Frugal Father :: "Red Headed Hipster"

Lost somewhere between the confessional barritone of Matt Berninger's work with the National and the glittering sonics of an LCD Soundsystem record, comes LA-by-way-of-Boulder, Colarado band Frugal Father. Essentially, the one-man work of Mac Welch, a young guy who has been cutting his teeth as a roadie for other bands, Frugal Father will soon be making its own way through the independent rock wilderness on the back of bulletproof first single, "Red Headed Hipster" and its charming mixture of lyrical hedonism and nihilism, one of the lines of 2013, "We don't have to be best friends/but I like your cardigan/let's dance." The arrangement grows in expansiveness from an initially limited perimeter, channeling a weird mixture of "Dance Yrself Clean" and "Bloodbuzz Ohio" in the opening measures before unleashing a somber glitch-pop anthem in the final movement. With just two songs to his name, Welch and Frugal Father have nothing but green lights ahead with this titanic mixture of indie rock.

Humans :: "Possession"

Fans of the latent tribalism of a band like Tanlines (who in reality are just doing bad portraiture of Liquid Liquid) or the digital dancetopia of LCD Soundsystem (who admitted how much they owed Liquid Liquid) will find much redemptive value in Humans. "Possession" emerges as a part dance-floor burner, all wicked angular loops and shout along vocals, and part think-piece, clocking in near five minutes and packing two or three distinct movements. The final twist, the addition of the cowbell and enough shuddering synths to make fans of EDM at least give notice, rings as big and bold, the sign of a band with ambition placed firmly in front of record sales.

Kodaline :: "All My Friends" [LCD Soundsystem cover]

It has been a weird last five years and everyone knows it. See, in 2007 when James Murphy's thesis statement track, "All My Friends" descended on downtown New York, no one had any way of knowing what the next years held. Only a little further downtown the next year Lehman Brothers would accidentally destroy the global economy. Speed up to 2012; LCD is no more; global financial markets are still behaving like a depressed teenager; "All My Friends" is still a genre and generational-defining track." It was about getting older and losing bits of yourself along the way, trying to regain the groups that held you together and have now fractured apart, the grand codependency of youth collapsing into jobs, unemployment, distance, all grinding bits of adulthood. In Murphy's world this was, "you're blowing 85 days days in the middle of France." Kodaline, a band who are doing a very reverent Coldplay impression, recently covered "All My Friends" with a mournful, Irish sparseness. While nothing touches the original, Kodaline, also tapped in the BBC's Sound of 2013 as one of the most promising acts of the coming year, take Murphy to church in a final, group sing. It won't stave the anxieties that drove "All My Friends" the first time, nor will it fix the new ones that emerged since its release, but it's a wonderful reminder all the same.

New Beard :: "Doom"

"I heard that you and your band sold your turntables and bought guitars", muttered James Murphy on "I'm Losing My Edge." But even Murphy, waxing philosophical about the complimentary New York trends of house, rock and rap, never could have foreseen a band that sold their bass guitars and bought a tuba. This is the gimmick - without being derisive - for the whimsical and straight-faced indie pop from Brooklyn's New Beard. The low end you hear on "Doom" is exactly this tuba, firmly divorced from the kid in your high school orchestra who either had a poor sense of humor or a good one. The band's debut full length is out Tuesday, and single, "Doom" resounds as a circus tent of baroque melodies, strings, and a winking Metal guitar progression that ties the arrangement together at the very end. It all sounds like Wes Anderson movie that left the set and walked right into non-fiction. Then again, perhaps, this is Brooklyn, the serious turned ironic and the ironic turned kitsch, unblinking as you burnish the shine on your tuba.

Listen :: New Beard - "Doom"

Thieving Irons :: "Poison"

You would be hard pressed to reach full maturity without at least once reflecting, "I've got poison in my head", as Brooklyn's Thieving Irons do so brilliantly on coming single, "Poison." This wouldn't have to be the self-medicated, over-the-counter poison of the suburbs, light American-style lagers in parking lots and basements. It wouldn't have to be the poison you can get prescribed to you by a medical doctor if you say the right things or complain of "recurrent and debilitating pain". It wouldn't have to be the poison that is the beauty and stupidity of youth. It wouldn't have to be poison of toxic relationships and the vague schadenfreude that creeps wearily at the edges of adult life. It might just be Poison, a feedback loop for which there is no milk to drink, no control center to call, no doctor's couch on which to crawl, no 12-step program to engage. "You were always on my mind", the band intones over the top of insistent, down-stroke guitars as the arrangement pounds away, suggesting a different sort of self-imposed and inescapable toxicity. The song crashes toward its conclusion, lost and found somewhere between the finishing kick of "All My Friends" and the Tom Petty-footnotes of War On Drugs, sick, tired, pretty and cathartic.

Listen :: Thieving Irons - "Poison"

Bright Moments :: "Tourists"

A session and touring horn player for Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and Beirut, Kelly Pratt releases his latest solo work under the name, Bright Moments, an allusion to our best selves. The album, Natives, and its first single, "Tourists" is amalgamated World Music, horns holding serve along side swaying melodies and a piano chord progression that resolves in such sweet fashion it nearly rots your teeth. This is Pratt at his finest, winking at Zach Condon, slightly un-Balkanized Eastern thematic pop making its way out from under some lazily big ideas (travel, tourism, airplane sound effects, etc) like afternoon sun waiting for a cloud bank to blow away. The whimsical synths won't or can't provide the marching orders, neither can the hand claps or Pratt's lilting falsetto, but the piano progression and the horn intro and exitlude do. This is fresh and buzzes with life, an earnest strike at making it on your own. Pratt's next-to-last lyrics, the potentially pedantic, "Go on, go on" even feel authentic and real. A guy who played with and for everyone else, now plays only for himself, exactly the type of travel we need.

Listen :: Bright Moments - "Tourists"

LCD Soundsystem :: "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" @ Madison Square Garden [4.2.11]

Goodnight Moon/...Goodnight room/ Goodnight moon/ Good night cow jumping over the moon/ Goodnight light/ And the red balloon/ Goodnight bears/ Goodnight chairs/ Goodnight kittens/ And goodnight mittens/ Goodnight clocks/ And goodnight socks/ Goodnight little house/ And goodnight mous/ Goodnight comb/ And goodnight brush/ Goodnight nobody/ Goodnight mush/ And goodnight to the old lady/ whispering "hush"/ Goodnight stars/ Goodnight air/ Goodnight noises everywhere

Goodnight LCD Soundsystem. The pleasure was certainly all ours.

LCD Soundsystem :: "Dance Yrself Clean" @ Terminal 5 [3.29.11]

Being one of the privileged 25,000 people - and a statement of this absurdity should communicate some of the cultural impact of this event - who will get to see LCD Soundsystem's  finishing kick this week, I feel rather un-uniquely positioned to say something about it. In fact, despite Murphy's urging for us to just, you know, "be here" instead of photographing everything, I suspect this run of shows will be one of the most widely documented and discussed series of concerts New York's history.

Last night, LCD Soundsystem opened with "Dance Yrself Clean", very nearly exploding Terminal 5, a venue most known for its dearth of emotional character and poor sight lines. Anyone in the building will always have those first five snare hits (4:05 above), the flashing strobes and all your friends, people you did and didn't know, going absolutely bananas, turning the floor into a gurgling, carbonated cluster of human energy. Thus, began a three-hour odyssey, a journey between band and audience. Never have I seen a New York crowd give of itself so unconsciously, perhaps because never has a band ever so egregiously and unpretentiously offered itself to us. LCD Soundsystem, we love you (but nothing) and this feels like a real event and we're happy to be a part of it, all of it, really.

Top 50 of 2010 :: Number One : LCD Soundsystem - "Home"

"Home" was the last song LCD Soundsystem would ever make, the final track on their allegedly final record. This fatalism rang appropriate. For most Americans 2010 was an age of increasing anxiety and for James Murphy, it was a year he sold the most records of his career and wrote, "Home," about his dead friend Jerry Fuchs who fell down an elevator shaft in Bushwick in late 2009. It was a modern answer to David Byrne's "This Must Be The Place," a dissatisfied take on satisfaction, or a very sophisticated translation of the platitudes about being happiest right where you are. But, Byrne was trying to talk himself into a women, a slacker's manual for how to fall in love. Murphy was just squinting to see the cocoon of human relationships that surrounded him. He spent most of 2007 asking where the hell his friends were. In 2010, James Murphy figured out they were there the whole time.

The verses address Murphy's place as a weary social meteorite on the New York scene, the coolest of the late night kids who aren't kids anymore. He reflects, "Yeah, do it right/and head again into space/so you can carry on/and carry on/and fall all over the place," his take on Byrne's blithe, "I guess I must be having fun." These late nights have worn him down, if not out. You see him nodding his head in a DJ booth at 3am, a mixture of champagne and bourbon in his glass, while he confides his need to "shut the door on terrible times, this his "trick to forget a terrible year." The keys and synths remain amoral, neither supporting this misery nor the nights out that Murphy used to overcome it.

Amidst all this pain lies a complicated pathos. Murphy knows he is actively ignoring his age and his emotional fragility on the wrong side of 40, divorced and too many empty bottles left under the colored lights. Yet, he asks the central question: "What would make you feel better?" The answer is a self-directed admonition as Murphy pleads, "You might forget the sound of a voice/still you should not forget/yeah, don't forget/the things that we laughed about." We rolled on the floor like children, he muses, but then you need to get home safely because we can't afford to lose each other. People make this work. People fill his life.

In his most obvious nod to Byrne's search for "Home," Murphy reaches the same conclusion in almost the same words, "So I guess I'm already there." He closes with a promising reminder, "If you're afraid of what you need, look around you/you're surrounded/it won't get any better ... until the night." It took a less naive melody to arrive at this final song about being surrounded by friends. What makes him feel better is this invisible fabric he has taken all too often for granted. These long nights out aren't the sound of impending age and death; they are the life blood of a man who has built and tied his life to this scene and these people. He sees it now in the final moment. His friends are right here.

Tiny Victories :: "Get Lost Mr. Bones"

Brooklyn's Tiny Victories are so low on the horizon that you couldn't necessarily be blamed for missing them. With one song in circulation, "Get Lost Mr. Bones" and less than a thousand views on their myspace, they are just embarking on what seems to promise a bright future. The brainchild of two Brooklyn samplers and keyboard-heads, "Get Lost Mr. Bones" listens like a mixture of LCD's "All My Friends" (to the point where you can almost hear, "you're blowing eighty-five days in the middle of France" in the melody) and the looping, crashing thunder of Dans Le Sac and Scroobius Pip's "Thou Shalt Always Kill". And in this case, the result is stunning first single and a crushing last line, "they've got a million different ways to make you pay." This is a reference to the price of getting into a metaphorical heaven (it also could be a nightclub/Golden Calf). It is a romantic and disastrous vision of New York City, a place we've come to know, and the perfect spot for Tiny Victories.

Get Lost Mr Bones by Tiny Victories

Listen :: Tiny Victories - "Get Lost Mr. Bones" [Mediafire]

On The List :: LCD Soundsystem @ Pitchfork Music Festival [7.17.10]

LCD Soundsystem took the stage with the sun firmly in the ground as the headliner. Of course, as the crowd of 15,000 packed against the stage, sightlines were bad, legs were tired and bodies worn and dehydrated. James Murphy looked conflicted, delivering truth like improvised lyrics about his neighborhood, Williamsburg, or about the bands' catalogue, "It's like, we have these 12-minute songs and the lyrics aren't in rhythm." At other moments he looked troubled, like a man tired of sound techs who can't get it right, and exhausted with being the spokesperson of an age that is now 15 years his junior. It was a divided set, the highlight being the generational thesis statement, "All My Friends." The band closed with the typical "New York, I Love You," but this was Chicago and it wasn't clear the invitation or emotion extended this far west. Murphy and his band were great as always, but it wasn't the same and somehow, even with thousands of friends, it didn't feel a lick like being at home.

"All My Friends" (Live @ Pitchfork 2010)

On the List :: LCD Soundsystem @ The Fillmore [6.3.10]

James Murphy is an unlikely rock god. We've been here before, along with seemingly everyone else, but it's shocking every time. A chubby dude, wearing a white tee shirt and 100-watt smile, gets the kids moving. Granted, most San Franciscans spend their waking hours boogieing to the music only they can hear, but some of us don't. And yet, we're all bouncing up and down to LCD Soundsystem. A friend who categorically doesn't dance, is dancing. This is the Power of James: the venue changes, the results don't. Groundhog Day The Musical?

Murphy and the gang are, understandably, tiring of the shtick. After weeks of touring, the set list has gotten repetitive. They are tight, but not as tight as they were a fortnight ago in New York. They work the crowd into a fevered pitch during most songs -- although "Get Innocuous," "All I Want," and "Pow Pow" never take off -- but their energy lags between each effort. They catch their breath. We follow suit, eager to start again. For us, it's our one chance to witness Murphy; for LCD, it's another gig in another city.

Set closer "New York, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down" remains a gorgeous, poignant duet between the lead singer and Nancy Whang, but just like the band tonight it's missing... home. Murphy wrote his best song about the misery of being on the road, away from his friends. Halfway through the show, he yells "where are your friends tonight," scans the crowd, and sees a seething mass of happy faces he doesn't recognize. It must be a bit disconcerting.

You can take LCD out of New York, but you can't take New York out of LCD. Or something along those lines. (Yes, they recorded most of This Is Happening in a Los Angeles mansion, but it's more Gotham than Batman.) But dancing, that resonates across the country.

This show, like every other one, becomes a night of simplicity.

On The List :: LCD Soundsystem @ Terminal 5 [5.21.10]

This review runs in radio edit shine, with awesome pictures on Bowery's House List.

On Friday night, Terminal 5 went to full capacity to try to grasp LCD Soundsystem's official return to New York City. And this isn't even entirely true; The Friday night show was the second of four-show, sell-out run, spanning Thursday to Sunday and numbering 12,000 tickets. So, as fans packed themselves between the stage and the bar, they were part of a larger, achingly metastatic fun. Distilled as an English sentence: This Was Happening.

From the outset, the band made clear their desire to destroy any vestage of collective boundaries. On the stunning opener, "Us v Them," from 2007 release Sounds of Silver, they poked fun at the divisions that brought their audience in the door as individuals in the hopes of having them move in unison. Later in the set, front man, James Murphy, directed, in quick succession, possible second single from the brand new This Is Happening, "All I Want", the band's thesis statement, "All My Friends", and "Never Change", each full of the Confucian-style wisdom ("I wouldn't change one stupid decision for another five years of life") that breeds such a sense of unity among those who subscribe to their recommendations.

The night closed with "Losing My Edge," a song about the fragility and impermanence of youth, and "New York, I Love You," a darkly romantic ode to the city, a sense of a rapidly fading moment and the impossible mission of recapturing it. Balloons poured from the ceiling and a few thousand individual orbs all bounced together.

LCD Soundsystem :: "Pow Pow" [Live @ Webster Hall 4.12.10]

"Pow Pow" is a slinky, hi-hat heavy jam of LCD Soundsystem's new record This Is Happening, and was debuted live on Monday night at Webster Hall. With no exaggeration, it was the best live show this writer has been to since the Arcade Fire, storm-the-stage show at United Palace in 2007. Murphy's "Pow Pow" is about the death-sounds of cultural relativism, "there's advantages to both/there's advantages to each," he intones with a completely straight face. But this is his judgement of an unjudgemental, lazy age. As Murphy finally erupts, "On this occasion there are couple of things that we know of to report from Fact Magazine: One, the king wears a king-hat and lives in a king-house. Two, your time will come but tonight is our night, so you should give us all your drugs. Three, we have a black president and you do not. So, shut up. You don't know shit about where I'm from that you didn't learn from TV."

http://vimeo.com/10894113 from Jaime's Weekly Concert Alert on Vimeo.

On The List :: LCD Soundsystem @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

James Murphy comes to the stage last with a little yin-and-yang advice. "There's good news and there's bad news," he says, staring into the stage lights. The crowd claps furiously, curiously. "The good news is we're here." Music Hall is reaching a fever pitch. "The bad news is I'm wasted," Murphy finishes his home-coming haiku. It's all true; they are here and the leader of LCD Soundsystem is comically, fantasically drunk. He finally adds, "This isn't really a show ... This is just ... us, playing for our friends."

The first half of the set features "Us V Them" and newest radio-single, "Drunk Girls," but the story is more Murphy's between-song narration. He tells us that this is the longest time the band has ever had between shows. He struggles through the passive voice in much the same way as the writer of the previous sentence. He also tells us this two, three, four, and five times. The crowd cuts him a break; he's drinking whiskey and champagne, he tells us, from a water bottle brought by a part-time guitarist, part-time sideline supporter at stage right. Did he mention that this is the longest break between shows in LCD Soundsystem history? Yes. "This isn't a show," he repeats, "this is us learning to be a band again." James Murphy is drunk.

Of course, it would be easy to focus on his drunkness and ignore the night's most important moments. "All My Friends" was typically propulsive, with a back-lit Murphy standing on a stage monitor and screaming, with the crowd, "WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS TONIGHT?" You simply haven't lived until you've seen this live. The band departs after playing some material from their first sets of single releases, "Losing My Edge" and "Yeah."

Murphy tells us they don't do encores when the band returns. He says, "Encores are for other places, not where we live. Encores are for places where people think we're something we're not." They play "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House," "Someone Great," and classsic, vaguely eponymous closer, "New York, I Love You." Murphy will play with the words a little, leaving out the most important one; "New York, I love you, oh don't change a thing."

LCD Soundsystem :: "Drunk Girls"

The level of intensity around the new LCD Soundsystem record is such that a girl I know working the album told me, rather flatly, "I could play it for you but I'd have to break the CD in front of you after." It wasn't entirely clear why this would be necessary but I got the point; we will take nearly theatrical measures to protect this record. But in a coordinated and approved "leak" (when publicists call "leaks" a "surprise" in their email announcing the "leak," you can be deservedly suspicious of the source), James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem are officially back with first single, "Drunk Girls."

"Drunk Girls" will storm its way onto Alternative Rock radio and onto the late-night playlists of millions of self-described cool kids. It is instantly memorable and catchy, a hybrid of the lyrical reference games of "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House," and the thudding, sonic down-strokes of "North American Scum." Murphy is at is his finest, saying almost nothing while still unleashing Confucian gems like, "Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut/It comes back but it's never the same." In the chorus, Murphy affirms that, "I believe in waking up together" before clarifying, "I believing in waking up with no promises." The arrangement storms and fumes around him, exhaling and puffing like an over-confident and terrifyingly breakable teenager.

For James Murphy, a guy who sounded like a rock star before he was one, this is the moment where those two impulses intersect. He recorded the album in a Los Angeles mansion. The last record, Sounds of Silver was about the crisis of post-adolescence, spending 45 days in the middle of France, and where the hell were your friends? The unsettling is over. As Murphy postulates, "Just cause you're hungry/doesn't mean that you're lean," super-stardom is at hand. Hungry and fit, LCD Soundsystem is playing your house, your house.