On The List :: Alt-J @ Bowery Ballroom [9.12.12]

Ed. note: This review runs live and first on Bowery Presents' House List blog. Photo courtesy of @jenncorazz because 32ft/second's publication photography department still shuts down this publication's cell phone when this publication tries to take blurry pictures.

There was a certain geometric incoherence in play as hotly buzzed UK band Alt-J took the stage at a very sold-out Bowery Ballroom last night. Everyone was jammed together in this glorified square to see a band that insisted they were a triangle. See, Alt-J contend their name is more than a collection of letters, instead representing the outcome of a keyboard command, the combination of “Alt” and “J,” which on a Mac makes the shape of a triangle, making their very name an unspeakable symbolic iconography. Every face in the audience pointed toward four faces onstage offering seemingly infinite possibilities. This would all seem overwrought, if it weren’t for the uncommon quality of the band’s debut, An Awesome Wave, and their bizarre and brilliant live show. Somehow helpless against their insistence on three-way vanishing points—or how affected and silly this would seem in less capable hands—the audience and the band intersected over and over, creating a cohesive, if pleasantly limited, little world inside these invented boundaries.

The band opened with “(Interlude 1),” with a choir joining them to offer the band’s Baroque-ish two-part harmonies a chilling and elegiac varnish. One part Mumford & Sons and one part the xx, Alt-J slid between slow-drive, sexy arrangements and these warm duets between guitarist Joe Newman and keys player Gus Unger-Hamilton. “Something Good” and “Dissolve Me,” mid-album and middle-set songs expanded this notion of austere vocals and ebullient keyboard-driven arrangements, accented brightly with tactile guitar picking and high-fret work. The band played their best song, “Breezeblocks,” near the end, the track’s punching vocals and guitars ringing through the balconies as the audience shuffled around chanting lines like “Do you know where the wild things go?” The song’s conclusion, a collision of the lyrics “Please don’t go, I love you so” and “I’d eat you whole,” an awesome and approachable angle to a band that values its weirdness as much as its beautiful arrangements.

“This is the last song on the album,” Unger-Hamilton mumbled over the din as Alt-J returned to play “Taro” as the encore. At least one person in the crowd made the reference that is as controversial as it is possibly correct: “Radiohead.” This is a bit of branding too loaded even for a band currently touring with a gigantic neon triangle as their backdrop. However, there was something undeniable happening here. Alt-J finished the haunting last chords of “Taro” and held up a slightly altered version of the “diamonds in the sky,” triangle-ish hand sign that Jay-Z and Kanye West initiated with a straight face in 2005. The crowd returned it in kind having fully embraced this iconography of two lines and three points. The audience and the band made two of these three, one of the year’s best albums brought to the stage made the third at The Bowery Ballroom, a tidy and discrete geometric universe, a triangle inside a square.

sootytern :: "Get It Sorted"

"It's often lovely," the last lyric of UK band sootytern's "Get It Sorted" rings against the edges of an arrangement that features an unholy and ebullient alliance of ukelele and mandolin. It risks being a bit cute even if it, thankfully, never is. Even hidden beneath the twee veneer is a tiny post-punk song that in its final movement chases up the fret board for the highest iteration of hi-fi stringed instruments, an ode to shoegaze with tools that fit in a backpack. It is the type of self-actualized pop that reminds this writer of a combination of the leanings of Mumford and Sons - the choice of traditional folk instruments to create what are, ostensibly, pop songs - and Stornoway or an unplugged and considerably happier Frightened Rabbit. For all their repetition of the final lyric, "Get It Sorted" isn't often lovely, it always is.

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"

Jinja Safari :: "Head In A Blender"

Afro-pop turns beautifully glossy in the hands of Sydney, Australia band Jinja Safari. A blend of Mumford and Sons harmonies, Jonquil's Graceland affectations and the holier-than-thou elevation of bands like Lord Huron and Local Natives, Jinja and "Head In A Blender" aren't only the latest to do this type of miasmatic world music, but they might be one of the best. With a string of one-off singles on their Soundcloud page that are as unexpectedly charming as any band since Fanfarlo's debut demos, the band channels a pleasant tribalism as unoriginal as it is entirely satisfying, the kind of thing that reminds A&Rs why they have a rolling office chair to push back from their desks. "Head In A Blender" features an austere little guitar line behind layers and layers of vocals, a marching beat setting the stakes for a sort of journey where there are stories in the soil and where the lyrics "got caught up in the bloody pursuit of truth" mean absolutely everything. The final movement swings and sways before hurling itself out into the ether, chimes and echos left to sort out the details.

Mumford and Sons :: "England" [The National Cover]

East Enders, Mumford and Sons recently recorded a cover of the National's "England" from 2010's High Violet. Perhaps, it is appropriate that an actual English band play the song written by the Brooklyners by way of Ohio, in a swarm of bees, you know the rest. The cover was a part of VH1's "Unplugged" series, more than a little ironic given that Mumford has never played anything approaching "electric" or "plugged". However, "England" wears well in the hands of the folk set, building to a stomping conclusion around the lyric, "'fraid of the house, spend the night with the sinners", one of those lines written by a divided atheist and appropriated to be worn smooth in the hands of a believer. But all religion and regions aside, this reminds us of the depth and talent of the National and Mumford's ongoing revelation that a banjo band can and will sound great all the time.

Tags: Mumford and Sons Unplugged, Mumford and Sons, Music Videos, Live Performances

CMJ 2009 :: Golden Silvers, Mumford & Sons and The Temper Trap @ Music Hall of Williamsburg [10.22.09]

This review runs on Bowery's Houselist blog.

Temper Trap lead singer, Chris Mandagi beckoned the crowd to surge forward. The band was in the middle of an eight-song set at a nearly sold-out Music Hall of Williamsburg and things tilted with furious telemetry. It wouldn't be fair to say the set up to this point was pedestrian, but it certainly wasn't an elevating artistic moment. The band's much-licensed, smash-single, "Sweet Disposition" tipped the whole evening towards something different. So as Mandagi chanted the lyrics, he beckoned us forward.



An hour earlier, British folk-rock act Mumford and Sons dominated the same stage that Mandagi would later try to crush the crowd against. Rife with banjo, upright bass, and full-on four-part harmony, Mumford and Sons are the first band to ever move this many people without a drummer. The crowd knew the lyrics though the band would later joke that their album isn't out in the states yet. The implication is clear (you stole our album) but the accusation is invisible (still, thanks for singing along). They closed with a new song, "Whispers in the Dark," featuring the closing line, "let's live while we're still young." There isn't anything better to tell a room full of people who are mortgaging sleep and jobs for the sake of a music festival.



Slipped back in medias res and Temper Trap crushed their final four songs after "Sweet Disposition." Closing with "Science of Fear," Mandagi does his best vocal clown car, with a surprising amount of material coming out of a seemingly tiny vessel. As the song closed, he turned to his band and let the mike thud to the floor. The Temper Trap urged us forward and then retreated in kind. We were left to live while we were young. And that's what we did.