty much everything got extended with much funky soloing etc. etc. i didn't even mind too much that we'd missed "papa was a rolling stone" and (all but the final few moments of) "i feel better than james brown" - apparently this was one set that actually started on time, and lasted until the very end of the allotted hour; the band seemed like they'd have been happy to keep on blowing. just means i'll have to catch them when they come around on tour. sweet!

oh, it wasn't quite all over...we tried for a minute to get into this one party, and then this other party, where matthew was already inside, and which turned out to be perez hilton's party, for what that's worth - funnily, it was back at the palm door, where we'd started out the day, and nobody seemed to know what was going on. it later turned out that robyn had played there (i think earlier than when we arrived) and n.e.r.d. and dragonette (among many others) played later, but for some reason there seemed to be just a dj spinning prince and daft punk while we were outside, trying half-heartedly to get in. i'm not sure but i think we could have made it - i mean, they let taylor hanson in (and a-trak, such a nice jewish boy) - but by that point there'd been enough confusion, and matt came out (with a bag of liquid "schwag" including the new not-yet-available izze flavor, peach, omg, which he was pretty excited about) and we went home. well, first we went to magnolia, where our wristbands weren't good enough to beat the wait but it was well less than an hour anyway, and we went home happy and full of quesos and fish tacos, and glorious ringing in our ears (well, figuratively in my case, thanx muso. plugs.)

sunday

sxsw was over, but we stuck around town for another day rather than rushing for the crowded and pricejacked airport. and we slept in until nearly 1pm, but we still packed in an excellent full day of classic (more or less) austin activities: brunchish at the hallowed salt lick barbeque a bit of a ways out in the hill country, jumping on the trampoline in bobby's borrowed backyard (whilst strumming billy bragg and paul simon songs), strolling down south congress to thrift western shirts and pause in a candy store for gummy fruit, and later on taking in a movie (in bruges) and a final round of nachos and fish tacos at the awesome alamo draft house, before a final round of political conversation with some of the obama folks back at bob's. man, another nearly perfect day... i think it's about time for me to get back to texas.

sxsw roundup pt. 3: i'm not that into music

friday

started off (musically) where thursday had ended - with billy bragg, this time doing a quick three-song set for live broadcast on "free yr radio," though i'm still not sure what that is despite the considerable amount of time i spent in contact with their promotional machinery. this time nava was even awake. there was a delicious soundcheck tease of "to have and have not," and maybe something else, but the set was mostly a repeat of two new songs he'd done last night - the not-quite-xtc-ish "farmboy" and the allegedly title-less clash one - and some of the same stories to boot, but he did treat us with an awesome "waiting for the great leap forward," which he introduced as a sing-along despite then changing nearly every line from the recorded version, including some special "sxsw exclusive" versions. good man good man. oh yeah, we also heard/saw she & him (m. ward and zooey deschanel) play there, though we were mostly too busy making buttons to notice. (i made robyn and jens buttons.)

and then we saw jens! (lekman). well, first peter moren, of björn & john sxsw ubiquity fame. was cute - he did one pb+j song, "paris 2004" - but also just kind of odd as a solo performer. he just walked off stage towards the end of his last song. was hoping for a full-band lekman set, but he just had one female accompanist (on bongos) instead of five. that turned out to be just fine though, making it a little more intimate and off-the-cuff feeling. he's just as charismatic and endearing a performer as bragg is, maybe even more so, and his banter feels less stagy and scripted - he tells the same stories over and over too of course, but he at least acknowledges it, in the unmistakably jonathan richman-esque self-dialogue intro to "postcard to nina" ("tell that story just one more time, jens." besides "nina," he did most of the highlights from kortedala (though not my faves, "shirin" and, what i was really hoping for, "your arms around me,") as well as "black cab" and the so-so "hammer hill." best part, maybe, was the sparse, kalimba-accompanied arthur russell cover ("a little lost"), though bobby didn't like it. but the set list is really beside the point, since just watching him smile to himself is as subtly thrilling as about anything you could hope hear.

had promised nava we'd take it easy on the music, or at least the rushing-around, for the afternoon, so after finishing up our semi-free beers and failing to win shoes playing washers (?) there at club de ville we headed to a parking garage cross-town to see about getting some ice cream and swimming pool action. of course. well turned out the ice cream cost and the pool line was daunting, so we stayed in the shade and played some shuffleboard - five games of it in fact, of three rounds each, which was enough to convince them we deserved free shoes even though we couldn't quite squeak out three wins in a row (even playing against bobby who was attempting to throw his games.) the vaunted santogold was also playing in the parking lot (as well as szwerogold), but we didn't really pay any attention to her, so i can't comment on that.

it was a pretty low-key evening musically as well, though i did bop around a bit at the beginning - catching five or six songs from jeff hanson (including my hands-down favorite, "this time it will"), whose impossibly high, frail, angelic voice (sadly, no match for the bar conversation and street noise wafting into emo's iv) makes for a pretty unsettling disconnect with his fairly pedestrian, quite burly, decidedly non-female physical presence; a couple extended jams from kelley stoltz, who may have some decent pop writing chops (i wouldn't know, as they weren't on display in the last ten-fifteen minutes of his set) but isn't quite good enough to justify so much aimless rocking out, harmonica-slide or no; and a perplexing tune or two from the ruby suns, who dressed like frolicking hippy schoolchildren (basically, like my twelve-year-old self - complete with flowing tie-dye shirts and a plastic bone necklace - n.b. the photo above is actually from a different show), acted like they hadn't quite grasped the concept of performing for an audience, and played as though they could have used a few more band members, multitasking instruments and sometimes switching mid-song for no apparent reason. well, i'll withhold judgment until i hear the record, i guess.

i'm ready to pass judgment, however, on the ballyhooed MGMT, whose 10pm set at stubb's was probably the most disappointing of the acts i was somewhat actively anticipating. actually i guess my expectations weren't too high, since the album had so far failed to excite me much. in fairness, i think the sound was pretty poorly mixed, as you could barely hear the keyboard parts (which are definitely the group's strongest point), but they seemed pretty content being a parody of a big-hair arena rock band (this must have been one of the biggest crowds they'd ever played to.) they seemed so young up there, like a bunch of play-acting kids - which is all well and good, but the songs just didn't seem to be there. "time to pretend" and "electric feel," pretty much the only songs i recognized, sounded good enough, but the wankery:melody ratio everywhere else was way off-balance. and they pointedly, it seemed to me, didn't play their best song, "kids," which would have gone a long way to appeasing me (since i was more or less counting on it as pay off for a hard hour or standing on my feet.) on the other hand, the beer-swigging dudes in front of me said the band was awesome, so what do i know?

from there we hedged our bets and lost out both at getting into dr. dog/tapes and tapes (way-long line) and a-trak/cool kids (could maybe have made it, but not in time to be worth it), though i did run into aaron of inflight rock band/throw me the statue. anyway, we made sure to be at pangaea early enough to avoid the rush for robyn that, as far as i could tell, never quite materialized. like amy phillips, we rolled into the (creepily glitzy) club just as the vines were hammering out a clueless cover of "ms. jackson" that after a minute came of less as painful than just plain hilarious. then they yammered something about just wanting to make a lot of money and get all the girls, played one final song (whether it was one of their hits i really couldn't tell ya), during which at one point the lead singer sort of fell over or threw himself into the drum set or something. and you know, i've gotta say i like their style of rocking out a lot more than i like mgmt's - at least it's got some pop, some pep, some rhythmic propulsion, and the songs are short.

but whatever. we were there for robyn, robyn robyn robyn. mmhm. they futzed around with her equipment for a long time, and then she started playing. not sure if the tech issues had truly been fixed - it sounded okay mostly though her vox were too quiet (in her monitor too, after several requests), and one on song ("handle me"?) the bass was suddenly chest-shakingly intense, but she still seemed kinda distracted and annoyed about it, or about something. yeah, robyn's a total pro, and she still put on a great show and got everybody riled up and smiled up, and i'm sure if there were any doubters there they were converted, so in that sense she did what she came there for, but it still seemed like a shamefully badly organized affair. this was her only showcase (though she also played at an invite-only day party in cedar street where apparently she had to do much of the set without the electronics, and at the perez hilton party - i wonder how well the tech worked there), and they couldn't even get her to soundcheck properly or figure out in advance how to make her (seemingly quite involved) setup work?

eh, i know i'm just spoiled for having gotten to see her at her first u.s. gig in new york, but there was strikingly little of the mutual warmth and magic that marked that show here - she barely talked to us, for one thing. no major changes to the set list either, though the mid-set covers medley was pretty nice, including not just "push it" and "sexual eruption" but a few more too that i can't think of now, though the latter was definitely the highlight, as she reworded it: "i'm gonna take my time...i'm gonna get mine before he gets his." i did notice that "dream on" was on the set list, but they cut it due to time constraints (presumably.) too bad... i know, i shouldn't complain, right?

the night was not quite over: we bundled up our energy and headed a little ways away to the blender magazine party, a decidedly hip affair that was going down in a warehouse in an unassuming residential area. the free drinks (pineapple vanilla vodka) and assorted schwag were nice enough, but what we really went for was the dance party, and although the notoriously reserved sxsw crowd did take a little warming up, they did eventually get into it. as well they better damn well should have, considering who was rocking the decks: diplo (philly's own!) and a-trak (maybe my fave dj, both live and on the stellar dirty south dance mixtape), trying out a one-time-only (?) experiment of switching back and forth after one track apiece. i quickly lost track of who was playing what, and it really didn't matter, as it all flowed gorgeously, with plenty of my own favorites getting aired (notably lrd's "jacques your body," stone roses' "fools' gold," de la soul's "saturdays," missy's "pass the dutch") along with lots more i didn't recognize. sadly, this party too had to be cut short, ending at 4am, maybe an hour and fifteen after d and a had taken the stage (and by which point they'd been joined by, in addition to the pottymouthed emcee blaqqstar, kid sister and a host of others whose relevance it was difficult to gauge.) damn. good to shake it with those guys.

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.

sxsw roundup pt. 1: the cough alliance (is an anagram of the el guincho canal)

just got back from awesome austin, tx, where i rocked my second annual (so far) south by southwest, this time taking in upwards of forty artists (catching about 36 full or nearly-full sets) over four very full days. most of it spent with three superlative companions: my ever-endearing once-and-future roomie, consummate host and itunes playlist compositor par excellence matthew "dominic" stangoni; my irrepressible, hilary-hatin' cousin bobby "billy bob" gravity, on a long-deserved (and semi-stealthy) furlough after a year of barackin' around the clock; and my tolerant super-trooper of a nap-happy music-appreciation gal navacado rockswild sxswergold. i'd say it was a blur - four days of biking helter-skelter around downtown, eating tacos, imbibing giveaway drinkproduct, spraying on sunscreen, waiting in lines (tho not nearly so much as last year, since thanks to the almighty, er mostly-mighty wristbands), receiving hand-stamps from bouncers, to no evident purpose, coughing up an impressive reserve of phlegm left over from the sickness i'd mercifully all-but-overcome by the start of the festival, and eventually, after many sole-sacrificing hours of standing and dancing and watching and standing and dancing, driving back home, two-to-a-seatbelt, and crashing out on matthew's futon to recuperate from between, roughly, 4am or so until around noon. yeah...it'll be a blur soon enough.

but for the moment it's still plenty vivid; i've still got the logic-puzzle information overload of venue names, cross-streets, set times, rsvp statuses, and reshuffling priorities buzzing around my mental circuitry, i've still got the sense-memory of colors, tastes and sounds, the as-yet-unanecdotified remembrance of recountable occurences, the post-party debrief detail-recall of setlists and banter. so i better jot something down here before it all goes fuzzy. i'll do what i can to mediate between narrative chronicling and merciful brevity:

tuesday
got into town. fine texas welcome in the form of bobby's leftover brisket and ribs from smitty's. wi-fi-netted our lists of show picks at the green muse for as long as my itchy eyes could take, then took semi-respite in the form of a yoga class (led by nicolette of sxsw 07 fame yay!) at their multi-purpose non-church friendlychristian meeting space, mosaic - which was good except i had to give up towards the end. matt and i picked up our wristbands and some goodflow 'n kombucha, but that's about all i was good for that day, so we retreated to his apartment for green chile tamales and an early bedtime. just as oh well since we hadn't been able to secure tix to the free yo la/my morning show that night. (matt did sneak out to see a certain bald four-letter celebrity dj.)

wednesday

got to red-eyed fly a bit late for the explorer's club, definitely too late for the free bloody marys (which were probably gone by 11:03 am), but enjoyed the sunshine, promo neon-pink MGMT shoelaces, and a couple numbers from a tweedy/petty-alike, tom freund, who sang first w/ just stand-up bass and an older drummer who kept dropping his sticks, then with gtr+bass and a different drummer who seemed to possibly not have had any sticks in the first place. took a bit of a reconnaisance jaunt around town, picking up "vip" "laminates" at the pure volume ranch (right next door to where aberfeldy were not gonna be playing that night after all boo hoo boo hoo) and wristbands for the fort, listening from without as the whip whipped it good within. then to emo's where we heard the final song from the raveonettes (purty sweet) and then finally got our first proper set of sxsw08: the mae shi.

actually i almost forgot about them and said it was why? which isn't to say the shi were forgettable - they were fun and young and punky and shambly and had cute stage antics (canvas parachute - no apes and androids tho) and were a decent substitute for not managing to catch no age again later on in the week. but why? were just top-notch. it was great to hear some almost-favorites from elephant eyelash (tracks 1-3, if i'm not mistaken), but maybe even greater getting to take a first-stab at parsing yoni's new beat-leet floetry live, before i get around to grokking their new record i didn't even know existed (which would turn out to be a recurring theme of the week.) vibes as part of the drumset = clutch.

the blow seemed a bit flustered and bewildered; she whined about her short set time and kvetched about the posturing of sxsw attendees in a way that was meant as a performance schtick - complete with play-along "bingo card" - but came off as uncomfortably honest in a not-quite-intentional way. so khaela wasn't quite on top of her game (she dropped quite a few lines too) but she's still plenty charming and too refreshingly down-to-earth to want to acknowledge as 'quirky.' and her songs are great.

we hung around at emo's for the free popsicles (they were out of pistachio and coconut so i settled for watermelon) and caught el guincho, a mildly manic, muppety-looking spaniard who hammered away at a single drum that awesomely matched his bright red pants. (not to mention the scarlet macaw on his album cover.) there were more sounds emanating from the couple of boxes and gadgets on his slapdash table, and he would occasionally sing along with his looped vocal samples, but the combined effect was pretty unidentifiable - discernably spanish with vaguely cha-cha-style grooves and looped flamenco-like exhortations, but far from traditional in any sense, not even as electronic dance music (which, ultimately, is how you'd have to classify it, if you'd have to.) really fun, reminiscent of animal collective in ways that didn't actually annoy me (which is impressive) and basically great semi-abstract background music for a summery technicolor rave.

that was the end of wednesday: day, and instead of taking the conventional breather before wednesday: night, bobby and i strode across town to try our luck at getting into the van morrison gig. we got in probably two or three songs into the set, though to tell you the truth it was pretty tough to distinguish one song from another. i could only understand at most a quarter of what van was singing, though just about every song seemed to have something to do with trains. anyway, there's no denying it was him - that voice was unmistakable from the moment we walked through the room, even if standing (still) there on the stage he could have passed for any number of the portly be-hatted older denizens of the crowd that were preventing us from really getting a good look at him. eh, it was nice enough to listen to. i've never been a big van fan, but it's still kind of cool to have seen him, even if we did wait in vain for "and it stoned me" or indeed anything recognizable from the three or so albums of his i've ended up with regardless.

seeing freezepop was a bit of a time-filler but i'm glad we did, as they were very enjoyably goofy and amateurish, and there was even a sizable crowd that was fairly amped up about them (and prague is a pretty nice club.) they looked pretty ridiculous/cool, with their two (2) keytars and liz enthusiasm's hot pink dress, but they didn't seem to be especially technically proficient. (one of the guys joked that they couldn't play "less talk more rock" - their guitar hero 'hit' - live because it was too fast, and judging from their performance of it i don't think he was actually joking.) was nice to hear some older stuff too - "boys on film" cover and "stakeout" (from the album of theirs i first heard via a random unlabelled cd-r found somewhere.) oh yeah, they closed with a cover of "the final countdown," which i didn't even know.

just after that set, nava arrived in town, earlier than anticipated, and we bummed around a little in search of the next activity. peeked into the k records showcase, but set times were changed around so mahjonng weren't on then and saturday looks good to me weren't either because i guess they cancelled, so it was this guy city center who said it was his second ever show (the first was at cmj) and it was kind of cool but too noisy for the navi so we walked up the street to see jeffrey lewis instead. and the jitters, as he apparently calls his drummer and bassist and the funny woman who played pennywhistle and a tiny little casio keyboard. happily we caught most of "will oldham williamsburg horror" or whatever that song is called, which was great, and the rest of his set was real fun too (we must have missed the first half of it though), including one of his crass covers and a "film" (with picture book accompaniment) called "creeping brain" that nava said was her favorite part of the festival and was definitely a highlight for me too. gotta remember to see jeff more often - he's definitely awesome live even if his records don't quite do it.

stuck around too for kaki king, whose set veered all over the place from bluesy/folky acoustic picking to straight-up indie rock to mathy/jazzy/proggy muscular post-rock/classical. undeniably impressive musicianship (especially the super sick acoustic guitar v. drums battle in the last song) and often lovely-sounding but a little too willfully eclectic (and the songs not quite interesting enough) to quite gel as a whole.

we were pretty tired by now - it was only day one after all, we hadn't got our stamina up yet - so we only stood for the first fifteen minutes or so of lindstrøm's set at the thirsty nickel (and only danced for a subset of that - hans-peter took his time with transitions, leaving us hanging in space for quite a while between beatdrops), then retreated to sit down in the back of the club, where i somewhat disengagedly watched the beginning of one of the jackass movies, muted, on the bar tv, while lindstrøm's hazy, swirly grooves washed over me - quite a surreal, disconnected experience.

soon enough it was time for a final slog across town and up a little hill to karma, the off-the-beaten-path venue for the first sxsw appearance about which i was truly excited: the tough alliance. they fulfilled expectations perhaps too fully, and turned out to be just as obstreperous, impertinent, and iconoclastic as you could anticipate, deliberately subverting concert conventions by showing up late (maybe not deliberate, but unconventional by sxsw standards) and "playing" a six-songs-short set that pretty much consisted of them mugging, 'dancing,' and generally goofing around on stage, only occasionally even bothering to lip-sync, in front of projected videos of dolphins, waves and carnival dancers, while their records played. it was actually pretty intense. the one dude mostly just kind of stands there with his mouth open and his arms in the air, shaking spasmodically. one of them took apart a mic stand and started banging the pieces together. at one point (when there were strings in the music) one of them mimed playing a violin with a mic stand and microphone as a bow. they didn't talk at all, though they did acknowledge the small but enthusiastic audience in their dancing, coming down into the crowd and pulling somebody on stage at one point. actually, one of the nicest things about it was the (pre-recorded) transitions between the songs, which flowed very smoothly. the whole set was taken from the new school, in album order (songs 1-4 plus "neo-violence") except for "silly crimes" added in the number three slot. was it a disappointment? perhaps, frankly, but only in the ways that i more or less expected. if it was another group, i wouldn't mind so much that they're more interested in inscrutable performance art that deconstructs the very underlying concepts of "performance" than they are in just putting on a good show, but their music is just so damn good that it kind of hurts to see it, in a sense, mocked and dismissed by its very creators. at least it was great to dance to... (and yeah, i'd go to another tta show in a second, just to hear the music.)