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 :: 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 :: 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 :: 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"

On The List :: The Decemberists @ Prospect Park Bandshell [6.14.11]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery Presents' House List blog.

Colin Meloy, lead singer of the Decemberists, took to the stage last night in Brooklyn, a borough he unwittingly helped build. See, since the first Decemberists demos and EP back in 2000-2001, Brooklyn fully embraced the Meloy shtick, a delocated Portland East, full of beards, thick-framed glasses, microbrewed beers and sustainably raised chicken. In essence, Meloy turned his wanton nerdiness into a major label deal with Capitol Records, and a bunch of nerdy kids declared him their archetype and followed his excellence by deftly selecting their shifts at the Park Slope Food Coop. The memory of these 10 years is as powerful as whatever actually happened. You didn’t necessarily need to look like Meloy to get into the bandshell last night, although it didn’t hurt, but this was in so many ways the return of the king.

Dressed in a smart three-piece gray suit, Meloy strode to the microphone more or less on time, with a glass of red wine that he carefully placed atop an amp, to be largely forgotten. The band opened with “July, July,” potentially their most singable song, before moving into material off their latest and best record, The King Is Dead, playing “Down by the Water” and “Calamity Song,” which Meloy offered free of charge to Michelle Bachman’s campaign. The beards and cheese plates on the lawn roared their approval but it was only Meloy who pulled off the sarcastic lyrical reference to supply-side economics before singing, “Will we gather to conjure the rain down?” laughing as his followers stood in hoods and umbrellas under a spitting drizzle. He couldn’t have seemed more powerful.

Perhaps it was some of Meloy’s first lyrics of the evening that rang the most true. In “July, July,” he reflected: “And we’ll remember this when we are old and ancient, though the specifics might be vague. And I’ll say your camisole was a sprightly light magenta when in fact it was a nappy bluish gray.” Memories colored with the sheen of nostalgia. So those in the crowd would forget these silly beards and goofy haircuts and the sleeping baby at a rock concert and the organic cheeses and the sustainably fermented pinot noir, but they will remember how this felt, to be in the same ZIP code as the brilliant Meloy. As he sang in “All Arise,” a country-western joint played to Prospect Park West, “just be mine tonight,” and they were.

The Decemberists -This Is Why We Fight by MMMusic

On The List :: The Rural Alberta Advantage @ Bowery Ballroom [3.10.11]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery's House List blog.

The Rural Alberta Advantage came to the sold-out Bowery Ballroom last night already having made a career, albeit a short one, on weird, fetishized stories about provincial Canada. Supporting their second record, Departing, thematically connected to their first, Hometowns, it was hard to say if the band was coming or going, with their lyrics touching equally on the desire to return to the places we know best and the need to burn these rural geographies from our past and hit the road. Their charm was, perhaps, in their ability to table these questions of origin and escape velocity, as they stood as an homage to life on the road a million miles from your friends.

On The List :: The New Pornographers @ Terminal 5 [12.6.10]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery's House List.

Neko Case, one part of Canadian rock band the New Pornographers, flicked absentmindedly at the zipper on her sweatshirt before visibly, but not sheepishly, yawning as frontman Carl Newman spat wry bits of magnanimity to the crowd. But Case wasn’t bored. She would later confess that her house had caught fire, she had been involved in a car accident, she had been dumped and she was convinced the whole band was going to die on their flight to London the next day. So you could forgive her for seeming a little distant. But these unassuming reveals wove the fabric of a tangible anti-heroism, even for a band that seems to take pride in coming out of the phone booth in the same clothes they went in with.

The night opened with the stomping and churning of “Moves,” the centerpiece of which is the lyric “These things get louder.” It wasn’t exactly a promise, rather a reminder as the band wandered through their five-album catalog, touching on quieter moments, “Adventures in Solitude,” and approaching serious bombast on the third song, “It’s Only Divine Right.” The New Pornographers’ sonic evolution was obvious from this range, stretching from the 2003 power-pop anthem “The Laws Have Changed” to the orchestral “We End Up Together,” off the most recent record, Together, each sharing the same foot-shuffling excellence that this group seems so uninterested in advertising.

Before an encore including the stunning “Challengers,” “Up in the Dark” and crowd-favorite “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” Newman and his unassuming band closed their main set with “The Bleeding Heart Show.” Even with all of Case’s heartbreak on the table, it was not the title lyric that stood out larger than the 36-inch illuminated letters spelling out NEW PORNOGRAPHERS behind the stage. For the rapt thousands of spectators, even with a group that seems to deny the possibility of such a triumph, the words rang out in the West 50s and across the river: “We have arrived.”

On The List :: Hockey @ Bowery Ballroom [3.15.10]

This review runs in radio edit shine at Bowery's Houselist Blog

Hockey's lead singer Benjamin Grubin has this habit of touching his face. At times, this manifests as an index finger pressed to the femple, accompanied by a cocked eyebrow that indicates revelation at hand. In other moments, it is an open palm into which he buries his face and hairline. Nearly always he explodes away from these gestures, whipping his lithe frame in circles. On this night at a sold out Bowery, Grubin was in exactly this moment between the revelations communicated to his temple and the shroud of his palm over his face, both inspired and insecure, a spinning, exploding vessel of influences and new creations.

Of course, the Grubin acknowledges the unique space Hockey inhabits between the bands they are admittedly borrowing from and the new music they forged in this crucible of pastiche. On "Song Away," a song that transported the audience to a Tom Petty summer on the FM dial, Grubin sang, "I stole my personality from an anonymous source/and I'm getting paid for it to/I don't feel bad about that." This is just seconds after confiding "I want to write a truthful song over an 80s groove." The song was both, completely lifted and completely elevating. The sell-out crowd moved like it was the middle of June and perhaps Grubin's admitted influence-plagiarism made this all more carefree and honest. Earlier on the soaring "Learn to Lose," he admitted "Last time I lost control of my confidence it took me five years to get it back." The forthrightness was winning and unquestionably original.

In between playing two new songs, darker creations suggesting a deep second album, the band crushed debut record favorites "3am Spanish" and "Curse This City." After a deserved encore, the band closed with the appropriate "Too Fake" and Grubin was back to the topic of originality. This time coming to front of the stage, he screamed the chorus, "Look out! I'm just too fake for the world!" It was both terms of surrender and declaration of war, exhaustion in the age of footnotes and inspiration in a time of collage.

On The List :: Small Black @ Mercury Lounge [3.7.10]

This review runs, in radio edit shine on Bowery's Houselist.

In an appropriate coda to the fading electro craze of the last five years, newly dubbed "glo-fi" bands stepped into a void that perhaps didn't exist. Small Black is exactly one of those bands, not quite original but more likely a sharp, revisionist critic. After all, the lo-fi synth movement managed to fire this electro-impulse through muddy, underwater effects and fuzz, finding rough choruses and beauty in something intentionally broken. If Justice was a metaphorical Saturday night, Small Black is slow-drive, contrarian Sunday morning.

With multi-colored lights echoing around the front of the stage, Small Black appeared four-across, opening with "Weird Machines." Not the least bit ironic, even given the collection of technology on stage, the song is endemic of what makes the band such an intriguing prospect; it is both anthemic and intentionally drowned in cold medicine reverb. In what is now typical response, the crowd moved their feet and nodded their heads with vicious and responsive purpose. Running through the bass-heavy, "Lady In The Wires" and some unreleased material before closing with the anti-hit hit, "Despicable Dogs" and the closer, "Bad Lover," Small Black defined something both steeped in criticism and concerned with contemporaneity.

As the lyrics to "Despicable Dogs" - "do it without me/do it when I'm gone" - sailed out through flashing light and moving humanity, there attached no extra significance as the second to last song of the night. In ways, the pathos was the narrative movement from bands obsessed with the dance floor to bands making similar music in their bedrooms. This is the soundtrack to a Breakfast Club generation that never received a detention, a soundtrack for the kids who actually enjoyed staying home. If Small Black isn't crushing your Saturday night, and this was a Sunday, they are the blinking, blurry eyes of a Sunday morning, criticism and coffee in the kitchen.

Listen :: Small Black - "Despicable Dogs"

On The List :: Yeasayer @ Bowery Ballroom [2.8.10]

This review runs on Bowery's Houselist Blog.

Brooklyn’s Yeasayer exists somewhere between an indeterminate futurism and the completely recognizable past. Like a laser-charged Krautrock band playing in British Mandate-era Palestine or like Depeche Mode performing in postcolonial Delhi, the band is undeniably synthesized, tribal and born back into the future. At a sold-out Bowery Ballroom, the reference game would prove useful as they took the stage amidst sea-sick colors and flashing lights.

Yeasayer opened with the unsettling and familiar first track from their latest record, Odd Blood, “The Children.” With vocals set in an artificially low register and pulsing, almost breathing industrial soundscapes, “The Children” was the edgy, creepy start to a set that would only equal one of the previous two descriptors. Relying heavily on material from the new album, out today, the group powered through “Love Me Girl,” “Madder Red” and “Remember,” although not necessarily in that order. There was an air of science to the exoticism, like Yeasayer had shown up to mediate sound, rather than actually produce it. Far more the medium for the cacophony than its creator, it was almost like they were the dimmer for the lights pulsing around them.

Yeasayer, the guys who used to practice in their apartment on Prospect Avenue in South Park Slope, closed their main set with “Ambling Alp” and “O.N.E,” the two singles off Odd Blood. The words of the middle of their set—from “Remember”—were still echoing around in the top recesses of The Bowery Ballroom: “You’re stuck in my mind/ All the time.” People wouldn’t forget this. And then loops peeled off into nowhere, and the band shuffled around between here and some indefinite never forever.

Listen :: Yeasayer - "Ambling Alp"
Listen :: Yeasayer - "O.N.E."

On The List :: Spoon @ Mercury Lounge [1.21.10]

This review appears on Bowery's Houselist Blog.

The sidewalk in front of Mercury Lounge was divided into two lines like some sort of downtown apartheid: One for those seeking to pay their way in to see Britt Daniel and the other for those with their names on the guest list. They were faced in opposite directions—the music-industry insiders and the morally righteous superfans willing to stand in the cold and pay real money for music. It was thus written on the street that something special was happening inside. A band that will play Radio City Music Hall in two months was playing this tiny sold-out venue.

Spoon took the stage just after 10 and, Daniel, in a brown fitted shirt (he wrote an entire song about this in 2001), was awkward in the way cool people can get away with being weird and compelling. He thanked us for coming, and the room buzzed with the sense that we should be thanking him. Spoon slipped into “Black Like Me,” maybe their most cerebral effort, before shifting into “Is Love Forever?,” off their latest album, Transference, a downstroke anthem that ends with a collision of reverb and the feeling of a pulled plug. Daniel played most of the new record, including “Who Makes Your Money” and “Nobody Gets Me but You,” in the first half of the set. The crowd, quite obviously a sea of personal and music-business connections, leaned close and the room approached the feeling of a birthday party where everyone was sure their invitation was genuine.

Daniel upped the ante in the set’s final third. Favorites “Cherry Bomb,” “I Summon You” and “Beast and Dragon, Adored,” appeared next to new cuts like “Mystery Zone,” “Written in Reverse” and the night’s closer, the propulsive “Got Nuffin.” Daniel thanked us again for standing in the cold and we silently replied that we mostly hadn’t. But some did, and for the feeling of a major event with a big band in a little room, this is exactly what counted.

On The List :: Ambulance LTD @ Mercury Lounge [8.18.09]

This review runs on Bowery's Houselist Blog

Ambulance LTD’s lead singer Marcus Congleton, had a gigantic tiger on the front of his T-shirt (and one on the back). It was, in fact, a tiger shirt. The type that is either grossly ironic or more earnestly worn in shopping malls throughout America’s red states. It’s hard to tell if these animal graphic T-shirts, first popular in the ’80s, are seriously old or very, very new. And for a frontman with uncanny calm, a tiger leaping through the front of his major textile garment is either fun as hell or extremely disjointed.

The band opened with material the sold-out crowd didn’t know. Working on a new record after years of label disputes, Ambulance LTD appeared committed to honing the new songs in a live environment, which is difficult to evaluate, both artistically and performance-wise. Are the new songs less impressive because we didn’t know them? Or was the audience too focused on old material to spot the brilliance of the new offerings? For 10 songs the debate raged and the concertgoers kind of swayed, equal parts happy to be there and confused about where this was going. And then the set shifted.

After a pleasant prog-rock breakdown, the band delved into its first full-length album, LP, playing “Ophelia.” From there on out, with one exception, the band played material from that first album. The crowd responded to the expected, bouncing and nodding along. But what about the tension between old and new? As Congleton noted in the lyrics of one of his first songs, “I’m too young to belong to anyone/ But I’m too old to be taken.” It was achingly serious and pertinent—the divide is challenging. Except for the tiger leaping out of his chest. That needs no reconciliation.

Listen :: Ambulance LTD - "Stay Where You Are"

On The List :: The Hold Steady @ Bowery Ballroom [6.9.09]

[editor's note: this runs in full on The House List]

Craig Finn, lead singer of The Hold Steady, does not cut an impressive figure. He could just as easily be cheering on his kids at a youth soccer game as controlling the stage at The Bowery Ballroom. But his voice—a paradox, an unexpected power, a rapid-fire weapon—is the mediator. He belongs here. Looks can be deceiving but sounds rarely are.

A slowly advancing onslaught of sweat made its way down Finn’s blue oxford shirt as the evening wore on. It began with a small foothold near the neckline and built, like liquid manifest destiny, until it soaked half of his chest. Amidst this symbol of workmanship, Finn was plenty reflective and made sure to mention, “We haven’t played here since 2005.” It was a return in music, too, with the band playing the majority of the songs off Separation Sunday. Finn worked exceptionally hard with the older songs—slightly awkward in his movements and utterly explosive in his manner.

The Hold Steady began their encore with “Stuck Between Stations,” a song, like many of their others, about drinking recklessly. The crowd matched the band’s intensity, rocking the floor and bouncing to the ceiling. Finn, with his freestyle delivery, shouted the lyrics away from the mike and the band poured keyboard over the arrangement like drunk college students pouring lighter fluid on charcoal fires. Earlier, Finn maintained that, despite success, the band is still a “bar band.” No deception was necessary. The audience could not have missed what they heard.

Listen :: The Hold Steady - Your Little Hoodrat Friend

On The List :: Art Brut @ Mercury Lounge [6.3.09]

[editor's note: this runs in full on The House List. the crowd was great and the band was explosive. it's easy to get down on the city and our music crowds. sometimes we get it right. ready, art brut?]

Eddie Argos, lead singer of Art Brut, looked out into the audience and deadpanned: “My sex is on fire.” It was fairly late in the set and Argos had already made clear his disdain for Kings of Leon. But to clarify, he elaborated: “Twelve revisions and a million dollars and we got ‘My sex is on fire.’ What does it mean? What the fuck does any of it mean?” It’s an appropriate question—especially from the front man of the most deconstructionist rock band ever.

Made moderately famous in 2005 for the song “Formed a Band,” Argos remains one of the most candid, if potentially sarcastic, front men on the market. His forthrightness on this night bled as much earnestness as it did candor. He bounced around the stage spinning stories about DC Comics (even ad-libbing the company into “Modern Art”) and jilted lovers. Despite his rainbow-colored shirt, Argos was less ironic than you might think. In fact, underneath the whole deconstructionist act, Art Brut was lethally serious.

The band was smack in the middle of a five-night residency at the Mercury and they looked no worse for wear, though Argos mused, “I’m running out of original things to say.” This bout of self-awareness was disarming and the band immediately launched into “Emily Kane” with Argos annotating about the power of rock and roll. The show was sold out and the crowd had the band’s lyrics more than memorized. Art Brut eventually left on “Bang Bang Rock & Roll,” a song that again pointed the lens inward and still left the audience wanting more. What does it all mean? We don’t have coherent answers—just be happy Art Brut is asking the questions.

Listen :: Art Brut - "Formed A Band"

On The List :: Travis @ Webster Hall [4.25.09]

This review runs in full on the Bowery Presents Blog, The House List. It's a pretty interesting project and it's good to be a part of it.

"Webster Hall might as well have been a time machine Saturday night. Early in the set, 'Writing to Reach You' sailed out over a sold-out crowd and it felt just like 1999. In less than four minutes, 10 years melted like a Prospect Park ice cream cone on the first hot day of spring. It felt real. It felt like the last of the Clinton years. But things have changed. The economy sucks, Travis never became as big as Coldplay and 2009 can have a sobering character."

Some other notes: Travis was the picture of being almost famous. 1,400 people who know the words, are fired up and act like the last ten years haven't happened. The weird thing is: if you close your eyes, it's almost Coldplay. If Travis had written "Yellow" or "Clocks," it would have been a wildly different pop music landscape. Never under-estimate the power of less than seven minutes of pop music to entirely change a career. It cost Travis literally millions of dollars. Never under-estimate the fine line between being a "Chris Martin" and ... not.