On The List :: NO @ Mercury Lounge [3.22.14]

Taking the stage north of 12:30, a time that was, "the latest show [they've] ever played" according to lead-singer and part-time conductor, Bradley Carter, Echo Park denizens NO arrived in a New York market they are still in the process of conquering. Bridging the gap between Saturday night and Sunday morning, a crowd fueled by liquid courage and plunging inhibitions sang along with the band's post-National jams (what to do in a facsimile of the fake empire?) - one of those rock concerts that makes the viewer think: "Why aren't these guys absurdly famous?" and "I know why these guys aren't absurdly famous yet." in the same moment.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the music, one of the general absurdities of seeing bands in 2014, because the music itself represents a titanic slice of indie rock. NO is a six-piece, a gut feeling of one-too-many. The arrangements were tight and sizeable, Carter flourishing his hands - he doesn't play anything but in a different way than Matt Berninger doesn't play anything - as the band proceeded in and out of breaks. Carter alighted to the idea of being our David Blaine for the evening on songs like "Long Haul" and "Another Life": He knew how the tricks went, but it doesn't hurt to raise ones eyebrows and hands as if to say, "Not bad, right?" at the critical moment of the reveal.

Will the indie rock world have room for one more at the table, for a band that easily could be called Mistaken For Strangers and tour the country as a National cover band? It's an unfair metric for a good group of musicians sporting a strong crowd late on Saturday night. They should reasonably be playing at Webster Hall with the Augustines and Frightened Rabbits of the world; there is little difference in market or quality. The group vocals, and there were a lot of them, moved the audience and band together. Whatever the future holds, there are worse things to be than a hotly buzzed band from LA playing downtown in New York, and New York, as well as the rest of the country will be hearing and seeing a healthy measure more of them as the continue to snowball through 2014.

Kevin Drew :: "Good Sex"

It's a long way from Kevin Drew's work in Broken Social Scene to sophomore record, Darlings, under his own name and its lead single, "Good Sex". A mixture of soaring synthesizers, plaintive guitars and piano obbligatos borrowed right from Arcade Fire's early work, Drew chases toward something fecund and pure. The sensuality arrives from this combination of the sordid and the sanctified, though the sonic aesthetics are straight from the National or War On Drugs playbook, two bands that never exactly typified sex. Somehow distant, vaguely graphic Americana sounds right coming from Drew, like "Lover's Spit" or a lyric like "park that car, drop that phone". The last line, "I'm still breathing with you, baby" remains a statement of existential truth and a romantic survival instinct in a world of devaluation and needless determinism.

NO :: "Leave The Door Wide Open"

NO, a bunch of guys who play what you'd have to call "post-National" rock, debut their newest self, signed to Arts and Crafts, full-length record on the way in February, with lead track, "Leave The Door Wide Open". More than a fair share of bombast creeps in here, backing call-and-response chants of the title lyric owing to the band being a six-piece, and a final movement that sends the arrangement to the top of the biggest rooms. Even the blithe lyric, "We make some noise inside a room and call it art" belies the obvious self-consciousness here. This is a rock band staring you in the face and asking you to feel something: the old Coldplay trick. It works, making NO a band who could easily break out and through in 2014.

Top 50 Songs of 2013 :: [20-11]

Welcome to our annual countdown of the 50 best songs of the calendar year. Songs must be from an EP, LP or demo released during 2013, and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 20 to 11.

20. Okkervil River - "Down Down The Deep River"



No one did intimacy and nostalgia better in 2013 than Will Sheff and Okkervil River on "Down Down The Deep River". He took us into the tents of his past, using the the imagery of his childhood in a deeply cold New Hampshire, Sheff dished lines like, "We can never go back, we can only remember" which were tautological and still important. We are submerged by memories, his and ours, as the song, surges past six minutes, undeniably Okkervil River's best work since 2005, another memory we can only remember.

19. TV Girl - "She Smokes In Bed"



TV Girl described attractive self-destruction on "She Smokes In Bed". It wasn't a new idea, more like a trope really, a woman, fecund, damaged and damaging, sitting blithely in bed smoking the cigarette that will kill you both. Explosive femininity of this type does little to reason through why this woman is so compelling - see the chorus here, "Ba ba ba" - but "She Smokes In Bed" and its pumping soul-loops built a universe in which we were all happy to burn.

18. The National - "Demons"



What was surprising on the National's latest offering, Trouble Will Find Me, was the relentless ability of  Matt Berninger to be miserable in public. With a hefty six-figure income playing music to an adoring fan base that fills arenas, a brother who seemed to outweigh his problems in easy measure, Berninger still managed to dish lines like, "When I walk into a room, I do not light it up ... fuck." It was work being this sad, or maybe it was the pathos we expected from the band, Berninger providing us what we wanted even when he and we had undeniably changed.

17. Shy Girls - "Second Heartbeat"



2013 was the last days of the R&B craze and Shy Girls arrived as one of the last best pieces of the Empire with "Second Heartbeat". It was simple, quiet even, a reminder of the bizarre beauty of the 1990s of our memories. The chorus wrapped itself together in two parts, the drums almost a hair off-beat, the alleged "Second Heartbeat" of the title. It was, briefly, unity.

16. Wolf Alice - "Bros"



The Joy Formidable never went away, they just had their sound hijacked and turned up by Wolf Alice, among others. It was part Silversun Pickups, it was part the Pretenders. The explosion of the first movement, guitars and vocals erupting from some unseen location provided the magic of the Prestige that emerged over and over again. "Forget everyone", they told us, and this was easy. Nothing sounded as big and brash as "Bros", as the band sang, "there's no one quite like you," we suitably reflected the sentiment back. "Are you wild like me?" provided the best bridge of 2013, the last quiet movement before a wave of destruction returned.

15. Phosphorescent - "Song for Zula"



No song had the power to make you more miserable in 2013 than "Song For Zula". Pulling threads from Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia", string loops designed to cut, and lyrics like "I saw love disfigure me into something I am not recognizing," "Song for Zula" was a punch to the chest, a stab to the side, a caved-in knee; pick you visual metaphor here. "I will not open myself up this way again", Phosphorescent sang to us, explaining all the weakness he wouldn't let "Zula" see, though "Song for Zula" was exactly this window in his heart. "I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee," he sang, though he would and did exactly that.

14. Emily Reo - "Coast"



It was the best unsigned LP of 2013, Emily Reo's seasick, laptop symphony, Olive Juice. Its best song, "Coast" stuttered over seven minutes, a mixture of Grimes and Beach House, the charm of Computer Magic and the baroque brilliance of the Postal Service. Modernity never sounded so broken, dated or beautiful as Reo's charming vocoded vocal soared out over a sea of keyboards. There were hints of menace and dystopia, a song that took too many shots of digital cold medicine before walking the world a trailing and dizzy mess. This is what 2013 sounded like for some of the hyper-literate and increasingly distant elite. It was, for seven and a half minutes, beautiful.

13. Mt. Wolf - "Hypolight"



Mt. Wolf jumped out of the gym this year, and then broke up, leaving us with a few scant songs and the promise of things to come that never would. "Hypolight" proved a brilliant and troubled composition, made all the more dour by the band's later break-up. "Put another light out", ringing as one of those lyrics so general that their application is only a matter of having a meaningful relationship with the aesthetic and emotive worlds. There was no debating the soaring, crystalline head voice of the first chorus, the onset of the drums reminding us that this all began on the ground. "Hypolight" was already tragic as a piece of art, and became more tragic still, now that its creators are no more.

12. Mary Cassidy and Jon Lawless - "Make It Do"



There was a particularly languid evening this August spent listening, largely, to Haim remixes and Jon Lawless and Mary Cassidy's "Make It Do". The dominant reflection of that night was a head-nodding, "This is just so good," twinkling keys set against Cassidy's delicate soprano. The two iterations of the chorus, trafficking in a rap-video chic (something Lawless did well before Lorde was a teenager), were finally united in a figure-eight weave through the arrangement's last moments. Cassidy was a dream and Lawless, a genius, as "Make It Do" evaporated from view in the same ethereal manner which it arrived; it was and is so good.

11. RAC - "Let Go" [ft. Kele and MNDR]



The RAC finished remixing other people's work by remixing their own. "Let Go" sounded like a Kele song, or a MNDR song onto which the RAC threw a sheen and a backbeat. But this was the debut RAC single, original work that sounded like a remix already. Were the lines between the remix and the mix blurring when a DJ sought out to two solo artists to guest on his own music? Of course, narrative is dead; the call was coming from, as it were, inside the house. Still, "Let Go" held one of the best hooks of the year, MNDR at the top of the room on the title lyric, Kele occasionally mumbling beneath. It wasn't quite a dance floor burner - it didn't have the BPMs - rather, it was one of the best pop songs of 2013, the kind of thing that Top 40 radio should well have put in heavy rotation, and, for you, thankfully didn't.

Fancy Werewolves :: "Ghosts of Detroit"

An opening drum-guitar mixture that recalls Radiohead's "Creep" and a male vocal that took its graduate work at the Matt Berninger School of Moral Victories, Fancy Werewolves unleash one of the best unsigned rock songs of 2013 on "Ghosts of Detroit". Male and female vocals intertwine in figure eights, a nighttime slow-drive through the blighted afterglow of an American wasteland. Inspired by the on-going beauty and tragedy of the titular city, "Detroit", the band urges us to "Shut up, get in", to join them for a drive downtown, a lyric fecund for its brutality if nothing else. The arrangement swells and washes on the chorus, a Gothic architecture, soaring, austere and dark. Put simply: you won't hear a better rock song from a band you haven't heard of yet in 2013, a stunning and promising debut from the wilds of post-industrial modernity.

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.

Frugal Father :: "Red Headed Hipster"

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

Local Natives :: "Heavy Feet"

Local Natives long ago cornered the market on big group vocals. Each arrangement seemed to swell on human power alone, the spacious guitars and signature pounding tams subordinated to the nearly physical lift of a group of voices racing over the longer, curved, top part of the wing. "Heavy Feet", a track from their excellent sophomore LP, Hummingbird, is a treatise on the type of love and loss that seems to crest in the mid-20s. The chorus is full of claps, a post-apocalyptic lyric, "after everything," and drums that speak the influence of the production of the National's Aaron Dessner. It is a high tide and a washing away, two and three part harmonies colliding to the finish in a race to get us all finally up in the air.

NO :: "What's Your Name" and "Eleven Eleven"

"Get ready and I'm on my way," promises the lyrics of NO's newest single, "What's Your Name." It works on two levels, a lyric truth and the current state of affairs for one of the most promising unsigned American rock bands. Somewhere between the National and Pela, NO are product of the people who were left to grow up in this fake empire. The bands growing up in the ashes of this system won't have the luxuries of the ones who rode the horse down. The guitars charge ahead, an undercurrent of real menace in the bass, while the drums on "What's Your Name" are schizophrenic, languid splashing tams in one moment and ratatat snares the next. It all adds up to an undeniable sense of becoming, that this might not be exactly that thing, but it is very nearly there. This is another double-truth, this seven-inch double single for White Iris Records is only a precursor the band's true full length due next year.

NO :: "In Another Life"

The next big band to come out of Los Angeles could easily be NO. Cutting somewhere between the grandiosity of group vocals and the baritone gravel of a lead singer that eerily evokes Berninger's National, the band crafts the same kind of burnished melodies end up as well-worn, memorized hooks. "In Another Life", one of six excellent songs on the band's debut EP, builds its house out of a crystalline guitar and one of those authoritarian bass lines that has three notes and each one hits you in the chest. The second movement opens wide with chanting vocals and horns - a flashback to the last 30 seconds of "Fake Empire" - and a finishing kick that turns the title lyric into a statement of purpose and profound failure. The aesthetics revive the energy of the National in 2005 with some of the critical refinements and depth that both the original and its imitators (here think: Pela come We Are Augustines) added in the intervening years. NO plays SXSW this week and returns to LA for a free Monday show at the Echo. They are simply the most promising independent rock band this writer has heard in at least a calendar year, poised to do some absolute damage in the coming one.

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

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

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

Top 50 Songs of 2010 :: 5-2 [Now we're screaming, "Sing the chorus again"]

5. Tokyo Police Club - "Breakneck Speed"



It was a comparatively laid back song from a frenetic band that dominated the spring and summer of 2010. For a record that began with ambient beeps, Tokyo Police Club's Champ had its first single sitting tight in the three hole waiting to stumble out with shabby guitars and slurring lyrics exploding into a sea of hi-fi guitars. These dynamic shifts proved to be the genius of "Breakneck Speed," especially with its driving metaphor, motif and lyric, "It's good to be back/good to be back," opening at the 1.12 mark and defining the emotional character of a band releasing their first record since 2007. It was one of those fist-swinging, life-affirming, shout-along moments, "It's good to be back". You couldn't sing it loud enough.

4. Beach House - "Norway"

"Norway" made you a little seasick if you listened to it closely enough. The tonal quality of the keyboards warped up and down in pitch only slightly, but it was more than enough for the listener to feel a mild disquiet, take a deep breath and try to focus on the horizon. This was the sound of unsettling. However, Beach House on "Norway", like the rest of Teen Dream, was comfortable in their treatment of troubling themes because the melodies behind these cold medicine keyboards were simple, beautiful pop. Even "Norway," for its challenging verses, is breathless, pulsing and remarkably singable in the chorus. This does not even account for the bridge - and surely, no one wrote better bridges in 2010 than Beach House - and the way it frames the final chorus, a sea of twirling vocals lifting Victoria Legrand up as she moans into the storm. It was enough to just breath it in.

3. The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

The drums announced their return, and in the case of "Bloodbuzz Ohio," the drums did not equivocate the return of the Kings of Indie Rock in 2010, The National. Like a fighter running combinations, the band open "Bloodbuzz" with rapid fire percussion before laying over a steady piano progression, finding in this combination a strange and less stable cousin to "Fake Empire." Berninger fires his lazy wisdom in his head-spinning trip back to the band's roots in Ohio, reflecting both on his impermanence there, "Ohio don't remember me," and the current economic status quo, "The floors are falling out from everybody I know." But there is surprise affection in this return as Berninger muses with regret, "I never thought about love when I thought about home." The power of this nostos carried the National through a tour de force album, a return in its own right to the frustrated brilliance of Alligator, proving that which was left in the dark, behind and forgotten, is not just fuel for reflection, but what moves us onward.

2. Arcade Fire - "We Used To Wait"



One of the most moving songs of the year was about standing still. Win Butler and Arcade Fire crafted the fantastically tense, "We Used To Wait" to address exactly this disjoint. Butler too, along with many of his contemporaries, stares into his personal history with a mixture of fascination and horror. It is his delicacy in handling the source material that sets both song and record apart. Bulter's curiosity is evident, though not particularly judgemental, as he sifts through seemingly bland vignettes of his youth, like the romantic sloth of postal delivery. There aren't easy answers here, suburbia cast equally as terrifying and beautiful. In fact, Butler's complex and divided feelings about his own upbringing, the ability to find richness in superficial American experience, are the soul of The Suburbs and the emotional core of "We Used To Wait." The record's unsettling cover art revealed the key. We are poised behind a car in the driveway of the subdivided neighborhood of Butler's youth. The only glimpse of ourselves will be in the rear view mirror as we move forward (and backward) to explore what is in front of us and what is left inside.

[Video] The National :: "Terrible Love" and "Anyone's Ghost"

As a part of the run-up to the release of their nearly perfect High Violet, The National recorded a three-song set in an abandoned mansion on the Hudson for Pitchfork. Dubbed The Castle Rock Session, the recordings have also turned into an EP. With questions about their edginess answered, looking lean and abrupt in black suits, Berninger and his mates storm around a forgotten living room, filing the dead with life. High Violet conversly is a living testament to triumph, revealing a band at the height of their abilities, making the album of their career. High Violet hits record stores tomorrow.

"Terrible Love"



"Anyone's Ghost"



Listen :: The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

The National :: "I'm Afraid Of Everyone"

As songs continue to leak off The National's apparently outstanding next record, High Violet, we continue to see the darker side of the band. On the lush and dank, "I'm Afraid Of Everyone," Berninger is as restrained and smooth as the arrangement, which unravels like a wheel of rich and expensive fabric. Beginning as a low-key meditation on the nervousa of darker corners, by the end the drums are thudding in a threatening circle overhead while guitar feedback and fuzz hum. Meaning what he says, Berninger capitulates in the middle, saying "I don't have the drugs to sort it out." Perhaps the finest moment is a vocal-build, passing for a bridge, that involves layers and layers of Berninger repeating the same phrase, "Your voice is swallowing my soul" until "I'm Afraid Of Everyone" flushes and breathes with life. Or is it death? Appropriately, it all sounds like drowning in the dark.

Listen :: The National - "I'm Afraid Of Everyone"

The National :: "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

The first time I saw The National was 2006 at a show about which my colleague Noah would later write, (I'm paraphrasing) "It was hard to tell if your phone was vibrating in your pocket or if the sound was shaking your body." This was vastly prior to the meditative and NPR-approved record Boxer. In 2005 the band was hungry and touring on Alligator, entirely as pissed off as indie rock would let itself be. Fast-forward to 2008; audiences were paying 30-bucks a ticket to see "Start A War" and the band was sort of swimming through their catalogue, almost sedated, until they closed with "Mr. November." For those of us who knew a different band, a band with more soul or maybe more pain, this version seemed tame.

Back with "Bloodbuzz Ohio" off High Violet, the band is literally discussing a return of sorts. In this case, a magically-real (via "a swarm of bees?") return to the land of Ohio where they wrote their earliest records, where they wrote parts of Alligator. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" falls somewhere between "Brainy" and "Mistaken For Strangers," two songs that are recognizably off the album that not 50 words ago I accused of being tame and predictable. But, perhaps this goes further or takes the dark jag that the band so vehemently discussed. "Bloodbuzz" is the sonic undeniability of a band with a limited range, but what they do, they do undeniably well. Suffice it to say, until we see the tour, the nation should set their phone on permanent vibrate for you.

Listen :: The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

[Video] The National - "Terrible Love"

Our first look at The National's forthcoming LP High Violet came last night on Fallon's show. The song, "Terrible Love" is somewhere between the piano-driven "Fake Empire" and the finger-picked "All The Wine." "Terrible Love" has a second-movement, with horns and ratatat drums and most importantly, finds the band back to the darkness that colored Alligator. Somewhere, Matty Berninger is drinking white zinfandel and thinking about what rhymes with "soho riots," but in the last half of "Terrible Love," he's back closer to the sound that gave suggestions to "Abel" and promised no letdown from his personal avatar, "Mr. November."