On The List :: Free Energy @ Brooklyn Bowl [1.22.10]

Historically speaking, Brooklyn Bowl is situated on a block that Eastern European immigrants built and is now home to a graveyard of low-lying and almost forgotten brick, industrial architecture. It hearkens back to a place that Williamsburg used to be, a place that almost does not exist anymore. Inside Brooklyn Bowl, Free Energy, the long-drive from Philly, took the stage in front of a crowd, loosely packed back to the bar. The band, a mixture of winking and willful influences to rock's Golden Age of the 1970s, took the stage with a languid confidence, both thrown back in time and very much in the present.

With only a four-song EP, Free Energy quickly dove into material from their coming full length, Stuck On Nothing. Soon-to-be first single, "Bang Pop," a stomping and instantly memorable cut hung in the middle of the set like a vicious linchpin. Lead singer, Paul Sprangers, in the simplest of grey sweatshirts, strutted around the stage like a wiry drum major, leading the crowd through the eponymous chorus, "Bang bang/pop pop." It was rife with classic rock derivation but, at the moment, no one seemed to notice. In the closing moments, the band played "Free Energy," with its seminal battle cry of youth, "We are young and still alive/now the time is on our side," and "Something In Common," with a 4/4 time signature and enough inclusive language to make us feel like we had been through something, together.


It was perhaps, a night of ignoring disjoints: A bowling alley with a music venue inside of it, a neighborhood, both old and desperately new, and a band, with regard for the past, making music they are confident is enduring. Though it sounded like 40 years ago, we were still young and we were certainly alive. Time wasn't necessarily on our side but it had been successfully removed from the equation.

Listen :: Free Energy - "Something In Common"

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.

Emanuel and The Fear :: "Dear Friend"

Emanuel and The Fear turned out one of our favorite songs of last year, the seminal and sunshiney, "The Rain Becomes The Clouds." In a shocking twist, the band is releasing a new LP of 19 songs entitled, Listen, to back up last year's EP. We're counting that as prolific. The band is releasing an preview of the record, "Dear Friend," track seven on the album, and a perfect example of the band's orchestral, throw-back pop in the style of television montages from the opening credits. The song's first tones almost evoke Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" before spilling to a lighter-than-air series of strings, horns and Ben Folds-style piano. All of this swirls into a etherial bridge before the band finds a second movement recalling the most earnest of Stevie Wonder melodies, replete with summiting-major chord progressions. All of this levels up to a place, somewhere in a sharp focused 1983 family situation comedy, where it isn't possible to feel an ounce of bad.

Listen :: Emanuel and The Fear - "Dear Friend"

Interview :: First Rate People [1.19.09]

With summer-style slam, "Girls' Night" burning up stereos, we shot some emails back and forth with the hotly buzzed and Toronto's own First Rate People. With insight about their nomenclature, a bit about the ubiquity of "genre-hopping" and a new song, here they are.

32Feet: Where did you all dig up the name First Rate People?

First Rate People: We actually never intended to be "The First Rate People" which is what some people call us. We're not the First Rate People the name is referring to. Is that confusing? Our old band had a song called "First Rate" so we basically stole our name from that song. We've considered abbreviating the name to just FRP but we don't wanna make R.E.M. or MGMT mad at us.

Top 5 desert island albums?

• The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths
• Illmatic - Nas
• Since I Left You - The Avalanches
• All Is Well - Samamidon
• Boxer - The National

Talk about some of the sonic influences on the first group of songs you have floating around, It's Never Not Happening. It seems like a delicate mixture of r&b, bedroom pop. What are you shooting for?

It's not a super-conscious thing but we're always up for making music that, in theory, shouldn't work. For example, one of our songs called "Dress So Fine" was our attempt to make a country reggae song. Country reggae sounds awful on paper, right? Our friend Dave tells us Willie Nelson once made a country reggae album to mixed results...

What should we expect from FRP in 2010? Big tour? How close are you to signing with a label?

We've been really lucky with how things have picked up in the past couple weeks. For the moment though, because most of us are still in school, we're gonna focus on making the live act really exciting and tour around Ontario and into the States in the fall.

What is the one thing everyone should remember about your band, no matter what happens in the coming months?

First off - that we're thankful for the attention. We hope to be able to continue changing styles (almost excessively). Tossing around the term "genre-hopping" has been overdone lately, but we really do have great respect for the Jonis, Sufjans & Becks of the world.

Listen :: First Rate People - "American Life" [zshare]

On The List :: Vampire Weekend @ Webster Hall [1.18.10]

This review runs on Bowery's Houselist Blog.

The four boys of Vampire Weekend took the stage at Webster Hall with an enormous screen-printed cover of their latest album, Contra hanging behind them. The face of the anonymous blond from Contra's 50-foot high cover art stared ominously out at the crowd. The band smiled winningly and immediately waltzed into "White Sky," an amphetamine-angle on a chord progression from Paul Simon's "Under African Skies." If it was a night of influences, it was also a homecoming; an ode to all the chosen parts that made album art stand five stories high.

It would be a set of contradictions; half drawn from their eponymous debut album and the other from their six-day old sophomore effort. From the outset when the band ripped through, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," "M79" and stand-out live track, "Cousins," it was clear that keyboardist, Rostam Batmanglij wasn't entirely together, holding a 10-mile stare and looking overheated and frankly not sober. He, along with front man, Ezra Koenig and bassist, Chris Baio all dressed in blue, checkered dress shirts, in the kind of gesture that is either hilariously planned or embarrassingly accidental. In the dead middle, the band played the haunting "Taxi," lit from below, casting huge shadows on the face of their album art. It was impossible not to think of these four as shadow giants, both legitimately enormous and completely inflated in the light of their new celebrity.

After the equally spot-on "Diplomat's Son," Koenig thanked the crowd for joining the band on, "this odyssey of growing up." The band then played the opening to "Giving Up The Gun," a meditation on modernism and the loss of innocence in the face of flux. Of course, as much as Vampire Weekend is different than the band we saw three years ago, they still close with "Walcott," at the end of their encore. It was a song of departure for a band just arriving. In the city that bore them, an unflinching, five-story stare hung in the background and shadows shuffled off to stage right.

Listen :: Vampire Weekend - "Horchata"

On The List :: The Dodos @ SF MOMA [1.15.10]

It's clear from the line wrapped around not one, not two, but three sides of the block demarcated by 3rd, Minna, Montgomery and Howard Streets that 1,000 of our closest friends will be joining us on the list tonight. More accurately, a great many of SF MOMA's good acquaintances also received an invitation (+1!) to opening night of the 75th anniversary show with special guests including Jackson Pollock (deceased), Dorothea Lange (deceased), and The Dodos (alive; on stage).

We couldn’t care less about The Dodos. We don't really care about the art (although the show turns out to be excellent. If you'd like to go, you can borrow our membership card.) We are here ostensibly for the potential of meeting girls but honestly for the certainty of free drinks promised by the invite.

By the time we navigate the line, however, tickets entitling one to a free glass of Korbel are no longer available at the door. Dewar's, however, is only six bucks. We settle.

Two choices present themselves: Upstairs to the art, where no drinks are allowed, or right into a hot room where The Dodos, accompanied by The Magik*Magik Orchestra, play.

The triumvirate of Scotch, rocks, and music triumphs.

The band fits the role of local favorite well. (We later learn one of them lives within a couple blocks of us and held a Halloween party where he played drums while wearing a purple dress. This anecdote, while having no bearing on the content of this review, seems worth sharing.) The front few rows dance as much as they deem appropriate given the setting. The rest of the crowd oscillates between paying attention while trying hard to look like they are not and enjoying themselves while attempting to look like they aren't paying attention.

We pay attention. Almost immediately, The Dodos remind us of The White Rabbits. Tribal drumming and a singer who resorts to a strained voice will do that. (See "Men" for further proof.) The San Francisco version favors leading with a guitar and letting the drums take over, while the boys from Brooklyn launch into the skins from the get go, but the distinction is simply semantics. They are brothers from a different coast.

The Dodos play two sets, of which we catch probably seven songs. (At some point, we feel obliged to wander through the galleries upstairs.) At 10:30, they finish, SF MOMA begins to shut down, and we leave.

But the beat goes on, da da dum da dum da da.

Listen :: The Dodos - "Fables"

On The List :: Julian Casablancas @ Terminal 5 [1.14.10]

Everyone was calling Julian Casablancas by his first name. Near the ticket window it was, "Julian" and upstairs in VIP it was a more familiar, "Jules." Opener Tanlines even referred to him as the vaguely messianic "JC." Apparently, New York assumed it was on a first name basis with the guy who allegedly saved rock and roll in 2001 on the Lower East Side. As if winking at 3,000 people at once, Casablancas opened with "Ludlow St.," an overly sentimental ode to the street he helped make famous. Of course, it was also to say that if we thought we knew him, he most assuredly knew us better.

Casablancas, dressed almost head-to-foot in black leather came to the stage last, a subtle tip to the significance of his return to the city that bore him. After "Ludlow St.," he directed the band in the wailing and enormous "River Of Brakelights," a song that few outside the first twenty rows grasped or reacted to appropriately. Followed quickly with "11th Dimension," Casablancas turned Terminal 5 into a sea of jumping heads and bobbing angular haircuts. As if to endear himself, during "Out Of The Blue," Casablancas whipped the mike around by its cord, before catching it and ripping through the last chorus. It was the kind of maneuver that said both, "I've still got it" and, "I never really left."

Of course, this return couldn't be complete without an unscripted ending. After closing his first encore with "4 Chords Of The Apocalypse," Casablancas slammed the mike on the stage and reached into the crowd with all the magnanimous affect of a messiah. The crowd visibly pushed towards their hero and he seemed visibly affected by this display. Terminal 5 turned on their background music and the crowd was supposed to leave. No one moved. Casablancas returned, rather sheepishly, saying, "We really were done." He then played "Tourist," as if to indicate that even The Messiah feels a little weird when everyone tries to know his name. The crowd, unabashedly, sang along with their own personal Julian.

Listen :: Julian Casablancas - "I Wish It Was Christmas Today"