On The List :: Jungle @ Mercury Lounge [3.9.14]

This review runs first and with much better pictures on Bowery Presents House List. 

Mysterious London outfit Jungle, a synth-funk project that remains sonically faithful to the implied wild in its name, took the stage as none other than themselves at Mercury Lounge last night for their second-ever U.S. show. The band has remained largely anonymous and didn’t even appear in the XL Recordings–sponsored video for their debut single, “Busy Earnin’,” and their Soundcloud avatar is a collection of cartoon jungle animals. Some of this image making rang appropriate for a band about to descend on SXSW with the seemingly self-possessed knowledge that they are about to be a very, very big act. In real life, as the kids say, Jungle arrived as an actual human five-piece, hustling to the stage under the cover of darkness—their anonymity preserved for one last instant—to the sounds of the jungle over the PA, squawking birds and a recorded voice-over: “Our friends from the jungle have finally found a cure.”

It was a band doing a band. The narrative slammed backward into the counternarrative: The bassist wore a Members Only jacket with the word jungle written in lowercase across the back. The lights came up and it was time for the band to be a band. Sounding exceptionally tight and in complete control, Jungle opened with “The Heat,” a song, like many of their tracks, that features sirens. It’s a musical street drama with a 1970s filter, a blaxploitation movie as done by four dudes and a girl from London, Shaft coming to indie-rock circles. As the evening unfolded, the group’s prowess for making dance music never fought actively with this crafting of narrative, the performance-art component never obfuscating the fun. With an intro that also featured sounds of the police, Jungle played “Lucky I Got What I Want” before running through “Crime” and “Drops.”

The set closed with the stunning single “Busy Earnin’,” easily one of the best contributions to late-night people everywhere in 2014, the soundtrack for a never-was cop drama in which the audience openly roots for the criminals, and the appropriately imperial “Platoon.” The latter unwired in spectacular fashion, Jungle unleashing their technical, stylized selves with focus and intensity. The goal was to transport the listener somewhere humid, fecund and dangerous, a more committed version of the music that briefly made Miike Snow famous. Afterward, Jungle, as they slid back down the sidewall of Mercury Lounge, were headed in two directions at once: To take the listener to their terrifying wilds and to come out of the woods to run rampant through civilization.

On The List :: Augustines and Frightened Rabbit @ Webster Hall [10.25.13]

This review runs first and with great photographs from Sean O'Kane at Bowery Presents House List blog.

Frightened Rabbit and Augustines are nearly mirror images of each other: one Scottish, one raised in the wilds of Brooklyn, each driven to find salvation in ripping guitar-drum-and-bass rock songs. Augustines frontman Billy McCarthy, who is leading the third iteration of the band once known as Pela and then We Are Augustines before landing on their current nomenclature, admitted as much at a sold-out Webster Hall on Friday night, when they opened for their Scottish counterparts. “I’m gonna miss them so goddamn much,” warbled McCarthy about Frightened Rabbit in his trademark gravel-flecked baritone. The parallels were obvious under the sweeping stage lights, both groups pitting themselves firmly against the forces of modernity, trying to recapture a world of unfiltered misery and saviors, a time when people loved people enough to be destroyed by them.

There wasn’t an ounce of irony in either band. Augustines played “Cruel City,” a song about being miserable in New York City, and the single from their upcoming second full-length, and McCarthy yelled, “That was for you!” to wild applause. The audience didn’t exactly come for misery, but rather to experience the redemptive power of an emotive past, to bathe in the pain of others for whatever that would be worth. As if unifying their purpose, Scott Hutchinson, lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, joined Augustines on “Headlong into the Abyss,” a song that either band could have penned.

Frightened Rabbit took the stage backed by their monstrous half-crucifix-half-telephone-poll backdrop that has become the band’s iconography. While the saving was strictly lyrical, a fan in the 10th row stared down Hutchinson and mouthed every word to the opener, “Holy,” seemingly unaware of the other 1,500 people in attendance. Frightened Rabbit followed the tune about divinity and personal failings with “Modern Leper,” another vaguely biblical reference and the song that broke the band firmly into mainstream indie rock six years ago.

The band sounded explosive and tight, marching through “Nothing Like You” and “Living in Colour” before playing one of their first releases, “Old Old Fashioned.” “This is a dancing song,” said Hutchinson, the arrangement’s sea-shanty chord progression erupting from the fret board on his guitar. Of course, it wasn’t just a dancing song—it was about getting back to an old, lost world, a song about waltzing around the living room with a woman who might well hold the power to make you utterly miserable. The redemption would be in older patterns. Frightened Rabbit then played “December’s Traditions,” about the exacting power and misery of these yearly rituals. It wouldn’t even matter that Hutchinson climbed into the venue’s balcony late in the set, because Frightened Rabbit
and Augustines had already crawled backward in search of salvation in something old.

On The List :: NO @ Glasslands [8.23.13]

Other than opening for Icona Pop on a fun but strange one-off bill, this was NO's "first proper show in New York," their lead singer told an increasingly crowded Glasslands on Friday night. Other than this admission, a special moment for its novelty as firsts are, the particulars of NO's debut on the New York scene were undeservedly banal. Glasslands, even with its newly bourgeois veneer (a bouncer, a rope outside), still lies in the gentrifying industrial wastes of South Williamsburg and fire codes under two hundred. With one great EP already released and an a certainly excellent full-length record to come, this was hardly the conquering entry to New York that this band will likely receive the next time they return to the confines of the city. For those in attendance at Glasslands, or those who caught NO at Mercury Lounge the following night, they had an opportunity to see the moment before the moment, a band about to about to be more broadly popular than either audience or performer entirely predict at a half-full Glasslands on a summer Friday night in August.

The band opened with the pounding, "In Another Life", a song that models the band's methodolgy of big second movements and anthemic choruses. As the song explodes into its finishing kick, the band, a surprising six-piece, churns behind their three guitars, bass, drums and vocals. It's a reversed dramatic irony; they know something that we do not, and each of these arrangements will have a surprising and furious twist. The band motored through single, "What's Your Name," with its prophetic lyric, "Get ready, I'm on my way," EP-track, "There's A Glow" and new songs, "Monday" and "So Scared." Sounding an awful lot like the National, a comparison the band is surely tired of, each arrangement is firm and angular, the band channeled more post-punk than their heretofore recorded material reflects.

Closing with old favorite, "Stay With Me," new song, "North Star," "Long Haul," before a final song that was unannounced and unknown to most of the audience, NO proved a depth and breadth of catalog that both surprised and impressed. They won't return to Glasslands. This night emerged as strictly developmental, a band designed and built to transcend itself in this moment. There was a measure of sadness then, these the fans who would help the band grow, who would be the initial body of their later success, but who might never again see them this close, this available, half-full on a weekend night.

On The List :: The National @ Barclays Center [6.5.13]

This review runs live and first on Bowery Presents' House List blog with great photos from Brian Reilly.

Last fall, New York magazine wondered if Brooklyn was finished. The cover story featured Barclays Center, a veritable spaceship of urban development that landed at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. But the arena as a new Brooklyn icon wasn’t truly finished until the National, a band whose Midwestern-displacement story mirrors many of the borough’s residents, took to its stage last night. As their fans—a bearded and craft-brew-swilling demographic hybrid of DIY and yuppie—clapped along, the band, avatars of Kings County’s mixture of aspiration and crooked shame, opened with “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” the sound of everything Brooklyn could and couldn’t be.

The early part of the set saw the National run through material from their latest, Trouble Will Find Me, mixed with songs from their previous two records, High Violet and Boxer. Playing “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Mistaken for Strangers” and “Sea of Love” (before which they facetiously said, “We’ve played 35 venues in this city, and it’s great to be back here where it all started”), the National proved to be in sharp and slicing form, tumbling tom-tom drums colliding with Matt Berninger’s graveled baritone. The quintet then performed “Sorrow,” which they “knew better than any other” song, after playing it for six straight hours straight as performance art at MoMA PS1 just a few weeks ago. Somewhere someone bit into an artisanal sausage and washed it down with an IPA just as the song about being absolutely miserable forever rang through the rafters. It was Brooklyn, old and new, misery and joy, on display in the same moment for the band, clad in black and backed by a string and horn section.

Following a run of “Squalor Victoria” and “I Need My Girl,” the National ripped through “Graceless,” the down-tempo “Pink Rabbits” and “England.” The crowd waited for one of the five-piece’s signature tunes and perhaps the night’s defining moment, “Fake Empire,” a song ostensibly about the terrible mistakes of the second Bush administration but could just as easily have been applied to the coterminous power and hypocrisy of Brooklyn’s rise to cultural prominence. The band and their fans sang the title lyric with real vigor, staying out sort of late on a weeknight in the moment when Brooklyn found nothing left to do or prove.

On The List :: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. @ Music Hall of Williamsburg [4.27.13]

This review runs first on Bowery's House List blog.

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.”

On The List :: Magic Man @ Fete Music, Providence, RI [3.28.13]

By pressing a heart icon, some 2,500 people have indicated their affection, maybe even their love, for Magic Man's latest single, "Texas" on the Hype Machine. More than twice this number fell in this sort of "like" with the band's other recent single, "Paris", a song that drives at heretofore unknown spot between the Cure and Passion Pit. In the past month or so, this was good enough to make the band one of the most discussed and buzzed about bands in certain corners of the admittedly cavernous Internet. On this night, a languid and clear weeknight in Providence, RI, Magic Man played to far less than 5,700 or 2,500 people. This is the quietude before the noise, and there exists a rather substantive gap between what happens on the Internet and what happens in a midsized American city on a Thursday.

The band opened with a song off their coming LP, a song they know and their audience doesn't. The main lyric is, "what are looking for?", which represents an appropriate rhetorical question for the Providence five-piece to ask of the label and A&R community. It was also an enormous opening movement. Frankly, given the sound coming from the stage, it was abundantly clear that this band is going to make themselves and someone else loads of money in 2014. Frenchkiss Records should come calling, and if they don't, Glassnote should, and if they don't, the majors should take a long look. Unconcerned with these long-view derivatives, the set built into old material, "Darling" from Real Life Color before transitioning back to the two recent singles, "Paris" and "Texas". It wasn't just a mediation on places; this is West Providence, Olneyville, a neighborhood that houses noise bands, lower-middle class moral victories, RISD student lofts and a weird, half-hearted gentrification. There are no miracles here.

The band thanked the audience at the end of their set, joking with the sound guy to, "cue that sad Ryan Adams music". Obliging, the sound guy played a piano ballad that wasn't from Adams' catalog, causing the adorable Magic Man keyboardist to say, sardonically, instructively, "Sadder." The band packed their gear, chatted with three fans who approached the stage, and I turned to the bartender and said, "you'll remember this band in a year's time."

On The List :: The Joy Formidable @ Littlefield [11.11.12]

Ritzy Bryan is absolutely possessed. It is a mixture of sex and violence, rock and roll tied up in this white Victorian dress. Her signature stare, a blend of surprise and being overcome, scanned the corners of the room at Littlefield, a challenge and a dare from the lead singer of the Joy Formidable, one of the best rock bands you can currently see live. But this possession, the seeming loss of control in the hands of the moment has a secondary quality. As Bryan collapsed, heaved and writhed in the hands of her music, she captured the audience, a trick of being possessed and possessing in the same moment. Her eyes, writ large for effect, communicated that she was both here and somewhere else, or, that what was happening was about both her and her audience.

Playing a few intimate shows in New York in advance of their coming sophomore LP, Wolf's Law, the band took the stage at a sold-out and still entirely pleasant Littlefield, to the head-nodding tones of "The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade". Bryan produced her perfect little diorama of destruction on the song's signature lyric, "This dream is in a telescope now," a line written four years ago that seems almost anachronistic now that the band is seemingly so close to crossover, mainstream success. Put another way, the last time they played Brooklyn was nearly three years ago at Union Hall, and though Littlefield is just a few short blocks away, these two sets are separated by a gulf of touring, record sales and reputation-building as a one of the single most transformative live bands of their generation. Using this past to craft their future, the band played, "I Don't Want To See You Like This," a favorite from their debut LP before unleashing, "This Ladder Is Ours," the consensus first single from their forth-coming record. There is little better metaphor than possession of a ladder upwards, especially given the song's video featuring the band in a house blown to bits. Joy Formidable aim upwards because they are so gifted at the creative destruction of their surroundings.

The band moved through favorites, "Cradle," the first song that seized the American audience, and "Heavy Abacus" before playing some new, as-yet-unknown material. They returned to their back catalog on closer, "Whirring", a song where Bryan is at her finest zombie self, charging around the stage, bangs swaying at her eye line with a mixture of menace and couture. In the final moments of "Whirring", bassist Rhydian Dafydd pounded the cymbals on the drum kit, pointing to drummer Matt Thomas and mouthing, "This fucking guy" as Thomas did what he does best: unleashing double-tap fill after double-tap fill. Thomas returned the favor, giving Dafydd the finger which took one hand away from his drumming, a fact that did not seem to disrupt the fury coming from the kit.

Closing with a bit of the dualism that made them suitably famous, Joy Formidable returned for an encore of the acoustic, "Silent Treatment" and the thrashing "Ever Changing Spectrum Of A Lie". Bryan did both poles well, vulnerable and a bit awkward without her guitar and then wantonly destructive. It was possessed and possession, weakness and strength, quiet and loud, a band that is always moving in two directions at once. Finally, this dualism will be appropriately reconciled as they move onward and upward on a ladder of their own making, sex and violence in the same breath.

On The List :: A.C. Newman @ Bowery Ballroom [10.22.12]

[Ed.note: This review runs live and first on Bowery Presents House List. On an unrelated note you may notice our publication is back to posting its own crappy cell phone photographs which is a real underdog story.]

Two days after the close of the CMJ Music Marathon, the celestial music solstice marking the independent-music calendar’s embrace of unknown and rising stars, The Bowery Ballroom reserved its confines for one of the Old Guard. Carl Newman, playing as A.C. Newman behind his third solo record, took the stage as the Establishment, a man prodigiously talented enough that he began releasing solo material to accent his work with his larger and more well-known collective, the New Pornographers. The question was: What made this not the New Pornographers? Newman seemed almost self-consciously aware—this is a singer who proved he remembers his fans’ different haircuts from show to show and year to year—of being simply an alternate version of his parent band. And apart from that band, he was, in some sense, a more intimate version of himself. Neko Case was replaced on tour with the resplendent bangs of Megan Bradfield, and Newman opened with “I’m Not Talking,” the first single from Shut Down the Streets, a definitively separate take on the power pop that made the singer deservedly famous.

While Newman’s solo career and shows remain distinct, the bond between singer and audience blurred from the start. Newman resembles his fans, and his fans resemble him, a coincidence that probably isn’t one. Middle-aged men with close-cropped hair and thick-framed glasses who knew all the words to “On the Table” and “Secretarial,” songs that Newman, a middle-aged guy with close-cropped hair, sang back (or first) with no sense that snake might have been eating itself. Of course, Newman, arguably the best ear and pen for rugged pop songs since Stephen Malkmus, paid this only passing mind. Following the whistled bridge of “Drink to Me, Babe, Then” the crowd applauded, and Newman, recognizing this recognition of some minor bit of brilliance commented, “It’s one of the great marvels of modern man, how I whistle in key,” pausing only to add, “Proof that there is a God,” much to the delight and murmuring of his hyper-literate and (possibly) largely atheist fan base. It was a bit of faux self-aggrandizement, a bit of sarcastic evangelism, a joke only these people could fully appreciate—a joke they themselves might have made.

Newman closed the main set with “Come Crash,” his best love song and one he “wrote for my wife, two years before I met her,” and “Miracle Drug.” The band returned after a stomping bit of encore applause to play “Strings” and “Town Halo,” the latter producing the closest moment to transfiguration behind pounding keys and its shuddering bridge. It was, of course, what these people came to see, a singer apart from his band, perhaps even a little closer to his fans than he, or they, would be entirely willing to admit. So he returned to his earlier comment, a quick eulogy for a fan’s Mohawk, now shaved off, a previous haircut cataloged and remembered by the singer. The fan yelled, “Things change,” although he and Newman were both still here.

Listen :: A.C. Newman - "I'm Not Talking"

On The List :: Sun Kil Moon @ Music Hall of Williamsburg [9.29.12]

[Ed.note] This review runs live and first on Bowery's House List blog. There is also no video or imagery from this show by anyone, anywhere, which is, if you think about it, sort of amazing in 2012. Kozelek fans live in the moment.

Mark Kozelek has already written this review. Without being overly meta, this is to say that he is both in on the joke and knows everything you might say or write about him. We all know this even without listening to his most recent thesis statement, “Sunshine in Chicago,” a song about being a musician getting older who used to play in a sort of famous band and is now a sort of famous solo artist, with all the niceties aside. The singer, alone onstage at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Saturday, referenced exactly this notion while telling a protracted story about an incident from the previous evening in Philadelphia: 45-year-old Kozelek had made a broken pass at the 23-year old daughter of a fan, 58, who had invited the singer out to dinner with the family. Kozelek asked the daughter to dinner instead, and the father was incensed. “I don’t play Christian Rock,” said Kozelek. “My music is about death, depression, trying to get laid and not getting laid.”

There were chairs in the venue, and the lights came nearly all the way down as the singer took the stage amidst a reverent hush. Kozelek, dressed in a dark dress shirt and jeans, sat alone with his guitar, two bottles of water and a Becks that he would accidentally spill (and might have been nonalcoholic if the basement bartender can be believed on these sorts of vagaries). “One of the few pleasures I have,” Kozelek offered as maybe nonalcoholic Becks foamed from the neck of the salvaged bottle. He opened with Modest Mouse’s “Four Fingered Fisherman,” with the lyric “It doesn’t matter anyway”—spilled beer, not getting laid, sitting in chairs at a rock venue were all forgivable mistakes. He followed this with an original, “Moorestown,” which you could argue is the best song ever written about New Jersey by someone other than Bruce Springsteen. Kozelek settled in and girded himself for a set that was to be as long as a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, obliterating the audience in his quiet way on the night’s fourth offering, “Missed My Heart.”

Kozelek had not arrived here to save anyone, but the audience already knew this. On “Elaine,” a tune from his most recent record, Kozelek murmured, “Wish I could help you with your problems, but, babe, I’ve got enough of my own.” It is true for his audience, too, as he encouraged two fans to box after they yelled rival song titles from the wings. He may as well have tried to fuck their daughters. Everyone seemed to grasp this completely. Kozelek closed with “Cruiser,” a favorite, but the night was better summed up by his “UK Blues,” a song about being miserable on a European tour, with each new place, Finland, Denmark, London, Belfast, featured in the chorus. “Belfast, Belfast,” sang Kozelek, but it could have been “Brooklyn, Brooklyn,” just another stop on the singer’s moveable feast of earnest sadness. These are things everyone already knew but came to see anyway. Kozelek didn’t play “Sunshine in Chicago,” partly because he didn’t need to.

On The List :: Stars @ Webster Hall and Mercury Lounge [9.22.12]

Stars is Torquil Campbell's band now and everyone knows it. Maybe it always has been, but the transition became official - or at least undeniable - at somewhere north of 1am at the Mercury Lounge, the most crowded of all the crowded rooms on New York's Lower East Side. Campbell stared into the stage lights, dressed in his full Morrissey-lite regalia of a blazer with pushed up sleeves and thick glasses that he lifted to make funny faces at the soundboard. Amy Milan, Campbell's bandmate, and the shining light of all the female voices in independent rock over the last decade, was noticeably absent, having already left the stage before the night's last song. Campbell didn't look relieved or triumphant, his affection for Milan is obvious and immutable, but he allowed himself a moment of strangeness, alone at the middle of the band he started and Milan helped make deservedly famous. To be clear, this was no power struggle. It was something more complicated, sweeter, more grinding, the second set in the span of a few hours, the story of a band releasing their sixth LP depending on who, and if, anyone is counting. Campbell, alone, led the band in a long slow cover of "This Charming Man", and Milan, presumably, grinned from somewhere not the stage.

Stars were performing rare double duty. First, a 9pm sold-out gig at Webster Hall, a venue that was literally transitioning into a nightclub for thousands as the audience left, where they played for 90 minutes, and a smaller set of rarities that kicked off at 12:45am at Mercury Lounge, a room that fire codes south of 200 people, all in celebration of the band's latest album, The North. It was a gear problem at the very least. Stars tour with an enormous amount of equipment, the product of a rich sound, strong record sales and the natural accumulation of a band approaching their third Presidential election on tour. An incredulous member of the Diamond Rings, the very excellent fellow Canadians who opened for Stars at Webster, mused to me, "I really have no idea how they'll get their stuff down to the second gig." It was a structural problem Stars fans didn't have, walking 11 blocks south and two avenues east in the two or so hours between shows. Milan asked the audience at the Mercury Lounge how many had attended the Webster show earlier in the evening, an unscientific poll that indicated it was something like half. A better question would have been how long it had been since Stars had played a room this small. Campbell, as if paying this uniqueness homage, yelled, "We're gonna play a bunch of shit we haven't played in years!" Milan elaborated and cleaned up, "I mean, you don't want to hear the same songs we just played, right?" Someone in the audience yelled, "Elevator Love Letter!", the song that made the band famous, that they had played at Webster and would not play at the second set.

Campbell is at home on stage, an emotional universe with customized physics, a quirky guy who has made a career being very earnest in public. His wireless mic has a piece of green tape with "Torq" written on it, a nickname that sounds like "Turk," when people say it quickly. He was late to the Webster Hall sound check on Saturday afternoon, a gesture that was surely more pell-mell than rock star righteousness. He is reported to be hugely generous and funny, and in front of his audiences he gives the impression of a guy going every direction at once, a bit of unrestrained ebullient id set against Milan's pleasant and organizing superego. He speaks as directly as he can before the last song at Mercury Lounge, "Thank you, we love you; thank you for spending money on our band. You make our lives possible." This brief monologue, an odd lifting of the most obvious curtain in independent rock, was perfect for an audience who spent 30 dollars on Webster tickets (though fans received a free digital copy of The North at Webster and the Mercury Lounge show was free) and endured seven dollar beers at both venues. It was a winning moment, not the reason that people love this band, but the correct and honest response to that love. Earlier, as they took the stage, a breathless girl in the balcony at Webster Hall leaned over to a friend and whispered loudly, "Set Yourself On Fire is my favorite album ever." Both nodded gravely, elegiac even. Nearly everyone in the audience feels some variation of this exact sentiment.

This all makes the night feel both public and private. Stars' fame practically relies on members of their fanbase having an intimate relationship with their music, a bedroom band who happily soundtracked and counseled a million heartbreaks. In public all these threads braid, all these fans who have had this overwrought and important experience with the music, all these fans who know the words to "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" the way school children know the Pledge of Allegence; it is both celebratory and a little intense, like an emotional, music jingoism, punk music for people that don't like punk music.

Stars, in this sense, are less a real band than they are a collection of memories their fans have about listening to their music. The live show is this memory come alive. The band opened their Webster Hall gig with latest single, "Theory of Relativity," a song that relies almost entirely on this type of unremembered nostalgia with Campbell channeling Moz, "back in lame grade 10, I was a total devestator, baby/ down in the school yard they all fell to their knees " before closing the loop with, "but it can't be '93, sadly, 'cause I wish it could forever/you call it luck, I call it tragedy." This is the central contradiction, not only that Campbell was aged 21 in 1993, a good bit of magical remembering, fans and a band caught between an intense remembered self and the colder realities of the present. Campbell's success and his ascendancy in the band is that he believes this remembered self can't die if you keep writing the right song about it. He is the keeper of our story. Milan, too, traffics in this imagery but with a few more reservations. The band's web address and Twitter handle are the appropriately democratic, "You Are Stars."

It is not all winsome reminiscence though. Polemical and a bit silly, Stars played their most didactic song ever, "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It" in the middle of their Webster set, eleven years of emotional catharsis, wrapped into one fortune cookie message. It is also one their finest creations of pop music and one of the best songs of 2012. Campbell is his most powerful self, both brittle and relentless, equally fervent on apologias like, "If I'm frightened, if I'm high, it is my weakness, please forgive it," and its corrolary, "take the weakest thing in you and beat the bastards with it," the closest thing the Stars crowd gets to marching orders. Everyone was a little drunk, if not necessarily high, and increasingly resolute.

The Mercury Lounge set was lodged firmly in the past, the place where Campbell is most comfortable. After the crushing and new "A Song Is A Weapon," the band played exclusively from the back catalog. Running through "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", "One More Night" and "Calendar Girl", the last song before Milan left the stage, it was a memory of a time when Milan had as much skin in the game as Campbell, where they shared catharsis like thirsty elementary schoolers perched around a water fountain. And then it was Torq's turn. The North bears much more of his voice and influence than the band's previous work, and no one seems to entirely mind, least of all Milan. Campbell is, after all, fantastically talented and writes the songs his fans want to hear and remember hearing. He writes the music of the selves they want to remember being. This risks naming the elephant in the room, what we all came to see, a decade in the mirror with the truly ugly bits edited out and all the pain recast as moral victories. Milan headed to the back of the room and Campbell closed the show with perfect pathos; it was a charming man playing, "This Charming Man," a song of the story-keeper's remembered self.

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.

On The List :: Erika Spring @ Mercury Lounge [8.15.12]

(Editor's Note: This review runs live and first on the Bowery Presents House List. And also the above photo is not from last night's show because this publication's high tech photography equipment makes this publication's phone restart when you try to take a shitty cell phone picture.) 

You have never seen the Mercury Lounge stage this empty. Two figures, a furtive blonde and her lanky male guitarist took the stage with no drum kit, no loop pedals; amplifiers pushed back against the wall. The famous THIS IS NOT AN EXIT sign looked something approaching lonely as Erika Spring, of Au Revoir Simone, slid to the stage. Spring, née Erika Spring Forester, would later admit it was a challenge touring behind a five-song EP. “It’s hard to fill up the space,” she said as her carefully curated crowd chuckled in kind. It was exactly this sort of set, a bit spacious, empty even, and a bit full of Spring’s restless and beckoning alto breakdowns.

Spring opened with “Happy at Your Gate,” a song that features her buried and beautiful voice. Next she rolled into promotional single “Hidden,” off her self-titled EP. It was her best song and the most well known. Of course, given her anxiety about filling the set list, it was unsurprising she played a Eurythmics cover, “When Tomorrow Comes,” with the kind of eponymous chorus that absolutely ripped through the heart of those in the weeknight audience, both begging to get home to sleep and hoping they wouldn’t have to go to work.

The night closed with “Six More Weeks,” with Spring in her zebra-patterned tank top and leopard-patterned cardigan, a mix of animalistic cross tracks that only half betrayed the slow jams slipping from the public address system. Laughing, Spring called one song in the middle of the show her “’90s prom song,” before smiling wryly and moving on. It was sparse, to be sure, but Erika Spring is something to behold—knobby knees, the kind of woman who sailed a thousand music blogs if nothing else.

On The List :: Milagres @ Glasslands [7.26.12]

Opening for New York's Milagres was a gracious Danish artist who plays under the moniker Indians. Without necessarily delving into the bizarre irony of a northern European playing in New York under the name Indians - he could have been Dutch and named his band Lenape Stuyvesant - suffice it to say Indians possesses great affection for New York City. His last song was explicitly about New York, and he waxed philosophical about the city's charms two other times in between his pretty, looping keyboard creations. The audience felt guilty - or what guilty would look like after three drinks - like one of your college friends just informed you how "cool your parents are." You shuffle your feet and demure. These people know New York is transformative, and they know they take it for granted. Indians doesn't, sounding a bit like a more lonely Porcelain Raft, and his car service is coming to get him at 11:30. New York will have to wait.

Milagres took the stage as a surprisingly tight five piece. Their debut record for Kill Rock Stars, Glowing Mouth, dealt almost exclusively in a distended series of keyboard arrangements drowned in high-fret board guitars. They were the Antlers without taking themselves so seriously. On this night they sound phenomenal, featuring one of the better drummers in the independent rock music and layer upon layer of keyboards, vocals and guitars. On record it can be a beautiful, occasionally challenging listen, but live the music is sharp and urgent. The band opened with "Gone," playing "Lost In The Dark" and "Here To Stay" along the way, crafting the dualism of grieving departures and settling down for good. Appropriately, Milagres closed their main set with album opener "Halfway," a final moment of indecision. The chorus suggests, "I could be halfway from anyone," as Indians packed his gear into the trunk of a black cab. On this night, Milagres, one of the better indie rock bands you can see live, was happy to be trapped by the same city Europeans are loathe to leave.

On The List :: The Killers @ Webster Hall [7.23.12]

This review runs live on Bowery's House List Blog.

To watch the Killers in 2012 is an act of disjointed historical remembrance. This sort of anachronism isn’t simply a product of the band’s ability to resurrect the musical genres of everyone from Joy Division to Springsteen. Because these days, the Killers turn backward twice, using old influences with a wink and trying to escape and revive the songs that made them stupidly famous in 2004. It was then that the opening five songs of their debut LP, Hot Fuss, were as ambitious and outstanding as any popular rock album of the previous decade not made by the Strokes. This is and was the past, before the band nearly broke up, before the litany of solo records that take us up to present day. This sold-out crowd in the East Village would serve as the rough approximation of now, or the scene of where we might figure out the dimensions of the word. The Killers, four guys who wanted to lionize and transcend Las Vegas, the most anachronistic place on the planet, arrived at Webster Hall with a new single, “Runaways,” and a forthcoming new album, Battle Born, rich with the interstitial tension over whether to dig up or completely bury the past.

Appropriate to this dichotomy, the band opened with “Runaways” followed by their first American radio single, “Somebody Told Me.” The packed crowd was in full throat on the night’s third song, “Smile Like You Mean It,” before lead singer Brandon Flowers asked, “Are you guys in or are you out?” perhaps unaware that these fans had either passed up or taken advantage of the huge scalping price on the secondary market. For those who passed on the urgent, big offers in the line outside, they were, most definitely, in by the time Flowers climbed his stage monitor to shout the lyrics of “Spaceman.” It only served to raise the stakes, as the band oscillated from older material, like “This Is Your Life,” and new-album cuts, like “Miss Atomic Bomb,” full of future tense fatalism—Flowers soaring on the lyric “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

The main set concluded with the Hot Fuss long-form anthem, “All These Things That I’ve Done,” arriving at this denouement by way of “Reasons Unknown,” “Bling (Confessions of a King),” “Human” and the band’s first UK single from 2003, “Mr. Brightside.” But it was the present perfect tense of “All These Things That I’ve Done” that suitably served as the ending for a band standing on the very fulcrum of itself. Those in the crowd screamed the meaningless and perfect bridge, “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier,” along with Flowers, a slice of 2004 in 2012, these things we’ve done acting as a beacon for whatever it is that comes next.

On The List :: Deleted Scenes @ Mercury Lounge [7.19.12]

If being a small rock band on a small label was easy, everyone would do it. Deleted Scenes took to the Mercury Lounge in the 8 o'clock slot as the headliner of the "early show," which is rapidly becoming code for, "How do we turn this place over twice in a night?" The band opened with the buzzy onamonapia song, "Days of Adderall" before turning to the more esoteric, "Teenage Kids," a song that is, according to the band, not available anywhere, sporting a central lyrical image, "This is what it must feel like to have teenage kids" in regards to a failing romance. "I'd die to please you," the lead singer intones in what has to be the most heart breaking moment on the Lower East Side this Thursday. The middle of the set turned the band toward its more 1990s indie rock influences, cheeky and thinly veiled Pavement turns of phrase and, at times, chunky Built To Spill-style guitars. Deleted Scenes updated their reference points to those of the quirky, looping pop of the Shins on, "Bedbedbedbedbed," a song good enough to use a noun five times with no need a space bar. The night closed with "Fake IDs", a 2009 release and, surprisingly not their most recent single, "English As A Second Language," a song that was left out of the Thursday night set list. "Fake IDs" rang, as it has for the last three years, as an identity think piece, settling on the somewhat provocative lyric, "We've all got fake IDs" and its presumption that for all their "everyman pretensions," you couldn't be this band if you tried.


Listen :: Deleted Scenes - "English As A Second Language"

The band plays Rock Shop this evening, 7/20.

On The List :: Mates of State @ The Echo [7.6.12]

It's hard to write about Mates of State without writing about all things people write about Mates of State. The band's story, after being told and retold and retold again, has sort of transcended the band itself, an arc around to stab the backs of the people who first told their story. As we smash through the fourth wall of music journalism, this would be the part of the introductory paragraph where I mention that everyone mentions the two main members of Mates of State, Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel, are married and very much in love and everyone at the Echo on Los Angeles' East Side knows this. It is inescapable. Of course, Mates of State once suggested, and played on this night, "Everyone Needs An Editor," a love song about blue skies and maybe introductory paragraphs, and it is hardly their fault that their narrative so gratuitously swallows their music. It is also worth noting here that Hammel, the drummer, took off his wedding ring rather conspicuously in the minutes leading up to the show. This was not a symbolic or temporary divorce of Kori Gardner, it's just very hard to play drums with a wedding ring on. The music might trump the narrative after all, or at least they would collide on the stage for a bit more than an hour.

The band opened with a concerted mixture of material from their previous three albums, Bring It Back, Re-Arrange Us, one of the best releases of 2008, and their more recent, Mountaintops. Opening with "For The Actor", a screaming love song from a couple who is already in love, Gardner and Hammel glanced at each other furtively, with a learned and controlled fecundity, singing lyrics like, "I remember when it poured and you sang to me in summer, it's a fantasy." This from a band who made their name in the early part of the previous decade by playing shows while staring unbroken into each others' eyes. It was creepy and cute. There is none of this type of explicitness these days. They then played "My Only Offer", "Now", "Sway", "Unless I'm Led" and, maybe their finest song, "The Re-Arranger", its four discrete parts showing the band's gift for key signature changes and second (and third and fourth) movements. The third movement of "The Re-Arranger" featured Gardner and Hammel nearly screaming, "Re-arrange us, re-arrange us", one of the most tremulous and triumphant moments in recent pop music.

A brief interlude debate about what of their old catalog the band could play lead to one of those adorable arguments between the lead-singers about what key 2000's "Everyone Needs An Editor" was originally written in. Eventually, they arrived at the right key, or the right one for this night, and plowed to the final act centering on the lyric, "I'd paint the sky with you, I'd let you choose the blue." It is the type of life-affirming, love-sick lyric that makes audiences swoon. The band then played, "Ha-Ha", another of those multiple movement songs that closes with the lyric, "This is blood that we're made of, go tell it like a chronicle," that blood is their music and their marriage. It is the story that we, and they, can't help retelling.

Mates of State plays the Echo again on Saturday, July 7.

On The List :: The Echo-Friendly @ Mercury Lounge [6.21.12]

[Editor's Note: This review runs first on Bowery Presents' House List blog]

Nothing and everything changed this spring when the Echo-Friendly’s best song, “Same Mistakes,” was featured in the closing montage of an episode of HBO’s popular and divisive show Girls. This moment brought the band untold numbers of new fans, many of whom easily related to a show about the tragic comedy (or sometimes just tragedy) of mid-20s romance. Of course, the irony is that the Echo-Friendly represents the real version of some of the narrative heartbreaks offered as a somewhat credible facsimile on Girls.

For those who know the band well, the story of the breakup and continued friendship of the two lead singers, Jake Rabinbach and Shannon Esper, is well documented. For the fans who found the band through HBO, many of whom filled Mercury Lounge last night, they were matched perfectly, the strange intersection of life imitating art imitating life again. Truthfully, both everyone and no one know the Echo-Friendly. The group’s first four songs are, to most, entirely unknown. When they played “There’s a Part of Me Nobody Sees but You” and “Worried” the audience girded itself with recognition of Esper’s Chrissy Hynde–inpsired vocals and Rabinbach’s effusive guitar playing.

Of course, the whole evening, to a certain extent, built inexorably toward “Same Mistakes,” the song everyone knew they would play last. This was the new Brooklyn slow dance, a grinding and beautiful ode to the poor choices of post-adolescence. Esper curled into Rabinbach’s shoulder as the song concluded, a moment that felt like real New York truth, like the fact that the girls and boys who live off the F train are undeniably less attractive than those who live off the L. But for a band from Greenpoint with a complicated history, a band that used a description of its neighborhood as an invocation, a band with lead singers who live just blocks apart, it was the girls and boys who live off the G train that will break your heart.

Listen :: The Echo-Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

On The List :: Tokyo Police Club @ Bowery Ballroom [6.10.12]

This review runs live, first and in color on the Bowery Presents' House List blog. Photo via.

The indie-rock universe has taken on an especially mercurial quality when the guys in Tokyo Police Club, the veritable old guard, find themselves headlining a sold-out Bowery Ballroom show just one night before warming up for Foster the People in Central Park. But this was the landscape outside, the fickle cultural one—the very same one that in 2006 elevated TPC from obscure basement band to playing Mercury Lounge to signing with Saddle Creek and beyond. Inside, the band was back playing a New York City rock club, a bit of nostalgia for a well-established group that in some respects had transcended spaces like this one.

As their new record steadily creeps toward the finish line, this was Tokyo Police Club’s first show “in a long time,” according to singer Graham Wright. So, suitably, they opened with something new. The song, one of the few the audience knew none of the words to, featured the signature lyric “Don’t look back,” a winking self-admonishment from a band ripping between its past and its future. Diving to 2006, they followed with “Nature of the Experiment,” the type of song that makes you remember where you were when you first heard it. The set oscillated among old, recent and new, featuring “Favorite Colour,” “Tessellate” and a new song with the words “I want to travel to the future” lodged prominently in its chorus.

The band finished the set with the twosome of “Breakneck Speed,” one of the best songs of 2010, and “Wait Up (Boots of Danger),” the first bringing the house to its fullest voice on the lyric “It’s good to be back, good to be back” before an explosion of high-fret guitar and keyboard. It was, perhaps, this tension between returning and moving forward, the old becoming new and the new becoming familiar, that stuck the set together, a sort of past and future tense architecture. And so it was no joke when the band encored with a cover of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and then closed with their second-ever single, “Cheer It On.” Only a few people knew the words then but everyone knew them now, bringing the evening both back and full circle.

On The List :: John Roderick @ Mercury Lounge [1.28.11]

This review runs live, first and in color at the Bowery Presents' House List blog.

The first time I saw John Roderick was with his full band, the Long Winters, at a now-defunct East L.A. venue back in 2008. He was in rock-star mode with long hair and a loud maroon jacket, and he never took off his sunglasses. But on Saturday night, a mellower version, perhaps a more authentic Roderick, took the stage at Mercury Lounge with an acoustic guitar, plaid shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. It ended up being more of a group-therapy session than a rock concert. He seemed to accept and embrace this, one of the most self-aware and whip-smart musicians of his generation, positioned at the edge of being an indie-rock icon and a guy, like everyone else, getting older.

Roderick came onstage, tuned his guitar and asked for requests, later admitting he had half a mind to make the entire hour-plus set all requests, but this emerged as mildly problematic in the night’s second song. After playing “Hindsight,” Roderick took another suggestion, “The Sound of Coming Down,” a song from the Long Winters’ nearly decade old When I Pretend to Fall. After the first verse and chorus, a perfect and sublime Roderick hook (“Hey, you know nobody’s chasing us”), it was clear the singer struggled with the lyrics to the second verse. When an audience member shouted the first couplet, Roderick laughed and picked up the thread. He would apologize for the misstep, but it was a perfect reflection of the evening: audience members throwing requests, help, sarcastic barbs and Roderick responding in kind—a sort of hyper-literate ringleader for this circus collection of liberal arts degrees, facial hair and memorized indie-rock lyrics.

The audience wanted more than the 11 acoustic versions of Long Winters songs that Roderick played. “The Commander Thinks Aloud,” which Roderick informed us was “about a spaceship crash,” produced the type of silent reverence that brought all these quippy, culturally relevant fans to the same place. It was Roderick, alone, describing the last moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia. The final chilling lyric, “The crew compartment is breaking up,” describes the fatal perils of reentry. And the moment transcended any snappy comebacks as Roderick earnestly, and somewhat awkwardly, struggled to thank everyone for coming.

Listen :: The Long Winters - "Pushover"
Listen :: The Long Winters - "Ultimatum"
Listen :: The Long Winters - "Blue Diamonds"
Listen :: The Long Winters - "Stupid"
Listen :: The Long Winters - "Carparts"
Listen :: The Long Winters - "Unsalted Butter"
Listen :: The Long Winters - "The Commander Thinks Aloud" [Live at Union Hall 4.2.2007]

On The List :: Dreamers of the Ghetto @ Mercury Lounge [12.8.11]

This review runs live and in color on the incomparable Bowery Presents House List Blog. Photo courtesy.

Romanticizing the awfulness of the American ghetto experience isn’t necessarily new, although perhaps the modalities have changed in 2011. Even Lupe Fiasco suggested that if urban life threatened any lionizing appeal, it was certainly outweighed by practical realities. Dreamers of the Ghetto entered themselves into this conversation with a stunning debut record, Enemy/Lover, and a fall tour in support of U.S. Royalty that stopped at Mercury Lounge last night.

The four-piece Dreamers evokes a certain grittiness that befits the moniker—they’re underdogs dreaming of getting out or they’re solid outsiders dreaming of what happens within in the walls and streets of the American ghetto. Either way, the band pits wailing guitars against detached synthesizers, alongside pathos-rich vocals. This combination transmutes the band into the rarefied air of aspirational visionaries, hope-in-unseen believers armed with instruments.

Dreamers of the Ghetto closed the night with the breathy, seductive chorus of vocals of “Connection,” “Regulator” and the band’s thesis statement, “Tether.” Each song featured a central lyric loudly repeated and launched like projectiles into the minds and chests of the assembled audience: “When you’re gone I know you’re with me” (“Connection”), “I love your face/ I think you’re striking” (“Regulator”) and the fantastic and final “It’s just another door/ Tether on the other side” (“Tether”). Somehow these dark dreams of American terrors became beautiful; love, loss and fear of the urbane metastasizing into wide-open hymns and singable refrains. It was a dark pathos to be sure, but pathos all the same.

Listen :: Dreamers of the Ghetto - "State of a Dream"
Listen :: Dreamers of the Ghetto - "Tether"