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]

Deportees :: "A Heart Like Yours (In A Time Like This)"

We need vanishing points. Those dots on the horizon, the end of a long and tragic orthogonal, represent some better bit of accomplishment, some better vision of the future. Of course, all things being relative, we never arrive there exactly. We move forward, a halting and bizarre procession, but we never capture those lost black dots at the edge of what we can see. There emerge new ones. We steel ourselves, rekindle optimism and proceed. We find a platitude that works in this moment. Deportees' enormous and mournful single, "A Heart Like Yours (In A Time Like This)" feels cut from this type of cloth. Big, pulsing, background vocals take a choral turn on a song that runs over six minutes and never raises above head height. No grand final movement saves the listener. There is no transfiguration, just a routinized march forward on lyrics like, "Save it for another world"; we assume he means "your heart" if we take the title at face value. Each choral loop offers a few glossy steps forward, but the outcome is no more or less defined at the end. The final lyric, "I miss you when you're gone" is the lone vanishing point on the horizon, any progress towards it receding and receding in kind.

Loney Dear :: "Loney Blues"

Loney Dear mastermind Emil Svanagen seems to get a lot of mileage out of his project's name almost sounding like the word "lonely". This was particularly problematic in 2006 when the band's first LP broke into the hearts and minds of listeners with an ear for well-crafted bedroom pop, occasionally mistaking his name in confluence with his sound as "Lonely Dear". On latest promotional single, "Loney Blues", Svanagen leaves us with a self-referential signifier that does little more or less than its central lyric, "It gets to your head, it gets to your heart." In short, Loney Dear is back where he is most comfortable: making lonely, orchestral creations, this favoring slow-drive pop. The miracle isn't that he recovers from these lowest of lows, but rather that he never recovers from them. The ability to get and stay sad makes his work not of catharsis but of a more elemental depression. This darkness is not the moment before the clouds clear and the rain stops. This, in some sense, is the most terrible of fictions, the real opiate of modern life. It is, perhaps, just darkness, and darkness is enough.

Listen :: Loney Dear - "Loney Blues"

Kishi Bashi :: "It All Began With A Burst"

For a second the glittering electronics offer a vivid flashback to Animal Collective's "My Girls". It's a dream, Kishi Bashi stuttering a bit to turn over the engine on the bizarre, colliding pop arrangement of stunning single, "It All Began With A Burst". But what begins with fits and starts - at first, synth loops and hand claps, vocal yelps and melody all tuning against each other like a Bushwick orchestra (editorial note: Kishi Bashi are not from Bushwick) - finds a down-beat, pulling all these disparate elements into synchronization, something approaching linear, ordered time. Of course, like any good slice of magic realism it is only engages formal structures as a method of bending and exploding them, holding together just long enough for the viewer to notice when things falls apart. The title lyric - noticeably also the chorus, such as there is one - serves as the marching orders, an arrangement percolating and yelping as it tears its own periphery and the listener can't help clap in time.

Listen :: Kishi Bashi - "It All Began With A Burst"

Harriet :: "I Slept With All Your Mothers"

It's important to build part of your first single around a falsehood, an adolescent insult. Harriet and slamming first single, "I Slept With All Your Mothers" is neither as graphic nor as illicit as the title and central lyric let on. The song pitches either a tragic brand of anti-heroism ("I'm sorry I let the gas run out") or the weirdest love song in history ("I slept with all your mothers/ I slept in bed with you") or both. Presupposing the notion of universal maternal sexualization is lyrical, and it certainly is, the listener assumes a sort of complicity, a voyeurism, on these shared asides between broken lovers. Even the hollow barbs about financial considerations, "I love money", "I want your money, you know I do," ring as empty and bitterly sarcastic as the title lyric, something thrown backwards with retributive flair, these the last lashes of a terrible collision. But, "I Slept With All Your Mothers" has a secret even more precious than these obvious embellishments. The final 30 seconds let the pianos pound, the guitars rip and the strings surge, all of us screaming now, "I gave myself to you." This part feels good and true and everything else.

Harriet "I Slept With All Your Mothers" by HarrietMusic

Capybara :: "Neighbor Crimes"

A suburban ethos proves appropriate for Capybara's "Neighbor Crimes", a certain intimacy mixed with a critical distance. Sounding like a UB40 demo taken out to the garage and then shot up in the sky, ripping guitars erupt over a lullaby, upstroke melody. The song focuses on three big guitar chords, alternately setting them against a glittering arrangement of reverbated pop and pulling them out on their own, something dragged outside to explode alone in the backyard. Of course, the most memorable lyric isn't particularly domestic, the austere and pastoral, "Thinking, going, Mexico", both grammatically incorrect and also the perfect foil for those same guitars. Featuring some of the best pop hooks of 2012, "Neighbor Crimes" rings as idyllic, troubled and completely elevating, a family garage where the electric guitars sound like lions, the pianos ride the off-beat, and the next destination is undeniably elsewhere.

Listen :: Capybara - "Neighbor Crimes"
Listen :: Capybara - "Late Night Bikes"

Oberhofer :: "HEART"

There are a few Bradley Oberhofers on the cusp of the release of his debut full length album. There was the college student and label intern, so absurdly precocious that his demo songs demanded attention. The cuts were organized cacophony, colliding time signatures and arrangement shifts all thrown against Oberhofer's trademark, tweaking caterwaul. He had just moved from Tacoma, Washington and most of his song lyrics involved either staying ("Haus") or going ("I Could Go"). Then there was the Oberhofer I saw at Bowery Ballroom, shrieking with such intensity that the upstairs bar shook and the British girls to my left wrinkled their noses and said, "What the fuck is that?" This was not a compliment. The frenzy - frenetic and urgent - didn't always deliver. Then there is the Oberhofer of lead single, "HEART", the promotional track from his upcoming Glassnote debut. It is more plaintive, the mercy of a furious style worn smooth with time and a terrible relationship. The lyrics handle the latter in negative space, the architecture of the arrangement mirroring this impulse, rising and dwarfing the lonely narrator. The vocals, piano, and strings collapse into each other and Oberhofer finds himself all these people at once. A murderous young talent, unstoppable in so many ways, anxious and tweaking in so many others, sailing to the top of his ability, collecting all of his selves in one triumphant, terrible, moment.

HEART - Oberhofer by Glassnotemusic