Toro Y Moi :: "Blessa"

Eight years ago I was carrying a mix CD that actually contained the song "Raining In Baltimore" by the Counting Crows. Tonight, it actually is raining in Baltimore, 50 miles to the north, and I couldn't careless about Adam Duritz. Even in the damp rain of the eastern seaboard, Toro Y Moi's "Blessa" stumbles sea-sick, warm and colorful from its digital housing. In the spirit of Air France and the new Beach House, this is lo-fi, shimmering, keyboard pop. But this has a different rhythm. It breathes, heaving up and down until there isn't any air left. Loosely, the song is about being blessed. Less connected, this is about a paragraph with a topic sentence that doesn't quite work, about sunshine in the dead of fall, about giving thanks before Thanksgiving. Sometimes, you can look back and laugh and sometimes songs that are about staying warm work the whole year round.

Listen :: Toro Y Moi - "Blessa"

The Ghost Is Dancing :: "Battles On"

High school yearbook pages are deservedly notorious for their questionable content. Mine committed none of the following common mistakes: 1) I did not profess my love to a girl that I would stop speaking to within months. 2) I did not make any inside jokes. 3) I did not post some picture of kids at a party under the supposed coolness of having a "party picture" in the yearbook with the school's name on the front. 4) I did not overly graciously thank people, though perhaps this would have been nice and appropriate. 5) I did not reference any athletic championships or ever use the phrase: "Champs! They can't take it from us, baby!"

I did, however, commit the following act of adolescent solipsism: I made clear my disdain for authority. To paraphrase: you're time is over, old people. Of course, I was singing the anthem of youth, something that can only fade and look somewhat ridiculous years later. So when The Ghost Is Dancing thud through your speakers or headphones, you need to hear it with a more youthful ear. We are fighting against something. These people are ruining our generation. Authority cannot be trusted implicitly. Like a more frustrated and poppy Los Campesinos, this is big-scale pop music, a battle cry for people for who can say, "let's fight those bastards down" without blinking. Pounding drums, a call to action and the youthful mistrust of everyone who has an ounce of power - it's frankly beautiful.

Listen :: The Ghost Is Dancing - "Battles On"

Beach House :: "Norway"

Back in 2006, I was sleeping in what little darkness the enormous windows of my Bushwick loft allowed. A full moon hung over the gravel pit or "rock factory" we joked, outside. I was tucked in, headphones on, listening to glowing, down-tempo keyboard pop from Baltimore. It was Beach House's first album and the sun was going to rise like a blazing ball of fire in a few hours. If I was being honest, I wasn't particularly happy.

Of course it's 2009 and I've switched neighborhoods but Beach House, still very much the same, is back with a record to level us in similar fashion. Teen Dream, due out in late January 2010 is going to be this coming year's Veckatimest; the album people saw coming but didn't realize they would like so much until it was actually in their stereo. Frankly, the honest-to-goodness of this album isn't a surprise, but how good and how dense and how rich is shocking.

The melodies and the narrative come through immediately. The keyboard-rich, almost sea-sick first single, "Norway," isn't the best song on the album but its humming, glowing chorus is the crystalline picture of what makes this record and this band so powerful. The verses, a settled and woozy affair, make me think of 2006 and 2009 and 2010 and where the hell we might be in three years. The moon is up over the east coast and our time is short. Keep that in mind.

Listen :: Beach House - "Norway"

On the List :: Julian Casablancas @ Regency Ballroom [11.17.09]

(A brief introduction: Hi, I'm Noah. You probably don't remember me from such productions as "32feet gets impressively drunk on SPIN's dime" and "Good god, that's the Futurehead's music," but I was there. Now I'm writing here. We're taking this thing bicoastal. From San Francisco, with love.)

The Messiah -- happy, sober, and dressed entirely in black -- is bathed in white light at the front of The Regency Ballroom stage. Julian Casablancas traded his four horsemen for an impressively well intentioned if not always perfectly executed solo album and six new bandmates. Two guitarists, two keyboardists, and two percussionists are arranged in a semi-circle behind the once and future(?) lead singer of the Strokes, symmetrical through the Y-axis. They will barely move throughout the entire set, stuck inside their individual Casblancas-created Calling Bubbles.

The Chosen One, however, wanders freely around the stage. One earns this privilege after one's first band saves rock and roll. To his credit, "Phrazes For The Young" simultaneously builds upon and moves away from the music of the group that wrote the No. 1 album of our dying decade, a fact that's clear in concert. The choice to open the set with "River of Brakelights" -- whose backbone is the lyrics "getting the hang of it/timing is everything" -- hints perhaps at the novelty the singer experiences when he's alone as the centerpiece, but this thought fades minutes later when the chorus of "Left & Right In the Dark" explodes, driven by, dare I say, peppy keyboards. Casblancas can sing about stumbling in the dark, but he knows exactly where he's going. We, of course, will follow.

Julian, it seems, is enjoying himself on stage, becoming less posture and more human with each song. He increasingly interacts with both the crowd and his bandmates. Pretense washes away in a sea of well-orchestrated lights. During the set's one cover -- The Strokes' "I'll Try Anything Once," chosen, I have to assume, because a fan in the front row held up a homemade cardboard sign with the song title written on it -- he forgets the line "everybody was well dressed." (Accidental symbolism of mental departure from previous band known as time went on more for their clothes than their music=high.) Later, Casablancas announces that the group on stage at The Regency will play a b-side: "We'll probably ruin it, but shit, we're gonna have fun no matter what." By the end of the song, he's proven prophetic on both counts. The song is a wonderful disaster, ending with a wall of noise created by seven musicians playing their instruments, hard.

Being the Music Messiah is lucrative -- how else can you explain half a dozen band members in addition to a three-piece horn section that supports two songs? -- but I suspect it's not that much fun. The Strokes imploded under the pressure, splintering and going their separate ways. The band's lead singer doesn't want to save us again and, quite frankly, we don't need him to. But damn, it's nice when he walks among us.

Arms :: "Tiger Tamer"

I swapped out laptops today meaning I lost every play count, every playlist, even my tried-and-true system of arranging my music by "Date Imported." In essence, I've been asked to encounter my music library anew, an unfamiliar organization, no sense of time and space. This is as disorienting and stupid as I'm making it sound but practically speaking, it means that I'm dealing with an alphabetized music library for the first time in months. This means I'm in the "A's." Arms' "Tiger Tamer" is an urgent piece of indie-rock with a spaced-out, wide-open concluding movement. The band, featuring Todd from the Harlem Shakes, dropped their debut record, Kids Aflame two weeks ago. It's exactly the organization I need while this thing gets put back together.

Listen :: Arms - "Tiger Tamer"
Listen :: Arms - "Kids Aflame"

On The List :: Deluka @ Piano's [10.14.09]

There is a projector displaying the band's name against the backdrop of the stage. It is from a DVD and it says "PAUSE" in the upper left hand corner. The command is a little misleading, the screen is vibrating like a VCR with a tracking knob that either broke off or has a healthy problem with authority. For the duration of the evening, Deluka will play with their own name and the word "PAUSE" shimmering in the background. It will be the only thing in the room even trying to stand still.

Within seconds, it's clear that this band is bigger than this room. Of course, they're using some packaged synths and looped drums playing off a laptop but 80% of what's happening on stage is live, present and entirely organic. Deluka's frontwoman, a hybrid of Karen O and Emily Haines, has one of the best voices you haven't heard in rock. She is powerful without breaking a sweat, moving without thrashing around and spitting beer. As the tumbling synths of second-song, "Cascade" threaten to keep the evening too clean, the band charges forward with gritty, downtown rock and these powerful, spot-on vocals.

Over the course of a set that includes somewhere between eight and ten songs, the crowd moves forward, and people whisper to each other things like, "Wow, this is great." The only way to describe what's happening on stage is a pastiche of influences: A little of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a little bit of Metric, a little bit of the Industrial Pop of bands like The Big Pink. When Deluka is doing their best work, they're racing ahead with a clean mix of rock guitars, warehouse sized synth-riffs, and melody that will stick in your head for weeks. So, as Deluka hit their finishing kick, the sound, the volume, the backdrop, it made it seem like the whole room was vibrating. Which, okay, maybe it was.

Listen :: Deluka - "Cascade"

On The List :: Free Energy and Small Black @ Bell House [11.10.09]

Free Energy

It was a weird night at Bell House in Brooklyn. Ranging from the committed, almost baroque synth-collisions of Small Black, through the chunky, frankly forgettable, Diehard and closing with the if-you-haven't-seen-them-see-them-now Free Energy, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a little disjointed.

Small Black took the stage in front of something like 20 somewhat engaged music fans. Having seen them at CMJ it wasn't a surprise when big-packaged drums came thundering out of the speakers. They play this sort of broken-hearted synth symphony, but with live drums and thudding bass. If there was a indie version of The Breakfast Club, I would almost certainly want Small Black to do the soundtrack. I scratch, "We are wingless birds/engines of death" onto the back of a receipt. Listening to "Weird Machines," their last song, I think about a weird vision I had in the car the other day. All of us, a generation of overprotected kids who took off and never planned for what would happen next, we are birds rendered wingless in flight and now we silently soar towards the ground; a gigantic, v-formed fatal formation. Of course, this is absurd. But Small Black inspire a level of esoteric absurdity that I'm willing to accept.

Closing the night would be Philadelphia and DFA-signees Free Energy. Over the summer, their eponymous first-single put the screws to me in a way music hadn't in a while. It's a clear throwback, wearing its influences like a cut-off t-shirt or like the Dazed and Confused DVD that 85% of college students have somewhere in their private possessions. The music is unpretentious and uninhibited and the band doesn't play like the room is at 15% capacity, a circumstance more to do with night of the week and neighborhood than quality of music.

In fact, by the time they're motoring through "Free Energy," the audience is moving forward and shuffling around. When the lead-singer is sounding through the best lyric of the night, "We are young and still alive/now the time is on our side," it would be hard not to think of a reversed set of fatal emotions. You, whoever you are, might have clipped our wings. You might have tried to kill us. But we are still alive and this thing is blowing back on you like a hurricane. All those black, wingless birds aren't looking to crash, they're looking to blow you out of the water. If there's one band to see right now it's Free Energy. They are the best American rock band on tour and you should go see them, dead or alive.

Listen :: Free Energy - "Free Energy"
Listen :: Small Black - "Despicable Dogs"