Husky :: "History's Door"

No one has played a piano as delicately as the opening to Husky's "History's Door" since Sufjan waxed philosophical about a UFO sighting near Highland, Illinois back in 2005. The progression here rings of the neo-folk movement that rocketed bands like Mumford and Sons and Dry The River to the top of the building. Husky pursue the same set of imperatives as the aforementioned bands, a sparse arrangement that unwinds toward something more and more uplifting. The final act features rolling drums and a doubling of the chorus that features at least one memorable, pseudo-falsetto note. The sanctimony is never far from the backing vocals and the seriousness of purpose, all enlivened with enough to keep the elegiac qualities just a bit at bay. Put another way, if this is what sorrow sounds like, sorrow doesn't sound so bad.

Listen :: Husky - "History's Door"

[Elevator 2012] :: Bands On The Rise

A recurring feature of music journalism this century is the mindless prediction of who will "blow up" in the following year. This always feels a little odd coming from mainstream outlets like Rolling Stone, Spin and the BBC. A little like Fox News complaining about the "mainstream media", you think, but you are the mainstream media. If these artists are appearing in your pages, Spin Magazine - let's shatter the fourth wall here - they are already "blowing up". In fact, you're helping that happen. Which means, the only people you can trust on the eve of the 2012 calendar year are relatively small publications with no specific skin in the game and no control of the outcome. That's us. See how we did last year and with regard for the bands that might just make it real this year, in no specific order, your Elevator Bands of 2012 after the jump.

Top 50 Songs of 2011 :: 20-11 [You could be my luck]

Welcome to our annual countdown of the 50 best songs of the calendar year. Songs must be from an EP, LP or demo released during 2011, no band may appear twice. Each post title contains a lyric from one of the ten songs to follow, a hint and a hook that stuck out clearly in this group. Today, we count down 20-11.

20. Kyla La Grange - "Walk Through Walls"



In a hospital waiting room last January I opened an email from the publicist of a heretofore unknown British singer, Kyla La Grange. It was singer-songwriter stuff, I thought. In short, this would be instantly detestable. And then, like the great Eli Cash suggested, what if it wasn't? What if a tiny blonde girl with a guitar wrote the single biggest chorus of 2011?  "Walk Through Walls" was built for the sky, winking influences to Kate Bush (see: "It's the year of Kate Bush" joke, on going, 2005-present) and so full of life that it could not be ignored. "Walk Through Walls" suggested an ability to transmute physical spaces which was exactly what the waifish La Grange did in 2011. But she didn't just walk through these barriers, she began by destroying all of them.

19. Capital Cities - "Safe and Sound"

No one had more fun in 2011 than Capital Cities and their horn-heavy, electro-single, "Safe and Sound". It was a slam the first time you heard it, instantly singable, ebullient and entirely sunny. But this was back in June, before M83 would use a huge sax in their biggest song, before the Rapture would do the same on their promotional single. If it was going to be the Year of Unironic Use of Brass/Woodwinds In Pop, Capital Cities had the jump on everyone.

18. St. Lucia - "All Eyes On You"

St. Lucia is going to absolutely kill you in 2012 with a debut EP due out just after the first of the year. In 2011 the tropical single "All Eyes On You", a song that could easily slip into a Tom Cruise montage from the first half of Cocktail, came burning out of speakers and headphones with an aural portrait of something equatorial (even the band name notwithstanding). "All Eyes On You" was built on a series of lazy bass pick-ups, enough synth and keys to bankrupt your local Guitar Center and a hook so breathless and modular it fit into your heart and mind like a lost puzzle piece. Though the visual metaphors were all Caribbean, you were only taking a vacation from the rest of the synth-bands you thought you liked before you heard this.

17. BIGKids - "Drum In Your Chest"

 

I will confess I know next to nothing about BIGKids other than they send great personal emails and their single, "Drum In Your Chest" got more plays in a week than half the other music I listened to this year. The song was so damn simple, three or four lyrical couplets and a driving and metronomic chorus. The lyrics address our certainty that our breathing is controlled unconsciously, suggesting the sublime, "Will you remember to take another breath/when your heart's beating like a drum in your chest?" You chuckle. Of course, you would remember to breathe. Goofy, you think. But this is before the four-minute-twenty-second sprint that is "Drum In Your Chest", a single strong enough to make you reconsider basic bodily physics. Thus the stakes are set: you might not necessarily survive this. The band, I presume, welcomes this, a single built to dance to, a single built to kill.

16. Beirut - "East Harlem"

 

"East Harlem" is a swimming trip through Beirut's Zach Condon's magically real universe on the Upper (and he means higher than you're used to) East Side. It was a much more credible take on Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" narrative. Here, he is a downtown boy, but that doesn't mean what you think either, and Uptown has been retrofitted to be Spanish Harlem. The moment to watch in "East Harlem" is the arrangement shift at the 2:10 mark, a swinging engagement full of horns and the ever-present, foundational piano progression. Condon looses himself on a series of couplets that begin with, "the sound", suggesting it is tone alone that can save us. Sound. It is your breath at the door, he says. It is what will bring him home. Sound, he presumes, still has power, and in the second movement of "East Harlem", Condon presumes absolutely correct.

15. We Are Augustines - "Chapel Song"

 

Like Pela,before it, We Are Augustines do their best work introducing a lyric and then repeating it with increasing degrees of insistence. On "Chapel Song", the best song off their great 2011 LP, Rise Ye Sunken Ships, the band channels its origins as the aforementioned Pela, a group who once made a mountain out of saying, "Yeah, there's an undertow, but it ain't got me" twice in a row. This go round, We Are Augustines exploded "Chapel Song" into a repeated voice-quivering pathos around images like "shaking like a leaf" and "lying through my teeth". You have to say it twice, at least, and louder the second, to make it all work. The final edict, more recently appropriated by a company selling outerwear on television, "tear up the photograph/'cause its a bright blue sky" repeats no less than five times, each more meaningful than the last. We assume you'll need to listen to this at least as many times.

14. Dreamers of the Ghetto - "Tether"

The inevitable march of the drums in Dreamers of the Ghetto's seminal album closer "Tether" feels almost fatalist. The song directs itself less six-feet-under and more miles high. The resignation of the central lyric, "it's just another door/tether on the other side" belies the vitriol and energy in the vocals and arrangement. The edge appears at the song's midpoint where those marching drums attach with an abrasive down-stroke guitar chord. The synthesizers wash over the song's architecture at the 4.40 mark, maybe the single finest and biggest moment in music in 2011. It is spacious and grandiose as the band wails to the finish line, but neither of these qualities feel a bit out of place or even dishonest. In the end you were supposed to arrive here anyways.


13. Cults - "You Know What I Mean"



Cults asked listeners if "You Know What I Mean" in 2011 and they found mostly people did. Using conversational platitudes as song titles isn't new, but the Cults version connected to a bombastic and effusive single. Sure, the melody was cribbed from the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and, yes, they were one of those bands that went from a few blog posts to a Columbia Record deal in no time flat, but what made "You Know What I Mean" great had nothing to do with hype or criticism. The swinging snaps and wailing vocals would appear nowhere else. It was fragile and reactionary in the same breath, brittle and resolute. It was, ultimately, something intensely familiar.

12. Fucked Up - "The Other Shoe"

As a sense of foreboding seized our collective consciousness, Damien Abraham and Fucked Up cut through the fuzz and penned a song about "The Other Shoe" where the main lyric was, "We're dying on the inside". It was still hardcore, the band hadn't changed drastically since the seminal Chemistry of Modern Life broke them from relative obscurity in 2008. This, "The Other Shoe" was their thesis statement for their punk opera LP, David Comes To Life, a song that mixed big arena drums, delicate female vocals, screaming choruses and huge soaring guitars. In short, no one went more for broke than Fucked Up in 2011, making a great record about a fictional lightbulb factory (you can't make this up) and absolutely slaying on "The Other Shoe". The key part of, "We're dying on the inside" was that Abraham didn't make it a terminal diagnosis; they were marching orders and a call to arms.

11. Dry The River - "New Ceremony"

From the same East London folk scene that birthed Mumford and Sons, Noah and the Whale and Laura Marling came Dry The River and their surging single, "New Ceremony". It was acoustically rooted, to be sure, but the song found its sea legs at the 1.30 mark when the pre-chorus spun, seemingly, out of nowhere with elevating strings and a vicious hook. This was only portentous of the chorus itself, a top of the room melody built to break most vocalists, a refrain that dumped its personal effects on the table, turned its pockets out and said, "This is all I've got." This was the sort of song that rhymed "prison kiss" with "dying wish" without batting an eyelash. There was something to be said for this brand emotivism in 2011 with no critical voice necessary.

On The List :: Alabama Shakes and Dry The River @ Bowery Ballroom [10.20.2011]

 This review runs live and in color on Bowery Presents' House List blog.

That old E. B. White line about there being three New Yorks, that of the born-and-bred, that of the commuter and that of the transplant, always feels particularly relevant during CMJ, a mixture of hardened music-industry brass, New York City bands hoping to gain national exposure and regional acts making their way to the city in hopes of the same. The 8 p.m. band, Alabama Shakes, at a uniquely focused Bowery Ballroom, represent the second, commuters playing their first New York City gig. Three hours later, UK favorites, Dry the River were making their second jaunt to the city, out-of-towners, jet-lagged and in search of that crack in the US music market. These two transients, a pair of the most compelling acts at this year’s CMJ, plied their craft with a commuters’ intensity: restless, energized and ephemeral, success to be determined by the unnamed music executives and consumers in the crowd.

Alabama Shakes looked comfortably out of place, a warm slice of rustic rock with none of the pretense of NYC bands that traffic in the same influences. There were moments that feel channeled through Otis Redding’s seminal “Try a Little Tenderness” and others where vocalist Brittany Howard—and you simply won’t hear a better voice this year—yelped and pitched with the seasick sublimity of Janis Joplin, broken and perfect and gritty. The band remains largely introverted, save for Howard’s spinning movements around the stage, even on a second-to-last roots-rock jam played for nearly seven minutes. But it’s this band’s more explosive moments that had SPIN magazine name them one of the 25 bands not to miss at this year’s CMJ. Perhaps most important, the e-mail exchange on the Blackberry of a somewhat disinterested gentleman at the upstairs bar. The addressee: Norah Jones. The subject line: Alabama Shakes.

Dry the River, a different form of New York transient, shuffled to the stage to considerably less fanfare just after 11 p.m. and with the baggage of being a major-label act overseas but a beginner to music fans here. Playing their best song, “No Rest,” first, they carried the audience, showing the scatter and wear of day three of CMJ, to the top of the room with the biggest chorus you’ll hear in 2011. Screaming “I loved you in the best way possible” has all the potential to be cloying or overwrought and yet, amazingly, never was. Another single, “New Ceremony,” in a kinship relation to this broad-scope refrain, chilled the crowd with the aplomb of a tour-toughened band with a penchant for the grandiose. But it was “Bible Belt,” a song about troubling contradiction, that tied together a UK folk-rock act wistfully reflecting on the American red states and an American red-state original (yes, Alabama Shakes hung around, watching from the front row), a shared vision of having come here for a very specific reason.
Dry The River - New Ceremony by lucidonline

On The List :: Dry The River @ Rock Shop [7.24.11]

London's Dry The River have been on stage for less than two minutes when the arrive at their finest musical moment. It is the second half of latest single, "No Rest", an explosive, three-part chorus centering on the unforgettable lyric, "I loved you in the best way possible." In the video for the song, the band members are splashed in the face with water as they scream the lyrics, either a weird appropriation of the American government's response to extremism or a dramatic, visual interpretation of this moment - quite literally their own - where the arrangement has swollen around them and they all spill their guts out.

In full disclosure, it's always a little weird for these comer bands from the UK that play their first few shows in the US. The crowds are thin. The band's equipment is either in jeopardy or isn't totally there. Case in point, Dry The River's front man will break a string for which there is no immediate replacement. The last song is played without a functional acoustic guitar. Further, Rock Shop, a venue that fire codes at 90 is well below capacity. This is no affront to the band, but rather one of those moments that later fans and listeners will look back on and think, "Holy shit, they played Rock Shop? Where was I?"

It's no one's fault really. The average, even the literate, US consumer relies on a sick combination of immediacy and repetition. They will like this when they hear it, but they will also need to hear it a few times before they fork over money to see and be a part of it. Sony Corporate will need to offer the activation energy to address the first and the touring budget to address the second. After that, and what we assume is a few commercial syncs (and here, can you whet your knives on "No Rest" for some NBC show or the conclusion of the next HBO looker?) this band will be primed to sell a lot of records in this country. We may be a little flawed, us, but we will love them in the best way possible.

Of course, these commercial asides, as important as they will be to the band's ability to pay a mortgage, are of little relivance on this evening. They can wait for later. The band plays live staples, "Bible Belt" an awesomely slow build, featuring the astute lyric, "The devil's in the Bible Belt" and first single, "New Ceremony". It would be easy to write this off as another Noah And The Whale, a group of London folk kids with exactly two card tricks, easily figured . But, "New Ceramony" confirms a different antecedent. This band rips. Even in their quiet moments, singing delicate harmonies away from microphones, a trick that Stornoway brought these shores last summer, they hold a dangerous potential energy, like at any moment they will explode into a second movement, something you may not have seen coming (go listen again to the first minute of "No Rest" and ask yourself if you had any idea what was next). And for an American audience, the few that treked out faithfully to see one of these moments before the moment, it is impossible to fully see the next thing. Dry The River will have an enormous 2012, whether you can entirely understand that or not.

Dry the River - "New Ceremony" by Dry the River

Dry The River :: "New Ceremony"

With fragile vocals, broken in the same spirit of the epic folk of Mumford and Sons, the UK's Dry The River suppose to create a new orthodoxy built to pull up the cobblestones of the Old Order. Of course, this isn't achingly original and the footnotes are listed at the end of the chapter, but Dry The River may be the next big thing to come out of the UK folk revival. On "New Ceremony", pensive, pulsing melodies engage in a slow build for a 90 seconds before surging strings arise out of nowhere, the chorus becoming an exercise in Icarus as the vocals soar into those falsetto breaks that only Brandon Flowers really nails. Quite simply, if you aren't moved by this and insist on staying in its way, it will level you. So, we add our voice to the chorus, this is going to be very important.

Dry The River - New Ceremony by lucidonline