The world of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. now operates on one law of nature and physics: If some is good, more is better. This wasn’t always the case for Dan Zott and Josh Epstein. Early on, they made their name wearing NASCAR racing suits and trafficking in Pet Sounds–era two-part harmonies. The first song on their debut EP, “Nothing but Our Love,” was sort of a simple offer compared to the bombast that’s begun creeping into their more recent work. Thus begins something of a second life with a new EP, the two-weeks-old Patterns: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. in an active and obvious evolution. Bubbles, cloth lanterns, enormous inflatable balls and human beings—the band sent spheres of all kinds into revolution if not outright orbit on Friday night at a very sold-out and frenetic Music Hall of Williamsburg.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. opened with a brief teaser of the “na-na-na” chorus of first-LP jam “An Ugly Person on a Movie Screen” before making the transition to open with the recent “Hiding,” an enormous slice of buzzing synth pop. With Zott rocking a side ponytail in his curly brown hair, and both members wearing matching paisley suits, the sounds owed themselves to the crossover of “We Are Young,” by fun., but the visual aesthetics were all LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.” This was as exciting to the Warner Music contingent in the balcony as it was to the combustible fans on the floor. Dale Earnhardt. Jr. Jr. turned to play “Simple Girl,” a sweet little song from their first LP, It’s a Corporate World, before running through “Vocal Chords” and some new material, noting, “You’ll know this one,” prior to playing “Morning Thought.”
But, unquestionably, the moment of the evening occurred when the enormous inflatable white sphere that stood like an unpigmented sun above the stage was lit with projected animation, making a gigantic Lego-man face that sang along with the music. The face became 8-bit animation to go with the lyrics for “Skeletons,” a loop of the life cycle of a tiny pixelated man and woman. The song, about the twin impulses of forgetting and remembering the past, rang perfectly for the band on the cusp of something of a big next movement, the next turn, the lives of imagined selves and illuminated orbs set against the “skeletons buried in the backyard.”
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 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 30-21.
30. The Jezabels - "Endless Summer"
This was the year and the album where the Jezabels washed over the American consumer like a rogue wave. Well, it didn't happen, but it wasn't for fault of "Endless Summer", an alternately austere and bold piece of pop music. Singer Hayley Mary cast herself in the sharpest form of relief, the single best voice of the year, a vocalist entirely unrestrained and simultaneously in total control.
29. Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. - "An Ugly Person On A Movie Screen"
The mix of electronics and silky vocals gave Detroit's Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. an easy entry point to the pop listener of 2011. Building on a successful 2010 EP, the band returned with a well received full length (just ask Paste Magazine) and a track five, "An Ugly Person On A Movie Screen" that blew the collective doors off. Or maybe it was the roof, a musical convertible with the power to pick up the breezy, send the clouds home early and sound sunnier than anything else you heard this year. The chorus was full of woozy "nahs" and lyrics like "You don't know how your caged bird sings". It was, of course, critical of a world too focused on aesthetics, even if the aesthetics here were fantastic.
Sometimes it is a lyric, even just one, that sticks out so squarely it makes the whole song ache with relevance. For Typhoon on "Summer Home" it was the soaring and fragile, "it's how we start over" set on repeat in the bridge. The band attempts to follow its own recommendation, stripping the arrangement down to nothing, before building it again, though never returning to the edicts of the bridge. It was a delicate brand of folk music that Typhoon pulled off in 2011, built at once for destruction and again for framing, its edges serrated but not ill suited to construction.
Friska Viljor rarely makes any sense to the American audience. The name intimidates us, this before we even get to a song title we don't recognize. Can't you name yourselves after an animal like these American/Canadian bands do, we think? But, Friska Viljor don't care, and they're making the most fun music in the world right now. "Larionov" is an explosion of horns and kick out the windows drums. "You know the answers to the beating of my heart", they sing as their arrangement absolutely explodes around them, and maybe you reconsider how you felt about the consonants in their name and you go pick up their recent album.
Youth Lagoon, like Beirut before him, is a precocious, multi-instrumentalist from a part of the country that most Eastern Indie Music Elites label as good for American Indian Art to be used as a t-shirt design in Williamsburg. But the American West couldn't hold this bedroom collection, and "Afternoon" was so full of rich melodies and nostalgia that it didn't feel a bit indulgent or dishonest. Youth Lagoon is really just a kid, but then again, so was Condon.
If you are planning on getting in a relationship in New York City in the next few months, listen to Auditorium's "Sunday". Hell, this song is so sweet, you might end up dating it. Realistically, it describes a rosy-hued picture of life on Prospect Park West, marching up toward Grand Army Plaza and the Great Lawn with a cup of excellent coffee in hand, all in perfect time and harmony. This is your shift at the Co-Op set to music; this is your life but better.
24. We Barbarians - "The Wait Is Over"
Having seen their live show twice now, it is undebatable fact that We Barbarians are the best rock band playing in New York City right now. On their most recent EP, "The Wait Is Over" slotted at track two, a combination of glossy pop hooks and big guitars. The band bears inexact comparisons to early We Are Scientists, but their energy is different, an explosion of resurgent vocals and thrashing breakdowns. If this is modern barbarism, we will throw open the gates of the city and let the invaders in. But then again, they're already here and they're already dominant.
23. Polarsets - "Leave Argentina"
In the year that closed LCD Soundsystem's official career, bands like Polarsets proved that: 1. the cowbell was still very much alive and 2. Dancing in rock music was not as dead as James Murphy's band. "Leave Argentina" was an absurd trip to South America, full of references to "debonaire" sensibilities, nudity and, predictably, cocaine. The final movement put the listener inside the machine as the band screams about feeling drunk and glamorous. It didn't bring indie rock back to the club - it was already there - but it moved it onto the dance floor and made it do the windmill.
22. The Rural Alberta Advantage - "Barnes' Yard"
One of those albums that is so firmly in our collective rear view mirror by December, it would be easy to forget that Rural Alberta Advantage released a record this year and even easier to forget that the best song on it wasn't the promotional single, "Stamp". "Barnes' Yard" surged unexpectedly from the speakers, a breathless and aerobic exercise in acoustic pop. As usual, the final denouement lay in Nils Edenloff turning his neck into turnpike of surging veins, screaming into your iTunes with no regard for your safety or his own.
If there was one band that absolutely should have made more noise and sold more records before their demise, it was certainly Stricken City in 2011. "Some Say" was the band's last single before going on permanent hiatus and their last chance to convince you to buy one of their records. The song was divided into a few distinct movements, a soft open, a crackling first third, and an outright explosive final act. "Some Say" was post-punk with an updated ethos but, more likely, it was the song and the band that you missed.
DJ Natty Heavy and I go back more than 10 years now. And though my career only took a weird and brief trip through the music industry, he made his life there. Currently you can find him producing a top-rated morning radio show in Charleston, South Carolina and spinning the hottest records (check his Fashion Week video above) at Charleston's most exclusive clubs. On a recent visit I asked Heavy if he'd be up for putting together mixes for the blog based on some recent and challenging songs I sent his way. Now, this kid spins hip-hop, freestyles against Common, but you're not exactly going to find the new Cults record in his whip. But he agreed to the challenge, and the first edition mixtape is hot off the decks and ready for stream and download below, along with a track list. This might be the least hip-hop thing he has ever done, and it is absolutely perfect for all your plug-and-play summer circumstances. He even threw in some extra fog horn for me. Check it up or check it down.
Tracks:
1. Cults - "You Know What I Mean"/Common - "The Corner"
2. The Vaccines - "Norgaard"
3. French Films - "Convict"
4. Gauntlet Hair - "I Was Thinking"/Lady Gaga - "LoveGame"
5. Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. - "An Ugly Person On A Movie Screen"/ Tupac - "Changes"
6. Coldplay - "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall"
7.Theme Park - "Milk"
8. Tom Vek - "A Chore"
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. sound-checked in street clothes but took the stage in stock-car jumpsuits last night. The band’s name already steeped in a few layers of irony, this represented its traditional performance attire: a winking ode to a NASCAR culture that we can only assume the group has absolutely no serious interest in. However, on this night at a very sold-out Mercury Lounge, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. possessed a second wrinkle, unzipping their race suits to unveil real business suits, one of them of the three-piece variety. The two frontmen sealed this reveal with a completely straight-faced handshake, lips pursed and brows furrowed for maximum impact—a kind of poststructuralist irony so serious that it could never be, and so planned and willfully wry that it could not help being all business.
Opening with “Morning Thought,” the first single off the forthcoming LP, It’s a Corporate World, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. pounded through an arrangement of delicate two-part harmonies and slamming drums. The main lyric, “I’m not thinking about it,” proved to be a useful antimantra for a band that so carefully plans so many of its moves (and here it is worth noting that the group tours with gigantic homemade wooden letters that light up and spell “JR”).
The band then shifted back into material from last year’s outstanding Horse Power EP, playing “Simple Girl,” blending immediately into “Vocal Chords,” a love song that doesn’t feel solipsistic or indulgent, resting instead on inevitability: “Well, it’s got to be the way it is.” The fourth song of the night was unknown to the crowd, a cut off their upcoming LP, but in the bridge the band ad-libbed the now-famous “New York, I love you,” a reference to the now-defunct LCD Soundsystem’s ode to the city of the same name. It was a slice of earnest irony before the band played a completely self-serious and quite excellent cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” It would have been absolutely serious if everyone in the crowd hadn’t been smiling so hard.
One of the most promising bands on the horizon of your tasteless friend's iTunes is Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Rephrased as an English sentence: This is a band you have the pleasure of enjoying now, before you have to reconsider your original feelings because of how many people (and not terribly credible critics of music either) like them. We caught the Dale E. boys at CMJ and were floored by how they were able to operate without all the ironic overtones of their normal stage show. Sonically, it is the mixture of the second Vampire Weekend record and the melodic subtlty of a Justin Vernon tune. In that moment before they blow up, they have a remix EP ready with retakes done by the likes of Deastro. On this reimagining of "Vocal Chords," the back beat emerges as a Nintendo drum pad while the melody soars out of zeros and ones with the ebullience of a helium balloon fleeing a child's hand. Now, whether that child had good enough taste to appreciate the balloon is another matter entirely.
Only at CMJ is the guitarist of Magic Bullets waiting for one of the members of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. to leave the bathroom so they can play their set at Bruar Falls. The lead singer of Dominant Legs is in the front row, relaying the score of the San Francisco Giants playoff game (they would go on to win in dramatic fashion). It is a proper noun hurricane of too many bands, maybe even too many great bands, all stuffed together in venues that don't always suit them, in time slots that push the boundaries of what is possible.
Earnhardt Jr. Jr. won the night with a stripped down 8pm set at Bruar Falls and the promise of destruction later at Santos. Playing effectively "unplugged," the boys usually accustomed to their jumpsuits, electronics and drummer, channeled something closer to Simon and Garfunkel or Grizzly Bear, using rich harmonies and delicate instrumentals to craft something quiet and brilliant. They confessed before the show, "we only agreed to this because I said if we didn't play three shows in a day, I wasn't coming." This was more than moderately sarcastic. The stage was too small and they were too pressed for time, only playing three songs. Magic Bullets take the stage almost imediately and prove every bit the post-Lucksmiths pop you might think them to be. The Earnhardt boys are packing their gear and their frustration, heading for Santos and the blocks below Canal.
Later at Rock Shop, the bill was again packed. Blair played her set of extremely winning pop songs in the 9:30 slot. Her record, Die Young, is still one of the year's finest and her stage show, with tie-dyed backing band, chooses delicacy over bombast. LESANDS would take the stage from San Diego. Their lead-singer chuckles and mumbles, "ha, yeah, sun." It is glimmering synths and packaged loops for the next half hour as LESANDS prove every bit of the potential we caught in LA over the summer. The night closes with Beach Fossils well after 1am. Enough ink has been spilled on their behalf to not merit further working here, but suffice it to say their surf-rock progressions owe more than a little to early-career Cure. As the Rock Shop crowd headed out to the ungently gentrifying 4th Avenue landscape, it was another night full of bands, too many photographers and too much good music.
